The Claustrophobic Hero

 

Welcome back y’all! It’s been a minute!

As many of you know, while tarot is my passion project, it is by no means my full-time job. Over the past couple of months, I’ve had some monstrous writing deadlines, so I’ve had to ease up on the blog and Instagram page; however, we are so back.

We left off on our journey in the tarot with the Four Kings Method, where I discussed the King of Wands and his relationship to actualized masculinity. I have a solid draft for a follow-up post on the King of Swords, which I’ll release soon; however, I wanted to take a quick side quest into an archetype that I’ve been communing with since New Years: The Claustrophobic Hero. This figure has been haunting me through much of the media and literature I’ve been engaged with over the past month and a half and I wanted to share with you my thoughts on this archetype, which I believe is very relevant as we march forward into what 2025 has in store for us.

My reading of the Claustrophobic Hero is one who feels entrapped by the present, longs for a nostalgic past, and is fearful of a doomed future. Instead of readily jumping on the Hero’s Journey, this archetype is stuck in place, longing for the “good old days,” “a connection to their ancestors,” or “a return to nature.” Yet, they are forced to move forward against their will toward certain doom. The archetype reveals to us the ways that we pine after nostalgic content, romanticize nature in the face of technological dystopia, and perhaps dream of days in the aftermath of the apocalypse.

I chose the phrase “Claustrophobic,” as I was viscerally reminded of the scholar Dr. Tara Brabazon’s theory of Claustropolitan Sociology. She stated: “We view a world that is never ours to own and experience. It is seen through miniaturized digital technologies. Such an environment creates paranoia and irrationality and perpetuates a sense of powerlessness. The only light at the end of the tunnel is that of a freight train hurtling towards us, gaining speed and getting ever closer.”

As a citizen in the Claustropolis, our bodies are tensed up and prepared for impact; yet, impact does not happen, rather we are held perpetually in a state of constant anticipation. The world does not provide the catharsis to release the pressure. Thus, we must act, in the present, for the good of the future, even if it means the destruction of our own self-concept, a radical change in our environment, and the possibility of failure.

 

The Archetype in the Cards

Rather than a single card, I believe the Claustrophobic Hero can be found within a clustering of cards; trapped within a web of nostalgia, anxiety, and hope for the future. At the center, we find The Fool (0), who stands on the edge of the abyss. However, unlike The Fool (0) we know to be fearless and alive with a sense of adventure, this Fool (0) stands at the edge and is frozen in time. On the one hand, he is pulled backwards into the past by the VI of Cups, and longs for days long gone. On the other hand, he rests within a present dominated by the VIII of Swords, unable to move because he is bound in the eternal present. The future, represented by the V of Pentacles, looks bleak and worse than where he stands in the present. However, the VIII of Wands hovers overhead and demands that he make a decision and move in any direction, as stagnancy will result in certain destruction of the spirit.

Under these conditions, the Claustrophobic Hero relies on his environment to push him toward action. Perhaps his vacation in the past has made him forget how to take a step forward? Perhaps the visions of the beggars outside the cathedral induce a paralysis. Maybe the forcefulness of the Wands causes him to retreat into himself. Perhaps he feels there must be a perfect plan in place before he can take his first step. However, these feelings are neither helpful nor productive, as they all spiral down into a state of stagnancy. The Fool (0) must move or he shall die on the edge of the cliff. A corpse on the side of Mt Everest.

The Claustrophobic Hero aligns with what I perceive to be a dominant disposition in our current cultural moment. Across the internet we bare witness to traditional lifestyles (“TradLife”) which romanticize a fictional past, a paralyzed politics which refuses to move forward for fear of disruption, and a general despair for the future. The despair comes becomes embodied through climate anxiety, declining birth rates, war, and economic precarity. There exists no counter argument for imagining a positive future, no utopian vision to drive action, no hope for what seems like a civilization running full steam on a Thanatos drive. In this context, I wanted to explore this archetype: Why is the past beckoning to his so aggressively? What do with do with a present locked in time? What is our responsibility to ensure the future does occur?

 

What is to be Done?

At the beginning of the year, I made it a point to complete a book I had been procrastinating: Goodbye to a River by John Graves. The author documents his journey by boat from Possum Kingdom Lake to Lake Whitney in North Texas during the mid-20^th century. Graves and I share a locational and cultural heritage, we both grew up along the Brazos River. For me, one set of grandparents had a ranch up north, past Possum Kingdom, while the other set lived along the river south of Granbury. Reading his story filled me with ambivalence; I found myself longing for my own past along the river at the same time Graves also longed for his past along the river. Yet, a feeling of alienation came over me, as he reminisced for a river that was not my own, nor was the river he travel remotely similar to the river of my youth. It was like we shared in a sense of nostalgia that could seem similar on the surface, yet in actuality, was not.

This difference, matters. Graves is not interested in pining after the past. Rather, he teaches us how to find closure and become comfortable with the past: “The provincial who cultivates only his roots is in peril, potato-like, of becoming more root than plant. The man who cuts his roots away and denies that they were ever connected with him withers into half a man.” Because time always moves forward, one cannot hope to keep a full connection to the past, and it is not healthy to let nostalgia prevent us from moving forward. However, we must also not neglect the past, as he also notes, “What that self is tangles itself knottily with what his people were, and what they came out of. Mine came out of Texas, as did I. If those were louts, they were my own louts.”

