lesson 12: languishing in the divinatory mean reds

​LESSON 12: 
Nine card Box:
Four of Wands, Ten of Swords, Ace of Wands
Ten of Coins, Nine of Cups*, King of Swords
Four of Coins, Three of Wands, Nine of Swords
Deck: The Gay Marseille by Charlie Claire Burgess 
*Indicates the card that I put down first and the first one I consider in the spread, paired with the top left. 

It seems strange, I’ve been doing this for twelve weeks now and I’ve yet to do the nine-bard box or work with a Marseille deck! These are the two things I’m known for (in the limited places where I’m known). The real reason I haven’t done the nine-card yet for this blog is because I tend to write in bed, and it’s easier to pull the three- or five-card arcs and four-card crosses and lay them out while I’m tummy down on the mattress writing like I’m some off-brand, bald Carrie Bradshaw (I hated Sex in the City, but I’m team Catrall). But today I’m at my work table in the office, partly because I’m uploading a client reading and the wifi is faster in here. So the time is right! 

In an effort to keep these blogs relatively short, I’ve set myself up a difficult task because you can see how much I write based on three or five cards. But it’s common for me to read this particular spread in arround 15 minutes. I think I can achieve brevity, or something close to it. With that, let’s get straight to the cards. We start with the Nine of Cups partnered with the Four of Swords. We find a bored mind and a tired heart, which is a sensation I’m familiar with lately, and I bet some of you are, too. There’s an overall weariness with the constant onslaught of relentless fuckery in the world and that is both infuriating and oddly desensitizing. 

While it’s not the best look politically, desensitization is something our bodies does to keep us safe. Our senses will deaden if we’re constantly assaulted by the difficult-to-process. Our brains stop working, our bodies stop sending chemical responses keeping us alert to danger, our emotions also begin to deaden. We may dissociate or experience long, deep bouts of depression. It’s odd to say, but the depression—a very real, very common, and very important health issue—is one way our body protects itself from the relentless onslaught of nonsense. It’s not a good way of protecting us, but it does stop us from finding ourselves constantly in fight-flight-freeze (henceforth, 3F). Depression isn’t a good protector because it actually causes all kinds of other issues, which is why it’s better if we can avoid reaching that level of enstuckification. Of course, we usually don’t know we’re headed in that direction until we wake up one day and can’t fathom getting out of bed. That’s the hard part. It’s one thing to say don’t let yourself get so injured by life that you stop feeling it, but it’s much harder to do—especially given how relentlessly awful things seem to be. 

Here I must pause and suggest that if you are experiencing feelings of depression, dissociation, or desensitization, you don’t have to go through that alone. There are professionals who can help you with that. I have lived with depression and anxiety my entire life and I’ve had to rely on the kindness of experts more often than I’d like to admit. (I also want to mention that if the health care providers you have access to aren’t listening to you, speak up for yourself if you can. In recent months the stories I’ve heard of shit treatment from healthcare professionals have reached epic levels. Of course, this is a sign that folks in that field are experiencing exactly what we’re talking about, but of course our capitalist machine doesn’t center their health or ours. The healthcare industry as it exists right now is designed purely to make money for hospital owners and drug companies. The rest of us can go fuck ourselves. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t help out there, and I can tell you first-hand that this help can be life-changing. (If you don’t have access to healthcare right now, many states and cities have advocacy groups that can help you. I recognize that in the so-called US, the idea of telling someone to get help from the medical industry is fraught with privilege, but the dialectic opposite side of that same coin is that we simply cannot “get better” from certain kinds of mental health struggles without some kind of outside help—and if there is spiritual help out there that works for you, that’s worth doing, too.)

As readers, we’re particularly susceptible to this kind of desensitizing. Folks who fall into this realm of divination tend to be people who are naturally empathic, naturally caring, naturally concerned about the plight of humanity and the planet, and also tend to suffer from the kinds of mental health struggles that seem almost tailor made to hurt sensitive souls like us. And if you do read for others, and do so with any regularity, that means you’re often putting yourself in front of people who are struggling and need help. You’re going to hear (sometimes shocking) stories of trauma and betrayal, of shitty behavior from bosses and employers, and even some fucked up things that the clients have done. I always say that people tend not to come for readings when things are going well. People want readings when something isn’t working, when they’re suffering, what they don’t know what to do. Sure, we get the curios seekers who want a sense of what’s going on. But when things are going OK, we tend not to pause and consider why and how. Maybe we should! It might make it easier to sustain those things. But we humans are really, really good at staying in the present moment. That might sound bizarre to anyone (like me) who struggles with mindfulness and meditation. But that’s not the kind of presence I’m talking about. We really struggle to understand or see the ways our actions today will impact us down the line, and even when we do we have a hard time letting that motivate us. 

