Card of the Week: Six of Coins

If you want to touch the past, touch a rock.  If you want to touch the present, touch a flower.  If you want to touch the future, touch a life.  Kindness, like a boomerang, always returns.

The Six of Coins symbolizes charity, giving and receiving, either offered freely or with obvious conditions.  Both sides of the exchange are important, for the benefactor and for the recipient, whether transferring material resources, knowledge and tutoring, or leadership and following authority.  Be mindful of whether the gift is a true windfall, or a beneficial loan that must be repaid.

Inverted, this card suggests to consider gifts with reservation.  Don’t automatically refuse, but look out for strings attached, shifts in the balance of power, outright cons, or other potential pitfalls.

In “Bread and Circuses”, the Enterprise traces the lost survey ship SS Beagle to planet 4 of the unexplored System 892.  A small landing party finds an ancient-Roman-style society, complete with slavery, but with a mid-twentieth-century level of technology.  Its leader, Proconsul Claudius Marcus, had convinced the Beagle’s former Captain Merrick to abandon Starfleet to become Marcus’s second-in-command.  Most of Merrick’s crew had then perished in the planet’s brutal gladatorial games.  Marcus tries to persuade Kirk to do the same with the Enterprise crew, first threatening to kill Spock and McCoy, then trying to bribe Kirk with his own personal slave Drusilla.  Merrick is killed helping them escape.  As the Entetprise departs, Uhura explains that the planet’s growing underground religious movement is similar to early Christianity.