My first tarot deck was a black and gold thing with simple line art. It is an homage to the idea that everything is connected by a single thread. Everything has some point of connection to every other thing. Connection is inherent, inevitable, truth.
Rigid identity categorization is the antithesis to connection. It says “you are ‘this’ they are ‘that’ you are not the same, you cannot relate.” It says “you have no common ground, you cannot understand one another, there is no intersection.” Rigid identity categorization is no Venn Diagram. It paints us all as individually contained spheres orbiting through space, never touching one another. Even when we share some facet of identity, we belong to groups and those groups do not intersect. Black people and White people cannot understand one another. We are separate species. Men and Women. Gays and Straights.
All of it is lies. Identity is the most convincing lie our species has ever fabricated. Difference is such a pervasive disease that robs us all of so much feeling and so much love and experience and connection: because when a lie is supported by belief it gets up and goes walking and talking and looks a whole lot like truth. What we believe in lives. What we believe is true has power over us whether it is true or not, and when we believe in a lie we hand all our power over to the darkest parts of us. When we give our belief over to disconnect, we only see difference. We only give validity to separation. We begin to create divisions calling them nature without even realizing that we made them up in the first place. What you look for is what you will find.
The human brain is predisposed for pattern recognition. It fills in the blanks. Any simple optical illusion will prove this point. This capacity for the brain to fill in the blanks does not simply apply to what we can physically see but also is true of what we think. We are all meaning making machines. That is how we have so many systems of mythology. We love to write stories and create explanations for our realities. There is no human civilization that has not done this. That is how culture/custom/tradition happens. It is all stories we have made up and brought to fruition. Somehow, it is so simple for us to dismiss old world mythologies as fiction, yet we do not see our present-day living customs as the unnatural fabrications that they are.