 Arc of 5.
Cards drawn: Emotions (XIX, 21); 4 of water; 5 of earth; 9 of fire; 9 of air Deck: Dream of Gaia Tarot by Ravynne Phelan I’d intended to use a different deck today, but I saw this one sitting out on my table as it has been for ages now. I rarely use it but I quite like it. It’s barely a tarot, I call it a “taroracle,” but it’s also an exciting thing sometimes to break with the familiar. In fact, it’s an excellent way to keep our brains sharp, active, and experimenting. The main reason I didn’t use this deck for ages after getting it and liking it is that it is so far from tarot. The minors are “situational” but not Waite-Smith or Thoth. They’re their own thing. And the majors are entirely remade. Then at a certain point last year I thought, “Well, you know, you’ve managed to read all kinds non-tarot of systems, now; why not return to this deck and see what you can do with it?” And I did, and I have had some good readings. Weirdly, using non-traditional tarots seems to be particularly effective when reading for myself because it forces me to not be lazy. I can’t rest on my own tired knowledge; I have to dig and actually divine, rather than reciting. I never phone it in for clients but I typically do when reading for myself. But what’s this reading have to say? Starting with the central card, the one that went down first, we find the Five of Earth. This deck uses the elements in place of suit objects, not a big departure. The numerology that Phelan uses is completely different from mine, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use it—that doesn’t mean I can’t unite her images with my system. And in some ways, that’s maybe the first lesson of this particular entry: how to read with non-trad tarots without throwing everything you’ve learned out the window. Fives are unstable numbers. Perhaps the most unstable. They reject the status quo, a particularly Aquarian tendency in my opinion. Earth, of course, represents money, day to day life, and that which grounds us. This is a time where the earth for many of us is particularly unstable, particularly . . . swampy. It’s quicksand. In this case, Phelan’s image offers a host of potentials. The card seems to suggest trickery, con artistry, and the loss that comes from it. See the sobbing, ghostly image in the background and the devlish figure in the fore—a particularly queer being, if you ask me. I can’t guess the author’s intent, but this feels very much to me a non-binary person. The eyebrows, the jawline, the shape of the eyes—these all suggest AMAB facial structure; the hands, the ears, the lips, the hair, the posture suggest AFAB tendencies. Then there’s the rash of red we see at the hairline and on the hands, along with the horns and the sharp finger nails. These suggest to me an animal or otherworldly entity. So not only does this person defy gender, they defy species. In that way, one might hold them as a sibling of Baphomet, who is similarly non-binary. My first thought when seeing this card was our old pal, Donald J. Trump and his con-artistry taking over the planet. I rejected that out of pocket, though, mostly because I don’t feel like giving him any fucking credit and also because that’s not really contextually relevant in a blog about divination. Yes, his hucksterism may well cause us losses—that’s pretty certain, in fact. On the other hand, I refuse to let this queer image represent such a revoltingly straight entity. In fact, I think this foreground figure represents us, dear ones: fortune teller, diviners, readers, witches, and anyone vilified for our lack of “acceptable” tendencies. The figure turning away isn’t the victim, no no; this figure is white bread, cis het trad wife society that makes itself the victim any time anyone takes it upon themselves to say, “Fuck your norms, I am fucking magic.” For folks who step out of the cis het paradigm of acceptability, everything is unstable—everything is very five. In fact, we are the destabilizing force that earth needs at the moment, because the status quo isn’t going to save us. The so-called “US” has made it very clear that we can collectively go fuck ourselves so that ugly, boring, mean, entitled straight white men and their equally ugly, boring, mean, and entitled handmaidens can feel safe in their incredibly ugly, boring, mean, dull, entitled lives. But their victories don’t mean we’re less interesting; it means that we’ve got to hold on to our destabilizing vibes harder. (For what it’s worth, I do not think the other electoral outcome wouldn’t have done much but play out the same way the last four years have—which was also unsustainable. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have preferred something less scary, but I’m also not saying I’m not furious about the DNC’s staggering ineptitude. I have left that particular cult for good. I have zero hope in politics, anymore. Thank god I didn’t major in poly sci, as I intended to. I’ve already got an MFA in an industry I can’t stomach anymore.) It’s fun that I’ve been reading so much about the Devil in modern trad craft because this card shows up as the central image and displays some devilishness. And this is yet another reason why I decided the “victim” isn’t white tears Becky in the background, but the non-binary being in the front. “Ouch,” the lady in the background cries, “Your cards are hurting me. Did you steal those jewels? I’m calling the cops! Waahhhh Rickyyyyyy.” So many moments over the last few weeks have left me saying to myself, “This is what you’ve been training for.” All of us in the divination spaces are this foreground figure, being fucking magic despite constant admonitions not to. (I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned this before, but as a young Catholic boy, I was a red-headed, left-handed fembot; it’s odd to me that it took me so long to see, despite even what people told me growing up, that I am “of the devil.”) Let’s expanded our scope for a moment. The Five of Earth is flanked by the Four of Water and the Nine of Fire. Fours are not unstable; fours are conservative as fuck. That’s one thing that makes the fives so relentless. They are fed up with being held back, with being restrained. The Four of Water suggests “emotional stability.” Nines, like fives, are also unstable (all odd numbers are). Nines of Fire in pretty all version of tarot can suggest burnout. You’ve likely heard me talk about that before. It’s “too much” fire. But in this case, I think it’s creating an antidote to the four. Before I get into why, let’s actually look at the two cards to the left of the center (ironic—or not?—that the conservative card shows up “left of center,” eh?) The Emotions card has no cognate in trad tarot. As I mentioned, all the majors in this deck have been remade. But there were times we didn’t know what the “normal” majors meant as well, so this is no issue for us. I tend to take the majors more-or-less at face value more or less most of the time. Except for when I don’t. Which also happens more or less most of the time. By which I mean, I don’t really know how often I do that—but I do. Anyway. What are emotions? If you look up the word in a dictionary, you can see lexicographers have a hard time defining it. In order to tell us what an emotion is, they name emotions. But they can’t tell us what they are. They’re “sensations” of “feeling.” But they can’t really say what that means. It’s like attempting to define a color. What is “red”? What is “blue”? And how do I know that what you see as red is the same as what I see? We don’t know; we have no way of knowing. Which means that emotion, like color, is something we think we understand—something we get conceptually, philosophically, but not something that we’re able to truly “get.” I might make the argument (though I’m not sure I’d defend it that hard) that emotions are simply the names we give for our current state of being, sort of our base level mood at any given time. I’d also argue (though, again, not that forcefully) that emotions are a way our body warns us about our present state of