![]() LESSONS SIX: An arc of five: Three of Cups (5), Seven of Swords (3), The Sun (1), Ten of Cups (2), The Empress (4) Deck: Sun and Moon Tarot by Vanessa Decort This is very surely my favorite mass market deck. It always makes me happy and we’re presented with The Sun as the first card—which is a traditionally happy card. Here in the very early days of summer (I’m writing this on July 5, though based on the schedule I’ve set up for myself, you may not be reading this until much later), it’s easy to see the sun’s major influence. But of course the question is, “What does this have to do with divination?” And the answer has to do with shedding light on things. I’ve spent much of the spring and into summer deep-diving into the esoteric systems that built tarot’s modern foundation. Time and time again I come up against the inscrutable, oblique, and opaque. (Just thought I’d use some five dollar words to match the majesty of esotericism.) I’ve been uniquely smug in my distaste for esotericism. Until recently, that had more to do with my distaste for dogma and anything scented with Christianity (which was quite traumatic for me). These days, it’s got less to do with dogma (though I’m still anti-dogma) and everything to do with exclusivity. Let’s just spend some time on the Golden Dawn, since they were arguably the most notable influence on mass market tarot and magic in the English-speaking world, anyway. There is nothing wrong with having a spiritual goal, even one that centers the self. That said, the entire system is based on a cycle of rote memorization, examination, and recitation. Even the initiatory rituals require memorization (and if you want to initiate yourself, which is possible, then you have to play all the parts in the ceremonies, which means you have to memorize the whole rite—not only what you have to say, but what the gods and entities are saying to you). This implies not only a neurotypical brain (and I frequently make the argument what what we think of as “typical” is in fact the real divergence and what we think of a divergent is more typical—by which I mean I think most people are neurodivergent), but also the leisure time to devote to the pages and pages of material one has to not only memorize but make sense of. And making sense out of much of this isn’t easy, because it’s designed to be opaque. They are, after all, mystery traditions. So, you need an excess of time, a brain that enjoys focus and memorization, excellent recall, a head for arcane language, and the space to sit down with all of this and attempt to bring it to life. That’s to say nothing of the cost associated with fashioning the various tools, buying study materials, or joining orders. (And if you’re devoting all this time to the development of self, you’re really not paying attention to the world around you—which betrays the myth that this focus on the self, on the elevation and evolution of the self, will “trickle down” to the rest of humanity. It won’t. Trickle down spirituality is just as much a myth as trickle down economics. And in both cases, it is something created by the wealthy elite.) It’s not so much what the GD believes, but rather the philosophy of scholarship that separates the human from the divine. I’m not particularly drawn to the teachings, but I don’t have any especial problem with them (I’ve already documented my feelings about the use of Kabbalah by non-Jewish practitioners—which is that, if you insist on it, you should do your best to understand where and how it emerged, the ways in which it was used against Jewish communities, and offer some kind of recompense for its use). What bugs me is that it is classist (you must be able to dedicate your life to this study and even making it past the neophyte level requires mastery of some really big concepts), it’s exclusionary, it’s pretentious (contact with the divine need not be that complicated), and it’s appropriative. Now, look: Working with spiritual concepts outside of your culture of origin can be, I think, a good thing—if for no other reason than to understand the humanity and divinity of a people, and also because we never know where we might discover “god.” That’s an unpopular opinion and I understand why. That said, if the key to revelation lives in a practice and if that key can help the human race doff its hatred and bigotry, I welcome it. If done, this must be done respectfully. It is the practitioners job to understand the culture and, if at all possible, honor it—both politically and financially. As the saying goes, “rent is due.” If you want to practice, say, Hoodoo in America, then your political donations and actions best reflect an interest in the libration of traditionally excluded communities, especially (in this case) Black Americans, whose ancestors created the practices in the throes of enslavement, sexual assault, forced imprisonment, and forced conversion, while handling the displacement from home and an attempt to dissolve their pantheon. On the other hand, too many people who find solace and magic in traditions outside their own (usually white people) cannot wait to capitalize off of it. The other thing that happens is historically marginalized groups are judged harshly for their spiritual traditions—until Becky comes along and discovers how “powerful” they are, and opens up a chain of studios exploring it. (We see this not just with spirituality, but music, fashion, etc.) It’s the combination of societal judgement and exclusion compounded with white people making money off things people of global majority don’t or won’t that makes this all so messy. (I also think that advertising the details of your spiritual practice, particularly if they’re “borrowed” from traditions outside your own, sets you up. No one can judge what they don’t know you’re doing, and if you’re doing your work sincerely there’s no reason to advertise it. Just a thought.) Anyway, this is all to say that the diviner’s job isn’t exclusivity and mystery; it’s access and demystification. We are here to shed light on things. That’s the whole point. The Sun reminds us of our goal—to spotlight the answers, to make the unknown known. That sounds awfully lofty and in saying it I could easily be accused of the kind of pretense that I’m always criticizing in exclusively spiritual traditions. I don’t mean it to be lofty at all. In fact, it’s the base requirement—and, frankly, if you achieve no other goal as a diviner, I think you’re doing pretty well. Too many folks get stuck in the esoteric, in the arcane, and clarity never arises because it’s mired in so much stuff. Clarity is the goal. Of course, one hopes for accuracy—but I’ve also documented my feelings on that. (See my books for deeper explorations of that topic. For our purposes here, accuracy shouldn’t be the thing that readers are worried about at first. We should be focused on clarity. Accuracy comes with practice and cannot be gaged easily because life isn’t a straight line.) The sun tells us: make things clear, visible; make them easy to see; make them bright; bring the light. (Here I must comment on Lucifer’s role as “light bringer” and how he existed as an entity before he was transformed by the church into the devil.) How do we do that? The rest of the cards show us! Let’s broaden out to the Seven of Swords (Futility) and the Ten of Cups (Satiety). The Seven of Swords offers us inner insight because we’re pausing to assess our mental state or how we’re thinking. The title of futility annoys me. It means “ineffective” or “unimportant.” Suppose we say in this case that too much inner reflection is futile, ineffective. For a cerebral over thinker (like me) that’s not easy to sit with, which is one reason I’m sitting with it. (It also happens to be a trend in this blog, which I think highlights how far away I am from it.) Now, let’s pause and consider the Ten of Cups (Satiety). Tens are the climax of their suit. You can think of them as abundant (each new number following the ace adding to the suit) or as drained (every new number from the ace depleting the suit). The word “satiety” suggests that we’ve had enough—which, good or bad, is the salient point here. We can have had enough because we’ve reached the amount that we can take (we’re full) or because we’re over it. In the case of the Ten of Cups, we’re full of water—which makes me think about having to pee. That’s not really relevant, but it just popped into my head. Combining the two, and remembering that we’re looking at advice on how to make our readings clearer and easier to “see” (read: understand), we’ve got the intellect (swords) and the senses (cups) working together. We’ve got the introspection of the seven and the totality of the cups. We’ve also got “futility” and “satiety.” The cards aren’t a natural blend in this context, but of course we need to make them work together. We could read this as: “It’s futile to ever think you can have enough.” But, as the kids say, that’s mid. We can reassess (seven) how we give voice to (swords) the many, many sensations (Ten of Cups) that arrive in a reading. That’s definitely getting closer to the topic for sure. But it’s not quite right. Sometimes in readings we have to keep digging. This is one of those times. Let’s pause with these two cards and broaden again. The final two cards are the Three of Cups (abundance—a word I used earlier) and The Empress. Threes are expansive, so abundance makes sense. And of course we know what cups are. The Empress is also an emotional being, but a driven one, a powerful one. She also happens to be a three. So we’ve got two threes! The senses (cups) expand (three) a lot (two threes) when we empower (Empress) them. This is a theme I keep finding in these blogs—that one has to let go of the logical and give way to the senses. The Seven of Swords, as the only “logical” card, suggests that it is futile to rely on that part of us. But I know that’s not the answer to the question because we need to communicate clearly. So the reading can’t be about how logic and language are futile. (This is one reason why people get so hung up on the keywords—they often don’t apply. Here I’m making myself apply it, but if this were a real reading for a client, at this point I’d probably recognize that it’s futile to incorporate the word futile in this reading.) Because of that, I’m returning to the seven for a moment. (When I’m reading for a client, this is all happening mentally—which is a swords-y experience.) What are other associations with the Seven of Swords? Deception is one, when we think of the PCS image. But what she was really drawing was “Unstable Effort.” The futility in a way becomes about how futile it is to base divination in logic, in the sense that it is objectively an illogical thing to do. Or an “unstable effort.” The rational can only go so far and must be partnered with a major flood of intuition (cups/water). This is a trend I keep banging up against in these readings, and I don’t really believe it. It’s funny that I keep coming up with it. Actually, this card has been dogging me in a few ways in the last few weeks. I think it wants to show me something I can’t seem to see quite yet, but it keeps coming up. Is it futile trying to understand this? Or, is it futile to divorce our thoughts/words (swords) and feelings (cups)? I’m struggling here! In the e-book I released recently, Thoth on Earth: The Harris-Crowley Deck for Modern Fortune Tellers, I call this card “the over-thinker over-thinking.” Which may be exactly what I’m doing right now. Laughy face emoji. But I also talk about how water and air are inseparable. Because air as we understand it here on earth (and divination tends to be somewhat geocentric) is oxygen, and oxygen is one of the things that makes up water, we can’t have water without it. Is it possible, then, that our thoughts and feelings aren’t different at all? I always say one reflects the other. We think and feel or feel and think. They dictate each other. Is that the point? Because of this, there is no difference and so the feelings we feel in a reading are also thoughts and ideas that need to be expressed. Which is a pretty deep concept, when you think(!) about it. Yoav Ben Doc, whose work I greatly admired, said in Tarot: The Open Reading that everything occurring during a reading means something. I frequently admonish folks that the reader isn’t the oracle, but I do say that the reader is part of the oracle. —Hold please. This is where I stopped last night because my DoorDash order arrived. Later, as I was reading in bed and finding the stuff I was reading inscrutable (related to esoteric tarot—well written, but I cannot make myself care about this stuff), I realize it was futile for me to jam my head with “scholarship,” when I always say that divination is about life. And while this is a spread of mostly cups cards (joined by The Empress, who is somewhat watery), what water does is flow. Like life. It actually reminded me why my style is so down and dirty, because the more you get lost in the intellectual murk, the harder it can be to read about life. We forget it. And that’s actually a really dangerous aspect of both cups and swords. We can literally float away. In fact, the lack of earth in this reading reminds me that it’s not so much about logic; it’s about literacy. By which I mean taking the intellectual and making it understandable to anyone. When air lacks any practicality, it does become somewhat useless because it’s indulging in its own kind of seven-y naval gazing. I’ve written about this a few times, recently—how the introspection of the seven is good sometimes and sometimes it’s naval gazing and self-absorption. Without grounding, air gets flighty, loopy, and in love with its own wit. Much the way a Waite or a Crowley or a Mathers did their own work. In fact, the Golden Dawn’s own insistence that the intellect is really the ego and must be overcome in order to reach the heights of divinity is rather amusing when you think about it. The creators of the Golden Dawn along with its two most famous acolytes were incredibly arrogant! The Golden Dawn splintered because of the egos of the men running it. (There were a few women’s egos, too, but they were nowhere near as destructive to the order.) Why, it’s almost as if . . . getting caught in all that arcana actually takes you away from divinity . . . . It’s almost as though an environment full of editorial cockblocking and pontificating somehow separates the self from what makes it spiritual. (Of course, we can’t blame the Golden Dawn for eating itself alive. First of all, the ouroboros is one of its favorite symbols. Yes, infinity; but also a snake eating its own ass. Further, the older I get, the more I realize that all power corrupts. I haven’t seen anyone who has been immune from this. Whether it’s formerly progressive politicos who, we soon discover, are taking in dough from super pacs to the arrogance of CEO’s, even people who are normally quite grounded can be poisoned by power.) Point is, the futility of the Seven of Swords doesn’t have to do with logic; it has to do with un-tethered intellectualism and cold reason. When we look inside ourselves intellectually, we may do so with the kind of cold, clear-eyed “objectivity” of a scientist (the Six of Swords is called “science” in the Thoth decks—“earned success” in the GD traditions), and — wait for it — that’s not who we truly are. When we look at ourselves only through the lens of one of the suits, we’re going to find ourselves wanting because we’re made up of every suit. We can’t fully be the suit of swords because we (pardon the expression) contain multitudes. When we judge ourselves (or our work) purely though this lens, we aren’t looking at ourselves accurately, either; we’re looking at ourselves as though our goal should only be cold, clear-eyed, somewhat emotionless critique. If you’ve read my book Your Tarot Toolkit, you’ll have seen my self-reflection assessment. This is designed so that readers have an objective way to view their readings that doesn’t rely on the client’s feedback or our own biased judgments. The checklist comes from my theory that if you focus on giving a clear, logical, appropriate reading that both answers the question and makes sense given the cards drawn, you can rest assured the reading was good. And I still believe that. But thinking in terms of this Seven of Swords, which, frankly, is taking up undue space in this spread (and my life, currently), it also suggests that a barometer of how how well we read is the feeling we get about it. Honestly, I don’t agree with that. While clear-eyed objectivity can be cruel and (maybe even more important) nearly impossible (leading to grand frustration), relying on our “feelings,” too, is problematic, because our feelings are bias. Or, you could say, the come from our bias. Our reactions to things are formed through our bias for or against them (or our indifference). This is one reason I’m so emphatic that readers should have some foundational learning to support their readings. The purely (supposedly) “intuitive” reader (a reader with no actual foundational learning) can’t demonstrate that they’re not just reading from confirmation bias, say, or otherwise framing the cards in a way that reflects what they feel rather than what the reading is saying. Readers who rely only on their feelings wind up not being able to read when they don’t “feel” like it, which is difficult to deal with when you’re reading for others. We read when clients want us, not when we feel like it. (Of course, there’s no requirement anyone read for others.) The Sun card makes steam of water, evaporating it, and converting it into “air” (in the esoteric sense). It is the combination of air and water (intellect and instinct) that makes good readings, and it’s futile to deny it. Because the seven and the Ten of Cups directly flank The Sun, it blends them—making steam. The Three of Cups and the Empress take that steam and make something cool out of it, something expansive, something creative. This makes me think of the way myth can take a banal idea (the change of seasons) and make it into an epic tale (Persephone’s story), illuminating it and poeticizing it, while also make it understandable for the “masses.” Fairy tales, after all, were written to teach children “morality”—what is “good” and “bad” and who to be afraid of (generally anyone “other”). (We still have these lessons impacting us today, which is why anyone who was obsessed with Disney Princesses since the release of The Little Mermaid likely has a fucked up relationship to relationships.) The myth takes the intellectual and transforms it into the emotional. And as an adult learning specialist, I can tell you that the best way to get people to remember dry (intellectual) information is to create a link to the emotional. In divination, we already have the benefit of the topic being important to the client—but it does make sense that we might want to try to blend the intellectual and emotional into a “myth” that is both clear (understandable) and felt (emotional). And, ultimately, that’s (I think) what this reading is telling us. Or me. As the Seven of Swords has been following me me for a few weeks, now. Hopefully I’ve released it from its spell. A read of one’s own Whenever I get a message like the messy one above, I have a tendency to try to fundamentally alter my entire worldview. Like, somehow the reading tells me that I’ve been “doing it wrong.” And why shouldn’t I think that way? Most of what we see on Social Media is someone telling us we’re doing something wrong. It’s rather a litany of abasement. Let’s think, instead, of evolution. How do we evolve into a more integrated reader, one for whom the logical and emotional are united in service of a clear, impactful, resonant answers.
