![]() LESSON ONE A three-card spread of: Ten of Cups (3), Seven of Cups (1), Temperance (2) (The number following the card titles is the order in which they were drawn and laid out.) Deck used: The Starlight Illuminated Tarot, a repainting of the Waite-Smith deck by Carol Herzer All divination is an act of wonder and faith, staring into the potential much the way that the Seven of Cups stares at a fantastical array of cups holding all kinds of options. In laying out the cards, we enact the famous image—wondering what our fate will be, much like the silhouetted figure, or what chance we should take. Which cup should we take? Which unlocks the future? Are any even real? Like the hero presented with the choice of three keys to three doors, one assuring total happiness, two assuring certain death, we wonder for just a moment if this really is it. Is this the time our luck has finally run out? Is the image of the skull peeking through the reflections of the cup containing a laurel wreath an indication that getting what we most desire will equal our death? Or is it more a reminder that nothing is one thing? Is it a reminder that the road to victory is fraught with risk? And what of the shrouded figure rising from their cup like Christ or another other of the dead-and-risen deities from the tomb? Is one of the options available to us a truly divine transubstantiation? We (tarot readers) like the suit of cups. It’s romantic, it’s sexy, it’s fluid. We live in a moment where fluidity may be essential. And as the dominant element in this spread, our first reading/lesson, we must consider the major water vibe we’ve got going here. Not only do we have the seven—a lucky number!—but also the ten, which is the fullness of the suit. It’s as much water as you can have at any one time in any one card. And we can’t deny that Temperance also gives water vibes, too, so we’re experiencing a waterlogged reading—in a good way. In fact, this reading reminds us that fluidity is a fundamental need in divination. We have to (I can’t believe I’m about to say this) “go with the flow” (to quote Margo Channing in All About Eve: “I detest cheap sentiment”). But it is true. Reading well is an exercises in fluidity. I was tempted to begin this paragraph saying, “The act of laying out cards to make sense of the world is an objectively crazy thing to do.” But the idea of objectivity is false. Humans aren’t capable of it. Frequently, what we consider objectivity is really the ability to view information through a biased lens that we have collectively “agreed” is objective, but that just favors a certain point of view. Today, that means anything stripped of magic, spirituality, human emotion, and even of humanity. It is the lens of the “scientist,” but not the idealized scientist many of us lefties associate with that gig. No, it is the “scientist” who operates from a bias that what meets their expectations of real is real . . . and anything else is bullshit. It is a fundamentalist point of view, and in its way colonial. The secular totality of science is really an overcorrection thanks to the outsized influence of Christianity and its mythos. It rarely has to do with the scientific method and everything to do with personal distaste for the spiritual. The overcorrection is understandable, but fundamentalism is always fundamentalism, even when it’s happening on the political left—or, anyway, tangential to it. Science was (and in parts of the world, still is) part of the spiritual; science is how we make sense of the numinous, and in this way it is our modern myth-making. But to suggest that science and the spiritual are separate is to operate from a modern colonial attitude that centers post-humanistic European cosmology over, well, everything else. Science knows that our spirit, our emotions (water) impacts our health. But the individualist focus of modern secular thought stops at the end of our nose. Sure, if we’re stressed we’re going to have poorer health—but the solutions to that are simply to not be stressed anymore. Fixed. Right? Except not right, because that’s not how life works (unless you’re privileged enough to be able to, say, quit a toxic job without suffering financially). Nothing is as simple at pop-science makes it seem, and here I guess I should say I’m focusing mostly on the celebrity scientist who casually and wryly shits all over the spiritual while recognizing the possibility of quantum mechanics and string theory. It’s possible (maybe probable?) that in other parts of space, another writer could be writing sentences very much like this right now—but it’s impossible that a deck of cards might be able to reflect our reality or that the position of the celestial bodies at birth might help us understand who we are. For a real scientist, anything is possible until proven unlikely. For the pop-scientist, nothing is possible unless it meets his (for it is always a cis het man) barometer of possibility. And that is fully unscientific. This isn’t an anti-science screed. I like science. Real science. Science that understands the scientific method, which is an experiment-based approach to figuring out why things work as they do. Science is that is open-minded and doesn’t pull down its pants and show its whole ass when it encounters