danger or safety. When we feel “love” or “happiness” or even “boredom,” our body recognizes that it is safe. When we feel “angry” or “sad” or “anxious,” our body recognize that we are not safe. It doesn’t know for sure, it’s doing its best to suss out our environment and use its natural receptors to do this. For those of us who live with anxiety and depression, our body is somehow more prone to telling us that we’re unsafe. Usually we’re not, not these days, but there are definitely times when we’re in danger. But our bodies can’t really tell the difference between a real trigger--an actual danger—and an imagined one. If, like me, you also have some form of neurodivergence, you’re also more prone to over reacting to things. Everything is magnified. So that an objectively small trigger might yield a major meltdown. This happens to me when I feel rejected, for example. Also when I fuck something up, even something unimportant, like dropping a fork while doing dishes. Anyway, a slight digression—perhaps. But the thing that I take away from the Emotions card partnered with the Four of Water is, in some ways, we’ve (not everyone, many of us) been in a bit of a day dream. Now, the images on the Emotions card aren’t really yielding much. But they’re intended, I think, to depict the gamut. The Four of Water could be said to “rhyme” with the Five of Earth, thanks to the ghostly hue of the female-presenting figures thereon. You might even detect that the Four of Water figure holds a necklace not totally unlike the foreground figure in the five. What I see is someone who has been lulled into a false sense of security suddenly waking up and facing a reality. That “someone” can both be the Becky I saw in the five prior, but also the figure in the front. “We” (us, reader) are also being awoken as the four transforms into the five. “You’ve been led into a lull, but that will not help you. Be sad about it if you want, but it’s time to let the Devil out.” Everything solidifies. Like a spiritual erection. A sentence I never imagined writing, but there you have it. We are forced into reality, forced into facing things as they are, and recognizing that we may be about to face some Becky tears, too. Not our own, but we will probably be accused of being indifferent to the “pain” of the privileged. (I don’t doubt that privileged people have pain. I just think they don’t really know what their pain actually is. I keep thinking about that meme of the white lady with a sticker of a bull’s eye taped to her forehead. Her caption reading, “What it feels like to be a conservative woman in America today.” But the best part is the response from someone else, who says, “I actually love this post, because that’s a fake bull’s eye and you put it there yourself.” Like, if privileged people could pause and recognize that the very fact they make themselves into victims is a sign of how massively psychologically fucked up they truly are, they’d spend less time worrying about trans boys playing baseball and more about the fact that they’re teaching their children to be callous fucking assholes. But whatever.) Anyway, let’s return to the Nine of Fire. The reason I wanted to come back to this is because I recognized that the two cards to the right of the five are both nines. So we have the projective suits (fire, air) and the weight of nine. Nine is an interesting number because while it can be “too much” of something it can also be thought of as rapid expansion (3+3+3). Major expansion of energy, of fire; major expansion of intellect, learning, of air. One might, if one were of a mind, say that the combo of fire and air creates magic. The spiritual energy of fire meeting the conductive energy of air. What do I mean by “conductive”? Air “conducts” things in the sense of pushing them in certain directions. It also conducts whatever the temperature is. When it’s hot out, the air is hot. It may vary from spot to spot, but when it’s hot, it’s hot all around us. So it “conducts” heat. Which basically means it puts it into action. Bit of a stretch, but who cares? It makes sense. I think this suggests that it’s time to start making some big, bold, energetic, conductive shifts to the stasis we’ve experienced. And I think we can think about this from a divinatory viewpoint in a few ways: first, likely we’re going to have take this attitude toward our divantory work. People are going to need different things as they experience bigger, more dramatic (more projective) emotions and states of being (the Emotions card mirrors the Nine of Air, and air is closely connected to emotion because our mind often dictates what we’re feeling—or attempts to make sense of it). This means that our usual ways of doing things won’t work, or at least may have to be adjusted, expanded, and/or recalibrated. Another way to look at this is in a more broadly spiritual way: we may need to expand the work we do. I think about the potential threats of the incoming administration (and based on my own readings, I feel pretty strongly we haven’t seen the end of drama around this election—but I don’t know anymore), education and healthcare could become dramatically more difficult to come by. There’s also nothing saying more “spirituality” won’t be forced on us, because of course the “American” right wing loves to pretend it gives a flying fuck about Jesus but shoving laws in our faces Jesus wouldn’t have given a flying fuck about. People may need spiritual alternatives, and diviners may be able to provide that. In many ways, diviners may be called upon to do things that we’re not used to because the world needs that. This sounds awfully self-aggrandizing, but I don’t mean it that way. I simply mean, what clients (and when we read for ourselves, we’ve clients) need will change and we would do well to adapt to those needs. The presence of the two nines, though, does remind us that we can also become easily burned out, spiritually and mentally, if we’re not careful. Of course you know that theme is a trend in this blog, but it is inevitable that when we feel like we’re at war, we’re going to fight all the time. That doesn’t leave us any rest and recuperation, and we can make ourselves sick. Given that healthcare may be impacted, that’s not great—so we need to make sure that we’re measuring our sense of energy, our output, etc., so that we’re getting back what we put out. This may all sound somewhat dystopian. Well, I’m not an optimist by nature. We easily could be in for some massively dystopian stuff quite soon. But I also think that the devil figure, that horned being in the Five of Earth, reminds us: this is what you’ve been training for. (Quick context observation: Note that I didn’t even consider the images on the two nines. That’s not to say they don’t matter, only that they weren’t the first thing I needed in this context. The number and elements really gave me the intel I needed. If I wanted to, I could keep going and use the images to deepen the reading—but I don’t need to, and I’m trying to keep this relatively brief. Also please note that if I had blue eyes and long hair, I’d bear a strange resemblance to the figure on the Nine of Fire.) A Read of One’s Own I regret that the week got away from me and I didn’t have time to create a new spread and write a demo of it. But I think the content of this post warrants a spread, so I’m going to create one now. Though I won’t provide an example, I’m confident you’ll figure it out. Position 1: In what ways may my divinatory practice need to evolve over the next few years? Position 2: What things might my clients/querents/self need out of readings that I’m not currently versed in? Position 3: In what ways have I already been preparing myself for this? Position 4: Where in my practice should I start thinking about exploring aspects of my art that I don’t currently use—or, what blind spots do I need to be aware of as I’m evolving? Position 5: How can I check my progress? = As always, I recommend using at least three cards per position, but this is of course up to you! Have a good week, friends. See next time.