A quick example: My first set of three, representing the best of my intellectual/logical aspect, are: Death, Four of Swords, Four of Wands. This is an easy one: I cut through staid thoughts and dullness (the four of wands is a fairly dull fire). The keywords on the two fours are “truce” (swords) and “completion” (wands). In fact, the Death card smacks both of those concepts: no, this isn’t a pause, and no you’re not done. My mentality makes it possible for me to get through “stuck” perceptions and ruts. My second set of three, representing the best of my emotional/instinctual self, are: Adjustment (Justice), Knight (King) of Wands, The Fool. (There’s a connection with two fire cards—that may mean something, but it may not. There’s also a lot of majors, now: Death, Adjustment, The Fool. Also maybe meaningful.) Let’s see: My instincts are, in fact, the opposite of staid (the fours above) while being quite stable. The Adjustment card (I’m using the Thoth again) has quickly become one of my favorites, because it represents the imperceptible-yet-constant movements happening to keep things on course. The Knight of Wands brings all the energy into the equation, and the complete lack of expectations in The Fool. (I often read The Fool as “foolish,” but here we’re looking for its best aspects.) The Fool is often thought of as curious. No. Curiosity implies expectations. That’s the realm of the pages. The Fool has no expectations and so can’t wonder about what’s going to happen. The Fool simply looks at things and sees them as they are without assigning motive, meaning, or intent. It sees things and looks at them as though for the first time. The energy of this trio, thanks to the Knight of Wands, carries us from right to left. The Knight fervently drags The Fool toward Adjustment. Adjustment synthesizes all these various impulses, kind of the way the brain does for us as we, say, navigate uneven terrain. The way our body responds to bumps in the road and divots and we can (generally) keep ourselves walking. It does that automatically. In fact, if you try to think of it you’ll likely notice that getting across this bumpy path is harder now. When we draw attention to it, it becomes labored, effortful, tiring; when you simply let your body do what it knows how to do, it generally makes it easier to navigate this uneven path. Adjustment reminds me that I’m always responding and reacting to the information and when I’m at my best, I approach the reading with energy but without any expectation. The final set of three suggests how to integrate those two elements. In this case, I pulled: Two of Pentacles (Change), Princess (Page) of Disks (Pentacles/Coins), Ace of Cups. Where a lot of advice readings fall down is the lack of action items that are actually doable. When we’re giving advice readings, and I hate to pull from my corporate life but there’s value here, we should be thinking in terms of legit goal setting. SMART goals. S = Specific; M = Measurable; A = Actionable; R = Reasonable; T = Timely or time-bound. We should be able to see the behavior and the results of the behavior; it should be doable in the amount of time we’ve set and within reason for our abilities. This is what advice readings should offer. So that’s what I’m attempting to achieve here. Luckily, we have two Disks/Pentacles cards, so we’re firmly rooted in the earth. In fact, here’s all the earth we didn’t find in our earlier reading. The Two of Disks (Change) is an integrative card, because twos draw things to it. But how do we do that? If we think of earth/disks, we’re talking about application. What do I mean by that? In the emotional realm, we simply feel; in the intellectual realm, we think. In earth, we do (frequently in fire/wands, too). This means that we have to apply what we’re attempting to do into the real world. This is one of those times it’s actually difficult to explain what I mean. But, OK: the things we do intellectually and emotionally just kind of happen without us noticing. Consider your mood at any given time. Likely it was arrived at without a lot of intent on your part. How are you feeling right now? You probably didn’t decide to feel that way. If your mind drifted while reading this, you didn’t ask it to; it just did that. With earth, now, we’re noticing. We drawing our attention (the two’s attractiveness) to what we’re doing. Which is a change (the keyword on the card) because we’re just learning to notice how we’re navigating a reading. This is intensified by the Princess of Disks, who (unlike The Fool) is curious. She pays attention because she expects something to happen. Now, she may not know what it is—probably she doesn’t. But she has an expectation that something will happen. So she’s on the lookout for it. Unlike the Knight/Prince, she isn’t going hunting; she’s just noticing. Consider the way Harris’s Princess gazes at the disk in her hand (or even the way PCS’s Page of Pentacles simply holds up and gazes at her Penty—a term I just coined [see what I did this?] to mean “pentacle”). What are we noticing? We’ll know it when we feel it. The Ace of Cups. We return to the senses, now, but we’re paying attention to them. Each little feeling (one/ace and water/cups) can tell us something. In the blog post, you’ll note that I started to talk about Yoav Ben Dov’s sense that nothing happening in a reading happens without reason or meaning. I got distracted from that, but what I was going to say is that the sensations we experience during a reading are worth paying attention to. If we start to feel antsy (“I can’t wait for this reading to be over!”), excited, cranky, defensive, pay attention to those things. What are they telling (implied swords) you about the reading? Let’s say that our emotions become signals during a reading. Our emotions are signals to us generally. They tell us when some part of us needs care. But in a reading, perhaps they tell us something more external. Perhaps they’re relevant. Something I didn’t mean to do in this reading but did was wind up with a nine card box—because I drew three cards for each question. So, let’s consider them as columns, too. Why not? My first column is made up of Death (the thinking row), Adjustment (the emo row), and Two of Disks (integration row). This whole fukkin column is about change, transformation. And it may mean that these changes, these evolutions, are inevitable (Death) once you become aware they’re necessary. In a way, Death is the most trustworthy card because it’s the only one we can count on. Trust, then, the process (Adjustment/Two of Disks). The middle column is: Four of Swords, Knight of Wands, Princess of Disks. Harris’s Knight of Wands rides up to the Death card, positionally, so there’s a connection between those two. It’s almost like he bypasses the Four of Swords and goes right for Death. (“Your little knifes aren’t good enough. Give me that big fukkin scythe!”) I hear this row saying, “You’ve got the brains (Four of Swords) to count on (fours are stable). You’ve got the experience (knights correspond with kings in this deck) and the curiosity (princess/page). Again, the influence of Death’s inevitability are important. “Don’t think too hard about it.” Fours sustain, so they can also suggest thinking a lot. It’s not the same as overthinking, which is more active. The four is more like “dwelling.” Recall that the “truce” is a break, a stoppage, a halting. Of what? War. Which is action. It’s pointing to the fact that the four is an inaction, and dwelling on things is kind of inactive thought. Don’t linger on the idea too long. Don’t overthink it. Be energized in approach (Knight of Wands) and elegantly open (Princess of Disks—admittedly a value judgement on my part, but the card is stunning). The final column consists of: Four of Wands, The Fool, Ace of Cups. The Four of Wands (Completion) is sustained, again. Sustained energy (fire) in this case. It’s another keyword I just don’t like, but I’m trying to reconcile with my way of reading. In this particular case, I don’t think it’s particularly relevant, but I may come back to it. This card represents, again, the thinky, logical aspects because it comes from the first row. Actually, OK: “your education is complete”: the Four of Wands in the realm of thinking—the stability of the four, the sustained effort of the fire, and the fact that I can obsess (which, if you think about it, takes the passive “dwelling on” of the Four of Swords and translates it into the fiery realm—actively dwelling) on trying to be something better, to learn more, to not settle. Just go in without expectations (Fool) and see what you feel (Ace of Cups). Again, it’s a way of noticing. And this reading seems so much to simply be about noticing, which—honestly—is a thing I’m not particularly good at. The thing about The Fool is that he’s present. He’s never anywhere other than where he is. We can’t work with our intuition if we don’t notice it. Notice more, think less. Experience, rather than interpret. Notice. Feel. Communicate. Don’t use the swords at their coldest, use them at their most generous. Which makes total sense to me. Aaaand scene.
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A three-card draw:
Seven of Cups (2), Temperance (1), The Hanged Man (3) Deck: Smoke, Ash, & Embers by Three Trees created by Stephanie Burrows, Illustrated by Adam Oehlers Temperance makes its second appearance in one of our lessons, and that isn’t surprising; it’s a thing I’m particularly bad at. I’ve never been a moderate or temperate person and I have the emotional and occasionally physical scars to prove it. Peep my social media and you know I don’t excel at moderation. I also have that tendency when I eat. I eat fast and if I’m not careful I can eat a lot, thanks to the idea that there may not be enough if I don’t get it now. I’ve always operated under the strong feeling that the clock is and always has been rapidly ticking down for me. The threat of extinction, so to speak, has always given me a sense of urgency that isn’t always (in fact, rarely is) healthy. If I don’t make the point now, I may never make it (this is why I used to be awful about interrupting people); if I don’t solve the problem now, my opportunity will have passed; if I’m not successful to my standards of success—well, in that regard, I often feel as though I’ve run out the clock on that one. Success is a young people’s game, and while I’m not old, I definitely ain’t young anymore. Temperance is not the card you hear people name when you ask what their favorite card might be. (Note from future me: Having said that, I was listening to the Fortune’s Wheelhouse podcast yesterday, and both MM Meleen and T. Susan Chang talked about how much they love this card—so, there ya go. I’m wrong as often as I’m right.) I think a lot of readers, myself included, have found the card difficult to read because what, after all, is it really saying? I mean, that’s a loaded question. What it’s really saying is literally temperance. The word itself literally means self-restraint. It is frequently considered a more-or-less perfect synonym of moderation. That’s a word we understand. If you’re like me, you’re not particularly capable of it, but you know what it means. To give you an example of my fundamentally immoderate nature, I have in the last few weeks purchased several new decks—not because I didn’t have them, but I wondered if I might prefer them better in a different size or whether another printing of it might be more attractive. Like, I really don’t hold myself back unless I’m absolutely forced to. But moderation is an idea that I grasp. It is a goal. Temperance has a whole other weight, though; it’s not quite as simple as moderation, maybe partly because it comes to us in tarot. Everything gets seemingly elevated by becoming a tarot card—especially when it joins the major arcana. That’s a pretty tough club to get into. Most who have tried don’t make it. The trumps have been relatively solid for the last couple hundred years. It also doesn’t help that the Golden Dawn went and Golden-Dawnified everything, so that a concept as simple as “moderation” becomes something lofty, like Temperance. I’m actually in the middle of exploring more of the GD’s doctrine right now because of my challenge to myself to deep dive into the Crowley/Harris Thoth deck. (One thing I’ll grant them, those esotericists, is that nothing was left to creative impulse. Everything in those cards—the Waite-Smith, too—is there for a reason, and in the case of the Thoth deck, the color choices are deliberate, too. The printing technology of the early 1900’s limited what Waite and Smith could do with color, and we’ve all seen their deck in pretty disgusting print runs.) The fact that the card retains the title Temperance after all these years says something. Both Waite and Crowley changed things they didn’t like. For the esotericists, Temperance had nothing to do with moderation; it didn’t connect to consumption. It was a representation of an alchemical process, the unifying of seemingly opposite forces. Crowley turned this card into “Art,” and Harris depicts the results of this blending—a non-binary entity (they would use the cringe term androgyne, but the fact that they acknowledged the existence of the non-binary, elevating the concept, is a moderately progressive point I guess they can have—or not). But I’m not an esotericist. Even if I found the Golden Dawn’s teachings inspiring and worth my pursuing, it is the esotericism itself that bugs me. Access to divine shouldn’t be limited to the chosen few—particularly those privileged enough to afford dues into secret societies and with the leisure time to study the mysteries and the disposable income to spend on masks and cloaks. If you have divine knowledge that can save people or this planet, it is a crime to keep it secret. (On the other hand, I loathe proselytizing, too, so it’s a fine line. I don’t want to deal with latter-day missionaries. And we know they’re out there, at the moment pulling the strings on the US “judiciary.”) What is “Temperance” today? What line can be drawn between the alchemical unification of divine opposites forming a perfected whole and being a (for-the-love-of-god) fortune teller? Perhaps the other cards can help. (I’m going to pick on Fortune’s Wheelhouse for just a second, not because I don’t love that podcast—I adore it. But in this episode, Mel and Susie were at pains to say that “Temperance isn’t moderation.” I don’t have a problem with people having their own conclusions about the cards, but I also want to add that of course temperance is moderation, that’s literally what it means. And what is moderation? Yes, it’s not overeating, say, which is how we think of it. But it’s also facilitating. Someone who moderates is moderating, or practicing moderation. My point is, discover what the cards are for yourself. When I get smugly dismissive of esotericism, it’s because it’s often absolutism. Again, I’m a fortune teller--a thing loathed by [much of] esotericism. I read about life. I just read this morning that Crowley was adamant his cards never be made available to used by fortune tellers. Typically him. But, also? For someone like me? Even more incentive to do exactly that to his precious work. I guess what I mean to say is, don’t let anyone tell you what to do. Anyway, to conclude this digression on a positive note, I totally agree with their connection of this card to tempering--the metal-working and culinary process of hardening/strengthening something [both steel and chocolate need to be tempered] or moderating the temperature of something so that it can be mixed [hot liquid into eggs for a custard and egg whites into a thick batter are both things tempered.] This is part of the card, too!) The Hanged Man and the Seven of Cups. Let’s spend some time with our boy, The Hanged Man. He’s another dude who gets a major tarot glow-up: from the traitor, the criminal, to this transcendent image we’re familiar with today. I frequently read the card simply as consequences. Whatever is happening is happening as a consequence of something else, in the same way that the traitor hangs from the tree as a consequence of being accused and convicted of a crime. He doesn’t want to be there. Note that I said “accused and convicted.” That doesn’t mean he’s guilty. Of course not. In fact, there’s some small evidence the hanging of a criminals by their feet was, in fact, an antisemitic sentence reserved only for Jewish people (particularly in Germany)—but I’ve only seen that on Wikipedia, so take that as you will. We know that societal minorities don’t and never have gotten a fair shake in the courts of the oppressive governors of wherever people happened to be “in charge.” We see it today in the United States. The Hanged Man might easily represent the injustice of our world, where the system favors the wealthy, male, and white over literally everyone else. What we think of as “justice” is a myth taught by the ruling class. Justice is only what the law says is right or wrong. That’s why I can suddenly have my THC gummies from my stylish, Starbucksian “dispensary” while people still sit in jail for selling the same substance without the imprimatur of the state. It’s why fucking baby formula is kept under lock and key but guns are as easy as pie to get ahold of. Justice isn’t just, so neither is the Hanged Man’s punishment—not necessarily. Sometimes guilty people do get caught. This is, to my way of thinking, a much more relevant way of looking at the card. How often are you going through initiations that require ego death and the prolonged discomfort described by acolytes of many traditions? My guess is, not many. (Though many of us could benefit from some casual ego death.) This is one reason why, while I find the esoteric stuff interesting, I don’t find it particularly useful. But, of course, I try not to be a fundamentalist, and I know the esoteric concepts behind the cards, or at least I know the ones that didn’t make me roll my eyes hard enough that they got knocked from my brain. The question for all readers is, which version do we use and when? And in fact, that’s exactly what I think this reading is about! Let’s turn to the Seven of Cups. This card unlocks the reading. The Seven of Cups is a moment of emotional introspection. A self-check, in which we look at where we are and think about how we feel. This once again underscores the connection between water and air. We think about how we feel. Thinking and feeling are so closely linked, most of the time many of us can’t tell the difference! Because we think, we feel; because we feel, we think. It is a crazy, crazy cycle that has driven a lot of us (not enough, sadly) to therapy. Sometimes even (in my case) to medication. The Seven of Cups actually is doing exactly what the esoteric Hanged Man is doing: spending a serious amount of time reflecting on where we are and how we got there—at least in a manner of thinking. If the Hanged Man is undergoing an initiation, which is going to require the death of the ego, then he’s going to have to do a lot of soul searching. All the famous divinities who existed in human form do this. Buddha did it, so did Jesus. Shamans and medicine people and witches and hoodoos have done it, and continue to. Zora Neale Hurston, in one of the best first-person tales of magical arts in the US, “Hoodoo in America,” shares several initiatory experiences with various practitioners of Hoodoo and Voodoo in the South. And her experiences are consistent with the kind of extreme self-denial required of seers and holy people around the globe for, it seems, the entirety of the planet being peopled. The Hanged Man is undergoing a self-reflection so deep that it will leave him fundamentally different at the end of it. If he’s doing it correctly, he will transcend his own ego and die to the life he used to know. This is the esoteric reason why Death follows this card. (The exoteric reason is because criminals who get hanged die—another consequence. This is actually one reason I don’t mind Waite’s change of Justice and Strength. It makes a tidy little trio of sentencing, sentence, and sentence served.) This is a deep, inner process. Reports from those who have undergone this kind of bone-deep, soul deep self discovery or self release say that initiates begin to think they’re going mad. Nobody would endure this unless they have to. This isn’t winning Survivor. This is dying to the self as we know it and emerging as something totally connected to the collective. Transcendent though the Hanged Man may look, it’s an ugly experience. In a class, one of the participants once brought up that the process of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly is disgusting and painful. It is ugly and maybe even cruel. We like the outcome, we’d all like to think of ourselves as having become a butterfly in our own way, but to truly become a butterfly is to literally dissolve into a glutenous goo that no longer resembles a living thing; it means being completely re-formed (re-shaped, not reformed as in “fixed”) from the inside out and feeling every second of it; it means going through all that and still wanting to come out on the other side, rather than simply be put out of all this misery. That’s what the esotericists were really saying about this card. So, it sure makes it sound cringe when Becky or Chad (or their NB counterpart with a name-to-be-determined) gets on the socials that this card is about manifesting. Ahem. I got a little smug, there. Whoops. Clearly I haven’t experienced an ego death. Anyway. The Seven of Cups takes this into the real world, into daily life. It’s not the same thing, but it’s akin to it. It’s the more possible, more reasonable, more common experience of