Now, I realize I’m speaking as a person with ADHD—and a common theme for those of us with this neurological “abnormality” [I actually think it’s far more common than what we supposedly think is “neurotypical] is that we aren’t motivated by the future, because that doesn’t achieve the dopamine hits we need in order to get our asses in gear. More neurotypical people may not struggle as much. But the desire for immediate gratification is, from what I can see, common to the entire species, not just those of us blessed with dopamine deficits. From sex to food, we often let our wants trump our future happiness. Getting that dude in the sack or that pizza in our mouths is rarely going to be prevented by what we’ll feel like after—later tonight, tomorrow, or years from now. So we’re up against our biology, here. We are animals, after all. Food, sex, sleep, and shelter. That’s what we’re here to do. 

Anyway, the point is: as readers, we tend to encounter people during moments of struggle, and if we are particularly sensitive to the human condition, and if we do read for others with regularity, we can, if we’re not careful, because desensitized, depressed, and dissociative. This can also make us angry, short-tempered, and less empathetic than we usually are. You’ll know when you’re feeling this way. Friends, I have to tell you: I feel this way more days than not, of late. Luckily, I’m pretty good at compartmentalizing life, so I don’t take that out on my clients—in fact, the time I spend with clients, the days I spend reading at events, these are the times when I’m most invested, excited, and hopeful. I’m very, very lucky—because there isn’t much about life right now that leads me to these feelings. But that may not stay that way. And there have been times in my life where I have gotten to a level of — well, there isn’t a name for this experience, so I’m going to borrow from Truman Capote’s problematic-yet-silky book Breakfast at Tiffany’s (I’ve never seen the movie and likely won’t) and call this experience the mean reds. (If Capote had some kind of racist connotation associated with that phrase, I apologize. I did a little research to see if I could find anything, but I didn’t. You just never know with the “classics.”) 

Anyway, when we encounter the mean reds, we may struggle to do readings. The first row (Four of Swords, Ten of Swords, Ace of Wands) really summarizes the trajectory most of us experience when that happens: apathy and boredom leads to burnout (that word again—and it’s not quite right, here. What I really mean is the bone-deep exhaustion that comes not from doing things. It’s sort of the opposite of burnout, but it feels similar. We can become worn out by ruts, boredom, or desensitization). That sort of anti-burnout can only be “cured” when the right match (Ace of Wands) is struck. (This is a good time to point out the tension between high cards—the 10 of swords, 10 of coins, and the 9 of cups and swords—along with low cards, in this case the ace of wands, 4 of swords and coins and three of swords). 
The Ace of Wands, typically a good card, isn’t super helpful here because when we get into these deep ruts of desensitization, we literally have to wait and hope that something will come along soon to light our candle, as it were. The problem with that is twofold: First, we get impatient and we try to force “candles” to light that aren’t ready yet. We want to be done with the experience, we want to get back to our better selves, and so we push. That has the counter effect, because, as we’ve explored recently, fallow periods matter. We have to take them. Ideally we take them before we get to this point, but if we don’t there comes a moment where life will make us. And it takes however long it takes to get there. The second problem with this is that we simply don’t know when or from where the spark will come. It leaves us in a static position, which ironically may be exactly what got us in this mess to begin with. It is the stasis that is making us “sick” (for lack of a better word) with those mean old reds. 