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I hate the term “stalker card,” but I also hate that I’m the kind of person who can’t let idiomatic phrases go without focusing on their problematic implications. It’s a tight rope walk between accepting that not every fucking thing we say needs to be scrutinized for the failure of our allyship and recognizing that we say a lot of fucked up shit that deserves some editing. And, let’s be honest: “stalker card” has a similar vibe to it. There’s violence inherent in it. We don’t call them “stan cards” or “nosy neighbor cards” or “mansplainer cards.” We choose the term “stalker cards.” But the nature of communicating is also to reach for the most precise terms in order to make ourselves understood. In so doing, we often reach for major concepts and use them as metaphors. When we say “stalker card,” no one wonders what we means; they know immediately. When someone refers to wearing a “wife beater,” we not only know how they’re dressed, we also have an implication of the kind of person they might be . . . and it isn’t a compliment. I posted something recently and used the term “totem poll” as a metaphor. I can’t quite recall what context I used it in, but it was in the neighborhood of the innocuous “run it up the totem poll.” When I mentioned to a friend that I regretted using that term and hoped nobody was hurt by it, she said, “The English language is full of landmines and it’s difficult to avoid stepping on one.” She meant that the language, but really our idioms, is so full of problematic terms, phrases, and concepts, that it’s next to impossible to go through a conversation without using one—even when we’re relatively in touch with the fuckery of micro aggressions and racist cliches. She wasn’t dismissing my concern or saying I shouldn’t care about hurting people with my word choice; she meant that the English language is riddled with issues and no matter how carefully we might tread, we’re probably going to stumble on a phrase that has a fucked up origin. It’s everywhere. I cannot tell you how often I hear people in the DEI world of all different backgrounds use the g-word for Romany people—and who have no idea it’s offensive. Our language changes rapidly and it should and we are in a moment of revising and refining English in ways that revises out shitty expressions and replaces them with less shitty ones—but that are sometimes more awkward or difficult to wrap our mouths around. (Kinky.) And this is a very good thing, even when lazy-ass white folx (hi, I am one so if you’re one too then fucking unclench) throw our hands up in despair and say “Well I don’t know what to call people anymore.” (By their names would be a good start, incidentally.) Anyway — the Hanged Man might be the “devoted-but-not-violent, yet-maybe-a-little-too-excited fanboy” of this blog. (Does that work to replace “stalker card”?) Because it’s shown up in the initial draws for at least five of the twenty entries here, and might be the most repeated card so far. So I’m prompted to meditate a bit on why. Why this card that, in reality, I don’t see too often in readings? I typically read this card to mean “consequences.” The result of something, usually something not too bright, that comes to bite us on the ass. Before the esotericists showed up this card was often called The Traitor. There are, in early decks, blobs falling out of his pockets thought to represent the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas for his betrayal of Jesus. And I’ve had an interesting relationship with Judas since childhood. I think my earliest doubts about Christianity came from the treatment of Judas in the gospel. Obviously he’s the villain of Christianity for having betrayed Christ. But, and this might be because I’m a writer by nature, it occurred to me from young age that if Judas didn’t “betray” Jesus, than the whole “miracle” of Christianity doesn’t happen. Jesus in the Bible tells Judas it would have been better for Judas not to have been born. Well, no shit. Except that if Judas hadn’t sold out his pal, Jesus wouldn’t have been caught, killed, resurrected, and deified. So why doesn’t Judas get more fucking credit? He’s the inciting incident, the “reason for the season” (if you will). He is the lynchpin of the Christ myth. He literally makes the whole thing happen. And yet we find him Dante’s inferno after having done himself self-harm. This has led to a bizarre pop culture presence for the “evil” disciple, including the odd plot point Wes Craven chose for Dracula 2000 (a really terrible movie that somehow yielded several sequels—but perhaps the only movie I could stand to watch Gerard Butler in—men with fangs look hotter than without them, so there’s that) in which Dracula becomes a vampire (the vampire, in seems) upon his hanging. (Let’s acknowledge for a moment that some of the the likely parents of vampires are Lilith and Hades—not together, but each is “giving” vampire in their own way. Judas . . . not so much.) Why doesn’t Judas get a divine reprieve? Why is he cursed to hell (and to be played by a vapid actor with very little charm)? Shouldn’t Christ have forgiven him? What kind of pal lets his friend go to hell for doing the exact thing that friend needed him to do in order to reach the apex of his story? “Thanks for helping me move, buddy. Now rot in hell, asshole.” I mean . . . it makes very little sense. Probably as little sense as this lesson is making so far. Well, the first lesson—particularly when reading the cards without a client sitting before you—is that you sometimes need to go on a little discursive joint in order to access a reading. This is particularly true when you’re not entirely sure what you’re reading about and the most prominent card in the spread seems to have said all that it can say of late. Because in the story of Judas, we get another tale of the mortal wronged by divinity simply for doing exactly what he was placed on earth by that divinity to do. His siblings include Pandora and Sisyphus, Job, even Lucifer/Satan (to whom he is often compared). These are (mostly) mortals who followed the path laid out for them only to be condemned for it—as though their lives don’t matter. Of course, we don’t know for sure what divinity has to say about Judas anymore than Pandora, because the stories we know about them are recorded for us by other humans—humans with an agenda. We don’t know what the Christian god thinks about Judas; we just know what we humans think about him, and that’s pretty well depicted in early representations of The Hanged Man—he’s a criminal deserving a violent death. The Hanged Man implies judgment. Something had to happen for him to get up there; in this case, he didn’t do it himself. I think it’s helpful to think for a moment about that. While the esoteric traditions paint the card as an initiatory journey—an ego death—and preparation for the elevation of the spirit, that’s because they couldn’t stomach any of the baser implications of cards that were not created as esoteric tools. (At least as the history indicates to date.) But The Hanged Man can be a stand-in for the times in our lives where we lack autonomy and where we’re forced to suffer the consequences of others’ actions. Sound familiar? The Hanged Man can, in certain contexts, imply our powerlessness over certain situations. And while that can lead to all kinds of things, it usually doesn’t because we don’t like that in modern life. See, the perception shifts associated with the card are only possible once we accept that we’re not in charge. That, in itself, is partly the perception shift the card indicates: no matter how much we want to be, there are times when we’re at the mercy of other entities or energies. We decide to make the best of it because that’s all we really can do. Other than despair. Which, honestly, is a much more accurate read for this card: despair. The Hanged Man is not getting out of this alive. He’s going to die. The next card is death. This is the end. The silly face we see on old cards isn’t clowning; it’s the ugliness of a hanged person dying. His tongue lolls out; his limbs dangle at awkward angles; his blood rushes to his head—and when his body begins losing control, he’s going to end up voiding all over himself. Ideally, he’ll be unconscious when that happens. I said earlier that most men are sexier with fangs. Well, kids, so is tarot. The defanging of divination is an issue that too often takes the possibility of really learning something and castrates it. Sorry for the violent image, but that’s what it does. How many fucking times in life have you had the kind of transcendental experience that the Hanged Man supposedly shows? How many times have you gotten absolutely fucked because of someone else’s actions? Which one happens more often? Unless you’re a shockingly spiritual entity who manages to transcend the banality of everyday life, chances are you’re going to experience the latter exponentially more than the former. And so why do we allow ourselves to read cards almost exclusively in a way that reflects an incredibly rare experience? I wish I had a snarky answer for