something it doesn’t understand or doesn’t like. Science needn’t be divorced from the spiritual, and for most of human history it wasn’t. It’s only today that we are so fundamentally opposed to considering the inter-being of living on this planet, living in this universe, being part of this solar system, and whatever else exists out there. If string theory is possible, if there could be a version of “me” out there somewhere in another galaxy living out a similar life, that sure sounds a lot like magic to me. And science would do well operating more from a place of awe and curiosity rather than bias and fundamentalism. Looking for wisdom in a pack of cards is no more nuts than taking an experimental new medication, especially given the litany of side-effects we’re forced to endure during the commercial breaks of every TV show. (Would we even have TV anymore without the pharmaceutical industry? Again, I’m not anti-meds; I benefit from some. But dear god with the fucking ads. I know more about moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis than I ever imaged I would for someone who doesn’t [yet] have it.) Divination at least won’t kill you or put you at risk of lymphoma. And humanity has gone to the randomizing of banal objects to understand itself throughout our time on earth. Divination is one of the oldest art forms there is, and despite attempts from the christo-colonial church and the Celebrity Science Industrial Complex(TM) to shame and bully people out of it, people still reach for it. Life is fluid. It is not a straight line, as much as it is easiest to think in those terms. As we grow on our life journeys, we have big leaps forward, small steps forward, big leaps backward, and stumbles. We cannot get where we’re going by being stuck. And I say this as someone who is astrologically very fixed. I don’t like change. I’m fiery and airy. Water freaks me out in many ways. Being fluid scares me. And yet: it is the fluid that survives. It is the tree that bends in the wind that makes it through the storm. Life needs fluidity. Like water, when life stands still too long it can become riddled with toxins. We must evolve, we must trickle through lives many channels and never stop. It is the actual moving, the flowing, that reminds us we’re living. There’s nothing wrong with pauses, with rests, much like in music, but we are not static and do not benefit from longterm stasis. Life is the same. This watery reading, this first lesson on tarot, reminds us that we cannot take the pedantic bias of the not-very-scientific scientist as our role model (or any other fundie). We have to make fluidity essential. When we become static as readers we give readings that reflect stasis. When we get so married to what we are “sure” works correctly, we can find ourselves making a crutch out of those things. We become closed. We become stuck. The water dries up, leaving a muddy mess into which we sink like we’re a faithful horse in some traumatizing “family” sci-fi movie from the eighties (I see you, Never Ending Story). And as the mud dries, we not only get stuck there, but the weight of the clay increases as it hardens. This can make us suffocate. (Check out YouTube videos of people putting themselves in wet cement if you don’t believe me.) The Ten of Cups reminds us that we must be fully fluid in our work, which, in this case, I take to mean open and adaptable. We respond in real time and when we face an obstacle, we can find a new path. This is especially important for folks at the beginning of their tarot journeys, where we can feel sometimes as if there is only one way. There isn’t. Learning is a series of successes and failures on the path to finding your way. But also it is when a new reader hits a snag during the reading process, when they see a card and none of their memorized meanings make sense, that fluidity is most necessary and least frequently called upon. Panic causes that, and the inevitable downward spiral. I know it well. In fact, when I read for myself I often still do this. I’m just too lazy to read for myself. I’m too lazy to be fluid. I’m (usually) delighted to be fluid while reading for others. There are times when it feels a little stiffer, a little less satin, but that’s just life. Most of the time, it’s a gorgeous, flowing dance of interpretation. Panic and downward spiraling defy fluidity. Feelings of imposter syndrome and worthlessness emerge from the depths of panic and the downward spiral, and this causes our fight-flight-or-freeze response to activate. Our bodies literally flood with chemicals designed to help us survive this imminent threat and this limits the things we’re capable of doing in that moment. The triple-F response focuses us on one goal: get out of this situation. That isn’t a great place to operate from when attempting to read for anyone. And while it is difficult to stop the dawning of the triple-F, it isn’t required that we stay there. In fact, a return to fluidity, a return to the cards before us, can liberate us from the grasp of those protective but stultifying chemicals. And the arrival of the term “chemical” draws our attention to Temperance, the card we’ve not yet considered. Pamela Colman Smith’s, with one foot on land and one in water, reminds us that divination is a