Let us move to the second row: the Ten of Coins, Nine of Cups, and King of Swords. The immensity of the situation is highlighted here with the 9 and the 10 coming to play together. The dead branches tangling together on Charlie Claire Burgess’s 10 of Coins suggests the ways in which these mean red states (ha!) spread to various parts of our lives, reaching their dry, spindly tentacles into our relationships, jobs, and family (think of all the things associated with coins), as well as our emotions. The apathy, the depression, spreads. And this row also highlights the reality that there may be more leading to these states than simply our divinatory arts. This is going to be especially true if we don’t read for others—but that doesn’t mean people who aren’t experiencing this feeling elsewhere in their lives won’t feel less called to reading. When we get into these moods, it’s hard to want to do anything—including (especially?) things that could get us out of that situation. Like, the more possible something might help, the less likely we are to want to do it because of that damn ennui. This reminds me of a word that psychological circles have started using in public following a few years of lockdown: languishing. If you don’t know what it is, look it up. You might be in the throes of it now. 

The King of Swords looks away from these cards, toward the “future.” They remain (cautiously) optimistic that there can be a change. Their maturity and smarts suggests they understand that they will have to wait until the time is right. But I also see evidence, here, that they may hold the solution to this problem right in their hands. Guess what I’m talking about? The sword, literally held by the king. Sometimes, editing may be the key to resolving this state. By that I mean cutting out things that aren’t contributing to our well-being, things that are making us feel this languishy mean reddy thing. If a state of being has a cause, often removing that cause will lead to the possibility of a changed state of being. But that’s only possible when we know the cause and can edit it out. Where this gets tricky is that some things that cause our moods also happen to be things we can’t live without, at least not at the moment. If your job is making you feel this way, that’s real—but it’s also harder to do something about, because most of us lack the ability to up and quit without something to fall back on. And many of us are in a situation where we could change jobs, but that would just mean having the same experience in a different place. (That said, if the environment is the problem—and often that’s the case with jobs that drain us—moving to a new gig could solve at least that problem. Even if their culture is just as crap, you will have about six-to-nine months of honeymoon to recoup.)

One of the things about kings specifically is their laziness. They’re used to having things done for them, because that’s how they’ve been treated from birth. They sometimes forget they, to use an expression I frequently make fun of, “have the power inside them.” The King of Swords has power, unlike most of us, so they could act on it. But they think they can’t, because they’re used to waiting for other people to do their work for them. In this case, their perception of their abilities and their responsibilities is one of the things holding them back. 

I spend a lot of time thinking about agency in readings—who has it and who doesn’t. I tend to err toward clients lacking agency in situations where I don’t have any context to guide me otherwise. It’s important to me that I not suggest clients do things that their life conditions prevent. I’m not interested in telling someone to go back to school if they don’t have the money or time to do it, and I refuse to tell someone that they should think more positively if they’re experiencing actual obstacles to their goals. When we see kings in readings, though, there’s the indication of agency. In this spread, the only person card is a king. This would suggest to me that the client has more agency than they realize. In this case, the client is you, me, and anyone else reading this. So it suggests that we as readers have agency we don’t realize we do. Fair. Of course, how true that is will be different for everyone who encounters this. But, because we’re talking specifically about our divinatory life, we do have more control over that experience than we might our day jobs. 

Now, we turn to the bottom row which yields another four, the Four of Coins, the Three of Swords, and the Nine of Swords. The fact that the reading ends on the nine isn’t great for us, because we’re just a step back from where we were in the ten earlier. But there is a connection between the nine and the three that precedes it, and so—contextually—we might be able to read the nine much differently than its typically interpreted. 

I’m always tempted to look at the Four of Coins as negative. It’s a bias. But, as I always chant, cards aren’t good or bad. And I’m struck by the relationship between the Ten of Coins above it and this card. Now, typically I’m going to look at the columns after I do the rows—I tend to read in that order. But there are many times where a connection between cards in this spread makes me read them differently. When I say I let the cards or the reading guide me, this is what I’m talking about. When my eye catches something unique, I allow that connection to take over. Sometimes it doesn’t lead anywhere, but most of the time it does. In this case, I think about the prior row and I said that the king would benefit from editing. Well, they’ve done that in this row: we used to have ten coins, now we have four. That would be no bueno in a financial reading, but in this case it was the too-muchness of all the things that was causing the apathy we saw in the other four, the Four of Swords right above the ten. Here this says, “If you can edit out some stuff that isn’t serving you, your brain will start to feel expansive again (three being expansive, swords representing the mind)—in fact, the mind will feel so expansive, that you might even get a little drunk from it (the nine is three times three, so we get the expansiveness tripled). 