looking within the self and reacting to what we see there. But, in fact, it doesn’t actually matter what either card is doing, not in this reading. In this case, it matters more the realm. Which is a word I’m not used to using—can’t believe I did that, there. Point is, the major card (at least in this case) speaks of the diviner’s work in the spiritual, internal, magical realm—for lack of a better term, we’ll call it the divine plane. (I was tempted to use “astral plane,” but I didn’t want to get the haters cranky at me for misusing it.) It is the major arcana in the realm most of us learn it, putting the divine in divination. On the other side of the coin is the minor card doing the same thing, but in the material plane. Temperance takes the two and combines them. Which is the act of divination, when you think about it. Taking the divine—the message—and making it hearable to the recipient. This is, incidentally, another way we are like pages: we deliver messages. It’s also another reason why we have to make sure to give Mercury some love, because that was his job, too, and he “governs” that part of life. So, something I said earlier is that it’s hard to know which “version” of a card we’re supposed to be using in a reading. Do we go with the esoteric/spiritual? Do we go with the banal? Obviously, context dictates that to a big degree, but this reading is saying something else: always do both. Which, I have to admit, is amusing—because if you know my work, you know that I’m very down to earth in my style. I rarely if ever consider the spiritual consequences of a situation unless I’ve been asked to. While I do recognize that some physical problems (not only health issues) can have spiritual causes, I’ve never considered myself really capable of—talking about spiritual remediation for any problem. And yet. I have said before and will say again, the separation of divination from the spiritual is a relatively recent and mostly American-European (colonial) thing. And even within those two culture’s spheres of influence, there are many, many people who do practical spiritual remediation as part of their practice because it’s always been there. The sort of pop divination I’ve been a proponent of is really new and comes in part from the fact that I’m not a priest or a doctor; I lack the ordinance (so to speak) to explore spiritual or medical causes for problems. The only thing I feel “qualified” to do is read from the point of view of daily life. I feel as though I don’t have any “right” to offer anything else, because I’m not called to serve any spirits or even ancestors; I haven’t been asked by any entity to do what I do. I just . . . kinda do it and always have done. I’m not sort of gifted by the divine to do what I do in the way so many other folks are—I guess the folks I would say are actually psychics or mediums? Anyway, it feels that way. Maybe I totally have been called and I just don’t know it. Maybe I’m obeying orders I can’t hear. Who knows? And to be clear: I’m not saying that’s good, it’s just my reality. Frankly, having the spiritual abilities would likely make me feel less like an imposter when that old feeling kicks in. The point, though, is that this reading seems to suggest that every reading should be read through both lenses. For example, I tend to let the cards guide me to whether we’re thinking about something that’s more banal or more “elevated.” This reading is saying, “give both a spin.” Which, to be fair, is good advice—and not what I was expecting when I laid these cards out. In fact, I thought these cards were really saying I didn’t shuffle well enough, because all three of these showed up in the last reading I did with this deck. But I did shuffle, and they sure have an interesting journey to take. I did this not long ago. When I was at the Readers Studio in New York, I was lucky enough to be given the chance to offer a study group at the event—and as part of that, I got to be a reader for the “psychic fair” afterwards (I’m really uncomfortable with that word, can you tell?). One client had such an interesting situation, I decided that we should do the same reading two ways: what was going on physically, and what was going on spiritually. It was fascinating, and there seemed to be a combination of both at play. The difficulty was, the solutions weren’t going to be easy to come by. In essence, it was going to be an expensive problem—at least here in the material plane. But the idea of reading the same cards from two points of view hadn’t occurred to me before. Actually, now that I think of it I did a few things that night I’d never done before (as a reader, don’t be gross)—including asking a client to get up and switch places with me so that he could see the cards as I was seeing them. I think I did that twice, actually. No idea why I chose to then. I was feeling the “spirit,” I guess? That’s what I mean when I say that as readers we should be open. When things like that occur to us, we should see where they take us! Why not? Same with this new approach. Why not make every reading into two readings? Read the cards through the material lens and then again through the spiritual, or vice versa. What can we learn about the question, about the outcome, about the client if we take both tracks? There’s no reason not to. And you could be reading this and be thinking, “uh, no shit; I do this every time I read!” But I don’t! I am spiritual-avoidant a lot of the time. It freaks me out, in some ways. I don’t like to admit that I have a need for spirituality, in part because I was so hurt by it in my youth. Actually, not my youth; the spirituality of my early childhood was happy because I didn’t understand that God hated me. That came when I was going through puberty. That’s where the real trauma started. But because I’d grown to love it so much, the betrayal was huge. (Shades of me sitting in the back of a friend’s car in total turmoil because I was having an existential crises about the fact that God didn’t exist. At seventeen. Dear Lord, what a mess). So maybe you can see why I resist it so much. I also hate the fact that I’m getting older and there’s a cliche that as people age, they get more spiritual. I never want to be a cliche (even though, yes, I’m a cliche in many ways). But — and here’s the thing, my readings aren’t about me. They’re about my clients. I mean, if I read for myself they’re about me, but I don’t do it much. So this reading reminds me that just because I don’t need the spiritual doesn’t mean my clients don’t. Offering both points of view can provide them something that I haven’t been. Now, I’m not going to get down on myself. I’ve been a good reader and most of my clients have been happy with my work. I wouldn’t say I’m doing anything “wrong,” but I would say that this reminds me there’s an opportunity to at least consider the metaphysical as much as the physical in a reading about, well, anything. And that’s helpful for me to think about. Again, we cannot get stagnant as readers; we have to challenge ourselves. This reading definitely challenges me, because even talking about spiritual stuff makes me uncomfortable because the language always sounds . . . silly. And clearly I need to work on that, because I think this reading offers a point worth taking. For many of you, you may find yourself in the opposite boat: you’ve got the spiritual and may struggle with the material. If so, I just happen to have written two (with a third in the works) books on this topic. I’d be happy to guide you through it! It’s actually easier than you think. And for anyone who, like me, has swung in the entire different direction, there’s something to be said for practicing finding words that don’t get caught in our throat when talking about the spiritual. It’s worth coming back to the fact that the Seven of Cups and the Hanged Man actually do have meanings of their own, and while I said earlier it doesn’t really matter what those are, that’s not to say there’s nothing gained from exploring that a little more deeply. In fact, I gave you the practical answer: read practically and spiritually. What’s the spiritual aspect? The Seven of Cups and the Hanged Man for sure fit the spiritual landscape. The Seven of Cups typically depicts silhouetted figure staring up at a dazzling array of cups. This is one of the times where the Waite-Smith imagery lines up nicely with my own numerological thinking. That doesn’t happen much. But we can see a moment of self-reflection in the seven if we choose to. The esotericists called this card The Lord of Illusionary Success or the Lord of Debauch. The illusional success is easy enough to make sense of, we know enough people who have this particular delusion IRL (as the kids say). Debauch? What is that? There’s two meanings: indulgence, especially over indulgence. Indulgence edging gluttony. The other meaning is corruption. To corrupt the “pure” (a term I hate). Well then. Because I consider the suits and the element and well as the number (the esotericists didn’t; they used the astrology and Kabbalistic associations), if we’re taking the esoteric title, then that title is operating in the realm of cups/water, which is emotional and sensational. Emotional debauchery! Take that! Actually, one of the things I admire about Pamela Colman Smith was the way she could take a concept like this and make it into an image. And while it’s more likely she knew the Illusionary Success title, I can fully see emotional debauchery, as each cup contains a different feeling or sensation worth experiencing—even the scary one with the skull in the cup (the cards I’m working with don’t have that detail, but it’s hard to forget). Sometimes we don’t know there’s an experience we don’t want to have until we have it. And so the Seven of Cups can suggest exposing ourselves to different experiences to see how they feel. Interestingly, that’s exactly what I am trying to get at when I talk about being open as a reader: letting the reading wash over us and allowing us to experience different “hits,” different responses, different “feelings” about the cards and what they might mean in this reading. If you think about it, the Waite-Smith image of this card is much like that of doing a reading. Staring at all the possibilities, wondering which one works. This card gives you the answer: you’ll know it when you feel it. But you won’t know what might be possible unless you allow each “experience” to occur. In this case, to let every possibility make itself available to you and “feel” which ones are “right.” A thing I’ve “learned” about dealing with the esoteric titles—and really everything they did—is that you have to consider it a highfalutin metaphor for something that’s actually not difficult to understand. It’s like, they had to dress the concepts up in fancy language to make it seem important, but they really were just simple ideas anyone could grasp. And, frankly, everyone should be able to grasp them. Enlightenment shouldn’t only be for the moneyed and bored. When we see “debauch” or “illusionary success,” what we’re looking at is a myth. It isn’t literal debauchery; it’s debauchery in terms of a specific experience in life. Now, for many of the esotericists, they weren’t about doing divination, doing readings, so they probably wouldn’t endorse what I’m saying. But when we look at the Ten of Swords and it says “Lord of Ruin,” this is a math equation we have to figure out. What is ruin when we’re in the suit of swords and it’s relating to this particular reading? Believe it or not, it’s the same math we do when we look at the image. If we are “ruined” in the realm of air/swords, what does that look like? What would ruined thoughts be? What would ruined communication be? What even is ruin? It’s disintegration, decay—the process of that happening, or the thing it’s happening to. Ruins can be in ruin. As it were. This, then, suggests the decay of communication or the decay of thoughts--or it suggests thinking or communication about decay. This card could easily represent archeology. But because the suit of swords is its home, it’s more likely mental archeology or writing about archeology. But it could be literal. Context. If the question is about, “What should I study in grad school?” the answer is either going to be psychological or communicative archeology. A psychological archeologist is, essentially, a therapist. A communicative archeologist may write about long-lost or long-forgotten things, or may be a scholar of anything that involves “digging” into “ruins.” Art history, literary criticism, theatrical dramaturgy. It’s sort of a process of taking a literal thing (ruin), turning it into a metaphor (decay, disintegration) in the world of its suit (air/mentality/communication) and then turning it into a metaphor again. “Go be an intellectual archeologist” becomes “go be a therapist.” Of course, there are many others ways to think in terms of ruins, but hopefully you get the drift. Don’t take anything the esotericists said at face value. Take it apart and look at it through the lens of lived experience, and, hell, even through the lens of the damn dictionary. That’s what I’ve done with each of these terms while writing this lesson. It is incredible what can happen just by finding out the literal definition of a word we know well. What does it actually mean? This isn’t to say we don’t know, but we learn most language by listening and contextualizing—much like we read cards. We hear a word in a context a few times and we understand what it means contextually. But everyone uses words in slightly different ways because this is how we learn language (our native language, anyway). This is also why we may grow up pronouncing a word “wrong.” It’s not wrong, it’s just been picked up from people reading it and sounding it out and other people hearing it and saying it that way. In Connecticut, there’s a town called Versailles. Having taken French class and having heard the term in the context of France, I pronounced it “Vair-SIGH.” That’s not how locals say it. It’s “ver-SAILES.” We navigate most of communication this way. And I don’t think we should be stopping in the middle of conversations—or even readings—to look up the literal definition of words. But I do think that when we’re studying and playing with the cards, we say, “Well what does this literally mean? How does the dictionary define ‘Death’?” If we explore “death” as a literal concept, we get (according to dictionary.com), “the cessation of all the vital functions of an organism.” Merriam-Webster offers something so similar, my guess is that dictionary.com is just pointing to the same text. And the OED, well, the OED is behind a paywall, because capitalism reserves information for the elite. So, as we say around here, fuck the OED. Anyway, the point is, what happens if I operate in a reading from this literal definition as a metaphor, rather than a metaphor as a metaphor? Stay with me. I always say the cards, the majors in particular, are metaphors of experience. When we see the Death card in a reading, we’re not necessarily looking at the end of a life (another definition of the term), but the experience of deathiness. Obviously, “cessation of all vital functions of an organism” isn’t really a sexy metaphor. Still, let’s go further. What is a cessation? It’s “a temporary or complete stopping; discontinuance.” And ending right? Not quite. First of all, the arrival of the word temporary here is an intriguing and mostly accidental connection, but I know lexicographers aren’t haphazard about the words chosen to define another. But that’s not even the main thing. A discontinuance. Something that has been continued so far is being stopped. What are things that stop something continuing? A dam discontinues a river. A store discontinues the sales of an item. A network may discontinue (cancel) a series. Cancel. There’s a word we know and love in modern life. What do we mean when we cancel something (or someone)? Well, obviously it takes is right back to discontinuance, but of course words take on new lives—and cancel for sure has. To cancel, today, is to collectively and publicly shame an individual into submission and even retirement thanks to some real or perceived offense. And, in this way, Death becomes the cancel culture card. What’s interesting about all these words is that they imply choice. I frequently tend to read Death as inevitable--something that has to happen. I’m sure I still will. But playing this game of exploring the literal definition of the cards and journeying into the parts of its definition, into its evolution as a concept, and even into the pop culture zeitgeist, we get new shades. There is an aspect to this card, now, that is chosen. We choose to cancel, to discontinue. A series of potential outcomes has been ranked, risks have been assessed, tastes and trends considered, and a choice made. Something has become non-viable or not worthy of the risks. In essence, we choose to give up on it. A switch is flipped. The machine unplugged. We frequently tell ourselves we have no choice, but that is of course nonsense. We see it in the entertainment industry all the time, now, as shows are cancelled by one service and picked up by another, often going on to have the same amount of success. If we want something to continue, we can almost always make that happen. Bad relationships drag on for decades, jobs we’ve outgrown or that have used us up still keep us entrapped—hell, TV shows that have long decided jumped the shark still lumber across our screens in the vague hope its former spark will return. Sometimes it does. This is all to say that the experience of the card can be majorly opened up by exploring the concepts depicted, emblazoned, or associated with them in new contexts or in different “realms.” To return to the Seven of Cups (and the Hanged Man), as well as the concept of debauchery, there’s a warning in these cards, too: don’t get too obsessed with naval-gazing your divinatory work. What’s that mean? Good question. We’ll answer that and other questions next time on—No, kidding. What I mean is that sevens, being introspective, can become self-obsessed—and likely none more than the one in the suit of cups. The Hanged Man offers a similar risk, because he’s literally stuck there; he can’t move. The two cards, again, offer mirroring experiences—one on earth and one in the ether: don’t get too impressed with yourself, don’t get too obsessed with your gifts (all those cups, or whatever we’re debauching in), don’t start making the experience about how you feel, rather than what the client needs. The best analogy I can give for this is the actor who sucks all the air out of a rehearsal because he isn’t “feeling” it and needs to explore what his motivations are and needs the other actors to “give me more.” Good actors know that the way to give the best performance is to forget about yourself for the most part, and make the scene about the other person. Most scenes are about characters trying to get what they want. The way they do that is by manipulating the other players. When actors think about themselves, they’re focusing on the wrong thing. They should be focusing on what the character wants and, in essence, becoming the advocate who will get it from their parter. When they focus on their parter, the work comes to life. When they focus on themselves and how they “feel,” they’re getting self-indulgent. In the same way, when readers make the readings about us and how we feel doing it, we’re de-centering the client—who is the whole reason the reading is happening at all. Basically, it’s ego. And the seven can ignite the ego because it is so concerned with self-reflection and self-evaluation. When having a conversation with person who is deaf or hearing impaired and working with a sign language interpreter, you don’t look at the interpreter, you look at the person you’re speaking to. It’s rude to speak to the interpreter. They’re a facilitator. You’re there to engage with the other person. As readers, we’re interpreters. It’s not about us. It seems like it us because we’re doing most of the work, but that’s the job we asked for. The real conversation is between the divine and the client. When we make it about ourselves, we’re running the risk of our ego getting in the way. New readers sometimes ask how they know they’re reading the cards and not just letting their own biases guide them. That’s a good question. One way to check yourself is to see if you’re always getting the answers you expect from cards. If you’re never surprised by the answers, you may be operating from personal bias. It’s not a perfect method, most reading will likely yield at least something expected—but if they all do, if you’re never surprised, it could be worth considering whether you’re really letting the cards guide you or if you’re imposing yourself on the reading. Because the Hanged Man sustains whatever is happening, he, too, can get egotistical—even if he can’t literally gaze at his navel. Acting teacher Konstantin Stanislavksi (he of the oft-misunderstood “method”) once said, “Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art.” This sums it up: love the gift you’ve given, celebrate the gift. Don’t fall in love with yourself because you have it. Or, I guess, don’t believe your own press. In sum: read from a spiritual and banal standpoint any time—or every time—and don’t fall in love with your divination, too much. Don’t make it about you. And don’t fall so in love with the “mysteries” that the client doesn’t wind up with any clues. Make it about the client. All really good advice, I think. Tarot always amazes. A read of one’s own This reading is designed to explore the integration (and, in a way, the dis-integration) of the spiritual and banal.