two-part work: a connection to the ephemeral (water) and the information stored there and the solid (earth, the foot on the ground). When we’re reading we’re pulling information from the ephemeral and grounding it for mortal consumption. It’s the giving of language to a reading that does this. And in many ways language contains the reading in the way that a riverbed contains a river or tidal estuary contains at least a part of an ocean. The container gives us shape and helps us make sense of what we’re seeing. In New Orleans, Louisiana, a long bridge—a causeway—spans the length of Lake Pontchartrain. At the time I’m writing this, it holds the Guiness World Record for longest continuous span over water. It is so long that you drive over for about eight miles without being able to see land. People get so disoriented, they sometimes have to stop and turn around, or get someone else to drive them across. The vastness of the ocean and the gentle curve of the bridge (really the curve of the Earth) makes it feel as though there’s nothing in front of you. Those who have driven it say it feels like you’re driving to the end of the world. And while many people make their way over the causeway daily with no issue, many freak the fuck out (as I would). The openness of water, and the endlessness of the ocean (or, in this case, a lake) can be too difficult for the human mind to make sense of. Trying to imagine the vastness of water can be much like imagining what seventy-five billion dollars looks like. We have no real concept of it and if we were to find ourselves in the middle of it we might think there’s nothing but money. Water needs a container. When we are in the position of having no container, we can feel something akin to what those of us with bridge phobia (gephyrophobia) feel when faced with a ride across an endless expanse and the feeling of nothing solid to rest on—as well as nowhere solid to stop, if necessary. Water without something to rein it in will go everywhere and drown in its own intensity. Language is one of the ways in which we give divination shape. While there are no swords cards (air) in the reading, water can’t be without air; it is made up in part of oxygen. And so wherever there is water, there is the implication of at least oxygen. The problem with air is that’s not very good at holding things. That’s not what it’s “there” for. Language, too, isn’t a solid foundation and while it can give shape it also presents the opportunity for misunderstanding. Words are fluid. Language, like water, changes shape and flows where its easiest to go. And this is one reason conflict arises. It lives in the gap between the idea expressed by a speaker (or writer) and the ability of the listener to make the same or similar sense of those words that the speaker did. It is imprecise. We can see how closely water (emotion) and air (words) are in the reactions we experience to what other people say. Not only that, we can see how closely the two are related when we consider the way the words we speak to ourselves impact how we feel. If, like me, you experience a tendency toward negative self talk and generalized anxiety, you know that you’re in a constant dialogue with yourself in which you obsess over the meanest language, the cruelest ideas. I mean, they may not be objectively mean or cruel, but the impact on the self is. (On the other hand, if you’re a narcissist who tells yourself wonderful stories about you, this will be a foreign and possibly impossible to imagine. Also, I hate you because I often wish I could do that.) Language is very watery. It’s not good enough. It’s not strong enough. It’s a shocking thing for a writer to say, but it’s because I know language so well that I recognize its weakness. Particularly English, which is a major mess—in part because it is a language of colonialism. It is stolen from around the world, much like the contents of the British Museum. No, language isn’t enough, but it is the thing we use to conduct divination. At least in part. And then this spread, this watery spread, reflects the struggles of the diviner: how can we use our limited abilities to make sense of the messages contained in the cards (or bones or flight patterns of birds or hunting entrails) and relate it to others in a way that is clear, logical, and (ideally) actionable? It is here that water answers the question again: tenacity. Water is not put off by obstacles and frequently pays no attention to them. I think of the opening lines of the (problematic and yet moving—thank you, dialectics) Memoirs of a Geisha, in which the narrator recalls being told that her wateriness means she will always find a new path. It is the relentlessness of water, its tenacity (which connects it to fire) that serves as our advisor here: yes, we are stuck with an imprecise medium, and yet it is effective especially when we remain tenacious in our effort to make it work, to make it make sense. Water is so tenacious that, when faced with solid rock, it will silkily wear away at that rock until a deep bed is formed—and it will continue to wear away at that solidity until there’s nothing left beneath it, or until the sources of that water are dammed up—trapping it, forcing it into stillness and toxicity. Water doesn’t quit. Neither do