Do you recognize this man? All but the most innocent and sincere of us have a politician lurking somewhere in our minds. In fact, the mind is political. Its very nature is to plan and scheme and try to manipulate situations and people so that it can get what it wants. Here, the mind is represented by the snake, covered with clouds and "speaking with a forked tongue". But the important thing to realize about this card is that both faces are false. The sweet, innocent, "trust me" face is a mask, and the evil, toxic, "I'll have my way with you" face is a mask, too. Politicians don't have real faces. The whole game is a lie. Take a good look at yourself to see if you have been playing this game. What you see might be painful, but not as painful as continuing to play. It doesn't serve anybody's interest in the end, least of all yours. Whatever you might achieve in this way will just turn to dust in your hands.

Anybody who can be a good pretender, a hypocrite, will become your leader politically, will become your priest religiously. All that he needs is hypocrisy, all that he needs is cunningness, all that he needs is a facade to hide behind. Your politicians live double lives, your priests live double lives--one from the front door, the other from the back door. And the back-door life is their real life. Those front-door smiles are just false, those faces looking so innocent are just cultivated. If you want to see the reality of the politician you will have to see him from his back door. There he is in his nudity, as he is, and so is the priest. These two kinds of cunning people have dominated humanity. And they found out very early on that if you want to dominate humanity, make it weak, make it feel guilty, make it feel unworthy. Destroy its dignity, take all glory away from it, humiliate it. And they have found such subtle ways of humiliation that they don't come in the picture at all; they leave it to you to humiliate yourself, to destroy yourself. They have taught you a kind of slow suicide.