A quick example: I used the Thoth deck for this. The first card, representing an area of my life where spiritual and banal could benefit from integration: The-for-love-of-fuck-Hierophant. Always cracks me up, tarot does. Where do I need to integrate the spiritual and banal? In my spiritual space. Now, I’m among those who typically look at the good ol’ Hierophant negatively, but as I always say everything is its own other, and it makes sense. I definitely compartmentalize parts of my life and when I do, it becomes restrictive. When I allow parts of my life to blend, they generally help both parts. And since this whole lesson seems to be about me integrating the spiritual and banal, this is the perfect card to show up. The cards that represent the two parts that need integrating are Strength/Lust and the Two of Disks (Change). I read recently that the Thoth tarot is (or was) banned in prisons, because it’s considered pornographic—in part because of this card. Crowley being Crowley, he has to go for the vulgar. But what he seems to have meant by choosing this word over strength is that it’s not just about fortitude or effort, but life force, zest, energy, particularly creative energy. It’s not just about the physical ideal, but about a whole, sort of radiant force. The card is associated with Leo, my sun sign. And I know this card must represent the spiritual part of the equation because its partner, the Two of Disks, is earth—that’s the banal part. Which banal part? Good question. Twos are magnetic. The draw (and repel), and in this case what we’re drawing is earth—in this case life. It’s what we’re drawn to in life and what is drawn to us. What this combination suggests is that bringing a strong, powerful, zesty, lusty spiritual energy to the things I care most about (and that seem to care most about me) would benefit me. It is, in a way, the pervading of the the things I care most about with a divine purpose. Which sounds tiring—although the Lust/Strength card is a good reminder that I’ve got the energy. (Note that I’ve more or less ignored the Thoth title for the Two of Disks. Change. It contextually doesn’t offer much. Do I draw change to me? Everyone does. Life is change. What it might offer to the reading is the sense of shifting interests in life. The things I care about and what I need to endow with divinity are varied and shift frequently. Although I don’t think of even numbers are particularly fast, so probably not that frequently. In this case, I think it offers a better shade to the reading if we read change as evolution. That creates a greater interplay between the spiritual and the divine, because of course the two evolve as we grow. It’s also a nice connection because of the prominent ouroboros/lemniscate on the Thoth card—sort of endless, eternal evolution.) The final card, representing a method of achieving this integration, is the Eight of Swords (Interference). Sometimes when I work with this deck, I start to doubt myself as a reader because these titles/keywords are so often impediments. They’re so total. Words offer so much less elasticity than images do. Why am I using the damn thing, then? Compulsion, actually. I’m emphatically drawn to it this summer. Shrug. Let’s start with the thing I hate the most: the keyword. Interference. Assuming I have nothing to work with but this annoying word, that is somehow supposed to be a method of integrating, that is the opposite of it. It is interfering with integration. Or is it? The image is (as the kids say) giving interference—this a blockade. A cage. It is interfering with something. What? Well, it’s the suit of swords. The intellect. Esotericists believe the intellect is the great enemy. Actually, that’s common in many traditions. As a writer, I find that rude. As an over-thinker, I fully understand why. The mind is cruel. Logic is cruel. The card is telling me not to let logic get in the way of this spiritual integration. So even though it’s telling me not to do something, it’s telling me what not to do. “Don’t let the mind get in the way of this process.” Or, said another way, “Interfere with your mind’s attempts to over think this.” So, OK, then; the keyword isn’t that bad. What else about the card might enlighten me further? Eights are work. This is going to take some effort. Connect it to Strength/Lust, and it’s doable, but it’s effort. (The nine would suggest it’s maybe too hard to do.) This card is Jupiter in Gemini—expansive intellect. If we’re going to allow the intellect into this integrative process, we need to do it in the most Jupiter-y way possible. Not so much logic as curiosity. Gemini is very curious. It gathers. I’ve heard it said that Gemini researches and Virgo (the other sign ruled by Mercury) edits. If you have to think, think big. LESSON FOUR
A row of five: Ace of Pentacles (5), King of Wands (2), King of Cups (1), King of Pentacles (3), 5 of Swords (4) Deck used: The Silver Acorn Tarot by Stephanie Buscema From the dense and esoteric, to the charming. I’m not one for “whimsy,” but there are a handful of “cute” decks that I find really charming and useable. This is one. And what’s equally interesting is the arrival of three of our four kings! This is the type of reading that might have sent me into the depths when I was starting out. Three kings! And no context! How are we ever to make sense of that? The question of the courts always freaks out new readers and I think it’s because we keep saying reading the courts is difficult. Once we get it in our heads that the court cards are tough, we agree. But if no one had told us they’re difficult, they would never have been. As always, let’s start by doing some noticing. Other than noticing the three kings, we notice that the only king left out is the King of Swords. The suit of swords is represented by the five. There are no major cards. The Ace of Pentacles completes the quintet. This gives pentacles a (tiny) edge in this spread. In this deck, the King of Wands looks away from the other two kings and towards the ace. The King of Cups looks at the King of Pentacles, who would be looking at the Five of Swords if his eyes were open. The Five of Swords, featuring a bird, looks the King of Pentacles. Because the deck is fairly consistent with Waite-Smith other Waite-Smith decks, I won’t dwell too much on the artwork (though it is incredibly cute while also being incredibly useful—I love this deck). What do we know about kings? Let’s start there, since they have shown themselves so forcefully here. It’s almost as though they’re pissed we spent two readings working with decks that eliminated them for the sexier knight. “Hey! We’re still here, jerkwad!” Kings are of course monarchs, hereditary rulers who believe (generally) that they are appointed by “god” to rule their land. There is a whole history of kingship and colonialism, and though kings predate the christo-colonial, many of us tend now to think of these guys in terms of the toxicity of unilateral rulership, among other poisonous things. Rightfully so. But of course, nothing is all one thing. There are plenty of times when kings represent oppression in readings. That said, I’ve also seen The Empress and the queens play that role, too—they are, after all, part of the self-same system. Because this blog is about lessons and advice, chances are we’re not being asked to imitate the nastier elements of kings in our readings. If anything, there’s a warning here. But let’s go deeper. Let’s assume for a second that it’s not kingship that makes a leader a colonizer. Let’s say that evil tendency comes instead from society and from the poisonous ways in which we’ve trained men in this colonial world. Instead, let’s remove gender from the equation. In fact, let’s—at least for the time being—remove monarchy from the equation. Let’s also do something increasingly common in modern life: let’s not jump to any conclusions based on our associations with an idea or concept. Let’s take the king’s point of view for a hot second. Here we find someone doing exactly what they were placed on this earth to do. Whatever deck I’m reading with and however that deck styles the equivalent card, I tend to begin from the neutral gaze that the king represents someone doing what (they think, at least) they were put on this earth to do. (For context, let’s contrast with the queen. Queens, in this same mythology, are put on this earth to make more kings. Who the hell wants that job, other than social media trad wives? If we take the queen as a ruler, her job is the same as the king’s. In many royalist systems, queens weren’t put on this earth to do that job. This means a queen is someone who has to do a job despite the fact that they didn’t want it or are forced to do it in the face of a system not designed to support them.) Bringing in the elemental factors, the King of Cups, then, is a person working with the emotions, senses, feelings, religion, mediation—watery things—and is doing exactly what they should be doing. (The Queen of Cups would be someone working in that field unexpectedly or who was not to the manor born and is doing that work despite the odds. I tend to find, then, the queens cleverer, more active, and more resourceful. Struggle makes us more active.) A reading with three kings tells us about a person who is equally at home in the practical, the spiritual, and the creative—and/or someone who is at home with selling sex and sexuality (pentacles + [cups + wands]). I share that last part just to point out how we might consider these cards, not because it’s contextually relevant. But, actually, I think the reading is in part about selling ourselves. More on that presently. The kings are bracketed by the Ace of Pentacles and the Five of Swords. They “contain” the kings. These all-powerful rulers are being hemmed in by these two cards. And so we get a sense of restriction. Let’s see what is restricting us and why, so that we can tell whether this is good news or bad news. I recognize the Five of Swords is typically considered a negative card, but by now you know I don’t work that way. What we’re seeing right now is the way context shapes a reading. I don’t know what any of it means yet, but the relationships between the cards help me understand what potential meanings are relevant. If the Ace of Pentacles and Five of Swords are serving as restrictors, boundaries, or containers, then I have to read them accordingly. How does each of these cards “contain”? The Ace of Pentacles is practicality in its least developed state. It is the idea of the practical, the notion of the banal (or financial, but I’m not really seeing that as relevant--yet). There’s a naivety with the aces. Because they contain the fullness of the suit they have great potential, but because they’re “just” potential, they don’t really know what it is they’re doing, what they’re “for.” This is telling because we have three cards in the middle that fully know what they’re for. The ace knows its for something, but not yet what. It is possibility but not development. The Five of Swords, on the other hand, is developed. And it doesn’t like what it has become. If we think backwards from five, we deal with all the explosive potential of ace, two, and three—all of which comes to a dramatic halt with the four, which stops everything in its tracks. Four’s stability and stoicism gets stuck. It is so stable that it can no longer see what it could become. In a way, it’s the way we humans realize that we’re finite and that leaving this life means we will cease to be. Our egos hate that and so do what they can to hold on to these ideas of ourselves as hard as they can. We worry that if we change at all we will lose what we worked so hard to gain. The five comes along and says, “fuck that noise.” The Five of Swords (I think) is the lynchpin of this reading. What I start to see are kings who think they’ve reached the height of their abilities after only a little bit of work (the ace). The five—the only swords card—sees what they’ve become: arrogant, self-centered, self-impressed, and the worst versions of themselves. I don’t talk much about the swords representing “seeing,” but it’s a natural fit for them to play that role. There is something sharp and clear about swords/air; no other suit really “sees” quite as well. Not only does this card see that, it hates it. It wants to go to war with it. But how can it? It’s a lowly five, up against three kings and their outsized sense of potential (ace again). Note that I originally felt that the five and the ace bracketed or enclosed the kings. I don’t feel that way now that I’m looking closer. The five is the only card that’s doing anything and so it’s the main actor in the play. The kings have all reached a level of immobility because they think they have nowhere to go. And they’re “protected” by the ace. It stops them from moving. It roots them them, grounds them (pentacles/earth). But there’s a lumberjack coming to knock this forest down (five). Because the thing about fives? They’re inevitable. No matter how secure we think something is, there is always going to be a five moment. The mighty old oak will one day die and rot and fall. That is a four to five experience. It may take years, generations, millennia--but everything will experience a five moment sooner or later. Of course, like Death, the five doesn’t mean the end. More follows. (I read this morning in a book about the Thoth tarot by Lon Milo Duquette that the esotericists believed that there was a minor arcana for each of the majors. Not an individual card; an entire set of minors, one for each major. Each of the trump cards has fifty-six minor cards to go with it. The cards of course are always the same, but they may be influenced by a ruler in the way that astrological signs are “ruled” by planets. In the case above we’re seeing the five as though it’s part of Death’s minor arcana—and by that same logic, we’re seeing the Hanged Man’s version of the Ace of Pentacles. I enjoy this concept even if I’m only just sitting with whether or not it makes sense.) Earlier we discovered that the kings represent those doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. But we didn’t say how. We didn’t describe the methods the kings were using, so we never figured out whether they were doing what they’re supposed to be doing correctly. The Five of Swords, becoming a powerful card indeed, indicates they have to be doing something wrong. One of the things I mean when I say context is important is what we’re working with right now. The cards limit each other. If the Five of Swords, which is “looking” at the other cards, represents something that needs to be shaken up, then the other cards are those things. So I need to interpret those other things in the corresponding way. I didn’t know the ace was going to represent a sort of arrested development until the Five of Swords “told” me so. I didn’t know the five was going to say that until I “listened” to it. The listening is what you’ve read to this point—my mental monologue about what the cards mean. Recall, two of the kings (cups and pentacles) “look” to the Five of Swords (though the pentacles’ king closes his eyes). They know this is coming. The open-eyed King of Cups for sure does. He may not be able to see it (in this deck, the king has a skull’s head; he has no eyes, but those non-eyes are “open”), but he can feel (cups) it. That said, he’s still not doing things right. Who is the King of Cups when misbehaving? Someone wishy-washy, indirect, indecisive, temperamental, moody; someone prone to tantrums and attention-seeking; someone whose self-esteem is tied entirely to what other people think of him. In essence, he goes from being an intuitive master to a petulant, selfish baby. The baby part comes from the fact that kings are typically thought to represent older people and when we “reverse” that, we’re getting someone really young. I don’t read reversals, but having just used that word you can see why I don’t—even though we’re turning out to read these kings the way one might read them reversed. A little digression on reversals: The reason I don’t use reversals is because the card combinations tell me whether I’m seeing each as “upright” or “reversed” without having to put the cards physically in that direction. How do I do that? Let’s do a quick summary of how I’ve read these cards so far:
Back to the reading: Having read the King of Cups in this badly-behaving way, let’s begin contextualizing it in terms of this lesson. The only question I ask the cards at the start of each blog is “What is Lesson X?” In this case, “What is lesson four?” So I don’t have any thematic context, but this is a blog about reading tarot. Each post is a lesson on reading. So I need to begin to think about what I know so far in terms of a lesson about reading. Thinking of the King of Cups alone, we’re beginning to form the story of someone arrogant, thoughtless (remember the lack of a King of Swords in this spread—he can’t misbehave because he didn’t even show up to the party); someone judgmental rather than intuitive, someone who acts off irrational impulses rather than deep feeling. Here we have a smug-ass reader, is what we have—and one who’s stinking up the joint to boot. But, wait! There’s more! We’ve got the other funky little kings to deal with. The other card “looking” to the Five of Swords is the King of Pentacles. He serenely and patiently sits upon his throne, holding his little pentacle, foot resting on what looks like a warthog. He’s become complacent, content with stasis, impressed with himself, and lazy; he, once a hard-worker (pentacles are the suit of work), grows sedentary—like the animal at his feet, happily snoozing. All his power means nothing because he’s not doing anything with it. He’s not doing anything with anything. He thinks he’s achieved top form and now there’s nowhere for him to go. He should be able to see the consequence of this, but he closes eyes that shouldn’t even be there! But someone is coming with a knife to harvest him. The King of Wands, on the other hand, faces the Ace of Pentacles. He’s still in love with his potential. All his energy goes into shining that brilliant golden coin he’s got his eyes fixed on. “Look how cool I can be!” he says. “Look at how many amazing things I can do! There’s nobody like me! When I get this project off the ground, it’s going to change the world.” Cobwebs grow from this ace, by the way, and a spider dangles from two cut sunflowers that frame the pentacle. This king is so impressed with himself, he’s growing cobwebs! The King of Wands has big Leo energy (Leo’s glyph, partnered with Cancer, are carved into the floor below him). The sunflowers having been snipped cut the life force from Leo’s home “planet.” This king’s ego is so impressed with what he could do, he’s not actually doing it! And he’s draining himself of the main source of his energy: the doing of cool shit! And it is here that we land on the message of the reading: when you find yourself resting on your (considerable) laurels, that’s the time you’ve stopped doing the real work. You have to mess up that obsession with your potential, with what you could do, with what you have done. That’s the other thing these kings are doing in their passivity: becoming superannuated, obsolete. When we think about how good we are or could be, when we stop moving, stop working, stop growing, we not only stagnate, but we make ourselves somehow redundant. It is the myth that learning and expertise