diviners. Because we recognize that we have a responsibility to get the answer—or at least as close to the answer as we can. We keep trying, we keep carving away at the obstacles, and keep finding new paths, we keep moving. Or we should. Because when the diviner, like water, gets stagnate, only poison grows. Cholera spreads through stagnant water. For the diviner, stagnancy leaves us stunted, stuck, and unable to see past the end of our nose. It makes us conservative, egotistical, and even terrified of being found out or contradicted. A reader who can’t fathom an alternative interpretation, who can’t see the value in an ever-deepening relationship to their tools, is a reader giving stuck, formulaic readings that lack the fluidity we’ve already learned is so valuable. This is the influence on water of air in its most rigid: when the air is cold and freezes the water, stopping anything from growing. Yes, nothing rots when frozen, but water can only freeze when its standing still. There may be plenty of time for the rot to seep in before the ice takes hold. Ice can’t preserve what is already bad. And because it’s numbing, we don’t know we’re there. We just know there’s a vague sense of discomfort and a deadening of the senses. Even a deadening of the joy that once used to come from practicing divination. Happily, ice can melt. But it takes heat, fire. We don’t have that in this reading, and unlike air, there is no implied availability of fire in water. This is why they’re so often thought of as ill-dignified or adversarial. They’re not, or not anymore than any other element is with any other—context always dictates relationship—but they don’t “contain” each other in the way that water contains air. We need to bring in fire, and we do that through passion. And in this reading, the absence of earth and fire tells us something: we have to work (earth) hard (fire) to bring them in. See, the wateriness of this reading makes sense. The diviner is watery by nature, even if we’re stronger in other elements generally. Fluid people are drawn to divination because it is so watery. It is the intuition and the spirituality—both watery qualities—that draws us. And we get to bathe in the luxury of all the potential spiritual paths we can take with it. It is an area in life where we are not only encouraged but required to deep dive into the illogical, the impossible to quantify, the silky, the liquid, the imprecise, the sensational. Think back to the Oracle at Delphi, in which the seeker received inscrutable-yet-poetic revelations that had to be made sense of. Think of the very nature of divining. So much if it is driven by instinct. And intuition is in some ways another manifestation of instinct. Intuition is another aspect of our survival mechanism. We don’t know how it works, but we know we have it when it kicks in. In classes I always say that those of us city mice who spent our lives waiting at busy intersections can tell when cars are coming without looking. Likewise, country mice can sense the presence of predators who may put their stock in danger. Our intuition is tuned to our circumstances, and the “safer” we feel in life (I.e., the more protected the world is designed to keep us), the less we need it. People who aren’t drawn to divination may, in fact, doubt it because they doubt that there is actual danger in the world. Bill Nye may have no need to consider the reality of intuitive sciences because he’s been relatively safe most of his life. I don’t know him, so I don’t know. But I do know that the more marginalized society makes us, the more in tune with intuition we must be. It is how we navigate the dangers of being on the margin—where there are rarely protections. I’d wager one reason watery/intuitive types are so drawn to spirituality and divination is because it is a chance to use our skills in a productive rather than reactive way. It’s a chance to indulge in our natural abilities in a place that is safe because it is equally watery. Walk into a room of divination-minded folks, and you will probably feel relatively safe (insecurities aside) because the vibe is very fluid, very easy, very sensitive in the sense of thoughtful. (You’ll also likely find a lot of people who tend to drift off or away in the middle of a conversation when someone or something else catches their fleeting attention—and this is another example of the air innate in water.) Divination is a safe space because you have to be marginal, you are required to exhibit fluidity. It asks us to bask in our slinky, satin spirits. When you are someone who didn’t know you needed tarot in your life and you discover it, it’s like slipping off the restrictive corset of logic and feeling your body fills out to its natural shape—and then slipping on a silk robe, flowing and somehow both cooling and warming simultaneously (silk has that effect). We never want to talk that robe off! But: When we make divination into a partnering act—reading for someone else, including ourselves—we do need to have at least one foot in something real. That’s because the concerns we’re reading about are real. Frequently, they’re also not particularly watery, at least in the sense of adaptability and sensitivity. It is the gentle lamb lost in the big city. It needs more than