you, but I don’t: it’s because we’re afraid. Which is a very, very human thing to be. We don’t want to feel what the Hanged Man is feeling and so we try to find substitutions for his lot that make us feel better about ours. But sometimes everything is the worst. Sometimes we are stuck in a limbo not of our making. Sometimes we are playing the part that we’ve been assigned, doing everything by the script we’ve been handed, and we still get fucked. Sometimes we’ve done everything right and we still get shit on. Sometimes, sometimes we are simply stuck in the shit and there’s nothing we can do about it until life changes and we can. And sometimes—well, once—we will face a thing we cannot escape no matter what we do. Death. I’m coming to the conclusion that the other cards in this reading aren’t going to have space to say much, but that’s OK. Hopefully you’re into this deep dive into the card that seems to have wanted our attention most in this bloggy-poo. There are times when we do not have control. There are times when we are not at the wheel. There are times when we are the victims of circumstance. There are times when the good guy goes to jail. There are times when justice is not served. And there are also times when we fuck up and deserve it, but that doesn’t seem to be the vibe today. If your mind hasn’t leapt to where mine has, then what’s on my mind most right now is the recent election in the “US.” We are all, regardless of where we landed in the voting booth (if we even went), at the mercy of politics right now. In very scary ways. And while that may not seem like it has much to do with divination, it does. For two reasons: one, it’s going to impact our general mood a lot; two: it’s going to impact our clients’ lives (including ours, if we read for ourselves). We are a world, in many ways, embodied by The Hanged Man. And it’s difficult sometimes to wonder if we’re not, like the apparent progenitor of the card (Judas), simply playing our role, doing what we think we’re supposed to be doing, while simultaneously setting ourselves up for drama (to put it mildly). Are we simply playthings of divinity? And if we are, is divination then just a clever ploy to distract us from the game and make us think we have power while we obey the rules outlined for us on a game board with movements far more complicated than chess? Or . . . is divination the cheat code? OK, not gonna lie, that thought just blue my fuckin’ mind. I’m not a gamer, so I’m not even sure if that’s, like, the real phrase, but I think it is. Let us open our scope a bit and notice the way this particular Lovers card—with this deliciously seventies pornstar vibe (I would lick the chest hair off that dude given the chance) and the massively prominent presence of Cupid/Eros (or his gloved hands, anyway) pointing the arrow downward—both through the brain of the poor dame in the middle, but also into the Hanged Man’s crotch (based on the cards’ positions). This kind of implies the powerlessness of everything below it in the spread (the entire reading, in this case). This is a good chance for me to remind people that The Lovers isn’t about choice because once that arrow hits, whoever it hits is going to obey its power. Like the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, they are at the mercy of the magic thrown at them. But, though we’re “at the mercy” of some things, we’re not entirely on our own. We’re not entirely without agency or without guidance. We’ve got divination. Even if we lack autonomy, we can find out what is actually going on. We don’t have to navigate in the dark, we don’t have to shove our heads in the sand (and you could argue the Hanged man has ostrichy aspects, thanks mostly to his posture). We can ask questions and use divination and get answers. And we can find out how much agency we have—because rarely is everything out of our hands. Life, annoyingly, tends to be a combo of fate and free will. We have free will within the constraints of “fate.” In this case, take fate to mean simply conditions out of our control. Let’s consider the central column of this spread: The Lovers, the Hanged Man, the Six of Wands. Dropping through the sequence, the six is arguably a card of movement—if not necessarily autonomous movement. Six are “good” because they suggest beauty (sometimes vanity, which can also be relevant in this context—we tend to think we’re more powerful than we are . . . or we tend to think we’re absolved of responsibility because we can’t control fate . . . the reality being much more nuanced and requiring more energy than either of those assumptions suggests). Fire is good, too, because in this case it suggests the first bursts of energy we get in the Hanged Man’s existence. The Six of Wands is giving knight-in-shining-armor, coming in and burning the Hanged Man’s ropes and carrying him off into the sunset. But wait—so, too, does the Page of Swords, casually striking at the Hanged Man’s tethers. And then what the fuck with the Ten of Cups—these little twinks celebrating(?) together. I had to call that out so I don’t forget, but let’s return to that shortly. In the meantime, the central column continues: “Yes,” it seems to say, “you’re powerless right now. But there’s a beautiful fire burning that will change things.” Or, it might say, “Yes, I’m fucking with you—but if you expend some energy (think of the movement of the six as expending energy—fire being the energy), you’ll be able to make some progress.” In this case, the energy I’m thinking about is divinatory energy. Why? Well, mostly because that’s supposed to be the point of this blog. But I also can’t get the phrase “divine fire” out of my head. It keeps repeating. The divine fire, in this case, suggesting the reality and effectiveness of divination. In religious terms, ecstasy is potent union with divinity. In sexual terms, obviously, it’s a mind-bending orgasm. Both of those can be poetic metaphors for divination. Union with divinity escalating into the climax of an answer. We literally fuck the cards into meaning while we’re working with them—not a sentence I ever thought I would type, but there it is. And we’re not literally doing that; that’s literary hyperbole. We are metaphorically fucking the cards into meaning, but in a literal way. Wink. I’m also noting, now, my comments about the porn star Joy of Sex vibe in The Lovers and giggling at how apt that metaphor really is. The Lovers represents both our powerlessness in the face of divinity, but also our ability to commune with divinity in the act of divination. It is metaphysical congress with the release of intel. And you don’t have to think of that in the annoyingly patriarchal terms of male orgasm. A real divination session frequently reveals lots of little truths (orgasms) throughout, which is far more exciting and far more like non-penile orgasm (from what I’m told, alas). And if you don’t believe me, this whole reading is an example of that. Lots of little revelations and truths. Returning to the crossbar and to the page and the ten: I’m drawn to the Page of Swords’ preternatural curiosity. Of the pages, the one governing the suit of swords is going to be the most inquisitive, the most interested, the most curious; she’s the most likely to ask “why?” to the point of annoying her parents, or of hyperfocusing on a certain topic until she knows about all there is about it (an experience I know all too well). Her sword points up to The Lovers, to the divine, not unlike a lightning rod. “Hit me,” she says. She’s brave enough to ask when others aren’t. She says, “Well, OK, maybe I am fucking stuck, but I’m sure as fuck not going to know until I do some damn research. What if I only think the gods are fucking me with?” The Ancient Greeks were awfully obsessed with hubris (for example see, like, all their myths)—but isn’t it equally hubristic to think the gods give a flying fuck about us? Like the idea that the gods are even aware of us or care what we’re doing or have any interest in the day-to-day doings of what are surely (to them) a little ant colony of probably very little consequence is kind of smug. I’m not saying it’s wrong, just that the idea that we matter is hubris—and so in the telling of the myths, the writers were displaying hubris by suggesting human hubris annoys the gods because that means the gods care about what we do. Again, I’m not saying the gods do or don’t—or even that there “are” gods in the sense that Ancient Greeks understood them. I’m just saying that there’s a fascinating paradox that I had to call out because why the fuck not. Anyway, the Page of Swords is unconcerned with implications of hubris. She can’t know the answers until she asks, and because she’s not worried about what the gods will think of her, she asks. And in so doing, she cuts the ropes of stasis and reaches the apex of the suit of cups—the apex of love and spirituality, one could say. “Ask,” the page says, “because the worst and best that you could wind up with is enlightenment.” Maybe “enlightenment” isn’t a traditional keyword for the Ten of Cups, but could any card conceptually indicate it better? OK, yes, I know for some of you many