are destinations rather than journeys. The Five of Swords sees all this self-importance, arrogance, all this ego and says, “Not today, Satan.” This is a thing that happens as we get “good.” And this is as much a risk for the experienced reader as the new one. The new reader likely gets caught in the idea of potential, not unlike the King of Wands, always admiring what they will be able to do (the ace). They think constantly about how great it will be when they’ve hit all the hurdles, gotten though all the difficulties, and they spend a lot of time fantasizing about the greatness they’ll achieve. And by focusing on this, they actually forget to do the thing that will supposedly bring them all this greatness. Sometimes it’s not arrogance but fear that keeps folks in this potential-filled obsession. We worry we’ll never actually be able to do it so we never take the training wheels off. In that way, our fear takes over and we lose that potential because we’re afraid we won’t live up to the huge goals we’ve set for ourselves. This, my friends, is the story of my life. I know it well. I have always set goals too high to reach and downward spiraled when I’ve failed. This is been most true in my life as a writer (and once upon a time as an actor). I always let my ambitions outpace reality. I naively believed being talented would lead to success. But I also based my entire personality on the idea of a particular kind of success. It wasn’t enough that I was a good writer who once in a while got theatres to produce a play I wrote. I had to be the toast of the theatre; I needed to reach the heights of theatrical stardom (something that is next to impossible to achieve in a very small, very competitive, very nepotistic, often very vicious field). But at the same time, I gave up easily. Rejection left me defeated most of the time. I didn’t have the money or energy to move to a city with a huge theatrical network, and even if I’d had, I don’t have the extroversion to network! But there I was, imagining all the great things I was entitled to once the blockade eventually lifted and I managed to get myself where I should be (with as little effort on my part as possible, and for sure as little discomfort as can be). I became only the imagined idea of potential. And anything I did get that wasn’t that didn’t matter to me. I devalued it. And in a lot of ways, I devalued myself and my work. I felt it was only worth doing if it reached the theatrical Olympus. And when I realized that would never happen, I gave up. Wasted potential. In fact, I’ve been known to whine to friends that I often feel like the sum total of all the potential I had and never lived up to. So I frequently remain in that mode. This obsession with potential can dog new readers to the point that we never get past the foundational. Worse, because we’re so obsessed with how good we could be, we never let anyone see us in our messy modes. We need messy modes. Messy mode is where we begin. I recently rewatched an old episode of Drag Race All Stars, and the fabulous Yvie Oddly, a favorite of mine, did a whole number on how we should go out and fail. “Do,” she said, “fuck it up.” Of course, Yvie isn’t the first person to make this point, but because she’s the most recent place I was reminded of it, I’m getting her all the credit. We have to mess up. We can’t figure out what we’re doing wrong, or rather what we could do better, unless we do. It’s insidious. Our egos hate the idea of us messing up, but we cannot reach the full measure of our potential unless we do. We are required to fuck up. And to fuck up often. I’m not saying you want to go out there and give bad readings; I just mean, you have to go and make mistakes and then you have to figure out why, rather than getting down on yourself. This is true, too, for the old hats. And it may be even more important for those of us who’ve been around the block once or twice to keep our skills sharp and to keep learning. Experimentation is so important so that we don’t get stale, tired, lame; we need to keep our work fresh, we need to mix things up. We need five moments. We need them, and if we don’t get them, then we become the collective embodiment of those three kings above in their most negative manifestations. We get arrogant, lazy, soporific, and stagnant. In lesson one we did a number about what happens to stagnant water. Similarly, stagnant earth is dead earth—like a farmer’s field that has gone fallow. Stagnant fire doesn’t even exist. It goes out, like a candle flame at the end of its wick and fuel. This can happen to us as readers if we don’t keep challenging ourselves. You might recall I used Thoth decks in the last two lessons because I’ve decided to dedicate the summer to working with this system. I’m reading books about it, working with Harris’s stunning deck as well as two others, and just allowing myself to experience this kind of deck generally. It’s not a detriment to the client, because I have all my other tools to call on if I get too in the weeds with the esoteric—but I also still find so much of the esotericism a distraction from divination. So there’s little risk I’ll get too into it. Instead of embodying these immature kings, we should return to the beginning of the courts and embody the pages. They’re immature in different and important ways. The immature king knows better but refuses to act like an adult. The tantrums are all ego-driven and mostly for attention. There’s an entitlement, like a spoiled child, which is petty and easily ignited. Pages, meanwhile, actually are children. They’re curious and they want to know what’s going on. They’re immature because they’re still growing, not because they’re grown and just behaving badly. Pages are less likely to throw tantrums because they’re curious; that means their egos are harder to trigger. They don’t think they know anything, so they don’t worry about what anyone else thinks about them. And, best of all, they’re actively interested in everything (of course, they’re primarily interested in their own suit, but we have two of the three here). It’s worth spending a little time exploring the absence of the King of Swords. Earlier, I said he didn’t know up to the party. I think that’s actually a good sign. He sent his soldier, the five, because he’s not staying still the way the other kings are. It’s actually really difficult for the King of Swords to stand still because the swords are so relentless—much like the mind of an over-thinker. In this case, the King of Swords is technically our knight in shining armor—or at least his rep, the five, is. Now, it’s partly a trick of math that the King of Swords didn’t appear here—there were only five cards, so the already-slim possibility of all four kings decreased with each new card. But when I look at the rest of the deck, the King of Swords is nowhere near the others—at least a good ten or fifteen cards away. There, he was flanked by the Eight of Pentacles (practical work!) and the High Priestess (she’s often considered the diviner of the majors—the knower of the secrets). He’s doing the work. Because the Priestess can sometimes be nebulous in readings, I also looked at the card that follows her: the Three of Cups. So there’s more expansiveness and the cups of course amp up her intuitive nature. This king is really connected to the real work. He’s not navel-gazing his own potential; he’s out in the field doing the thing. And he’d be better supported if the rest of the kings joined in. I’ve found myself saying over and over lately that curiosity is the cure for so many of the world’s ills. The word “cure” is right there in it. This reading talks about the consequences of denying our curiosity. All those kings, so impressed with themselves, sitting on their thrones, expecting to be lauded—and, in fact, probably being lauded—and yet they have no idea that all their power has been given away. To who? No one. It’s being squandered. They have the one thing so many people want and they’re letting it go to waste because they think they’ve done all there is to do. People are so afraid of being thought of as students. But the student isn’t the shameful role; the teacher who stops learning is. A read of one’s own This is a spread designed to discover where we’re letting ourselves get stagnated, why, and how to overcome it.
When I think this way, I think it suggests my cursory sense of curiosity. Thinking back to the misbehaving qualities of the king, we get the more negative aspects of cups/water. Those same qualities now apply to the page, who is actually being childish. It suggests a certain amount of naivety. Not something I usually consider myself, but of course we don’t tend to notice places where we’re not at our best. What am I being naive about? Death and The Devil. What do they have to do with anything? I normally interpret The Devil representing our real core, our essential selves, that part of us that we have to hide or shape to fit the needs of “civilization.” Or, it represents being drawn to those more “primal” aspects of life because we’re starting to understand how being cut off from them has made us less. Death, of course, is an ending or a stopping. It can be inevitability, too. I can’t help but laugh at the fact that I’m doing this work with the Thoth decks and Aleister Crowley’s infatuation with being called The Beast 666—something, apparently, his mother called him when he misbehaved. One could say I’m being naive about his work and that’s stopping me (Death) from something. Like, my attitude about his work could be getting in the way of something inevitable. Which, who knows? Might be true. It could also be saying that I’m being naive about working with this deck, and that it’ll kill me. But that’s probably not true, since I’ve read with the deck before. More generally, there’s a naivety about something deep, primal, core to me and it appears to be stopping me from growing. It could be an exploration of darker themes, but that’s not something I typically shy away from. It may also be telling me that my perception of the card, or the entirety of my work, is naive. Again, that doesn’t seem likely, but it’s not impossible. Because I’m reading backwards from the Page of Cups, Death seems to put a punctuation mark on the reading. But if I take a different track, and I start with that card, it might yield something else. The spread could be saying it’s inevitable (Death) that the deeper I go into myself or into darker work (Devil) the more naive I’ll find myself to be (page). Interesting, but none of this makes much sense given anything that’s going on in my life. So I’m probably going to reject all of these interpretations soon. This is where a lot of us get frustrated and give up. Let’s put these three aside for a moment, because I have the card that followed the Ace of Pentacles to tell me where I’m being too rooted in my ego. The Hermit is who followed—our third major card. I typically think of this card as representing the teacher, a thing I do a lot of, as well as an introvert. My introversion may be keeping me too rooted, and given the fact that I really don’t have much interest in doing much of anything lately, that’s a particular possibility. By the same token, it’s not something I’m particularly naive about. I know that I stay in too much. It may suggest that my focus on teaching—I’ve been doing a lot of classes and writing a lot—is also keeping me too rooted in my ego. I guess that’s possible, too. But it’s not really that helpful, frankly. In fact, I’m about to cancel a class due to low enrollment. Still, not much use, this. Let’s go to the final two cards—those that followed the King of Swords and the Five of Swords. These happened to be the Seven of Swords and the Queen of Pentacles. These cards tell me how to solve the problem. I’m about to look to the cards to solve a problem I don’t even know exists because the reading hasn’t given me a useful answer, yet. But, what the hell? Let’s find out what they say. The sevens look within, as you’ve likely heard me say by now, and of course the swords are intellectual, cerebral, linguistic, educational—this ties to the Hermit as an educator. The Seven of Swords asks us to spend some time considering what it is we really think. What do we really know to be true? Are we sure that what we thought was true really is? The Queen of Pentacles represents someone not necessarily born to practicality but forced to do it—and doing it really well. Married, these two cards suggest the solution to the problem is to spend some time re-evaluating what I think about how to do the work I do. In essence, it’s a re-thinking of the whole brand: how we bring our work to life in a practical, useful way. Are the things we think are true really true? Is the way we work really working for us? The Seven of Swords and the Queen of Pentacles are going to find out by doing some work (pentacles) around it. Working backwards, I take this to mean that the solution to my problem is that I need to re-examine my work as a reader and spend time with what I really know to be true and how I’m making that come to life in my divinatory work. Weirdly, the reading seems to be saying that my teaching is taking me away from doing that and that I’m somewhat naive to be avoiding the deep work (the Devil) probably because I’m scared (Death freaks me out, so I take the card to mean that in this case). I’m being naive about how much work I’ve really done on the deeper, darker parts of myself and my teaching work has been a distraction from it. I need to reconsider whether or not that’s really valuable to me and whether or not I’m doing the work as I should be—whether or not it’s bringing to life what I want it to. Frankly, that still doesn’t make any sense. But this is what I would say to a client if faced with these cards. More or less. Now what? I always say that readings can be literal or metaphorical. If I take this reading in a more metaphorical fashion, it tells me, basically, that if I think I can be a good reader while avoiding the world, I’m being naive—and I really need to activate my work in a more worldly way. Which isn’t untrue. But, let’s be honest: I’m probably not going to do anything about it. Not at the moment. I’ve been feeling incredibly unsafe in the world lately, for a variety of reasons, and so going out always feels like pulling my skin off. But recall, I said the ego protects us from things that will help us grow. So I really should be getting out into the world. Actually, I think this has a lot to do with the fact that I should be hustling my wares a better—something I’m never good at. Weirdly, I think The Devil and Death (which in this cute deck are both rather charming) are trying to tell me I’m being naive about my own particularly creepy charm and I should be relying on it a bit more. Well. We’ll see about that! This also reminds me of something: sometimes, readings aren’t helpful. Especially if you’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, or if we’re trying to solve the wrong problem. I always say, don’t use a spread that doesn’t speak to the issue. In this case, I may have invented a spread that solves I problem I don’t have. Sometimes, if a reading doesn’t make any sense, it’s worth asking ourselves if we’re actually solving the right problem. LESSON 3
A Four-Card Cross: Knight (King) of Cups (1) Five of Cups (2); Two of Disks (3) Ten of Swords (4) Deck used: Tabula Mundi, an independently-produced, modern riff on the Thoth by MM Meleen. A few notes: Because I’m also reading a lot about astrology right now, I thought it would be fun to use this cross to play with two astrological aspects: oppositions and squares. In this case, The Five of Cups and the Two of Wands oppose each other, and the Knight (King) of Cups and the Ten of Swords oppose each other. Cards at right angles to each other are squared. The Knight of Cups squares the Five of Cups and the Two of Disks, as does the Ten of Swords. The Five of Cups squares the knight and the ten, as does the Two of Disks. We’ll consider all of this. Both of these aspects are “hard,” which means they tend to conflict. But as Sue Tompkins says in her books (Aspects in Astrology and The Contemporary Astrologer’s Handbook), the hard aspects are the ones most likely to lead to change and growth and action. The “easy” aspects often lead to stasis. I like thinking this way much more than the more usual binary of good/bad. The Lesson We’ve got two of the cards folks never want to see in a reading: Five of Cups (in this deck, titled “Disappointment”) and the Ten of Swords (“Ruin”). The Knight of Cups doesn’t have an esoteric keyword, but does have an elemental title: Fire of Water. The knight representing the suit of fire; cups, of course, representing water. The Two of Disks is titled “Change.” Because the Five and Ten are so dramatic, and related numerologically, let’s start there. These cards are square each other (at right angles), which suggests they have a hard time integrating. Tompkins suggests they have a hard time seeing each other. So they tend to operate as though they’re not impacting anything else, even though they’re likely working at cross purposes to something else. In a way, it’s not unlike the concept of unconscious bias. We can’t see it, so we don’t know we have it, but it’s still hurting us (any other folks, too). As readers, we’re often afraid of the Five of Cups and the Ten of Swords. Not the cards, per se, but more the idea of having to give readings where the things depicted on or traditionally associated with them are contextually important. No one wants to give bad news . . . not unless you’re a sociopath (or you understand that what seems like bad news is actually what’s going to spur the client on to needed change). Clients are afraid of them, too, because we don’t want to feel the way these cards suggest we have done, do, or will do. And so, for me, I’m tickled we get to begin the reading this way! Let’s consider the math: we’ve explored a couple times now how closely air and water are related. In this case, though, even though they’re closely woven, they’re working at cross purposes. They’re fighting each other, or at least acting without regard for the other. The Five of Cups is a card of emotional or sensual upheaval. Why I dislike the Golden Dawn titles is that they limit. Upheaval isn’t bad, per se, and neither are any of the cards in the deck. Yes, we can be disappointed by emotional upheaval—but there are for sure times when we relish it. Times when, say, we’ve been stuck in a rut. The Tabula Mundi deck offers an image of a barren, desolate, arid landscape—the ground is cracked and baked, the bones of a fish and some dry cups are strewn around. In the background, a red sky oppresses the large pyramids covering the entire horizon. This is a hot card for the suit of water, and what we see if we explore the artwork is the image of a heat that has evaporated all the water—literally sucked it all out of the ground, greedily, leaving nothing for anyone (or anything) else. This isn’t water at is finest, it is water at its thirstiest. It’s water longing for water. It for sure doesn’t look good, and that’s common for this card in many decks. The Ten of Swords offers another barren landscape, but this one a black-tarred expanse and stormy sky (not unlike the one in the Waite-Smith Ten of Swords). An egg stands center with eight swords stuck into its top. Two rocks flank it, each with a sword stuck in, and each