just its gentleness to survive making its way through Times Square on New Year’s Eve (terrifying). It may not naturally vibrate on that level, but if it wants to get out alive in needs to find a way of exhibiting that. So, diviners must force ourselves to take advantage of fire and earth. We spoke of earth already when we noted Temperance’s foot on dry land. We must, like the angel, keep one foot on solid ground so that we don’t drown. But we also need something to keep us warm. Water and air are generally pretty cool, pretty chill (we might even say aloof). I associate air with winter and water with spring. This is because we notice air most when it’s cold—only the cold can bite at us in that way. When the air is too hot, it’s uncomfortable but it lacks bite; it’s duller, heavier, more like being bludgeoned with a wand or baton. When it’s cold, the air hurts. It cuts. And it can even burn. And the cold makes water freeze. When it warms up—as fire enters the picture—water melts and can flow again. I associate fire/wands with summer. It is more common to put fire and water against each other, what astrologers would call “opposition” because they’re adversarial. But good astrologers have told me that oppositions aren’t necessarily adversarial; they’re two forces that need to be integrated. Fire and water are opposites in that one can cancel the other out. Fire can evaporate water; water can put out fire. But like all polarities, they aren’t separate entities. They’re actually the same thing. Because fire and water are two ends of the same pole, they’re both the other. Water is fire; fire is water. That’s an insane thing to say, right? But it’s true. Because you can’t have one thing without the other. The presence of water implies the presence of not-water. Elementally, not-water is fire. Likewise, the presence of fire indicates not-fire. Elementally, not-fire is water. The North and South Poles are two ends of the same line; they’re not two separate lines. They’re two points on a line, but if either one of them didn’t exist, the other one would also not exist. At the same time, because one exists, the other has to exist. Polarity isn’t binary; it is a mutual unity. A sort of oneness. So much of spirituality in humanity has obsessed about the duality of “male” and “female.” The binary nature of being, and the often-dueling forces that make up everything. This, alas, cannot be confined to christo-colonial thinking; it’s in much of the world’s cultures. The god/goddess dynamic. And this duality, this binary, is becoming increasingly less relevant in life. The present discussion of gender is an example and the reality of the non-binary person—the person who is neither “man” or “woman” and somehow “both” and somehow “neither.” (My liberal use of curly quotes indicates the present lack of clear language to express this.) Happily, this is also a concept that has existed spiritually, too, but it certainly hasn’t taken center stage in the way the binary has. I hope that’s changing. Because, if we apply the somewhat nebulous logic I used in regards to the fire/water polarity, then we have to recognize that nobody is a man or a woman, because in order to be one you also have to be the other. Male/female are a polarity, not a binary. And while we think in terms of masc and femme for genderfluid people, we only know what those terms mean because we understand them in contrast to the other—which means that if one ceases to be, so does the other. If we were to take all the masc and femme qualities that supposedly make people up and created a Venn diagram for each person on this planet, the things that fall into the non-binary category would exponentially outweigh the binary. Most of us most of the time present in a neutral—a non-binary—state. What we could call our “resting state.” When we are in our natural or resting state, we are not posing as anything, and as such we’re in essence without masculinity or femininity because we aren’t actively comparing ourselves to some other (gendered) thing. Nor is anyone else comparing us. We just are. We’re being. And when we’re being, the masculinity or femininity of any person ceases to exist, because we’re not being contextualized. A butch person doesn’t watch TV differently from a femme person. A femme person doesn’t nap differently from a butch person. They may watch different things, but that has nothing to with their position on the pole of masc/femme. The obsession with binaries I think is a heterosexual habit. In spiritual spaces, I think the obsession with the divine masculine and the divine feminine is in some ways an intentional misreading of what the esoteric principals were actually attempting to say. Now, I’m no esotericist. But having been in these spaces long enough, and having read enough of Robert M. Place’s books, I can see that the goal of alchemy, say, is the integration of the self. Place (and others, but I read it in Place first) uses the metaphor of a prince and princess joining together to become something larger. In the current editions of this Alchemical Tarot, he was a Lovers card with the prince and princess engaged penile/vaginal penetrative sex. It was, he says, changed for the original mass market edition to a PG version to make it more palatable to the