cards could indicate it better—but that’s not the point. The point is that it makes sense for that card in this reading if we consider cups as spirituality (and because it is the suit associated with the clergy historically, we can make that connection easily—no matter our feelings on the clergy), and ten as “fullness,” than we have spiritual fullness. Thus the entire reading says this: even when—and maybe especially when—we feel the most powerless, divination is the key to progress and enlightenment. Which is a far, far loftier fucking thing than I’d normally allow myself to say, but I’m feeling annoyingly expansive right now. I have spent so much of my life diminishing my own magic, and as someone who will likely be negatively impacted by the impending political landscape, I am in a mood right now where I’m undergoing the kind of Hanged Man experience that I dismissed early in his reading. I am undergoing a transformation. And as part of that I’m coming to the conclusion that divination is a powerful fucking act. I mean I’ve always felt it was a political act—it’s transgressive and marginal and frequently criminal—but to think of it was something that matters is new for me. After spending much of my adulthood bringing tarot “down to earth,” I’m in the process of (maybe?) allowing tarot to hoist me off the ground. I don’t even know what I mean by that, other than maybe to celebrate the gift of having this art form in my life. And of accepting that maybe it’s more than just the simple logic tool that I painted it as in my first book. I do think it’s a logic tool; I think intuition is shockingly logical. But I’m also willing to concede, perhaps, there is some magic—some divinity--at work, too. Do I think divination is the answer to all our problems or the only tool we need to fight the power? No. But do I think it’s an ingredient? Yes. More and more I’m coming to understand that there is . . . import to divination, there’s magic and power and even liberation in it. The very act of doing it is a middle finger to stuffy, christo-colonial convention. And while it isn’t a panacea, maybe it’s still a powerful and healing elixir. And that maybe--just maybe--my ability to do it well is potentially something more than just the ability to (as I frequently say) recognize patterns. Or maybe I just need to feel that potential because I do feel so fucking powerless right now. I’ve been listening to The Haunted Objects Podcast Greg and Dana Newkirk’s delicious, hilarious, and refreshingly respectful and humble exploration of metaphysical topics centered on objects from their paranormal museum. Spiritualism comes up a lot because of course it’s a formative moment in modern spirituality and because it is the lodestar of the skeptics who love to point to the major debunking of just about all the famous spiritualist mediums who, they say, duped the people they were trying to help. I don’t doubt that the con artists were con artists. I don’t doubt that there are a lot of assholes out there duping people. I do, though, have the sneaking suspicion that the issue wasn’t spiritualism as much as capitalism. It isn’t the spiritualism that made people into con artists; it was that it was an incredibly easy way to make a dime. Con artists look for ways to take advantage of belief. It might be belief in a product, a person, or a divinity; it might be belief in a nation or a lie or a job. Whatever it is, they find places where people’s credulity make them vulnerable--and they pounce. But they’re not spiritualists, anymore than most of the people murdered as witches were practicing witchcraft; they were con artists playing spiritualists. This doesn’t mean spiritualism is real—or that it’s not. But the issue wasn’t the idea of spiritualism or mediumship; it was using those concepts as a cover for grift. And I don’t doubt that some of the con artists started as earnest practitioners who, either to serve their ego, stay in the game, or due to the influence of an unscrupulous manager, allowed themselves to be turned into circus acts. I don’t doubt this in the same way I don’t doubt that most priests go into the seminary because of their deep love for god before they’re turned into soldiers in the predatory colonial army of the Vatican. We start out wanting to do good. (To quote Dear Evan Hansen, a musical I can’t stand with a song I love, “We start with stars in our eyes. We start believing that we belong.”) But capitalism forces us to make choices: survive or die. And sometimes survival looks like the theft of a loaf of bread and sometimes it looks like an earnest spiritual medium turning into a sleight of hand magician. The point that I wanted to get to, though, (or really, the paradox of that) is that people were helped—even by the crooks, at least in some cases. They got messages they needed and closure they wanted. Which is the strangest part of it. The spiritualist con artists wouldn’t have had a anyone to con if they weren’t drawing people in with the hope of union with dead loved ones, and giving them some semblance of that connection. And, I have to ask . . . if it helped . . . was it ALL bad? And what if the messages that the consumers received weren’t simply the result of conmen? What if divinity used those frauds to communicate with the grieving? And what if the grieving healed because of it? This is the kind of ethical loop that I typically avoid--and let me be clear: I am 100% opposed to con artists. But it does beg the question we started with: how much are we really in the hands of divinity and how much are we in control . . . ? I don’t know. My own spiritual development is recent. But I’ve been a good reader much longer than that. I didn’t have a relationship with any form of divinity when I started my YouTube channel or wrote my first two books. But the divinations I did worked. I still don’t do any spiritual preparation before readings. I don’t have special sprays or tools or crystals. I don’t consecrate my decks. But my divination still works. In fact, one reason I even allowed myself to deep dive into tarot in the way that landed me where I am is because I didn’t need any of that stuff. Today, though, I wonder (just a little) if that was all “part of the plan.” The gateway drug (another problematic idiom) to embracing my path and practice. I don’t know. That makes me uncomfortable to admit, but it does connect with the overall theme of today’s entry. Perhaps, like Judas, I was on this path all along and didn’t know it; perhaps the divine has been pushing me in a direction and allowing me to think I was in control. Or perhaps that hubris and, like Judas and all other pawns, I will have to suffer the consequences of believing I’m special. Sometimes I wonder, too, if I’m just a con artist. Is divination even real? In fact, one reason my “down to earth” approach was so important to me is because it divorced tarot from spirituality—and, that was important because there’s a part of me that thinks spirituality is grift. I mean that sounds terrible, and I’m loathe to admit it, but it’s true. I grew up Catholic, how could I not? If divination is more than something logical, how do I know I’m serving the right entities? How do I know I’m translating correctly? How do I know that I’m not misleading people? I mean, I’d like to think the feedback I get from clients belies that anxiety, but I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t hit me sometimes. Am I merely a spiritualist pawn? These days, literally anything is possible. So thank gods we’ve got the cards! A read of one’s own Despite the discursiveness of this blog, it is in many ways my favorite so far. And the idea that divination is something to hold tight to as a superpower over the next few years isn’t an unattractive one, even if—well, I doubt that’s actually true. But let’s assume divination is the cheat code, particularly in times of distress and powerlessness. And let’s call this spread, The Cheat Code! Shuffle and draw cards as follows:
