LOGOS DIVINÆ Artist Statement

In an attempt to combine my interests in philosophy, religion, and ancient art with my work as a game designer, I have created something both novel and useful with this work, LOGOS DIVINÆ. 

All my life I have been intrigued by how people form beliefs. The belief which I find most fascinating and revolutionary in history comes from my own heritage of Christianity. In which, God becomes Man—which is to say God experiences mortality—resolving an ontological tension which existed throughout the early history of civilization. This tension was touched on by the Book of Job.

In an attempt to understand why this belief became so pervasive so quickly in antiquity, I set out to research the history of the many forgotten deities of Greco-Egyptian, Syriatic and Roman polytheist cults, their myths of divine offspring, along with the Abrahamic apocalyptic literature developed across history.

I made this work with three objectives in mind:

1. to be an infinitely useful playing card deck—so we can re-learn and re-invent the traditions of card games which preceded our consumer gaming culture.

2. to use the conventions of tarot to articulate ancient wisdoms and cosmological mapping for the value it yields to the curious.

3. to understand the nature of deity as it has been imagined across all the history of civilization.

My aim is not to revive lost traditions, nor promote orthodoxies: but to understand the syncretic milieu that Christianity thrived and triumphed over in cosmopolitan urban areas like Alexandria, to acknowledge how they have contributed to the Christian literary corpus and its impact on world history.

By turning these facets into mechanics and characters of a game, as benign as Pokémon characters—it is my hope that we can examine the messianic expectations which have prevailed in modern orthodoxies, which were favored over the plurality of Christian traditions that died out or were left behind, like the so-called gnostic sects of Hermetic, Jewish, and Christian practitioners. I hope this work reunites the metaphysical worldview of the very first “Christian”—the anonymous Roman centurion described in Mark 15:39.

Many of the artifacts modeled in LOGOS DIVINÆ were first seen in the Vatican's collection or in classical wings I visited in museums worldwide. Over the years of this game’s development, I visited ancient ruins, Masonic libraries, and countless classical wings. All in an effort to see the rich syncretic world of the 1st century, these statues and cults were the focus of ritual life in the Mediterranean. Now, they are benign objects in art museums. What fascinates me most about these artifacts is the ability of these ancient objects to encode and transmit ideas beyond both literacy and language. The similarities which persist between cultures and dialects are astounding, speaking to a shared experiential aesthetic—using shared imagery and symbols which transcended the languages of an interconnected, globalized world.

As the artist of this work, I have merely given it an overarching visual language to make this information digestible for a modern audience, specifically gamers and tarot readers. My own representations found here are spliced together from multiple ancient sources, descriptions in ancient literature, and informed by the theophanic encounters humanity has reported throughout history. The imagination and symbolism found in these works belongs to us all as the foundations of western iconography and symbolism still animating brands, media, and architecture today.

As an independent game designer, I have worked on many types of games which I can sum up as "consumer-made" experiences. I recognize that gaming has been a way for many of my peers to have a direct relationship with their audience through affordable copies of their work, something which is often inaccessible in the art world.

LOGOS DIVINÆ represents a "non-fiction" game, a way of embedding bodies of information with the visual language of gaming to facilitate learning beyond STEM-based edutainment. By housing a humanities department's worth of ancient knowledge within the confines of a card deck, it is my hope that players will have endless discoveries by engaging with the content in this work.

It is my hope that LOGOS DIVINÆ will encourage folk-created card games, new local variations, and a Renaissance of traditional card games facilitated by the unique design of these cards—combining historical concepts with the 700+ years of classic playing cards.

—Colin Snyder, 2025

Bibliography of Research

This project wouldn't have been possible without the scholarship and research of many, many authors. Here's a select few texts I found immensely helpful to understanding this body of knowledge:

Assmann, Jan. 2020. The Invention of Religion: Faith and Covenant in the Book of Exodus. Princeton University Press.

Beard, Mary. 1998. Religions of Rome: Volume 1. Cambridge University Press.

Brennan, Chris. 2017. Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune. Amor Fati Publications.

Ehrman, Bart D. 2016. Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior. HarperOne.

Hall, Manly P. 1928. The Secret Teachings of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic & Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy. Philosophical Research Society.

Horowitz, Mitch. 2023. Modern Occultism: History, Theory, and Practice. G&D Media.

Hrůša, Ivan. 2015. Ancient Mesopotamian Religion: A Descriptive Introduction. Harrassowitz Verlag.

Idel, Moshe. 1988. The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia. State University of New York Press.

Jodorowsky, Alejandro, and Marianne Costa. 2004. The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards. Destiny Books.

Jung, Carl Gustav. 1954. Answer to Job. Princeton University Press.

Kerényi, Karl. 1967. Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter. Princeton University Press.

Kerényi, Karl. 1976. Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. Princeton University Press.

Lagalisse, Erica. 2019. Occult Features of Anarchism: With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples. PM Press.

Pagels, Elaine. 1995. The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics. Vintage.

Smith, Mark S. 2002. The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel. Eerdmans.

Stavrakopoulou, Francesca. 2021. God: An Anatomy. Picador.

Yates, Frances A. 1964. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. University of Chicago Press.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2000. The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? Verso.