consumer, at least in the mind of the publisher. But of course that bowdlerizing of the original image (now happily restored) misses the point. The intercourse depicted on the card isn’t a sex act; it is an integration of two things that were always meant to be one. It’s not a man in a woman fucking; it’s an entity becoming itself whole self. Any of these polarities, including the lingam and yoni (seen on the front of the Waite-Smith Chariot) or yin-yang are discussed in hetero-dominant societies as two parts of the same whole. No. They are one part of one whole—or two points on the same line. They cannot be two parts of a whole, because they cannot be separated. If they are, they immediately cease to be. It isn’t lingam and yoni it’s lingamyoni; it’s not yin and yang, it’s yinyang (which, annoyingly, is how a lot of Americans say it, adding a “g” to “ying”). Ken Burns said that Abraham Lincoln thought of the US as a “one-thing.” Let’s set aside the politics of the US for a moment, and take that “one-thing” concept because it’s contextually useful. Think of it this way: The annoyingly lost cause-y historian Shelby Foote says that, prior to the American Civil War, people said, “The United States are . . .” (as in “The United States are a colonial powerhouse”). The verb “are” in this case is the correct one to use when referring to a collective. (“These grapes are tasty.”) After the war, the grammar changed and people said “The United States is . . .” (As in “The United States is a colonial powerhouse.”) That doesn’t technically make sense. (It’s not “correct” to say “These grapes is tasty.”) Allow me to pause for a second and re-state something I’ve said many times: English grammar is a classist and racist and nationalist tool used to gate-keep anyone who doesn’t talk like a moneyed white academic out of the best-paying jobs. When I say “it’s not correct,” I mean by the rules of this grammar, not by the moral code of anything. But, with that caveat, Foote’s example is a good one for our purposes right now because he’s saying that the US became a one-thing after that war. He’s wrong, of course; that’s not at all what happened. But it’s a good way of thinking about the male-female polarity. There’s no opposition, it’s a one-thing. Most of life is non-binary, including gender. This is all to say that because this is a watery reading, fire has to be implied because by this way of thinking one can’t exist without the other. This is remembering that we’re thinking about fire and water as metaphors of experience, not in terms of actual elements in life. The wateriness of this reading implies the necessity of fire, but because fire exists only because its “opposite” is so strongly represented, it means we frequently have to work harder to bring the fire out. Further, it’s also more work to keep the fire going because water wants to put it out and stay watery. When fire and water work together, they create steam—which can power so many things. This is another way in which fire and water aren’t adversarial but complimentary. In fact, thinking in terms of astrological oppositions, steam is in many ways the perfect integration of fire and water into power. Rather than cancelling each other out, they create something powerful together. Steam is a great example of that one-thing, or that lingamyoni/yinyang concept, because it is the direct result of the integration of two seemingly opposing forces. The reality of steam proves the unity of fire and water, or more metaphorically, that everything is its own other. Because fire is only implied in this reading, it means that there’s a level of tenacity that diviners are going to have to find to make their practice sustainable. Earlier we saw that water has tenacity in its ability to find new paths and even forge new ones when necessary—carving a whole riverbed or canyon out of rock. That said, though, water prefers the easy path. It only starts carving out a new path if there’s absolutely no other way, and then it can take generations for it to even make a dent. Fire, on the other hand, is fast-acting and can clear a swath for itself in a matter of hours. It’s not that fire is active and water is passive; that’s more binary nonsense. Action is passive and vice-versa, because one doesn’t exist without the other. It’s that fire is insistent where water is oblique. That’s a weird analogy, right? Those two words aren’t related. But they’re not meant to be. Water is oblique because it doesn’t care what path it takes; it’ll go off to the side just as easily as it’ll go straight ahead. It doesn’t need a straight route or a direct path. (In fact, it may prefer it. Water is associated with the moon, which is the ruler of Cancer; cancer is the crab, who moves side-to-side.) Fire is hungry and demands food and attention. It doesn’t need a straight path, but it’s not concerned with a path. It can go wherever it wants, generally, as long as there’s food. It demands food, it demands attention. It, like the sun, is very Leonine. It roars and expects everything to get out of its way. In this way, we can see that fire and water aren’t oppositional because they have fundamentally different goals. Fire eats, water flows. As watery diviners, we lure fire into our work by giving it food. (It’s worth