Similarly, the Icelandic artist, Bjork spoke to this idea of carrying the past with you in her album Fossora in her song, “Ancestress.” In it, she describes the process of exchanging responsibility for the future from the hands of our elders to our own and then to the future generation.

My ancestress' clock is ticking
Her once vibrant rebellion is fading
I am her hopekeeper
I assure hope is there
At, at all times

For Bjork, the past is important because it is the source of our motivation to push forward into the unknown. Rather than be tethered to it, we should take responsibility for making sure the hopes, dreams, and visions of those who gave us our present are carried into the future. Even when the present is horrifying and the future seems doomed.

For that reason, I started 2025 by watching all three Lord of the Rings movies (extended edition, obviously). At the core of the story, we witness the changing of the times and how even the smallest of creatures are responsible for building the future. I think a valuable lesson for the Claustrophobic Hero can be learned from the elves of Middle Earth, whom realized that the infinitely long past they had once lived was coming to an end. Rather than despairing, they not only accepted that their age was over, but also came to the aid of the men who would inherit the new age. There was not a fearfulness or bitterness in their loss of the past; rather, they recognized their responsibility to ensure that the next age was a peaceful one.

We are currently facing the Claustropolitan Age, where paranoia and fear dance across a landscape of exploitative work, a disconnection between humans, and a present that is relentlessly being preserved and played back on repeat. We know the train is coming, but we do not have the privilege to see it race toward us. Rather, we are entrapped in social media algorithms, which feed us the same content over-and-over-and-over again. Entertainment companies are hell bent on forcing us to relive our childhoods through endless, poor quality CGI remakes and sequels. We are told not to trust or care for our neighbors, divided amongst ourselves with unjust political slogans calling for  justice. As Bjork articulated: “Our differences are irrelevant; to demand absolute justice at all times, blocks connection; our union is stronger, our union is stronger than us. Hope is a muscle that allows us to connect.”

However, this is a hard ask. Enemies lurk behind every shadow and while we cannot see the train coming to destroy us, we know it is there. We hoard toilet paper, eggs, and build apocalyptic bunkers to seal away the present as best we can. The past also calls to us longingly, like a ghost, it lures us into the cold embrace of death. We are too busy preventing the future, we accept our own death through refusing to allow the present to move and by clinging to ages that will never be again.

Despite the lessons from Graves, Bjork, and the elves of Middle Earth, the Claustrophobic Hero perceives that his present is uniquely evil and will go on forever. However, Engles and the ladies of 9 to 5 remind us that the past may have been much worse and it was also overcome. For example, during the Industrial Revolution, society was also ensnared into a nostalgic possession by the past. Technology had developed at such a breakneck speed, people were forced to move into the cities, and the overall quality of life plummeted for the average person, according to Engles. Poverty, homelessness, disease, violence, hunger were all normal and highly visible parts of every day life. Workers were pitted against each other to compete for low wages and degrading working conditions, while their quality of life, their families, and the society they once knew evaporated within their lifetime; it was their own post-apocalypse. However, things were not perpetually frozen, rather, a series of labor movements, revolutions, and wars were fought up and through the mid-century, which radically changed the overall quality of life for people.

Yet, as we know being humans in the 2020s, progress is not inevitable and it must be earned. In the 1980s, 9 to 5 captured the mood of the neoliberal, capitalist hellscape for women workers. From abuse to sexual harassment, the ladies in the office were forced to choose between paying the bills and taking care of their families or standing up for themselves and their dignity. Because the movie is an absurdist-comedy, the women opted to kidnap their supervisor and usurp his authority to make sweeping changes to the working conditions of their fellow workers; which they got away with. While kidnapping your boss is not my personal strategy, the movie serves two purposes: 1. Progress is not a given; over a 100-years after Engles, working conditions improved, but had to be continuously earned; and 2. You need to enact radical change in order to move toward a brighter future.

Unfortunately, the Claustrophobic Hero refuses to step off the cliff and be radical for the sake of the future. For him, the cliff is not “unknown,” but rather, it is a vision of certain destruction. We have accepted that the end of the world is upon us and we wait in anticipation (almost longingly) for the bomb to drop and usher in the nuclear winter. However, unbeknownst to us, even if the bomb drops, it will not represent the end of time. In Tatyana Tolstaya’s novel, The Slynx, we are met with a Moscow in the far distant future, long after the bomb. People are still people (despite their odd physical characteristics, due to mutations from radiation). Society is still unjust. There is still a crisis to find meaning and purpose. And unfortunately, there are still people who were alive on the planet prior to the nuclear winter, who have been cursed with immortality. Nostalgia is their opium as they despair for the changes in society due to their inaction in their own time. 

Conclusion

The Claustropolitan Hero is a figure of tragedy. He is frozen in place and awaits his own destruction. The past is his nostalgic opium and the present is treated like a commodity to be hoarded and treasured at the expense of the future. He is blocked from those around him and is forced into circumstances that leave him adrift in a sea of uncertainty. However, he can be spurred into action. If we return to the image of The Fool (0), he is not alone; his little dog reaches out to him. I believe, when considering this face of The Fool (0), the dog be our salvation, giving us the nudge into the future, off the cliff, into our own destruction. Ultimately, I think refusing to jump off the cliff is more dangerous than standing still. While that catalyst is unclear at the moment, we must prepare for the push into the unknown, otherwise, the train will come for us and we won’t make it.