lesson 2: feelin’ it

LESSON TWO:
A Five-Card Arc of:
The Moon (4), The Lovers (2), 10 of Swords (1), 4 of Cups (3), 3 of Swords (5)
Deck used: The Thoth Tarot by Lady Frieda Harris and Aleister Crowley

Oh, have we ever been thinking too much (Ten of Swords). We can get so in our heads that we forget we have a body. It is the curse of the suit of swords (the one I most identify with) that the better we are at thinking, the more detrimental our thinking becomes. The first card in this arc of five (with the center card at the apex) sets us squarely in the gray matter, in the brain, that part of ourselves so frequently awesome and so frequently exhausting. The Ten of Swords tells us that we could not get more wrapped up in our intellectualizing if we tried—and we are trying, despite the fact that we’ve really reached that pinnacle. Or is it a nadir? Isn’t wearing out our own minds kind of a drag? I think so. It pulls us down. It makes us heavy. It makes us cranky. 

Overthinking is a thing for a lot of tarot readers. Because we love what we do, we want to know everything about it. We voraciously consume books and videos on the topic, absorbing history, correspondences, and systems, and I find that many people can, within six months of beginning such an intense tarot journey, speak credibly on a lot of topics that they formerly had no relationship with. It’s impressive. Where it becomes problematic are the moments when we’re sitting in a reading trying to figure out what the hell correspondences are the ones that matter in this particular moment. It’s terrifying. And that’s assuming we haven’t also started getting distracted by the imagery on the cards in front of us. 

There’s a sense when we’re beginning that everything that we see in a reading matters equally. Every correspondence, every symbol, every association. Somehow all of these things announce themselves as needing attention at exactly the same time. Of course, the alternative can happen, too: we can turn over the cards and find that none of the images or associations mean anything. In a way, both of these are the exact same symptom of the exact same disease. We get overwhelmed—either by the amount of information or the lack of it. But the mind begins considering not the reading, but rather than many ways in which we have failed in our lives leading up to this moment. If we’re lucky, it’ll also begin dwelling on our ineptitude as readers and commence judging ourselves for thinking we could ever do this for someone else. 

I had that experience last night attempting to write this lesson. I did it, but hated it. I scrapped it all today and started again. It could have been the deck’s fault, but think I just wasn’t into it. One of the things I didn’t consider about writing this way is that I really have to finish each chapter in one sitting, otherwise I’ll forget where the reading was taking me. I have to stay in the moment. Even getting up to get water can distract me, and that’s not good because I use getting water as a way of collecting my thoughts when I’m writing. (I used to use cigarettes. And gin. This is better. But less fun.)

The mind is a powerful thing, and though I’m frequently critical of the Golden Dawn’s largely negative associations for the mind suit—swords/air—I don’t necessarily disagree, because it is in the mind where we do most of our wounding. We hurt ourselves, or at least many of us do, which the words that form thoughts there. It may be the intrusive thoughts forcing us to consider horrific-and-unlikely outcomes for normal situations; it may be the way we read (also a mind function) other people’s words or actions (or lack thereof); perhaps it’s the way we get pissed off and use our words or deeds to hurt others. Buddhists believe that anger is like swallowing poison and expecting someone else to die. When we get our snide dig in, we may feel good—but we’re just drinking a certain kind of poison. Words are dangerous. The pen is mightier than the sword because words cut our heart, not our flesh; our hearts hold wounds longer than our flesh does. 

The gods didn’t want Mercury bringing humans the written word. They felt we would wind up farther from the truth, because if anyone could commit anything to paper, it would confuse us. As a writer, it’s a funny thing. I adore words. I’m also rather a fan of my guy Mercury, given that he rules the things I love most. But I can understand why the gods were wary. Language limits. Especially in the world of the spiritual. Consider how cringy it can be to attempt putting your core spiritual beliefs into words. It’s not easy. Everything suddenly sounds small, stupid, clichéd. Things that move your soul when you think of them become trite, hackneyed, and Hallmark Movie of the Week when given voice. There are some things best left unsaid because to say them will muddy them. And yet. It’s all we have. We lack any other way of sharing how we feel, what we need, where we are. As mushy and imprecise as it is, we must have language. 

The diviner must spend a lot of time considering language. What we do is really a language art. The cards are a translation tool. The communicators are the client and, for lack of a less cringy term, the “divine.” The translators are the cards and the reader. The reader develops systems for reading the cards. The reader shuffles and the divine intervenes to arrange the cards in more or less the order required. There isn’t a strict necessary order because many cards can speak to many situations. The shuffling allows the divine to get things into roughly the shape necessary, because it can’t pick the deck up and put it in order itself. The reader lays out the cards and begins using their translation skills to make sense of things. This is a dance involving the reader’s lived experience, their foundational meanings, the question, the spread, and the ways in which the cards drawn interact with each other. 

The trick is to select the right words while reading so that the cards’ messages are available to the client, who speaks a different language (usually). If you’ve ever gotten a reading from me, there’s a chance you’ve heard me say something along the lines of, “What word am I reaching for, here?” I noticed this recently. And it’s funny because I didn’t choose that phrasing, per se, but it’s exactly what it feels like: I’m reaching into my mind, to the library of words stored there, in an attempt to select the most precise, most correct one. This isn’t always easy, especially since COVID seems to have done a number on my memory, and the fact that I’m just getting older. But I’ll eventually find it. 

