week 11: big shifts, lessons, and the non-binary nature of the future

Cards from The Othrysian Tarot by Michael Ezzell

Welcome back! I’ve taken a few weeks off from this, partly because not many folx read it, and partly because I made a vow to myself a year or more ago that I won’t put pressure on my writing after how much I did that when I was still trying to be a playwright. Ironically, I’m 100+ pages into a new play that will sit on my cloud and never see the light of day. My body can’t seem to stop doing what my heart can’t countenance anymore. 

Anyhoo. I’ve also had the chance to visit Chicago and lead a workshop at Malliway Brothers. They’re also co-owners of Crossed Crow, who published The Modern Fortune Teller’s Field Guide--which you should read if you haven’t yet! This week, a few nights ago, I had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion on tarot with the Key and Serpent Society, which is run by the co-owners of a local witch shop, The Veiled Crow. Lots of big crow energy for me, and I probably should be paying attention to it! It was equally delightful and reminded me that I really do need to be out in the world more . . . despite the reality that I’m 1. and inrovert; 2. exhausted by humanity. 
Which takes us to this week’s reading/survival tip. 
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I’m using the new Othrysian Tarot by Michael Ezzell. It’s a Titan-themed pip deck that attracted me because of its style and the almost completely re-named, but not unrecognizably so, majors. 
I’ve drawn a cross of five cards (and may draw more), yielding:

                     Rider of the East (Knight of Cups)
Ace of East/Cups, Order (Justice), Nine of North/Wands
                      The Omphalos (The World)

My only qualm this is gorgeous deck is that the cardinal directions are completely misaligned for me. But I don’t really use those in readings, anyway, so pardon me if I ignore them and refer to the cards by their familiar names—except for the majors. 

Let’s begin in the center with Order (Justice). At the panel the other night, I mentioned Justice is my least favorite card. What are we talking about when we’re talking about that word? I don’t mind, in fact I usually enjoy, when that card is changed—my favorite (unexpectedly) being Harris and Crowley’s Adjustment. With the card called order, here, there’s almost a deeper meaning than justice. I makes me think of the Universe, which I’m just going to use to call all of what is “out there.” There does seem to be some kind of order to existence, and the more I’ve gone on my sound healing exploration, the more we come up against the reality that everything is really vibrating energy. And while we may not entirely know what the order is, we are fairly certain there is one. 

The card is flanked by the Ace of Cups and the Nine of Wands. Because of the nine’s ability to go in a few directions, and because this one is so beautifully bird-cagey, I added an additional two cards (Pillar/King of East/Cups, and Eight of North/Wands). This weirdly continues to balance this row, even if in an imbalanced way. 

I think this row suggests we’ve had somewhat limited sense of the order of things, we’ve been somewhat overwhelmed by the “bigness” (that’s a common association for me of The World) everything, but the order remains nonetheless—and though we’ve all burned ourselves out trying to escape it, it is fact a reality that—because we’re just vibrating energy anyway, we’ve never actually been trapped. It’s not the Order of things that have done us in; it’s the perception of those things. 

Perceptions is tricky. I lack any swords cards (in this deck, west), and water and air are typically my perception combo. But I believe in this case that the lack of swords in the reading actually indicates we actually haven’t been perceiving. Certainly not the order of things. We’ve been moving through instinct and impulse. 

I added another card to the Ace of Cups. 13. Death. Or the nameless card. This actually reminds me of white people’s tendency toward despair when something goes wrong. Which, let’s be honest, a whole fuckton of us did in the wake not only of Trump’s so-called re-election and the increasingly unavoidable revelation of Isreal’s genocide—and our continued and enthusiastic complicity in that. 

It’s often been said in civil rights spaces that despair is colonial. It’s for sure a thing I’ve had to wrestle with, because I’ve been a pessimist my whole life. Despair is my entire personality. I was raised by parents who constantly told me before I tried new things, “Don’t get your hopes up!” And though I used frequently to quote Tony Kushner, who said once in an interview that “we have an ethical obligation to hope,” that was also during the Bush II years, and I was far more naive then. 