pointing out that I just grabbed the Thoth deck to check out how Lady Frieda Harris painted Temperance (Art, in that deck) and discovered that the card is associated with Sagittarius, which is a fire sign—so there’s another link to fire. If you take the posture as earth and Sagittarius as fire, then all four suits are implied here already.) Problem is, what each person’s fire wants to eat is different. There will be clues, though, because when our fire “meets” food its interested, we’re going to have a reaction. That reaction is frequently curiosity. When our fire needs feeding, it sends signals to us. In my case, my fire currently wants to “eat” astrology. Because I work with tarot, I’ve always had a tangential connection to that topic, but I don’t really find the tarot/astrology correspondences make much sense so I’ve never really dedicated much time to it. (For example, I fundamentally believe that The Moon card should correspond to, you know, the actual moon.) Lately, it’s all I want to read about. Not in tarot terms, but it’s having an impact on my tarot reading because I can’t escape the connections. Sometimes the food our fire thinks we want turns out not to hit the spot. The Golden Dawn’s systems, while somewhat interesting, seemed worth studying but I quickly found it did not nourish my fire. You may feel the exact opposite, and that’s likely since I think most readers (tarot readers, anyway) do. When that happens, we’d do well to stop worrying so much about what we thought we wanted and seek out something else. Don’t waste time, you don’t want your fire to get too hungry. It won’t go out; it can’t, at least as long as there’s water. But it can get ravenous, and when that happens we frequently wind up spending a lot of money on things we never wind up paying any attention to. As diviners, we must feed ourselves new things—new methods, new concepts, new ideas, new systems, new tools, new perspectives—in order to keep our fire burning. While learning is typically under the governance of swords, it’s worth noting that fire and air are as inseparable as air and water. Fire isn’t made of air, but it cannot burn without it. Air is one of the fuels fire needs. The best way to put out fire is to suffocate it. Knowledge, particularly of things related to divination but that aren’t repeating what we already know, is a great fuel for fire and it’s why so many people who start out with tarot wind up deep-diving into so many different tangential topics. I’ve told the story of my big hiatus from tarot in all my other books, so I won’t tell it again here. But the important thing is, I stopped being curious. I thought I knew it all. I let my water put my fire out because I didn’t feed my fire. There have been other other times, though, where I fed my fire too much and it flamed out. We call this burnout. I’ve written a lot about this, too, but I bring it up here to point out that—though this is a watery reading—it demonstrates that, even when a reading is biased toward one of the elements, the remaining elements are still necessary. The fact of each element implies the fact of the others. Crowley titled this card Art and Lady Frieda Harris (the motor of that deck and the reason it exists) painted an alchemical act. This reminds us that divination is both an art and a science, and in fact highlights for us again the reality that these seemingly opposing concepts aren’t opposing at all. They are a polarity, two sides of the same coin, both part of a one-thing. Is there a science to divination? Yes. It is our technique, the foundation we stand on when we read. It doesn’t matter what that foundation is, but we must have one. There must be something to hold us up, particularly when the more watery/intuitive aspects of our personality don’t feel like playing. (This only really matters if we’re reading for money, where we have to read when we’re asked to, not just when we feel like it—but if you’ve ever read for yourself and found it falling flat, this is where a stronger foundation can help . . . and, actually, a little more art.) The art is using that science, that foundation, to make meaning. The two things work together, just like water and fire, and are at their best when viewed not as separate entities but a one-thing. Art is science; science is art. When reading, I rarely view the majors as behaving differently from the minors. Unless there’s a big sexy surfeit of majors, I just take their metaphor into the fold and they function with the same importance as the minors. In this case, Temperance is doing a lot of things: it’s standing in for the whole deck (implying air, fire, and earth, and if course being a major), and so it’s also reminding us that being a diviner means having a “foot” in every part of life. It is a reminder that, though we are working in a “sensational” art (in this case, take sensation to mean the feeling of sensations—the experience of sensing), we have to be able to talk about everything. Divination isn’t a one-thing, either. If you know my work, you know I’m a very “secular” reader; my brand is kind of staked on that, as are my two books. For most folks, that secularism may seem impossible. How can divination—a word literally connected to divinity—not have a spiritual core? But when I found