\Cards drawn: Devil (4), Hanged Man (2), Knight of Wands (1), Knight of Pentacles (3), Six of Wands (5).
Deck: The Bohemian Gothic Tarot (3rd edition) by Alex Ukulov and Karen Mahoney I had a feeling this Devil card would show, as it’s my least favorite devil card probably in any deck. It’s actually one reason I don’t use this one more. I hoped it would change in the most recent edition, but it hasn’t. A close friend detests the Justice card in this deck because it shows two fuckers with the Malleus Maleficarum--but that doesn’t bother me, because I think it actually shows you exactly what justice looks like in the christo-colonial world, at least since the that proto-edgelord, proto-incel piece of fan fick arrived in the hands of powerful shitheads the world over. One thing I’ll say about this deck: it usually shows you the darker aspect of many of the cards, which is kind of the point. Anyhoo . . . the blog: With two knights in the spread, we could have a lot of action—although one of them stares dead-eyed into the middle distance and the other . . . well. He could use some head, as it were (it’s giving the battle scene at the denouement of Bedknobs and Broomsticks). We’ve also got a knight in the Six of Wands, who is actually active and appears to be leading their army of the dead out of the reading. And then on the other side of the reading we’ve got . . . all . . . that. No cups, no swords; two wands, to majors, one penty. I think this is the first time we’ve had such a fiery/majory reading in this blog. But what’s the lesson? Good question. And I’m having one of those moments where I don’t really feel like doing the work to figure it out. I had a bad day. I accidentally knocked a tray of handmade kyphi (ancient Egyptian incense that requires a lot of grinding of woods and resins by hand and it’s a workout) off the surface on which it sat, and it and I both downward spiraled. It was hours of work and weeks of drying—all for some supposedly sacred fumigation . . . and I knocked it all right onto the floor. And I had an absolute meltdown because I do shit like that all the time and after forty-five years of it, it really makes me dislike myself. I needed someone to give me grace today and the only one who could do it really didn’t want to and really couldn’t afford it: me. In fact, I had a moment of self loathing so deep, I thought about cancelling all my upcoming bookings and just saying “fuck it.” What am I tell you that? I’m stalling, honestly. Not unlike this weirdly static Knight of Wands, whose ghostly gaze seems somehow to be looking both everywhere and nowhere. This usually most active of knights has parked his horse (is that a thing?) and strode off a bit. Why? What’s he doing? Maybe he’s stalling like me. He’s flanked by two dramatic stories. In one corner, on our left (his right), we have The Devil and the Hanged Man. This is an interesting combo because they’re quite opposite. The Devil tends to be active, projective, aggressive; the Hanged Man, static (like this knight). I really hate this image of The Devil. I think that making the “devil” an exclusively negative card, as this one appears (to me), is just a reconfirming of christo-colonial stories about who is good and who is evil. It shows us how deeply we’re impacted by these stories even if we’re not or never were Christians. But I will take it as it comes. So on this side, I see a path where he stays in an endless cycle of stuckery and fuckery—a bad relationship, a stale job, a tendency toward self flagellation when (for example) he knocks a fucking tray of hand-ground, hand-formed, hand-sweated-over incense to the floor and has a menty b. There’s great comfort in the familiar, even if the familiar sucks. The devil we know, right? In the other corner, the headless Knight of Penties and the Six of Swords. If this knight had a head, he’d be looking at the Knight of Wands like, “dude . . . what the fuck?” But he’s not because he can’t. Because he’s been knocked headless by the banalities of his own suit. How do I know that? Because it just came out of my fingertips. The Six of Wands, literally the only card with any sense of progress here, wants to fuck off into the future—with their army of skeletors. There’s a tug-o-war with the self that we see depicted in these two cards. The desire to stay and make things better for the other knight . . . even as doing so is causing him to lose his head and (I’ll wager) more and more pieces of him—and the desire to get out of this situation, even if it means ripping a part of himself off and leaving it behind. Except we can’t do that. So he’s forced to drag all this crap behind him. If we were looking at this reading as a choice, we’re in a situation with the Knight of Wands has two choices and neither of them are good: he can stay in the same garbage doing the same crap and experiencing the same highs and lows; or, he can continue to study himself and his life while trying desperately to break out of it. The aim of this blog is, as always, to pull from these randomly drawn cards a lesson about divination. And I suppose we could say this reading is reminding us that sometimes we’ll have readings where every option is crap and the client’s likely to stay stuck for a while. And that’s certainly a thing that happens. But I’m not convinced that’s the lesson, here. So I’ll keep digging. Mirroring the cards (using “reflecting” cards, or the cards that are symmetrically opposed to each other), I have two new pairings: Devil/Six of Wands; Hanged Man/Knight of Penties. The Devil and wands have a natural affinity for each other, because devils like things “hot” — and if I ignore this image, it is The Devil’s “job” to fuck up the status quo. I’ve been reading a lot about devils lately, and I’ve come to realize that what is considered devilish or satanic is whatever the powerful decide is bad. Witches are “satanic” because they present the church with competition. Anyone who lives on the margins, anyone who is remotely fringe, is “satanic” by