I typically say it’s wise to decide what each position in a spread means before shuffling and drawing, but in this case I give you permission not to decide on five’s true meaning until you see the card that falls there. I encourage you to read it both ways. (Also, I encourage you to use three cards per position—but for the sake of quickness I use only one here.) A quick example: Center card, where in my life I’m particularly powerless: King of Swords. I really didn’t expect to see a court card here! Don’t know why. This king’s head is in some very dark clouds. I take this to mean my own self-image, which is a thing I’ve been struggling with a lot lately and which, despite my best efforts, seems to hit me unexpectedly and deeply. The King of Swords knows better, but can’t seem to believe himself. Top card, the major external influence: Queen of Wands. “Oh, well that’s my ego,” I said when I saw this card. Why this particular card associated with ego? Because in one deck of my earliest decks (I can’t recall which), the courts were given astrological signs not names. And this queen was simply titled “Leo.” I just always remember that. And I know the card isn’t associated with that sign in any other places, at least as far as I know, but I always remember it. We might also say that this card represents aspects of people who want to be inspirational (fire) but can’t seem to shake their ego (fire again). Why is the queen given this nasty reading? Only because she’s sitting in a “problem” position: this is the influence taking away my power. So I have to read her as a problem. And let’s not pretend that my love affair with writing and teaching and reading for tarot is entirely about teaching; I get off on the praise, too. So that tracks. There’s a reason that ego death is so central to so many faith ways. Bottom card, representing how divination can be the cheat code to this situation. Two of Cups. (Incidentally, this is one of my favorite cards in this deck. So I’ll put a pic below.) This is one of those times where the obvious answer (“Use it help you fall in love with yourself”) makes me eyes roll with arrogant indifference. Yet, even if I try to interpret the card in other ways—twos are magnets and cups are feelings and sensations. We see this card when we’re drawn toward something without being able to resist. It might mean using divination in ways that helps me attract myself; it might also mean falling into my relationship with divination and my divinatory work to become attracted to myself. A convoluted phrase that really means, “look at what you can do with this art form and let that be impressive to you.” Ironic given the ego above, but it comes down to a quote from the acting teacher Stanislavsky (famous for the much misunderstood “method”—it is not what young white male cis het actors think it is): “Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art.” Left card, representing one way to defy the “gods” (major powerful influence). Four of Wands. Fours sustain, wands burn—passionate, potent, energetic. “Keep doing your shit despite how much you don’t like yourself, sometimes.” Right card, representing either the eventual outcome and/or the way to work with the “gods.” Knight of Wands. I love this card, too; he looks to me like noted crush Pedro Pascal. I didn’t even notice how most these cards are courts. Woof. See, that’s a sign of progress for those of you reading this (is anyone reading this?) and just starting out. There will come a time for you when a spread made up almost entirely of courts won’t stump or shock you! Anyway, Pedro reminds me, too, that three of the cards are wands. The ego suit, the leonine suit. I think the Knight of Wands is chatty: “Run into the fire,” (he runs into the middle of the reading, not away from it) is one suggestion, and that’s not unlike working with the “gods.” It’s like saying, OK, let’s see how much you think you can take, ego. You’re not as strong as you think you are. Which might read creepy, but I think what I’m getting at is, like, dare the ego to try to fuck you up. I know that might sound bizarre and maybe even scary, but it’s not. It’s like facing the bully and forcing them to back down. Another thing he says is, “You’re a cowboy. Stop pretending to be a pilot.” And that, again, may sound insane—but it means, “be what you are.” He looks like a cowboy. He’s not a pilot. “Be entirely yourself. Like I am.” And you know, when I think of our collective boyfriend Pedro Pascal, he is quite a good example of it. I mean I have no idea whether his persona is an act, but he’s very, very comfortable in his own skin—which I think is one reason why we all think he’s a daddy. He belongs to himself in a way most people don’t. And that’s sexy. Why does the knight get all this juicy goodness and the queen got the crud? Because I’m a misogynist. No. Because this is a “solution” position. We’re looking to this spot for advice (partly), so I have to read the card differently. Actually, you could easily switch the queen and the knight in this spread and get more or less the same reading. There would be subtle differences, mostly in terms of metaphor (the queen does not look like a cowboy). They’re very similar, of course because they’re the same person in different moments of their life. But this blog is already too lengthy to explain more. The knights aren’t static, so the final thing the card says is: “you’re going to move on eventually. Probably quicker than you think.” The speed, of course, coming from the fiery nature of this knight. (Actually, the semi-final thing he reminds me of is that the ego [fire] is part of my nature, too, so I actually have to work with it whether I want to or not. Fuckery, I tell you. Fuckery.) And there you have it! Let me know if you do this spread and what you think. See you next week.   Cards drawn
Arc of five: Hanged Man (4), Page of Swords (2), Ten of Wands (1), Ten of Cups (3), Knight of Wands (5) Deck: The Scarab and Dahlia Tarot by Johanna Callahan Waldo Initial observations: only suit represented more than once—wands; we have two tens (wands, cups) and two courts (Page of Swords, Knight of Wands); we have one major; we have no pentacles. We’ve got a lot of fire and a fair amount of water (two tens). The floor, so to speak, is lava—or at any rate, gives that impression at first glance. When I don’t know how to start interpreting a spread of cards, I typically begin in this way. By noticing. Not interpreting, not assigning meaning. Noticing. Experiencing. What I notice depends on a lot of things, including the deck I’m using and my general mood at the time. Mercurial (read: moody) as I am, I may hit on the more negative aspects of cards early; sometimes the more positive. I strive for neutral noticing, but when I achieve it I often experience a beep of panic: “Will I be able to do it this time, or have I finally lost it? Will I finally have come to the end of the road?” The end of the road is apt, here, thanks to the arrival of two tens. They are the ends of their particular roads—something we’ve talked about before. Tens represent the finale of their suit and can suggest either abundance or depletion. Sometimes both—as in an abundance of depletion. If you’re anything like me, you’re feeling rather depleted lately. It’s not lost on me that this will be posted on Tuesday, 11/5 — election day in the so-called “United” States. If you’re anything like me, you’d rather have an intense, botched lobotomy than endure whatever follows. If you’re anything like me, even though you’re notoriously moody, your mood swings of late trend toward the glum, dismal, and despairing. And that’s without having to go about the business of living, as though this is all supposed to be normal and it’s what we’re here to experience during our time on this planet. It’s . . . a mind fuck. To say the least. Fire and water are traditionally considered adversarial. This is because modern divination is riddled with the same binaries that Contantinianity (what I call “Christianity” these days) foisted on us all. (I know there were binaries prior to the dawn of the christo-colonial, but in my estimation this particularly aggressive and war-mongering faithway weaponized it in a way no one ever had before and we retain the consequences today). I’m sure it’ll shock you to know that I don’t view the fire/water relationship as binary or adversarial. They both depend on oxygen for existence and they both have the same powerful vibes. Typical binary thinking asserts that wands and swords (fire, air) are the “active” or “aggressive” or “projective” suits. Projective maybe, wands and swords both thrust; not, though, active or aggressive. Water is far more active than air and its typical passive associations come from this male/female, masc/femme binary. Fire and water are only adverse when context forces them to function in that way. The context of a house fire, for example, when the fire hoses arrive. But fire and water paired needn’t be this way. Ask any steam engine. A steam engine is a violent little piece of machinery, but it is also an incredibly powerful one. Like most things, its inherent “goodness” is immaterial; its use is what determines its consequences. A steam engine can be quite good—unless its handled badly or made badly or poorly kept up. That’s when they explode. How are they working together in this spread and what does that say about this week’s lesson? Excellent question. I don’t know. All I know is that they’re evenly matched—though water does face a potential threat from the Knight of Wands. Let’s look to the non-tens and non-fire/water cards for more intel. We’ve got the Page of Swords and the Hanged Man. The uniqueness of these two cards make them more important to me than the others in some ways, despite the fact that they lack the dominance of high numbers or appearing more than once. The Hanged Man often suggests a state of arrested development (the experience, not the TV show). The Page of Swords is the antidote to the Hanged Man’s stasis. Let’s imagine the wedding of these two cards. We stay in a state of familiarity, of uncomfortable comfort. With this card, I tend to see situations where we’ve gotten used to a certain unfortunate reality to the point where any alternatives scare us—even if the reality we’re