tarot, I was done with spirituality. It had done a great deal of harm to me, and so I had to go on a journey of secularizing divination. That journey may sound nuts to some people, but it was what I needed to get good at this. This is another way in which we need to think about the wateriness of this reading and the reality of being a diviner. By stripping all spirituality from my divination, I had to come up with a way of reading that made sense in the day-to-day. I couldn’t rely on some ephemeral concept of Temperance meaning “the great work.” I had to understand it in the way we get around life: drinking too much, political movements, intemperance. I had, in many ways, to get literal. I couldn’t care about whether that card was associated with Sagittarius nor where it showed up on the (appropriated) Tree of Life. I had to understand what it meant for someone who has having problems at work. That became and remains central to my reading style. Temperance serving such heavy duty energy in this particular reading reminds us that we’re often seeing integration depicted on the cards. Frieda Harris’s Art card demonstrates that a bit better than the Waite-Smith, but in both the mixing of the cups is the integration of the parts into the one—the integration of opposing forces, the one-thingness of what we usually think of as binaries. Temperance itself is integration. This in a way takes (finally) us right back to the beginning. The fully overwhelming (ten and seven of cups) feeling and the tonnage of possibility. How do we choose? We don’t. We integrate. Temperance takes the Ten and Seven of Cups (the ten, in this case, intensifying the seven) and integrates all those possibilities into a one-thing. In this case, that one-thing is divination. It is a reading. The act of a tarot reading is the reader laying out lots of possibilities—each card in the deck and each combination suggests many, many possibilities. The reader integrates them into the message, one foot on land, one on water; all parts (fire, water, air, and earth) working together (integrated) into one message. That message, too, is a one-thing born of seemingly disparate parts. The answer isn’t separate from the cards; it is the cards, or at least the integration of them, making their separateness imaginary. When we read, we integrate ourselves, the divine, and the client; we integrate the cards, the question, and the correspondences; we integrate the logical and intuitive mind; we integrate the banal with the spiritual and the below with the above. And it is fluidity that allows us to do that, because without it we will get stuck, static, and still. Fluidity facilitates integration. Things that are tense, stolid—these things can’t blend, they refuse to. Their ego demands their separateness. And as such they become less-than and they’re more at risk. But fluid things aren’t bound in that way and so they’re free to integrate, in the way that steams meet and form rivers, and the way the angel in the Waite-Smith Temperance card creates their impossible flow. A read of one’s own Here’s a spread inspired by the lessons of this chapter:
A quick example: I drew the Page of Wands and the Seven of Wands from the two stacks (I just cut the deck; I didn’t deal out two stacks). For the sake of this example, I’m delighted to see two cards of the same element! This is a reminder that any one-thing is also a two-thing, because everything is also its opposite. Here, I see that I have two fiery parts of myself. I read this as the fact that I need to integrate my ambitions for success (page) with the fact that I get defensive when coming up against even the tamest obstacles (seven). Now, I draw three cards to bridge them. (Normally, I’d prefer doing up to seven but I’m aiming for something quick.) I’m legitimately cracking up. I got: The King of Wands, the Four of Wands, and the Knight of Wands. You cannot make this shit up. In this deck (an indie version of the Waite-Smith with much better coloring), the knight and the king both face left, which is where the page sits (who looks at them) and away from the right (where the seven sits, looking at us). The knight runs into the four. This tells me that I need to take that defensive fight (the seven and knight) and stabilize it (four) big time. I need to channel it into the real work, the mature work of creation (king). It’s also worth noting that the movement from knight to four to king tells me that I need to “grow up.” That’s not necessarily helpful advice, but it’s also not irrelevant because this reading is clearly telling on my ego and the nastier sides of my Leo sun. It also tells me that I have to take my temper and use it (knight/four) for something productive (four) that befits my status (king). I could go on, but you get the drift. Try it! I can’t tell you how much this reading tickled me. Especially given the massive meltdown I had yesterday morning about the book proposal I sent out for another project.
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AboutEach post is a tarot reading about the tarot, a lesson about the cards from the cards. Each ends with a brand new spread you can use to explore the main concepts of the reading. Archives
February 2025
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