One or Many?

"You can't be one wolf, you're always eight or nine, six or seven."
-1914: One or Several Wolves? Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

One or Many? is a solo ritual and journaling game about self-discovery, reflection, and individuation. This is a game of fragmentedness and wholing, of re-visioning and reshaping our Selves. The goal is to access, embody and reclaim your multifaceted, wild Selves and identify and build the inner psychological resources that are most in need of cultivation. 

You play as yourself, creating a four-direction circle in a physical space with markers for the four directions, in which you will move around and use to call to, dialogue with and embody your four-directional Selves. You will use the Minor Arcana suits from a tarot card deck and prompts associated with them to help you cultivate awareness of and the ability to embody the four-directional Selves. The Major Arcana suit is used to prompt dialogue, perspective and support from the four-directional Selves and help identify our subpersonalities, wounded or fragmented aspects of our psyches.  

To play, you need a deck of tarot cards and a way to record your play (pen and paper, audio recording, etc).  You can also choose not to record your play and play orally. You need a location (outside and more ecologically diverse works best for this game but can also be played inside) that you will feel comfortable spending some time in and feel like you have privacy, and you will need to know the four directions based on the location of your play, or use a gps or compass.

The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body? The answer for some readers, perhaps most, will be "none." If that happens, it's not your tune. No problem. But you would have been better off buying a record. 
-Brian Massumi, foreword to A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

Note: This was made for the Anamnesis Jam in January 2023. It has not been playtested. I'm hoping to return to it and make edits, playtest and changes. Any thoughts and suggestions welcome!

Inspired by

Anamnesis by Samantha Leigh, indigenous medicine wheels, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, eco-depth psychology from Wild Mind: A field guide to the human psyche by Bill Plotkin, and A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

For more information on these ideas, see Bill Plotkin’s work. 

Images

“Three wolves standing in the snow looking at a distant snow-bound village and church Drypoint and aquatint” by Jakov Jakovlevič Bel’zen, © The Trustees of the British Museum 

“Wolf Tracks on Snow.” Boyer, Viollet Collection

Symbols for the Oracle's different suits-- Cups, Swords, Wands and Coins, Sun and Death for the Major Arcana-- from Occult Symbols Vectors by Vecteezy

License

The work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.