these standards. This is one reason I get cranky when the card is depicted negatively. It’s just a confirmation of the idea that anything “other” is “evil.” It’s true that the card is frequently associated with addiction, but that’s because that’s what the church wants us to think. They want us thinking that if we experience “the devil” we’re going to get burned. What if I turn what I think I see? What if I turn that notion of the devil on its head, even working with this image? Suppose this winged entity isn’t injecting the desperate figure in front with drugs. What if she’s administering an antidote? What if this is the cure to the figure’s ills. Perhaps this devil is a “witch” who can help this figure with what the industrial powers cannot. These things must be done in “secret” (the darkness of the card) because we can’t be caught disobeying the rules. I read recently read (in Orion Foxwood’s The Flame in the Cauldron) “What is spoken fades away, but what is written may hang you some day” (this was his teacher, Lady Circe). Incidentally, if that’s true, I’m among the most fucked. But I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. If I read this card that way, turning this image, then when I pair it with the Six of Swords, I get someone setting off after recuperating. After some mysterious antidote administered by mysterious “witch.” This suggests that the solution to our Knight of Wands’s dilemma is to seek “alternate routs” (as the road signs say during construction). What of the Hanged Man and the Knight of Pentacles? Both are in rough shape. One suspending upside down, however meditatively, and the other is headless. In both cases, the head is not where it’s supposed to be—the head is not in the game. Which offers one reason why the Knight of Wands has dismounted and stares off into the distance. He’s stuck because he lost his head, but the solution to forward motion (we can imagine the knight in the Six of Wands “becoming” the Knight of Wands, when it’s time—even though they don’t resemble each other) is this witchery proffered by the scary-seeming entity. And I think that is the lesson . . . There are times when the solution to a reading lies in the place that seems scariest, weirdest, “darkest,” or least acceptable. Sometimes the answer lives in the spaces you’re “not supposed” to go. One sort of easy example of this, maybe not quite as dramatic as the words I used above, is the way I handled the fact that I didn’t like my initial interpretation of this cards or the lesson they indicated. I could have given up, scrapped the reading, redone it and used a deck that I vibe with a little better. But instead of doing that, I took the thing that was bugging me most (the image of The Devil in this deck) and went “deep.” What else could I see? So often we limit ourselves to what it seems like we’re seeing. In doing that, we miss what’s really there. I often say that whatever makes divination work uses the reader as much as the cards. By which I mean, they’ll take advantage of our moods and tendencies as much as they will our reactions to specific cards. This is why two readers answering the same question and getting the same answer might get completely different cards. Somehow they end up in the same place but the route they took (the cards drawn) were totally different. Neither of them would have landed on the same interpretation had they gotten the other reader’s spreads. In this case, it’s not a secret that I can’t stand the implications of this Devil card—and that becomes part of the reading. It’s probably exactly why the card showed up. Because the divination divinities knew that I was in a bad mood and would have a little bitchy moment about the card—and that, if I were tenacious and practicing what I preach, I would “get there.” In this case, not only did I do the reading, I became part of it. I became one of the cards because of my oft-asserted crankery around that depiction. But I wouldn’t have gotten the answer, I wouldn’t have unlocked the reading, had I not dug into the very thing I disliked and found a new way to make sense of it, to recontextualize it in a way that makes sense for me and the way I read. (I feel compelled to say that I actually do like this deck; I don’t use it much because of this card, but also because I rarely use theme decks with clients.) If you can, when you are struggling with a reading or with a card in the reading, take a look at the thing that seems to be the least helpful or the part that makes no sense—lean into it. What I don’t mean is staring at it until you lose your will to ever pick up the cards again. Instead, it’s simply asking ourselves what else we could be looking at. There’s a phrase we use in learning design that comes from the tech world: iterative development. In this way of working, you might write a first draft of a learning design. But rather than going on to the next step, you’d pause and do a completely different “first” draft that doesn’t resemble anything you already did. And then you did a third “first” draft, this completely different from the other two. The idea here is that you might use your first design, you might use the third, but you would never have had the idea for the third unless you forced yourself to do it. In many cases, your final draft will likely be a mix of all three. Readings can work that way, too. Much of the time, the first path we take works. Not always. But even if you’ve got a “good enough” answer, if you don’t “feel” it then keep going. There’s nothing wrong with that. At worst you’ve gathered data you didn’t need; at best, you’ve added a whole new set of information that gets you and/or your client closer to where they want to be. I always say that every reading is an experiment, and this is a case in point. You can read one spread of cards three ways and see what you get. (This is one of many reasons I love my nine-card square so much.) And when you try to re-interpret a spread, start with what you’re not connecting with. Go “deep.” What