with a snake curled atop the stone, loosely coiled around the blade. The card is ruin. And as always it is no one’s favorite. The barrenness of these images grabs my attention and considering the square aspect, reminds me that you can’t rehydrate by visiting the desert. There are times when we as readers feel we have nothing in the tank, or when we experience a series of readings that simply don’t come together. We may feel like we’re losing our touch. Panic sets in, and of course panic is a thing associated with the suit of swords—particularly that trio of the eight, nine, and ten. These three cards are associated in this system (Thoth/Golden Dawn) with the sign Gemini. Gemini, ruled by my guy Mercury, tends to be a nervous sign—and I know this because all the poor Geminis in my life are prone to anxiety. Mercury moves around a lot, he’s a messenger, he can’t stand still, and when we tend to stand still too long ourselves we get nervous. Mercury and Gemini are also, though, associated with learning. This is one reason Mercury is my dude. He’s the ruler of writing, learning, words, knowledge, language—all the stuff that means so much to me. And so, this reading is proving to be about the fear that comes when we worry we’re drying up, that we’re getting stale, that we’re losing our touch—or, conversely for the new reader, that we’ll never learn enough to be able to do this well. The barrenness of the five and ten, here, couples with Mercury/Gemini highlight a thing that can happen for readers sometimes: imposter syndrome. And when imposter syndrome kicks in, we may find ourselves doing things that will dry up our potential because we don’t realize that it’s actually working at cross purposes to our goal. We could say that Mercury is also the ruler of imposter syndrome (although I don’t for a second think he has it; he just doesn’t have time to worry about it—but when we feel like we’re missing him, that sensation creeps in). To turn to the cards and their more traditional meanings, we may find ourselves disappointed (Five of Cups) by our readings (swords = readings). And we may find ourselves feeling that way a lot (ten swords = a lot of thinking about this + thoughts are influenced by feelings and vice versa). Or, we find ourselves disappointed by our progress, or by the response we’re getting from friends or clients. And it eats away at us. Or rather, raises our temperature to the point where all our moderating water evaporates and we’re left literally deserted. So we’re feelings all kinds of shitty about ourselves. Meanwhile, in the Ten of Swords, we’re starting to overthink, over-intellectualize. We get stuck in our head (traditionally associated with the Eight of Swords), then we panic (nine), and then we freak the fuck out (ten). Our minds and hearts are both going through their own little Greek tragedy at the same time—and so, though you can usually call on one when the other starts being a little brat, you start to “realize” that you don’t have anything to fall back on. It’s bad enough for one part of us to be having a little tantrum, but for two of them? That’s just rude. Here we see the square aspect at work. These two parts of ourselves are entitled to have a freakout, but they have to give us the respect of not doing it simultaneously. But they’re square, they’re not “seeing” each other, not communicating—even though they’re both amping the other up without knowing it. It may seem odd to think of two parts of ourselves having a freakout, but if you’re prone to freakouts (I am!) then you know that a seemingly intellectual concept can send you into an emotional spiral, and a seemingly emotional thing can have you fighting major wars in your mind. Let’s put this two-card combo on hold for a moment and move up to the Knight, which also squares the Five of Cups. Here, the Knight of Cups is bringing water to the five, but the five can’t see him coming, and the Knight doesn’t know where he’s going. So we’re coming to rescue ourselves, but, like . . . badly. It’s worth noting that the Knights in this deck are really the kings (in Thoth decks, generally the Prince and the Knight are astride a horse or vehicle), which means there are parts of ourselves that should know better but aren’t functioning at their best. In this case, it’s likely our intuition that’s fucking around on us. And it’s because it’s not able to see what the real problem is. In fact, the knight is “bringing” his water not to the five, where water is needed, but rather to the Ten of Swords. The Knight thinks the root of the problem is what he can see (the ten), but it’s not; it’s the thing he’s ignoring or doesn’t even know is there. It’s like he got in the car and told his GPS to take him anywhere but hoped it would take him to the train station. So, we’re really off our game and we can feel it (water/cups is the dominant suit in this spread, even if one of the cards clearly is missing water). The Knight also squares the Two of Disks (Change). This card depicts an hourglass with a little mechanism inside. If the sand weren’t in the glass, we’d see that the mechanism is a lemniscate (infinity symbol) made of a belt that moves the wheels. This card feels so divorced from the other three, it’s like it’s in a different reading. It’s just out here doing it’s little thing, working it’s little system, the way it always does, while the rest of the reading is having a tantrum. Why? Because that’s just what it does. And what it’s doing is life. It’s just being. It’s cycling, as cycles do, and spinning, as wheels do, and it knows—even though we don’t—that this is just a blip and the next moment will eventually come. But squaring the Knight and the Ten of Swords, it has a lot of noise to compete with. The clomping splashes of the knight through the water, and the falsetto screaming of the Ten of Swords. (Why is the Ten of Swords full of falsetto screaming? I don’t know, but right now it is. Trust your instincts.) This little machine doesn’t know there’s a kink in the works, because it can’t break down. But it knows what the rest of the reading doesn’t: it’s going to be OK. Many of us do find ourselves in moments like this. We’re just not good enough. Or, worse, we were feeling amazing and then had a few experiences that totally harsh our mellow. And when that happens, all these alarm bells start ringing and all these different emergency responses kick into place. We worry, we start beating ourselves up (another quality of swords—hurting ourselves with words), we rush to find solutions (knight) even when we have no idea what problem we’re trying to solve (the impacts of the squares). And meanwhile, life is just humming along waiting for us to balance out (another aspect of the two) and realize that we’re being dramatic. The strange thing about imposter syndrome is that it only seems to hit people who, like, aren’t imposters. Morons who actually have no ability never seem to doubt themselves. It’s infuriating. Perhaps we’d be too powerful if we were able to fully accept our abilities. I don’t know. But I do know that this tendency, this self-doubt, can happen any time and often when least expected. I find that whenever I tend to be riding high for a couple days, something happens to knock me down a few pegs. I chalk this up to life stopping me from getting too arrogant, but I’d sure love it if I could ride those highs a little longer. I think most people experience it from time to time, some to lesser degrees. And I do think there’s some value in moments where we pause and reflect on whether we might be in a rut. But when they become chronic, it’s worrying. Before saying more, let’s talk about the oppositions. These are “hard” aspects, too, but unlike the square they’re (typically) aware of each other, they can probably see each other, but there may be a tendency for them to engage in a tug-o-war, a power dynamic that can sometimes make life . . . annoying. At their best, they integrate with each other and become unified in purpose. In this reading, we have the Knight of Cups opposing the Ten of Swords, and the Five of Cups opposing the Two of Disks. The knight/ten oppo is the classic diviner power struggle: the emotional hero ready to save the day, and the logical over-thinker who can’t stop turning things over in their mind. It’s like if Einstein married Jesus and they made a really weird baby together. (Hot!) Earlier, I said the knight was solving the wrong problem, and it’s because he’s “intuitive”: he solves the problem he can see. He’s not intuitive, he’s “intuitive.” At least in this case. If you don’t catch my drift, he’s more like Chad making a social media video about how to get a dope job than the actual person doing and hiring for that actual job out in the world who knows what it actually takes to do and get that job. Knights (in this case they don’t lose their active powers just because they’re kings in this deck; I tend to assign the Prince the more “kingly” role, at least in terms of speed and decorum) don’t think too much, and this isn’t the “thinkiest” knight to begin with. It’s the moodiest knight, the “feelingiest” knight. He’s very in touch with . . . whatever it is he thinks he’s in touch with in that moment. And he doesn’t get the brainy types, but he likes them (air and water like each other) and he wants to help. Once he gets to the Ten of Swords, though, his attempts to save the day will fail and he’ll get sullen and lose interest in it and find another cause to champion. He’s like the dog, Dug, in Up. Sweet, earnest, but easily distracted. The Ten of Swords, meanwhile, cannot deal with the Knight, right now. No! There is a logical solution to this and I will find it, god dammit! Tell that effete little fucker to go save someone else! I CAN DO THIS ALL BY MYSELF! The Ten of Swords, already entirely burned out and totally useless, still thinks only it can save the day; only it can make things right. It actually can’t; it has nothing left to give. The title on the card is “ruin,” and in this way it is ruined, spoiled, rotten. Not forever, at least not ideally, but right now. And one of the reasons it’s so cooked is that it, too, is trying to solve the problem incorrectly. The knight has water to bring and the ten knows where it needs to go, but both are so self-centered they can’t see that. Now, if they can get it together and integrate, they could actually do something. (For any Sondheim or musical theatre fans out where, take a look at the lyrics to Phyllis’s follies numbers in the musical Follies. There are three that have been used in various productions of of this strange and wonderful show: “Uptown/Downtown,” “The Story of Lucy and Jessie,” and “Ah, But Underneath!” All three are gorgeous interpretations of something experiencing this very thing.) This is not unlike the student who feels that cramming all the information possible into their brain will yield results quicker. They truly believe that they can shove all that information into their mind and their mind will retain it. They don’t ever stop to think there’s actual science about how we learn and remember, and not one single study has ever shown that people learn and retain information they stuff into their heads like a pillow into a case. It simply doesn’t work. We cannot rush our learning journeys; they have to take the time they take. I use this analogy a lot for this: you can rush bread dough to rise, but you can’t rush the flavor development. If it’s warm, yeast will rise quickly. But it will only do one of the two jobs it’s there to do. Yeast is what makes yeasted bread taste like bread. When you think of a yeasted loaf, what you’re remembering the taste of is yeast. Yeast can puff up fast, but flavor development takes time. And the best way to make bread is to allow the bread to rise as slowly as possible so that as much flavor develops as possible. Learning is like that. For those of us who’ve been around the block and face these moments of fear that we’ve finally lost it, we’re not likely to prove to ourselves that we haven’t lost it by cranking out reading after reading. We get terrified and each lackluster reading does nothing to calm us, and instead of taking a break—which is probably the thing we actually need—we keep going, keep trying, keep pushing, putting more and more stress on the muscle and giving it no time to heal. It’s like trying to run a marathon after a sprain, hoping the sprain will just get better on its own—in part by putting as much pressure on it as possible. Or we cram ourselves with books and classes to “unlock” some kind of mystery solution to a problem we still don’t even understand. All of this may stem from the knight’s ego—which in this case, we must take to mean the reader’s ego. The Knight of Cups is very much like a diviner, diving into the deep end of the unknown. Water is often representative of the unknown, and the unfathomable—a word related to water by “fathom,” which is a way of measuring the depth of water. A fathom is about six feet. Water is also, of course, associated with clarity. And so the diviner dives into the unknown in order to find clarity. The problem is, we may sometimes dive into the water expecting clarity and discovering only the unknown, the unfathomable. And this is in part because of the word expect. When we expect too much, we actually get in the way of possibility. Think of it this way. Have you ever been reading on a question and before you drew you had a certain of idea of what cards (or anyway what kinds of cards) you’re likely to see, only to find that the exact wrong cards come up? I have. Actually, one reason I read the way I do and that I’ve written about reading the way I have is because the “wrong cards” always seemed to come up for me. I never got the cards I was expecting and that other readers seemingly would get. I can’t tell you why that happens, but it did mean I had to rethink how I read. If you look at all my work, my previous books and videos, the subtext of all of it is essentially, “How to make the ‘wrong cards’ make sense in a reading.” Now, of course I don’t think that I’m getting the wrong cards—not anymore. I now understand that any card can answer any question correctly. I need to do the work to figure out how. But the point is many folks experience this and they think something is wrong with them. At that point, they may give up—which is sad, but not everybody needs to do this work—or they may rush to study more of the great books (and maybe not-so-great books) on the topic, attempting to inspire and get them back on track. But like the knight in this particular spread, that’s solving the wrong problem. What’s likely the issue is that you’re too full of information (Ten of Swords). You’re too full of intellect. What you need is the thing that the knight is bringing: water, feeling, sensation. These are things you can’t get from a book. And as a writer, it pains me to say it, but you can’t learn how to read tarot from a book. You can learn how the author readers tarot from a book, but you can’t learn how you read tarot from a book. I’m not saying the books aren’t helpful. I’d like to think mine are, and I’ve for sure been inspired by others’ books, too. But these books tell you what the cards mean and how to work with them. They don’t—and can’t—telly out how to put them together in the context if your lived experience. I occasionally get asked when I think a reader is “reader” to “go pro” or start reading for others (usually for money). I don’t have the ability to set that standard; you have to find those answers for yourself. But when asked, I say that a reader is ready to consider themselves a “pro” (I really do hate that term) when they’re able to contextualize the cards in terms of life, the question, and each other, without having to rely on memorized interpretations. When the reader can read and interpret, rather than see and recite. Again, that’s just me, but that was the barometer I used for myself and I didn’t start taking paying clients until I felt I had that ability. That said, taking on paying clients was never an ambition of mine. I fell into it by mistake, as I have done so many other areas of my career. The point is, it’s not about memorizing and cramming your brian full of information (Ten of Swords); it’s about having enough knowledge to call on when you need it, but also being able to feel your way through the reading. This is a thing that makes me uncomfortable to type. I’m not a sensing reader. I don’t consider myself psychic. I don’t experience clairaudience or clairsentience. I don’t hear voices or experience the presence of “guides.” And for that reason, my first two books are really systemic—in this case I mean they’re both based on the prospect of having a system that you can use and that comes from you when you need it. But that’s really only half the story. While I’ve been particularly emphatic about the systemic approach up to this point, that’s because I feel many folks lack a decent system (I did) and also because I hear from readers a lot how they reach a point where they know they know the card meanings but have reached some kind of plateau. And all of that is true. Having a system is necessary, especially when we feel somewhat dried up. But there’s more to it than that. And the opposition of the knight and the ten reminds us of that. It’s difficult to explain what the other half is, what that more sensational experience is. That’s one reason why the knight can’t see it. Even the Knight of Cups, who is watery AF, has a hard time giving language to this part of being a reader. It is the part that just knows/feels when something is right. And this is a thing a lot of readers feel somewhat shy discussing, because it is so hard to define and attempting to do it often sounds silly. But this is where intuition kicks in (rather than the “intuition” we discussed before). I’ve come to think intuition is really a survival mechanism. It’s part of our fight-or-flight response. We tend to be attuned to the dangers we face in life. The example I always use is that someone who lives in the city can tell when there’s cars coming at an intersection even without looking. We can sense them, feel them. Sure, we can hear them, too. And I guess what we’re really dealing with are the senses. Water is sensational in this way; it is very concerned with the senses. We think of hearing, vision, touch, taste, smell—but there’s (wait for it!) a sixth sense (oh gawd, I went there!). That sixth sense is intuition. Knowing the thing that can’t be smelled, heard, tasted, touched, or seen. It is most similar to touch in that we feel it, but of course it’s a different kind of feeling. Right now I can feel the sensation of my fingertips on the keyboard. I tend to write laying down in bed with a pillow propped under my chest. I can feel myself pressed against the pillow, I feel the part of the mattress I’m laying on, and I can feel the air conditioner tickling my legs where they extend over the end of the bed. I can feel a cut on my thumb I got tidying the kitchen (not with a knife; I don’t need knives or broken glass to cut myself—one of my special skills). Those are all touch-related. There is a kind of feeling that isn’t touch-centric: when we feel it in our gut or know it in our bones. We’ve talked about that already. This is intuition. The problem is, it’s difficult to tell the difference between intuition, intrusive thoughts, and bias. This is one reason many of us find it so difficult to read for