The solution, then, isn’t doing more; it’s not doing what makes us feel shitty. (Incidentally, it would be well within the realm of swords to relate to social media. Earlier today I found myself in a foul mood and I couldn’t figure out why. Yes, it’s Monday, but I can handle a Monday. So I stopped and asked myself what I’d been doing when I noticed I was feeling crappy, and what I’d been doing leading up to that. I remembered that I’d been on Instagram and saw something Trump is doing to invalidate the election before it happens. I realized that triggered the same old mean reds I’m talking about here: the despair, need to dissociate, and the fury all mixed into a ball of poison that makes it impossible to get through the day. So, if social media is the culprit, which in my case it often is, we know what we have to edit out.

I have an answer, so we could end here. But why not keep going? Let’s look at the columns, since we already started to with the two coins cards. That entire column begins with the four that started us down this mean red path, the Four of Swords. Here I think we can find confirmation for my thesis: If you’re weary and apathetic (4/swords) it’s because there’s a too-muchness happening in life (10/coins), so edit down what life demands of you (4/swords) to something stable and manageable. There are, I know, lots of other ways I could interpret this. I could say say the exact opposite: If you’re weary and apathetic it’s because there’s a too-muchness happening in life and whatever happens your life will be dull and frustrating (4/coins). That’s not super helpful, though, and it takes the reading in a suddenly different direction that says the opposite of what the reading seems to suggest: that it’s possible to work through these mean reds without waiting for life to catch up to us. So though it makes sense, by this point in the reading it’s not contextually relevant. 

If I’d started reading this column first, the whole reading would have a different tenor—and probably be about something else entirely. Remember it was the center card (the 9/cups) paired with the four that took me down the road I started describing. Because the column we’re looking at now doesn’t involve the 9/cups, it would say something totally different. So, given the context of what we’ve read so far, the most logical meaning for this column is the summary I have above. Sometimes as readers we start to doubt ourselves when we realize that we could be saying something “wrong.” We’re trained by life not to trust our instincts or go with our first impulse. And there are times when being impulsive isn’t wise. But this isn’t one of them. Our impulses in divination are helpful. In these situations, we can say with reasonable confidence that what pops into our minds during readings aren’t intrusive thoughts, but instead hits that have made it through to our brains before the logical mind shuts it down. Also, we can never be “sure” we’re correct. That’s why we have to trust ourselves, and friends: that is the most difficult thing for some of us to learn. I realize now that one reason I struggled for so long was lack of trust in my ability to read. I was so sure I’d be wrong that I constantly second guessed myself, sometimes right out of the reading making any sense. (For what it’s worth, I didn’t start charging money for readings until I’d at least started working on that—but it wouldn’t have been right to do so before then, because I didn’t believe in me. Which sounds so trite, but it was actually the issue.)

The second column, full of the Ten of Swords, Nine of Cups, and Three of Swords, could be summed up thus: “Thinking too much (10/swords) about how miserable (9/cups) you are? Think different (3/swords).” Borrowing from early Apple marketing wasn’t my intent, but as I’m writing this they’re doing their yearly phone launch—so it’s timely. (I’m a tech nerd, sorry. It’s a vice and terrible for the planet, but dear god do I love what they make. Anyway.) I’ve twisted the Three of Swords weirdly, innit? But let us be scandalous and center (again) the image: the two swords curving toward one another suggest a loop, a feedback look. The third comes along and hi-yahs that loop, Miss Piggy-like, and says, “Stop thinking that!” Easier said than done, yes—but: It’s not saying “stop thinking,” which is where many of us fall done entirely. Rather, it’s saying, “think different.” Think about something—anything—else, ideally something optimistic and with an eye toward (I know, but I have to say it:) a growth mindset. (Just because it’s a corporate cliche doesn’t mean we can’t make it work for us—and when we’re feeling the mean reds, we’re often focused on what’s not possible.) Literally just “changing our minds” (however we do that) is the key to unlocking progress. I would read this column then as “obsession is not going to help you.” Is it easy to stop obsessing? No, but it’s also not hard. We obsess partly because it feels good, like picking a scab or shoving our tongue into the space where a missing tooth used to be. It hurts, but it hurts in a kinky way. It’s stupid, but we keep doing it. If we disconnect the feeling from the thought, the thought from the action, then we can then simply think about something else. It’s also true that the brain can’t do multiple things at once, even if corporate America says multitasking is a prized skill. There is no such thing. So when you’re thinking about what to make for dinner, you can’t be thinking about depression. 