sustaining, to put it bluntly, sucks. This typically shows its ugly face in relationships and careers, but can exist in any part of our life. It’s a rut that doesn’t feel like a rut because its known nature protects us. The comes the Page of Swords. The ultimate curiosity card, this page takes all the pages’ curiosity to the next level. The card asks “what if?” and “why?” just like a toddler driving their parents insane with seemingly inane questions. They seem that way to the parent because the toddler wants to understand things long understood (or so they think) by the parents. The parents take everything for granted, but the pages—particularly the Page of Swords—do not. Annoying, but necessary. And if we take the page’s lead, we discover that there’s more to see in the world. If parents really paused and thought about the annoying questions their toddler asks, they might realize that, in fact, they have no idea “why” or “what if.” If we diviners paused and did that, we’d experience something similar. “Why do we do that?” “What do we hold this to be true?” “What if we tried something else?” “What happens if I don’t follow the rules?” “What if I put this here and that there, rather than the other way around?” One of my great fears is divinatory stasis. In fact, my writings and workshops are all geared toward avoiding that both in my own practice and in those who manage to put up with me long enough to get to whatever nuggets of truth may fall out. The Page of Swords is similar. His mortal enemy, you could say, is the Hanged Man. The Hanged Man is “fine.” The page isn’t. The Hanged Man thinks he’ll get there eventually, as though standing still is motion (in some ways it is); the page, youthful and ignorant though they may be, knows that nothing can be gained without action and investigation. Contextualized this way, we understand something new about the spread. The only way out of such ruts is curiosity. Asking the annoying questions repeatedly until we get a satisfactory answer. This isn’t a common trend in modern life, in fact as we’ve said several times in this blog, kids are discouraged from curiosity. We kill it in youth and lack it in adulthood and this is one of the ways in which we begin to accept the status quo. Shocking, eh? Why would the American Experience be so devoted to squelching the curiosity of children? Because people who ask questions discover that “because I said so” is not only a bad answer, it’s an incredibly fucked up one. Returning to the tens, then, what can we glean? The Page of Swords isn’t looking at those cards; he’s looking out at us. “Oh,” he seems to be saying, “you thought I had the answer? No, no; I have only questions. You’re the grownup. You’re supposed to know the answers.” He’s lying, of course; he does know the answers. He also knows if he gives it to us, we won’t remember it. Luckily, I know the secret the page won’t tell us: the Ten of Wands represents TNT. Divinatory TNT, anyway. It is a pack of Acme Dynamite(TM). It’s getting ready to blow up the Hanged Man. Will it do it? Will the ten succeed? The Ten of Cups isn’t so sure. You can’t light dynamite if the wicks are wet. So we’ve got a load of soggy dynamite. We can’t blow anything up no matter how much we want to. The two cards, in essence, cancel each other out—except that they both appear in the reading, so what they really do is highlight the ways in which these two parts of our lives cancel each other out. The desire to light the spiritual dynamite of divination is hemmed in by the emotional wetness of everything going on right now. There’s simply too much feeling for a solution that winds up in total destruction. Let’s return for a moment to the page. When we are young, when we encounter something new, the impulse to compare ourselves inevitably creeps in (for most of us, or so I think). We want to get from zero to sixty. In the case of the Page of Swords, we want to go from neophyte to expert right away. The problem is: what’s an expert? We’re too green to know. Or, maybe a better way to say it in this context is that we’re too intellectually limited to know. That sounds cruel, but it’s simply a state of ignorance born from lack of exposure. Anyone who presents in certain ways that we associate with expertise becomes an expert (to us) by the pure imbalance born of our lack of knowledge. And they may know more than we do, but knowing more is not the hallmark of an expert. Knowing what to do with what we know is what truly makes someone an expert. (Maybe? I just wrote that so I don’t know if it’s true; I’ve never had that thought before, but it sounds right.) Working for more than twenty years in corporate training, I’ve said to bosses, clients, and trainers more times than I can count: “People aren’t hired for what they know; they’re hired for what they do.” Of course, my job is to prepare people to sell their labor, so what the fuck do I know? But judging by that standard, it’s true. You can know all the shit in the world, but if it just stays up in your noggin, it’s not expertise. If that knowledge changes how you act in the world, what you do with your time and energy, and if you manage to combine your knowledge with actions that yield positive results (by what standard is up to you), then you’re probably an expert. The page doesn’t understand that; they think that looking like an expert means being an expert. Pages also tend to be resentful. They’re servants, after all; they’re not autonomous. So they both need and admire the “expert”—it is from experts that we learn—but they also resent the expert, because the ego doesn’t like the fact that someone is “better” than we are. The idea that anyone is “better” than we are is not unlike the interplay of fire and water. It is helpful for our humility to recall that we’re not the apex of anything we do. We should remain curious, open, humble, interested, willing to learn and grow. We need some semblance of “innocence” or “paginess” in order to stop ourselves from turning into giant egotistical gasbags—especially because, like methane, ego gas is bad for the planet. On the other side of the coin, we need to recall that anyone we view as an “expert” is just another human being who is equal to you in fuckeduppery. They may have a talent or technique you don’t, a background you lack, a way of saying or doing things you admire and/or envy. But they are, at the end of the day, nothing more than another meatsack sparked to life every day by the same electrical currents as you. So often we tend to view expertise as an abundance of confidence (fire) or even zealotry (fire+water). In divinatory spaces, likely it’s both. If you can play the role of a confident and zealot practitioner of whatever it is you do, people will think you’re an expert in it. Doesn’t matter whether you actually are. If we as the page detects that this is the key to expertise, it bad news: it [might] inspire us (or the page) to imitate the act of expertise, like a stage play, without having any actual expertise of our own. We become obsessed with how we look rather than what we do--or, to put it clearly given the topic of this blog, what we’re able to offer our clients and/or students. The Page of Swords is both most immune to and most susceptible to this tendency. Perception can very much be a reality to the pages, particularly the one associated with the suit of perceptions: swords. (I’ve done a number on this before, but for those who aren’t familiar: our perceptions of the world are formed in our mind, what we see and how our brains make sense of that sight. All of this happens in the mind, which is the realm of air/swords—so the suit of perceptions is swords.) What the Page of Swords sees, they can sometimes take at face value and assume it is correct. Their “youth” makes them think they’re chronically unworthy. But the Page of Swords is likely also the most critical of norms, and so the other side of that coin is that this page sees through bullshit more than the others do (particular the pages of wands and cups, who are so much at the mercy of impulse). This means that we can simultaneously be star struck and deeply critical. And that’s actually a good thing. I say this as someone who used to be constantly starstruck and has turned into someone who is constantly critical. I never seem to have found the balance between the two. I’m a great example of what the Page of Swords shouldn’t be. I skipped the good part where I get to both believe and be skeptical simultaneously. Now, I just jump to the worst conclusion or assumption. And that’s particularly true of people presented to me as experts! I’ll spare you the details of how I got there, but needless to say it came as a result of meeting people I presumed to be experts and discovering they’re not—and meeting people who perceived me as one, who discover that I’m just a piece of shit, too. Skeptical belief is quite a brilliant thing. If you can find it, I think you’ve got the golden ticket in many ways. To contextualize this lengthy exploration for you, reading is reminding us that comparing ourselves to those we admire may seem like the solution, but it’s not. Not