ourselves: we can’t tell what’s an intuitive hit, what’s confirmation bias, and what’s our anxiety telling us we’re doomed. I don’t use my intuition as a primary tool because I don’t trust it. I know what sounds like a strange thing for a diviner to say, but I don’t. I live with severe anxiety (treated) and sometimes depression (sometimes treated) and I have a hard time telling the difference between the imagined horrors I sense on a daily basis and the actual horrors that are likely to happen. I’m someone who is somewhat afraid of giving in to intuition because it feels both like a loss of control (something I hate) and potentially a gateway to more anxiety. I keep my intuition at bay most of the time. All of that said, it is part of our toolkit. I’ve experienced times where interpretations of cards arrive during a reading that I’ve never used before but that I know are right in that context. Recall earlier when I pointed out the “falsetto screaming” of the Ten of Swords. Where did this come from? I don’t know, but it popped into my head and felt incredibly appropriate at the moment. But that’s not even a very good example. I recall doing a reading for a client who had a severe vision impairment and also lived with autism. Early in the reading she mentioned wanted to learn a new language when I pointed out the centrality of the Page of Swords in the spread. Over the course of the reading, we explored what this could mean and she revealed she felt like she had a hard time getting her guardians to listen to how she was feeling. “Maybe that’s the language you need to learn,” I said, somewhat off-handedly, because it literally flew out of my mouth before I had time to consider the implication. We both paused and I grew somewhat misty-eyed. She said, “Whoa. I’m going to have to sit with that one for a while.” I said, “Me, too.” That is what I’m talking about. The whole reading was leading to that moment for that client. That is intuition. Or, rather, intuitive reading. “Intuitive” gets bandied around a lot in divination spaces. It’s a word that has come to mean anything anyone wants it to and because of that it doesn’t really mean anything. And because it doesn’t mean anything, anyone who wants to can call themselves an intuitive reader and not have anyone question what that means. That’s not necessarily a good thing. Nobody questions it because nobody wants to look like they don’t know what people are talking about. But I question it. Internally, anyway. What does it mean, you read intuitively? There isn’t a reader who doesn’t use intuition. Sad to say, what most people mean when they say they’re “intuitive readers” is that they don’t really feel like doing the work of learning and so they don’t and just read by gut reaction. I just began a paragraph on why I think “intuitive reading” is nonsense. All reading is intuitive. But I’m not interested in hot takes, at least many. The lessons are supposed to come from the cards. I’ll reserve my feelings about people who use “intuitive” as an excuse to not do their foundational work. This reading is reminding us (me, in particular) that we can’t only read cerebrally. But also that we need to feed the intuitive side. And here we take a journey back to the cards. The solution when we feel this dry, this burned out, this out of tune isn’t to cram our heads with more knowledge or to keep working ourselves into a frenzy; it’s to care for the intuitive side of our nature, for the intuitive side of our reading lives. This is why we need to understand what “intuition” means. We can’t develop that part of ourselves if we don’t feed it. And so the reading I offer at the end of this chapter will be focused on that: what is intuition, where do we need to care for it in our lives, and how. But more on that presently. We’ve given short shrift for the lonely Two of Disks (“change”). Sometimes cards in readings don’t have that much to say, and that’s partly the case with this card. The image reminds us that life keeps life-ing, even when we’re in the midst of an emo crisis. But I feel compelled to spend a little time talking about the title or keyword on this card: “change.” The obvious association with change in the sense of growth or development. What if it mean in the financial sense? Change as in pocket money. While the Thoth and other Golden Dawn systems aren’t interested in the banalities of fortune telling (something you likely know I’m very interested in), they aren’t here to scold us and the suit of coins/pentacles/disks/diamonds has always been associated with finances. Classically, it represents the merchant class and banking. It’s helpful to retain this because even though this reading is so much about feeling, the disks/coins suit reminds us that this isn’t only about what we feel. It’s also about where we put our money. I bring this up because I’m an emotional spender. I think these days a lot of people are. But I happen to be a big spender in particular when my sense of safety is messed with. The idea of accumulating makes me feel safe, even though it doesn’t actually have any real benefit other than thinning my bank account. Books are my weakness. Books are the realm of swords. We don’t need swords in this reading; swords have done all they can. What we need are more practical (disks/pentacles/coins) things—and to that end, not that many of them. Twos, of course, are a small number. This card reminds us to ground ourselves in the real world and to remember that when we spend all our time thinking about the magical, esoteric, mystical, whatever, that we’re losing touch with reality. And when we’re reading, we’re generally reading about real life. I can count on one hand the number of times a client has asked me to read about something that the Golden Dawn would have been interested in exploring. In fact, I’m pretty sure I can count those experience on no hands. The clinking of pocket “change” in the two of disks reminds us of a few things: first, if we are reading professionally, we need to stay connected to the real world. Too many readers don’t. We fly off into the magic kingdom and forget to remember we’re human—and so are our clients. Lately, I’ve noticed a total lack of interest in the “real world” on my part. Going to work, dealing with the bills, anything that is “grownup” and requires me to deal with life has been getting on my nerves. And this is frustrating because I do like my job. It’s also frustrating because we can’t forget reality. While I want to float away and focus on nothing but magical concepts (right now, astrology), I can’t do that—and one reason I can’t do that is because I do have clients who live down here on earth with me and they’re going to ask me to talk about that. The other thing this card does is remind us of the fact that life goes on. What we’re feeling now isn’t what we’re going to feel forever. This card and its focus on the hour glass definitely underscores the temporariness of these feelings. And the two little machine wheels inside also remind us a bit of cycles. We’re not going to stay here forever, but we may be back here again—in fact, it’s likely we will be here again. Things (ahem) change. What does this have to do with the clinking of change in our pockets? There’s something tangible about money, something practical, something useful (I mean, I’m going long with this one—but stay with me) that matters. We read because we need practical, useful information. We read because we need things to make sense. We need the down-to-earth. And the down-to-earth doesn’t have to be stifling or limiting—or, well, I guess it does have to be, but it can also be exciting. Look, we live in the “real world” and at the same time, we can still find answers in cards. So the point is that even things that seem banal aren’t only that. Here we return to the idea that nothing is all one thing. If something is earthy, by nature it also must be heavenly. As above, so below. And so the solution to these times when we feel stuck is in part to remember reality, our humanity (earth/disks) and at the same time try to find ways to nourish our intuitive side. And so that takes us to: A read of one’s own This reading is, as promised, designed to help us explore where we might be needing to care for our intuition and how we might do that.
A quick example: For my first three cards, how I know I need to care for my intuition, I got two of the cards from the first spread! The Ten of Swords and the Five of Cups! I love that this happened. I’m using the same deck, and I gave it a decent shuffle. But I knew all along that this lesson/chapter was really for me, and so I’m not shocked to see them here. In fact, I’m delighted. The third card was the Princess (page) of Swords (Earth of Air). I’m not really worried about aspects here because I simply have three sets of three. The Ten of Swords and the Five of Cups mean exactly what they meant above: when I’m feeling brain dead, burned out, uncreative, dry, thirsty, totally barren, and when all my intellectual curiosity yields no results. An interesting detail on this particular Princess of Swords is a sort of crown-like shape above that, thanks to some spiky protrusions, looks a lot like a bear trap. It is the mind trap, getting stuck in thinking, getting stuck in the cerebral, getting stuck in the intellectual, all that the expense (and dehydration) of the spiritual and emotional. And as someone who would just as well never deal with emotions, I’d just as soon never have to explore that part. The next set of three answers how I can care for this part of me. The cards drawn here are, The Eight of Wands (“swiftness”), The Hierophant, and the Seven of Wands (“valour”). As is typically the case for me, these aren’t the cards I expected to see. Two fire cards and my least favorite trump. Fun! But this is appropriate, because I’ve already done my number on how the “right” cards never show up for me when I read. Nothing jumps out at me as particularly appropriate or helpful for this question, so I’m just going to give up my reading career right now. Oh, I guess I could put some work into it. Fine. But isn’t this effort exactly the thing I’m supposed to be getting away from, tarot? (I’m being snarky.) The Eight of Wands in this deck is incredibly mercurial, with my boy’s winged sandals united by a rainbow, and a caduceus tipped with a diamond takes center stage. None of this is particularly helpful, either. Nor are any of my common associations for this card: putting your work into the world, giving things energy, doing passionate labor, that sort of thing. All of it rings hollow and false. Frustrating. The Hierophant is the king of the colonizers, the ruler of the old and outdated, the master of oppression. The Seven of Wands is a wonder of defensiveness in many decks, though this deck and the Thoth system generally title it “Valour.” I guess this means that there really isn’t an answer and I’m just the kind of person who can’t take care of my intuition. In fact, all of this fire is incredibly un-intuitive. And this is what unlocks the trio for me: do something else. Go do things you care about that aren’t related. Revisit something old (Hierophant), go work on something that you’re passionate about—something that isn’t divination. The Seven is introspective: what do you care about, this card often asks. Put your back into that (the Eight of Wands, associated with labor and effort). Maybe explore things you don’t like (the Hierophant); systems you find limiting or oppressive. Not because they’re right, but because I “can’t” learn anything from them. Recall that this is the first time we’re seeing fire cards in this lesson. Our original reading had two wands, a sword, and a disk/coin. Fire makes its way here finally, and I’m a fire sun. My sun is in Leo. I’m a fairly fire-y person, even though I have an airy nature, too. (Aquarius is my ascendant.) This tells me that when I feel like I’m burned out mentally and dehydrated emotionally, fire is the solution—and a fair amount of it, as we have an eight and a seven. Go play, this seems to say, go get wild, crazy, do things you really find exciting. The fire takes us away from the swords and air and tells me not to worry about those things for the moment. If water is intuitive, fire is instinctive. It may seem like a subtle thing, but instinct isn’t quite as fluid as intuition; it’s much faster, much less thoughtful. When we act from instinct we do now and think later. Intuition often makes us stop, wonder, consider—all very flowing things. Well, I guess “stopping” isn’t fluid, but the rest of it is. Instinct, fire, gets the impulse and acts on it. Here we really follow our gut, even if that’s a less considered and trustworthy part of our system. It’s OK, though, being thoughtful isn’t working and we (well, I) have nothing left to give emotionally. So just do it. In a way, this is like being Mercury. He doesn’t care what the message is he’s charged with delivering, he just delivers it. Sometimes as a reader I can get awfully wrapped up in saying things right, being correct, being please; Mercury gets a message and hands it over. I could benefit from playing in this way. The Hierophant, even though I don’t like him, frequently indicates faith. He’s telling me that there are times when it’s OK to have faith in my gut instinct. He also introduces earthiness, Taurus, into the reading. This is good, because earth was the element that sat on the periphery in the reading that opened this lesson. It tells me that my gut instinct is (often) rooted in real life. So I can trust it more than I think I do. In essence, this row says, “don’t overthink it—just do it.” Finally, the last three cards suggest how I can check my progress during these times. Here we find The Fool, The Seven of Swords(!) (“futility”), and the Two of Wands (“dominion”). The Seven of Swords, the introspective naval-gazing thinker! How apt, then, that in this deck, the seven is styled “futility.” If you (meaning me, in this case) find yourself (again, meaning me) thinking a lot? Remember it’s futile. It ain’t getting you where you want to be. Rather, approach the world with zero expectations (Fool) and let the fire take (Two of Wands). The association of the Two of Wands with “dominion” isn’t super helpful here. It rarely is. The suit of wants is the most colonial, most inspired (I think) by Britain’s legacy of empire. I was just browsing though a book on my TBR, T. Susie Chang’s 36 Secrets: A Decanic Journey through the Minor Arcana of the Tarot, and she explores the ways that the Two, Three, and Four of Wands take a journey from colonization (two), the setting up of a colonial government (three), and then the self-celebration of that new government (four). We can add to that the conservatism of four, which is reminds us the way colonialism sticks around even when it’s supposedly long gone (look, for example, at Haiti for the long-term impacts of colonialism). Dominion. It is almost religious in its fervor. Religion, particularly Abrahamic ones, love dominion. It was the brutal alliance of “Christianity” and Empire that led to much of the world’s ills. There were conquerers before then, but nobody managed to weaponize faith and the human fear of death like Christianity did. This ties me back to the Hierophant in the previous set of three. But because this is an advice reading, I need to look at these two cards with kinder eyes. Surely the advice is not to act like a colonizer bent on dominion. Rather, let’s take the fervent quality of the Two of Wands (and the Hierophant from the previous row) and take that part, but leave the colonizing out. Twos attract, probably none more than the Two of Wands/Fire. Like, as the old cliche goes, moths to a flame, eh? With my sun in Leo, I’m frequently drawn to flame. Because my sun is conjunct (so close to each other as to be in nearly or exactly the same degree of a sign) Venus, one would say that I find fire beautiful and that beauty lights me up. That’s a nice thought, but I’m rather messy and far from beautiful myself (at least in a Venusian way)—but an interesting anecdote nonetheless. What I think this means is that the Venusian passion is married to the sun’s potency, and so there’s an almost evangelical nature at play. And that feels very Two of Wands (even though that card is actually related to Aries in Mars). I take this to mean, because we’re reading about how I know I’m doing a good job caring for my intuition, is that I feel insanely passionate about what I’m doing. With The Fool, I’m to notice when I feel free of expectations, with the seven I’m to recognize when I’m falling into the habit of intellectual naval-gazing, and with the Two of Wands, I’m to notice when I feel incredibly—evangelically—attracted to the work (reading cards). I guess you could say this would give me dominion over reading, but I don’t think of reading that way. I’m a part of the puzzle, a cog in the machine, not the soul power at play. But I can for sure have dominion over my overthinking (the seven). Note how The Fool and the Two of Wands flank the seven. They’re limiting, containing, the seven’s potential to start getting in the way and making things too “thinky.” And so I know I’m doing a good job when I’m free of expectations, limit my overthinking, and when I’m feeling really passionate and drawn to my work. And that’s not a bad barometer at all! ![]() LESSON TWO: A Five-Card Arc of: The Moon (4), The Lovers (2), 10 of Swords (1), 4 of Cups (3), 3 of Swords (5) Deck used: The Thoth Tarot by Lady Frieda Harris and Aleister Crowley Oh, have we ever been thinking too much (Ten of Swords). We can get so in our heads that we forget we have a body. It is the curse of the suit of swords (the one I most identify with) that the better we are at thinking, the more detrimental our thinking becomes. The first card in this arc of five (with the center card at the apex) sets us squarely in the gray matter, in the brain, that part of ourselves so frequently awesome and so frequently exhausting. The Ten of Swords tells us that we could not get more wrapped up in our intellectualizing if we tried—and we are trying, despite the fact that we’ve really reached that pinnacle. Or is it a nadir? Isn’t wearing out our own minds kind of a drag? I think so. It pulls us down. It makes us heavy. It makes us cranky. Overthinking is a thing for a lot of tarot readers. Because we love what we do, we want to know everything about it. We voraciously consume books and videos on the topic, absorbing history, correspondences, and systems, and I find that many people can, within six months of beginning such an intense tarot journey, speak credibly on a lot of topics that they formerly had no relationship with. It’s impressive. Where it becomes problematic are the moments when we’re sitting in a reading trying to figure out what the hell correspondences are the ones that matter in this particular moment. It’s terrifying. And that’s assuming we haven’t also started getting distracted by the imagery on the cards in front of us. There’s a sense when we’re beginning that everything that we see in a reading matters equally. Every correspondence, every symbol, every association. Somehow all of these things announce themselves as needing attention at exactly the same time. Of course, the alternative can happen, too: we can turn over the cards and find that none of the images or associations mean anything. In a way, both of these are the exact same symptom of the exact same