Obviously this isn’t a good longterm solution and it takes effort, but remember we’re not talking about anything more “serious” than divination, which is what this blog is about. So it’s not about not obsessing over lost love, unfair job practices, or anything else; we’re going to stop obsessing about our divinatory mean reds—and we’re going to do that simply but thinking about anything else. We might think about another divination method or another aspect of our magical practice or even the music of The English Beat. Whatever it is, it’s simply giving our brains something else to pick apart so that we don’t continue our downward spiral into languishing despair. 

The final columns features the Ace of Wands, the King of Swords, and the Nine of Swords. This is, in my view, the most complex and difficult set of cards in the spread, because really it ends on a major downer—that 9/swords, again. Here, we lack any three cards to push it into a more positive realm. But I really have to avoid jumping to conclusions, even at this late point in the reading, because if I do I could miss something. Yes, the cards tend to act in certain ways, but they’re heavily influenced by the cards around them, too. 

We might look at the King of Swords having a lightbulb moment, with the Ace of Wands above. “Ah-ha!” says the king, “I have an idea!” What idea? Probably the 9/swords. Ugh. It just doesn’t seem to want to play nice, here. Well, that’s life, kids. Charlie Claire Burgess’s 9 provides us with some visual cues that are one of the reasons this deck is perfect for folks who are learning to explore Marseille-style cards (and if this had been out when I wrote Tarot on Earth, I would have probably asked permission to include some of the cards from that deck there—although, to be honest, when you’re learning Marseille there is something helpful in starting with a deck that is very spare and offers very little in terms of visual cues. This is mostly because it will help you work toward a foundation that works with any deck). 

The 9/swords (which, incidentally, knights to the 10/swords—if you don’t know what that is, it’s a lenormand technique in which you move around the spread in the two-over/one-over pattern of a knight in chess. It’s an L-shape, so you can see that the 10 and 9 are knighted in that shape, here) takes a step back from the 10. “OK,” it says, “let’s not try to boil the ocean, let’s just take one step back.” Then we look at the little visual cues on our card: there is a curvy sword cutting through the scimitars we found in the 3, earlier. That makes it different. There are also little crescent moon-shaped needles and thread adorning the empty space where we’d often see flora. 

I’m not choosing to focus on these elements because they mean something right now. I don’t know how to interpret this card in this spread at the moment, so I’m grasping at straws. That’s OK. See, certain elements of a card can sometimes be more important to a reading than the card as a whole. Sometimes, yeah, it’s the total implication of the card that matters, but sometimes it’s just a part of it that catches your eye. We already read that nine in a more traditional way, anyway, so we’ve got that covered. What could sewing have to do with the 9/swords? I could go to the guidebook they created with the deck, but I’m not big on breaking my flow to go seek out reference material (though there’s no shame in that, honestly—astrologers have to do that a lot). Sewing connects things, unites them, mends them. Needles can be difficult to spot and difficult to thread (and these needles are threaded). Needles are tiny swords. Thread is thin, thin string. 

I’m just sort of announcing things I know about this element, now. I’m not attempting to make them mean anything. I’m just saying things in the hope that something will click, and something has, but before I tell you what it is, let’s keep going. The creator chose to put needles on this card, and I assume it’s a choice that isn’t as arbitrary has the fact that needles are little sharp things, like swords. It makes me think of “little thoughts,” rather than the big ones that can overwhelm us. Tiny steps, tiny things, even in this “big” number. The needles take the hugeness of the swords and break them up into bite-sized pieces, so to speak. So though there’s a lot here, it’s made more palatable. Getting stuck with a needle is rather a difference experience than getting stabbed or bludgeoned with a sword, no? So that’s telling, too. I could keep going, but I have a couple useful ideas at this point, so I can stop. 

