When several members of the Ultima fan and fan project development communities (myself included) had the opportunity to tour the offices of BioWare Mythic in Fairfax, Virginia about a year ago, we had the pleasure of seeing (among many other things) a framed set of the Virtue tarot cards from Ultima 9…which may even have been the originals on which the card sets that shipped in the game boxes were based.

At the time, Time Machine Dragon remarked that the lunar phases depicted on the cards were wrong, though none of us — neither Mythic staff nor guests — could quite identify the exact issue with them. It seemed as though the lunar phases, which can be seen along the top of each tarot card, were added somewhat indiscriminately:

More recently, I was contacted by someone at Mythic looking to settle the issue with the tarot cards once and for all. And after looking at them for…well…a while, I spotted the error that Origin had made when assigning lunar phases to the cards. I also, however, saw what they were trying to do with them. And it’s really quite a cool thing.

Along the top of each card, the two moons of Britannia (Trammel and Felucca) are depicted. Trammel is always a full moon, whereas Felucca is depicted in different phases. And the phases are, for the most part, significant. Let’s look at the tarot card for Compassion:

Compassion

As noted above, Trammel is depicted as a full moon; Felucca is depicted as a waxing crescent. In Ultima lore, the waxing crescent has is the lunar phase that corresponds with Britain, the City of Compassion. And so, arguably, the choice of lunar phase is meant to point toward the Virtue of Compassion as well…which the tarot card of course depicts.

Now, as stated above, for the most part, the tarot cards correctly depict the lunar phase associated with the relevant Virtue. The two cards that are exceptions to this are Justice and Valor; there, Felucca is depicted in the inverse phase. I suspect that this was an error on the part of the artist(s) at Origin that created the card graphics; I can’t think of what sort of meaning they might have intended by intentionally including such reversals.

But even as I thought about all of this, I was almost more interested in Trammel’s depiction. The full moon, which (again) Trammel is always depicted as on the cards, is the lunar phase associated with Minoc, and therefore with Sacrifice. This, I think, is highly significant, and I think it might even be an intentional thing that Origin included to point us toward the game’s conclusion and the Avatar’s final and ultimate sacrifice of his own life. Sacrifice — the willing self-sacrifice of a signally virtuous person — is the major theme and the culmination of Ascension. More than that, the game ends on a note that points toward an eternity that awaits beyond that final act.

Good Friday and Easter resonate with the same themes. Indeed, one of the core ideals of the Christian faith — “greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13) — could just as easily describe the Avatar’s actions. And in fact, in both Ultima 9 and the Gospels, it’s worth noting that the virtuous one who sacrifices himself for the sake of others does not do so just for those who are his close friends. In both, the sacrifice is for everyone; those close to the willing victim, and those whom he has never met and who likely have little to no idea who he even is.

And in both cases, those who came after didn’t always keep sight of the significance of the sacrificial act. Origin certainly didn’t, and re-imagined the post-sacrificial Avatar as a Diablo-esque Avatar/Guardian hybrid in which the two sides of the being were waging an inner war against each other and brought about the world of Alucinor (the intended setting of Ultima X: Odyssey) in a kind of fever dream. At various times throughout history, various Christian churches and groups have similarly lost sight of what Christ’s sacrifice means, and have repurposed it to serve some other agenda and meaning which (more often than not) runs contrary thereto.

There’s actually also a parallel that can be drawn between Passover and the end of Ultima 9 as it was planned in the days of the Bob White Plot, which I think merits a bit of comment since it isn’t every year that Easter and Passover fall on the same weekend. The Passover, of course, is the observance of the deliverance of the Hebrew people from Egypt, and in particular marks the night of the final and most terrible plague to befall Egypt: the death of the firstborn. In the Passover narrative in the Book of Exodus, Hebrews are instructed to mark the door posts and lintil of each house; the Lord, upon observing this sign, would pass by that house and not claim the life of all firstborn within.

The conclusion of Ultima 9 in the Bob White Plot parallels this, somewhat, with the people of Britannia gathering on Skara Brae and using the power of the Runes and the Virtues to shield themselves from the effects of the Armageddon spell, which Lord British and the Avatar would have been required to cast after the defeat of the Guardian. We know, too, from the endgame video that was released not quite a year ago, that not all Britannians would have heeded the call; some would have perished with Britannia when the spell was cast. So too in Egypt; those in unmarked homes would have suffered great tragedy on that night so long ago. But, alas, the Bob White Plot was not used as the final plot of the game, so the parallel between Passover and Ultima 9 as released is far more tenuous, and in fact cannot reasonably be drawn out.

I digress.

Within Richard Garriott’s articulation of the Eight Virtues, Compassion is meant to be the product of Love and Courage. And really, that’s a very accurate summation of what true self-sacrifice is. Sacrificing the self for the good of another is surely an act which requires great courage. And it’s also an act that requires great love for the one(s) for whom it is done.

The great power of sacrifices of the kind depicted in Ascension or the Gospels, and why we both perceive in and impute great significance to the sacrifices made by e.g. soldiers in defense of their country or “Good Samaritans” in defense of set-upon strangers, is that the sacrifice isn’t just made for those with whom the willing victim shares close, personal forms of love. These sacrifices, made as much for total strangers as for close companions, are acts made out of love for all people, in every corner of the world(s) in which they happen.

And now that I think about it, perhaps there is a significance to the fact that Felucca is in the inverse lunar phase on the Justice and Valor tarot cards. Perhaps, from these, we can see the nod toward the Valor inherent in the act of self-sacrifice, and an acknowledgement of the rampant and seemingly insurmountable injustice that made that sacrifice necessary.

If so…then there, too, we can see just a hint of Easter as well.

Oh, and: Here’s a little teaser about what’s in store for tomorrow.

Imminent Ned