disease. We get overwhelmed—either by the amount of information or the lack of it. But the mind begins considering not the reading, but rather than many ways in which we have failed in our lives leading up to this moment. If we’re lucky, it’ll also begin dwelling on our ineptitude as readers and commence judging ourselves for thinking we could ever do this for someone else. I had that experience last night attempting to write this lesson. I did it, but hated it. I scrapped it all today and started again. It could have been the deck’s fault, but think I just wasn’t into it. One of the things I didn’t consider about writing this way is that I really have to finish each chapter in one sitting, otherwise I’ll forget where the reading was taking me. I have to stay in the moment. Even getting up to get water can distract me, and that’s not good because I use getting water as a way of collecting my thoughts when I’m writing. (I used to use cigarettes. And gin. This is better. But less fun.) The mind is a powerful thing, and though I’m frequently critical of the Golden Dawn’s largely negative associations for the mind suit—swords/air—I don’t necessarily disagree, because it is in the mind where we do most of our wounding. We hurt ourselves, or at least many of us do, which the words that form thoughts there. It may be the intrusive thoughts forcing us to consider horrific-and-unlikely outcomes for normal situations; it may be the way we read (also a mind function) other people’s words or actions (or lack thereof); perhaps it’s the way we get pissed off and use our words or deeds to hurt others. Buddhists believe that anger is like swallowing poison and expecting someone else to die. When we get our snide dig in, we may feel good—but we’re just drinking a certain kind of poison. Words are dangerous. The pen is mightier than the sword because words cut our heart, not our flesh; our hearts hold wounds longer than our flesh does. The gods didn’t want Mercury bringing humans the written word. They felt we would wind up farther from the truth, because if anyone could commit anything to paper, it would confuse us. As a writer, it’s a funny thing. I adore words. I’m also rather a fan of my guy Mercury, given that he rules the things I love most. But I can understand why the gods were wary. Language limits. Especially in the world of the spiritual. Consider how cringy it can be to attempt putting your core spiritual beliefs into words. It’s not easy. Everything suddenly sounds small, stupid, clichéd. Things that move your soul when you think of them become trite, hackneyed, and Hallmark Movie of the Week when given voice. There are some things best left unsaid because to say them will muddy them. And yet. It’s all we have. We lack any other way of sharing how we feel, what we need, where we are. As mushy and imprecise as it is, we must have language. The diviner must spend a lot of time considering language. What we do is really a language art. The cards are a translation tool. The communicators are the client and, for lack of a less cringy term, the “divine.” The translators are the cards and the reader. The reader develops systems for reading the cards. The reader shuffles and the divine intervenes to arrange the cards in more or less the order required. There isn’t a strict necessary order because many cards can speak to many situations. The shuffling allows the divine to get things into roughly the shape necessary, because it can’t pick the deck up and put it in order itself. The reader lays out the cards and begins using their translation skills to make sense of things. This is a dance involving the reader’s lived experience, their foundational meanings, the question, the spread, and the ways in which the cards drawn interact with each other. The trick is to select the right words while reading so that the cards’ messages are available to the client, who speaks a different language (usually). If you’ve ever gotten a reading from me, there’s a chance you’ve heard me say something along the lines of, “What word am I reaching for, here?” I noticed this recently. And it’s funny because I didn’t choose that phrasing, per se, but it’s exactly what it feels like: I’m reaching into my mind, to the library of words stored there, in an attempt to select the most precise, most correct one. This isn’t always easy, especially since COVID seems to have done a number on my memory, and the fact that I’m just getting older. But I’ll eventually find it. This isn’t advice, by the way. I’m sharing an experience with you, but I really don’t want you to mimic my anal relationship to word-smithing. It’s actually tiring. The point is, we have a special relationship to language, tarot readers, and we’re probably thinking about language a lot. In fact, I’d wager many of us are simply thinking a lot. Then Ten of Swords reminds us to take a fucking break. Tens have reached the fullness of their power (or, if you’d rather, they’ve diminished in power so much they have nothing left to give). We have to go back to one. We have to return to the start. Ten, in fact, is a delectable little number, because it is both itself and not: it’s 10, but it’s also 1 (1+0=1). It has to return to the start if it wants to be itself. (More integration, see lesson one.) There are times where many of us may be reading too thoughtfully, by which I mean to cerebrally, too intellectually. And I think this is why I was struggling with my attempt to write this chapter yesterday. I was making myself braindead, in part by trying to work with this deck (the Thoth) in a different way than I read with any other deck. I think I was trying to Thoth-i-fy myself, and in so doing nothing I wrote about the four cards I worked with for that spread had anywhere near as much to say as the Ten of Swords alone has tonight. So you’ll note that I’ve not get commented on the Golden Dawn title for the Ten of Swords: Ruin. What a delight. Frieda Harris gave us a lively, rich card with a shattered sword in its core, and a heart at its hilt. It makes me think of the needle on a sewing machine and how it snaps when things get too bunched up, too tight, or the thread gets pulled too hard. That ping sound of a needle snapping feels a lot like those moments we know our brain is broken. Fried. The heat of Harris’s art, here, ties us back to fire and suggests burnout. The tens are often a sign of burnout. And this is something I’m particularly sensitive to, because I am particularly prone to it. And it’s a reminder that all the interest and all the learning and all the thinking and intellectualizing is fine, until you’re exhausted and have nothing left to give. This can happen when we approach our divination from too intellectual a place, when we focus too much on the system at the expense of the dialogue. I suppose it’s comparable to language. You can communicate adequately enough to order dinner by using a translation app or a dictionary. But you can’t experience the poetry of conversing in a language until you really know it. Only then can you really have dialogue. We have to get out of our reader-minds and get into our reader bodies, our reader senses. And here we begin to sense the presence of other cards . . . The ten is flanked by The Lovers and the Four of Cups (Luxury). The Lovers is not the first card I think of when I think of bodies. But that’s what lovers are: bodies. Two old clunky, weird bodies thrashing around at each other, in search of an orgasm. Just flopping and grunting away, like animals. Ah, but the orgasm! What a flood of sensation! For a fraction of a second, time freezes and manages to expand and contract at the exact same time. We humans sure do love a release. And it is the animal nature that I’m really getting at, here. A quality I might usually associate more with The Moon, but The Lovers in this reading seems to really want to be carnal. (Well, it’s Crowley.) Harris’s image is really serving an alchemical allegory, a wedding of “blood” and “gluten” (which sounds . . . appetizing. Alchemically, blood is semen and gluten is vaginal fluid. Take that). But there’s a lot of bodies on this particular card, and in many versions of the card we find plenty of nudity. Body feels right. So, too, does the solidity of the Four, even if cups aren’t solid at all. Harris’s painting does suggest something of an orgasm, a gush of flow arriving in (I’m sorry for saying this) various orifices. But, like Harris’s analogy, we’re drawing one of our own: It is the sensation of the body we’re dealing with here, and what I really mean is: gut instinct. It is here we arrive at the idea of intuition, I think. Cups, of course, are a suit associated with that quality. The Lovers might not be a card we think of as intuitive, but of course we intuit our way through all attractions. We have to figure out how to navigate this other person, get from them what we want, and of course figure out what they want. This is a series of intuitive hits: watching for patterns and assigning those patterns meaning based on prior observations. For The Lovers to reach the stage of being lovers, there has to have been a lot of intuiting going on. (These days, once hopes that what used to be handled “intuitively” is now handled through open and honest dialogue, along with plenty of consent.) As much as we need the logical mind to read, we must feel the reading, too; we have to feel our way through it. It is the marriage (Lovers) of the heart (cups) and mind (swords) that makes the reader effective. Another thing I think I lacked in my attempt to write this chapter yesterday. I wasn’t really feeling much of anything, and in fact had rather a frustrating weekend and so didn’t have much energy to give. I thought the chapter would write itself and it didn’t. Ironically, that ease only happens when I’m really feeling my way through it. The thing I love about Lovers cards with Cupid depicted is that it’s so contrary to the idea that the card represents “choice.” Where Cupid shows his ass, nobody has a choice. We love what we have to and when we realize it, we know it. We know it in our bones. And that is relevant here because there’s something to be said for feeling our way through readings in such a way that we can feel them click into place. I’ll say this: that’s something I’ve felt, but it’s not something I feel every time, or even that much. So just know that I’m not saying this is something you should be feeling all the time. But there are moments where you know a reading sort of locks like the final puzzle piece. There’s a physical reaction, a completeness. And this makes me wonder if approaching reading with a slightly more indulgent, luxurious (the title of the Four of Cups) quality might be beneficial. I am, I think, somewhat systemic in my reading. There are times, but not often, where I find myself reading by pure instinct. Most of the time, though, I’m doing math. Should I be looking to recreate those instinct-driven readings more? To find out, let’s broaden the reading’s scope to include the final two cards: The Moon and the Three of Swords (Sorrow). Oh, Golden Dawn and your fucking Three of Swords nonsense. The Moon confirms the power of instinct and swords return us to the mind. That said, The Moon isn’t the clearest-seeing card in the deck. It can be, and frequently is, muddied by dimness and haze. The Three of Swords cuts through the haze with all it’s sad, sad, sadness. (Cue Celine Dion . . .) But, fine. Let’s start with the thing that drives me nuts: “sorrow.” What contextual relationship to this reading does “sorrow” have? Sorrow is a feeling, which unites swords and cups. In fact, I was thinking this morning that swords and cups are uniquely connected because our thoughts are what activate our feelings and moods, and our moods activate what we’re thinking about. They are a cycle together of action and reaction, constantly banging around against each other like those clunky old bodies we were talking about earlier. (Isn’t this sexy?) That’s about all I can give you to make “sorrow” make sense, folks. Other than that I’m sorrowful this card says that and also I guess we get sad when we don’t read well? Or something? The card is Saturn in Libra. Saturn is the “restriction” planet, which I take to mean “boundaries.” Libra is obviously the sign of the scales, and because my partner has libra rising and ascending, I know this is the sign of people who can’t make decisions (poor guy struggles with every single one). It’s a bit of a people-pleasing sign, too. But let’s broaden that, a bit: Libra likes fairness and balance, and if I use these correspondences we get a balance between firm boundaries and fluid boundaries. Which is a thing that we would do well to find, mentally, given the overthinking that got us here to begin with. Threes, in fact, are expansive. Saturn + Three, then, can be problematic because three wants to grow and Saturn doesn’t. (So maybe that’s why we’re sad? Or something?) Anyway, I think the influence of Libra reminds us the power of balance (maybe of integration?) because balance is a tension, and cool things happen in tension. If we add The Moon back into the equation, we’re presented with more tension—the moon’s pull on the Earth, and, of course, us. Which again takes us back to the balance of firm and fluid boundaries. The Three of Swords is maybe the most active card in this reading, operating on a lot of levels. It’s both expansive and contractive, like a muscle, and isn’t that a much healthier way for a brain to function than the ten? Swords cut through the bullshit, so any BS The Moon may offer (and with all those animals wandering around, there’s likely to be some shit on the ground) is lessened by the three. The Moon and The Lovers (working now in pairings rather than mirrors) elevates the attraction to intuition. It’s killing me to say this, but this reading is saying that intuition may be more important than logic--which is not how I really feel. But they’re both majors and they’re both powerful cards in their way. They also seem to enhance each other, because The Lovers can be a fairly moony, dreamy card and The Moon is, one could argue, something that makes people fall in love. (Songwriters always bemoan how few rhymes there are for both “moon” and “love.”) They’re dreamy, and of course divination can be a dreamy act. But on the other side of the spread, the stable Four of Cups limits the dreaminess with its squareness. Or, anyway, it limits to the extant it can. This is a very watery card. It’s the moon in Cancer—their home-base (my moon is in Cancer, annoyingly). Very sense-driven. But again we have the squareness of the four to limit it, somewhat. And the Three of Swords brings us back to a mind, one that’s functioning healthy. And so here is how I summarize this: When we’re weary of reading, or burned out, or when we’re finding that things are feeling dull and not exciting in our readings, throw out all the intellectuatual stuff and read from feeling. What are the cards making you feel? What sensations can you luxuriate in? What pulls your mind out of its rut and into a functioning organism again? Where can you feel your way through it, like someone navigating by night—only able to see a few feet ahead of them, but able to make the journey that way. In essence, when the brain is weary, let the instincts guide you. A read of one’s own: This spread is designed to detect when we might benefit from a less intellectual approach (how to tell we need one), and how to make it happen given our own unique way of being.
A quick example: Using the same deck, the cards I found following the Ten of Swords were, The Ace of Swords, Adjustment (Judgment), Prince of Cups. I just laughed, because I think this is suggesting that any time I’m using my brain (Ace of Swords) I should be biased (Adjustment) toward the great emotional hunt (Prince of Cups). So, in essence, anytime I notice I’m being “thinky,” I need to tilt the scales over to the sensational (here meaning of the senses, not, like, really good). The next three, which followed The Moon, The Lovers, and the Four of Cups were: Two of Swords(!), Prince of Disks(!), The Emperor(!). Why did I put exclamation marks after those? Not a single one of them is what I would have expected. An airy, thinky sword; a grounded prince; and the luddite of all luddites, the heavy Emperor. And yet: this has to speak to how I get out of my head and start feeling my way through. Normally, I think of twos as magnetic, pulling things toward them or pushing them away. The Golden Dawn title of peace, though, feels like a more likely access point for this card: peace, as in quiet the mind. How? By sniffing for clues like a bloodhound. Where the hell did I get that from? The bull on the Thoth Prince of Disks looks like he’s sniffing the ground like a bloodhound, and why shouldn’t he? This earthy suit can get down and dirty, which is a necessary thing for what we’re talking about. Start sniffing around the reading (dear lord, I hate that term), start acting like a detective who operates based on gut (earth, again, is gut-like to me—especially if we think of the swords as the mind). And then there’s Maude—I mean, the Emperor. Man, if this is the last card I expected to see here. The Emperor is no one’s favorite card, but recall that I’m very into this moment of opposites in fact being part of the same thing—which means that if The Emperor is everything we hate about christo-colonial patriarchy, then he’s also everything that isn’t christo-colonial patriarchy, which I usually take to mean men who aren’t toxic. Here, though, I taking the strong, sturdy, powerful emperor as a champion of the gut, so to speak. He’s really into the Prince of Disks—in this case, we’re getting an icky daddy vibe, because the Prince of Disk is most definitely, as they say in the south, nekked. The Emperor looks at the Prince like, “yeah, baby, ride that bull.” (Gross.) But, intrusive thoughts aside, the powerful entity endorses the tendency to operate from the gut. It’s also worth noting that the Aries vibes in this Golden Dawn-y deck are strong, and Aries is the first cardinal sign of the zodiac—so there’s something instinctual about that, because Aries moves fast and so must move based on instinct. (I guess sometimes astrological correspondences can be useful. But, again, you don’t need them.) The Emperor gives shape to things, because four contains. Think back to the way that four offered some stability to the watery reading that began this chapter. So, in his way, he provides a container for this gut-hunting. I think this means that, because I have such a strong structure, I need to remember it’s there and I don’t have to push it. Overall, it’s saying that the only way to do the thing is simply to do it. The final card, which followed the Three of Swords in the shuffled deck, was the Five of Disks (worry). Helpful! Another one of those keywords! Ugh! (Yes, yes, I know they’re “titles.” I’ve read the books, too.) Fives mess shit up. Disks are earth, so life; thus, the Five of Disks messes life up. What in hell does that mean? Well, really I think it’s just about changing. Challenging ourselves. Messing shit up. Trying new stuff. Doing it, even though we’re worried (there it is!) we’ll screw it up. As I always say, every reading is an experiment. It is helpful for me to remember my own advice from time to time. |
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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