The first thing that “hit” was the idea of mending. Darning socks or fixing a hem. That’s one thing we do with needles. Mending is repair. Actually, that’s a foreign idea in a lot of the christo-colonial places on the planet, because we’ve been trained in the last fifty years or so to accept even high-end purchases as disposable and subject to “planned obsolescence”—literally makers building degeneration into their products. Your car, your fridge, your phone, your computer—all of them designed to slowly break down so that you will be forced to buy a new one, as though the lure of advertising doesn’t already make it next to impossible not to want to replace our stuff with new stuff every year (which is why I recognize my Apple lust is problematic—and no, I don’t be getting a new phone this year). 

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I’d prefer to replace myself rather than repair myself. Repair is effortful and lacks the dopamine hit of a shiny, new toy (even if those toys have begun looking identical from generation to generation, so you don’t even really get the fun of something new, because it’s just a slightly fresher version of something that was already just fine to begin with). Repair is effortful, but it needn’t be done in big doses. In fact, we can’t fix everything all at once, so we have to take things in bite-sized pieces. And so this card suggests that the king’s idea or revelation isn’t a shocking one; it’s simply the act of taking the healing process bit by bit, taking our time, and addressing smaller causes of the mean reds—probably one at a time. 

The curvy sword and thread also suggests to me that taking a circuitous path toward healing will benefit us. This means potentially doing the unexpected, the things we haven’t tried before, or the off-beat. The key to healing the divinatory mean reds may well be going down a winding path we’ve never tried before—very Robert Frost, very “that-made-all-the-difference.” 

I prefer to give really doable, really practical answers—and there are some in this reading. But sometimes the ultimate outcome is one that is hard to achieve (and healing is often that) and also it’s not as simple or as rip-off-the-band-aid as we’d like. I said at the beginning of the reading that getting out of these states means waiting until a match gets struck within and relights our fire. There are things we can do to speed that up, to make us ready sooner, but I think the reality of the 9/swords ending the reading is that things are simply going to take as long as they take, and that the path toward relief isn’t a straight line. It may require different techniques and maybe even a lot of experimentation. Also, inherent in the 9/swords is the concept of mental burnout, which reminds us that over thinking and trying too hard will have the opposite effect. Nines can be oppressive and though the nines in this reading worked in different ways, the fact that we have two nines (and two tens) in this spread means that this isn’t a “light” situation. It’s going to take time, because when we reach this level of dissociation or despair, we have gotten to a point where our bodies, minds, hearts, and spirit are going to dictate the speed of our treatment. Sure, there’s things we can do, but as we saw early in the reading, pushing too hard too soon will have the opposite impact. We can create an environment where we’ll have our spark lit, but the flame won’t catch until the fuel is ready. We cannot sustain fire when there’s nothing to burn. And though this is kind of the opposite of burnout, whatever we call it, we’ve reached a point where we’ve run out of fuel. Refueling our tanks takes as long as it takes, no matter how fast we want to go. Sometimes our fuel runs out because we’ve been going too fast for too long. When we don’t take care of ourselves, sometimes life does it for us. It’s annoying.

A Read of One’s Own
The most practical piece of advice in this lesson was that of editing out what contributes to our languishing mean reds. Let’s allow this reading to suggest the area we most benefit from editing out, lessening our chances of downward spiraling. Where can we do less in order to feel more (so to speak)? Pull as many cards as you’d like to explore that topic. 

A brief example: I’ve drawn Nine of Coins (2), Two of Swords (1), Ace of Cups (3). 
Sometimes the first card down will tell you so much. For context, my Thoth deck was closest (I am now writing this part in bed, because Cheshire cat realness), so it’s not a Marseille deck. But it’s piptastic, and the 2/s shows two crossed swords. I mean, that’s it right there. Conflict, particularly intellectual or verbal or written disagreements over things that aren’t ultimately that important (the lack of importance comes from the fact that this is a two, a low number, and we have an ace next to it). The Nine of Coins/Disks (“Gain”) connects to all the nines above. Heaviness. The heaviness of life. The card is called gain, but what you’ve gained is weight—and I don’t mean body weight, I mean life weight. Being worn out. Instead, take a shower, or do anything cleansing—anything that is refreshing and renewing (ace of cups). Don’t fight with people on social media, is likely what this is saying, and when you use social media don’t argue. So, there ya go.