But that Ace of Cups is doing a lot of work here, settling us into the power of water and the fact that water can’t be caged. It can be contained, but we’re not talking about that. That bird-cagey Nine tells us a lot. The King of Cups reminds us of that we cannot be caged, and in fact never have been. 

Let’s take a look at the cards above and below this row. 

Knight of Cups and the Omphalos. What the FUCK is an omphalos? It’s a Greek word for navel. But I think the reason that it’s in this deck is because it was a stone in the temple at Delphi thought to be the center of the world (I referenced The World earlier, in its bigness). We’re actually dealing with the center, here, the crossroads even—a spot we know to be magical in so many cultures—so much so that when I do spellwork, I typically create the crossroads on my work table with candles and/or herbs.

I’m drawing additional cards to contextualize it, and we’re granted The Star (one of the few cards not renamed) and Passage (o—The Fool, typically) and The Teacher (Hierophant/Pope). All majors! And I in fact was hoping for a minor or two to ground us. No such like. This mini spread-within-a-spread suggests, to a certain degree, that the center cannot hold. The Star is our compass, The Omphalos—or center of the world—is shifting, and it’s doing so to each us a lesson. 

The Knight of Cups, to which I’ve additionally drawn the Five of Coins and The Two Rivers (Temperance), reminds us that the only way out is through—and though this appears to be a time of upheaval, it is toward the end of integration of the disparate parts of life. 

If we say “the center cannot hold,” and then a Temperance-like card comes along and suggests that we’re moving to the center, isn’t that a problem?

No, because Temperance is not a centrist idea. I’ve written in other blog posts that the temperance movement was really a racist and classist attempt to control the impoverished—because men in this class, it was said, abused their wives because of drinking. “Drink is the curse of the working class.” At no point could these moneyed assholes have paused and realized that people drank because of their exploitation, not because they’re prone to abuse. That’s not a centrist idea. 

But I also think the idea of integration is quite different from the idea of moderation--which is how I typically think about that card. Integration, The Two Rivers, even Harris and Crowley’s Art, all suggest a non-binary existence. Which also connects to one of the rare things that Crowley said I actually do find currency in: the Age of Horus. I don’t necessarily concieve of it in the way he did, but I do take from his teachings the idea of a matriarchal age (Isis), a Patriarchal Age—the current one (Osiris), and then a third age. That third age, in my opinion, is a non-binary age. Aquarius, the hippy name for it, feels appropriate; though I think the reality of the Boomer generation’s use of that term and then fucking off to make the world a worse place in their middle age reminds us that the sixties weren’t, in fact, the “dawning of the age of Aquarius,” but rather a giant boomerang shooting us into the “me generation” and the former hippies transformation in the 80’s to Reaganite pieces of shit. (I think constantly of the line in “Boys of Summer”: “Out on the road today, I saw a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac” as emblematic.) PLEASE, if you’re of this generation, hold yourself back from feeling offended. I’m talking about the collective generation, not individuals. (Though I also have to say there are far too many people who think they’re allies today whose progressivism locked in the 90’s and hasn’t actually progressed in close to thirty years.) 

I didn’t expect a message quite this big this week, but if I had to sum it up, I’d say something like: You are not caged by the world you’ve created, because you cannot be caged. You have to learn that you are not a solid, but rather a gas. And you also need to know what this massive thing that’s happening is part of a larger lesson, and those who lean into the integration—into the non-binariness of existence—are going to be much better off when the center shifts, which it’s already doing. 

This is a bit of an existential tip, admonishing us to lean into the new world rather than get caged by the one we’re in—because if we do, we’ll both resist the changes less and be more actively connected when they do change. 

The center, in this case then, can also be reframed as what happens after the two rivers meet, after the integration of binaries, and rather than thinking of the cards The Omphalos/World and Two Rivers/Temperance as “moderate,” what we really want to do is recall that they are ALREADY a non-binary reality. 

Do with that what you will. 

Til next time!