only will it not get us out of the Hanged Man’s comfortable stasis, it will also teach us the wrong lessons about what “expertise” really is. Further, we’d do well to view those we admire with a dose of skepticism. Not to the point of bitchy suspicion (as I do), but to the point of recognizing the fallibility of everyone—regardless of whether or not they’ve done, said, or written things we wish we’d done, said, or thought of. When we don’t maintain skeptical belief, we run the risk of joining a cult. Many of us are members of cults we don’t know we’re part of and didn’t sign up to be in, purely thanks to the parasocial reality of the world today. There’s an evangelical quality to the combo of fire and spirit, too. These are the elements that have often been associated with divinity—and also pop cultural understandings of experiencing divinity. The cliche “baptism by fire” makes sense to a lot of people, even those who didn’t grow up in a faithway that uses baptism. Water cleanses, cleans, sanctifies. So does fire. The flood of spirit, the fire of evangelism, the potency of these two elements in the religio-spiritual (they’re not the same) realm is huge. And so the Page of Swords stands on the edge of a precipice, not unlike The Fool: do they join the cult or not? (Unlike The Fool, the Page of Swords has experience to guide them.) We’ve talked about four of the give cards, but not the final one: the Knight of Wands. Fire again. This knight carries a torch through a bi-atmospheric landscape of hot (fire) and cool (water). (The knight actually isn’t carrying a torch; he carries a staff or spear, but the flames from the volcano give the impression of a torch—that’s what I saw at first, so I’m going with it. The impression sometimes matters more than what is really depicted.) The Knight uses his own light to forge a path forward. He leaves behind the comparisons, the evangelism, the assumption of expertise. He’s not immune to his own ego (fire), but also not interested in passive stasis. Being the farthest from the Hanged Man, while also mirroring the card, there’s a fascinating interrelationship. During the HM’s stasis, they gained a deep fire that will allow them to leave behind the crap that could block the page. In essence, the Page of Swords “goes through” the experience of the two tens and then comes out ready to forge their own path. (Forging is a swordsy concept, but done with fire—so it is there that we find a connection between the two court cards, here. We cannot forge the page’s sword without the knight’s fire.) There’s two ways to read this, then, depending on where you are in your journey. If you’re starting out, like the page, then you’d probably do well to enjoy the fullness of evangelical wisdom (here I’m talking about divination advice from people we admire, not the right-wing Constantinianity inherent in the word “evangelical”), without accepting it as dogma or racing to join the cult. Skeptical belief in everything you encounter in your learning journey will give you the light you need to forge your own path without being restrained by dogmatic thinking—either required by culty “experts” or assumed by our innate feeling of unworthiness. The second way is if you’ve been subject to self comparison and/or find yourself with a tendency to join the cult a little too quickly or too often. In this case, the reading says that this dedication to something other than your own path is sustaining the Hanged Man’s static vibe, despite the page’s knowing look reminding us that we know better. Just because we’ve decided someone or some group or anything is the “real” expert to whom we must pledge our commitment or base our path on doesn’t mean we can’t light the torch we already carry and start finding our own footing. Both of these are easier said than done and even doing a reading about it is somewhat idealistic because the answers will likely be either totally clear and totally difficult to enact, or the answers will be blisteringly opaque and likely to infuriate our egos. Maybe the readings will be all of the above. That said, these difficult topics are the ones we tend to learn the most from--if we can make ourselves sit with the cards long enough to find the intel we need. These are the kinds of readings it’s helpful to trade with others. Their objectivity may unlock something we would otherwise have protected ourselves from. (Which reminds me, sometimes the readings that make the least sense to us as clients could be the ones with the most to say—we’re just not ready yet. Of course, there are also just crappy readings. So it’s hard to know for sure.) A read of one’s own Let’s base this reading on the two extreme cards in the arc, above: the Hanged Man and Knight of Wands. Shuffle the deck and find these two cards. Take the two cards that show up before and after them in the deck when you stop shuffling. You do not need the Hanged Man or knight, but I tend to forget which cards were associated with each card when I do readings like this—so you can take the cards our and keep them with the ones that flanked them just to remind you. The HM and knight don’t “add” to the interpretation, though, because in this case they’re significators. Let’s allow the two cards connected with the HM to represent where in our divinatory practice we may have gotten stuck in a rut or begin to grow too comfortable and not curious enough. Next, let’s allow the cards flanking the knight to represent a way of forging our own path forward away from this. If you want more information, look for the Page of Swords in your deck and let it speak to you intuitively—maybe it adds to the HM’s cards, maybe the knight’s; maybe it has some third, related thing to say. That part is optional. If you’ve gotten an answer you like, you don’t need to do it. I mean, you don’t need to do any of this obviously, but . . . I’m too curious, so I will probably look. Two things to note: First, this is another spread that implies you’re having this issue. If you’re not, it may be harder to make sense of. Not everyone is stuck in a rut. So feel free to release yourself from too much in the way of restriction. Follow your gut. This “position” of the spread is an “opportunity” for you divinatorily, related to being stuck; the other cards are a potential solution. One more thing to note, actually: there’s something cool about doing this without shuffling the deck. Pick up a pack you haven’t used in a while and do this without shuffling. See what happens! For my two HM cards, I got the Ten of Wands and Art (Temperance) card; for my Knight of Wands cards, I got The Fool and the Six of Disks. (I’ve switched the the Thoth because I tend to use it most for myself these days.) The Tens of Wands is a repeat card from the original arc, above. The initial impulse that I get from this pairing is that my “rut” stems from mixing my own evangelism into my divination. In this case, the “mixing” comes from the Art card, which is exactly what the card is doing. I might take this to mean that forcing my own mission on the reading may be distracting me from really blending all the cards. By which I mean my agenda to explore “hot topics” (all that fire) is getting in my way. The knight’s cards, The Fool and the Six of Coins, are my “solution.” The Fool calls back to the Page of Swords from earlier, doesn’t it, because I compared the two. I said then that the page is similar to The Fool, but has experience and so has expectations. The Fool suggests having zero expectations—other than “success” (which is the title or keyword for the six). Know you’ll succeed, don’t worry about how you get there. Easier said than done, like I said. The Page of Swords’ (in this case, princess) cards were the Ten of Coins (another ten!) and the Princess (page) of Wands (more wands!). The spread is connected to the “solution” cards by the appearance in each of coins/disks/penties. We have an abundance of earth at the command of a fiery page/princess of wands. There’s a lot of life to get excited about (in this case, let’s take “excited” to mean “interested in”), so be open to all the options, not just the expected ones. This is an interesting series of “solutions” and even the “problem” is interesting, too. Mostly because everything here is a core part of how I read. I do tend to evangelize to a degree with my readings—that’s in some ways the whole point of this blog. But I have also been known to impose societal realities on readings that don’t necessarily contain those impacts. Sometimes we’re simply at the mercy of life events that aren’t massive societal moments. Even if they’re caused by societal issues, they may not be relevant in a particular moment for a particular client. Likewise, open curiosity is my main goal. That’s good, because it says that I’m doing the right thing. I just benefit from being generally more curious and less interested in demonstrating my social justice cred (for example). There you have it, friends. “See” you next week. (Assuming there is a next week, of course.) |
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
December 2024
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