you see when you first lay out the cards is the surface impression. What happens if you don’t accept that. What if you were forced to take the Waite-Smith Three of Swords and interpret it as representing the happiest thing ever to happen to someone? You could do it. Try it now. It’s totally possible. (I once interpreted that card as a Brazilian barbecue because that’s where they serve lots of roasted meats [including chicken heart] on long skewers. I’ve written recently how I saw swords as pipes.) What lies beyond what we assume we’re looking at? Or, what happens when you cast your eyes across a spread and one of the cards just doesn’t fit? In a recent entry here I said you don’t have to start there. You don’t. But what if you do? What if you don’t look at the other cards until you’ve found a way of reading that incongruent card in a way that makes contextual sense? I can tell you that the rest of the reading will probably be unlike anything you’ve ever done before and probably in a very good way. Look, not every card carries equal weight in a spread and sometimes a card that doesn’t “fit” is really just offering a little grace note, an accent, or even carrying one card to another the way vowel sounds carry consonants. If you give it a go and can’t make it make sense first, don’t worry about it. Maybe it’s not that important. But why not give it a try? You won’t know what you could discover until you decide to take the chance. I know that seems scary, particularly if you’re sitting across from someone else and they’re waiting for you to reveal their future. (I did a reading for a friend recently on video and she hadn’t had time to watch it yet and she said, “It’s so weird to me that you know my future and I don’t.” It was funny.) But remember as the reader, you facilitate the experience. You’re are fully within your rights as a reader to say, “OK, we’re gonna go on a crazy little journey right now and I think it’ll pay off—but if it doesn’t, no worries. I still know where we’re going to go.” It’s OK to do that. Why not? Every time I’ve said something similar to a client, they’ve gotten excited. They’re part of an experiment! They’ve inspired you to try something new! I know it’s weird to suggest that you don’t necessarily “know what you’re doing,” but we don’t know what we’re doing every time we spread the cards. Anything could happen and we take the gamble we’ll be able to make it make sense. Usually we do. Sometimes we don’t. We’re human. And clients enjoy being part of the process. If you’re reading for someone else and you say, “I think we should try something really wild” they’ll almost always laugh a little and look both happy and slightly apprehensive and they’ll say, “OK!” Because they know you’ve got their back. And you do. READER: I think we should get wild with this interpretation. CLIENT: OK! READER: I get the weird feeling that this card means you’re gonna become a hot air balloon pilot! CLIENT: I am absolutely never doing that, I am terrified of heights. READER: OK, let’s look at it this way, instead . . . ! When you’re reading for yourself, I recommend writing them out our recording them so you can listen to them later. I think this allows you to separate yourself from your own question and puts you in “reader” mode. And then, because you’re not as worried about getting the “right” answer, you’re more likely to experiment. And I bet that as you do the experiment, you’re going to suddenly find something that “clicks.” It happens so much. OK . . . this all takes us to . . . A Read of One’s Own This isn’t an easy one to develop a spread for! So instead of giving you a reading spread, what I want to offer in this case is a bit of an experiment . . . Grab a deck (if you have more than one, grab one you like but don’t use much). Go through it and pick out the cards you wish were different or that show imagery counter to the way you read the card. Make a little stack of these cards and set the rest of the deck aside. (I’ve chosen to call this stack of cards you don’t love “cranky cards” for the rest of those post.) What you do next depends on the number of cards you chose. If you have between one and three, randomly throw in some additional cards—another three, maybe. Enough that you can shuffle a bit, but not so many that you won’t get any of your cranky cards if you were to draw three from the pile. If you have four or more, you can add more cards or not—but again, don’t add so much that you won’t get any of your cranky cards. Now, shuffle your little stack of cranky cards and filler. When ready, draw three. Begin by looking at the crankiest of the cranky cards and begin to reinterpret the image in a way that you like. If you were to look beyond the image, or if you were inventing a story for the image that was somehow the exact opposite of what the artist seems to have intended. How would you read this combo if you did that for each of the cranky cards? Come up with an “answer” or a meaning for the reading—as if you were doing a general reading. Write it down. And then take a little time away. Maybe a day. Then, come back and think of a place in your life where this answer to a question you didn’t ask could help you. It’s OK if nothing comes, but I bet if you’re tenacious and get playful with the answer, you will find a way that this reading is telling you something you needed to know even if you didn’t know it when you shuffled the cards. If nothing connects, that’s OK. It’s really about the experimentation. Maybe it’s going to answer a question you’ll suddenly have in the coming days. Maybe it was just a silly game to play to help you out of a rut. Either way, it’s worth doing. Let me know how it goes—and have a great week.
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AboutEach post is a tarot reading about the tarot, a lesson about the cards from the cards. Each ends with a brand new spread you can use to explore the main concepts of the reading. Archives
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