This isn’t advice, by the way. I’m sharing an experience with you, but I really don’t want you to mimic my anal relationship to word-smithing. It’s actually tiring. The point is, we have a special relationship to language, tarot readers, and we’re probably thinking about language a lot. 

In fact, I’d wager many of us are simply thinking a lot. 

Then Ten of Swords reminds us to take a fucking break. Tens have reached the fullness of their power (or, if you’d rather, they’ve diminished in power so much they have nothing left to give). We have to go back to one. We have to return to the start. Ten, in fact, is a delectable little number, because it is both itself and not: it’s 10, but it’s also 1 (1+0=1). It has to return to the start if it wants to be itself. (More integration, see lesson one.) There are times where many of us may be reading too thoughtfully, by which I mean to cerebrally, too intellectually. And I think this is why I was struggling with my attempt to write this chapter yesterday. I was making myself braindead, in part by trying to work with this deck (the Thoth) in a different way than I read with any other deck. I think I was trying to Thoth-i-fy myself, and in so doing nothing I wrote about the four cards I worked with for that spread had anywhere near as much to say as the Ten of Swords alone has tonight. So you’ll note that I’ve not get commented on the Golden Dawn title for the Ten of Swords: Ruin. What a delight. 

Frieda Harris gave us a lively, rich card with a shattered sword in its core, and a heart at its hilt. It makes me think of the needle on a sewing machine and how it snaps when things get too bunched up, too tight, or the thread gets pulled too hard. That ping sound of a needle snapping feels a lot like those moments we know our brain is broken. Fried. The heat of Harris’s art, here, ties us back to fire and suggests burnout. The tens are often a sign of burnout. And this is something I’m particularly sensitive to, because I am particularly prone to it. And it’s a reminder that all the interest and all the learning and all the thinking and intellectualizing is fine, until you’re exhausted and have nothing left to give. 

This can happen when we approach our divination from too intellectual a place, when we focus too much on the system at the expense of the dialogue. I suppose it’s comparable to language. You can communicate adequately enough to order dinner by using a translation app or a dictionary. But you can’t experience the poetry of conversing in a language until you really know it. Only then can you really have dialogue. We have to get out of our reader-minds and get into our reader bodies, our reader senses. And here we begin to sense the presence of other cards . . . 
 
The ten is flanked by The Lovers and the Four of Cups (Luxury). The Lovers is not the first card I think of when I think of bodies. But that’s what lovers are: bodies. Two old clunky, weird bodies thrashing around at each other, in search of an orgasm. Just flopping and grunting away, like animals. Ah, but the orgasm! What a flood of sensation! For a fraction of a second, time freezes and manages to expand and contract at the exact same time. We humans sure do love a release. And it is the animal nature that I’m really getting at, here. A quality I might usually associate more with The Moon, but The Lovers in this reading seems to really want to be carnal. (Well, it’s Crowley.) Harris’s image is really serving an alchemical allegory, a wedding of “blood” and “gluten” (which sounds . . . appetizing. Alchemically, blood is semen and gluten is vaginal fluid. Take that). But there’s a lot of bodies on this particular card, and in many versions of the card we find plenty of nudity. Body feels right. So, too, does the solidity of the Four, even if cups aren’t solid at all. Harris’s painting does suggest something of an orgasm, a gush of flow arriving in (I’m sorry for saying this) various orifices. But, like Harris’s analogy, we’re drawing one of our own: It is the sensation of the body we’re dealing with here, and what I really mean is: gut instinct. 

It is here we arrive at the idea of intuition, I think. Cups, of course, are a suit associated with that quality. The Lovers might not be a card we think of as intuitive, but of course we intuit our way through all attractions. We have to figure out how to navigate this other person, get from them what we want, and of course figure out what they want. This is a series of intuitive hits: watching for patterns and assigning those patterns meaning based on prior observations. For The Lovers to reach the stage of being lovers, there has to have been a lot of intuiting going on. (These days, once hopes that what used to be handled “intuitively” is now handled through open and honest dialogue, along with plenty of consent.) 
 
As much as we need the logical mind to read, we must feel the reading, too; we have to feel our way through it. It is the marriage (Lovers) of the heart (cups) and mind (swords) that makes the reader effective. Another thing I think I lacked in my attempt to write this chapter yesterday. I wasn’t really feeling much of anything, and in fact had rather a frustrating weekend and so didn’t have much energy to give. I thought the chapter would write itself and it didn’t. Ironically, that ease only happens when I’m really feeling my way through it. 

The thing I love about Lovers cards with Cupid depicted is that it’s so contrary to the idea that the card represents “choice.” Where Cupid shows his ass, nobody has a choice. We love what we have to and when we realize it, we know it. We know it in our bones. And that is relevant here because there’s something to be said for feeling our way through readings in such a way that we can feel them click into place. I’ll say this: that’s something I’ve felt, but it’s not something I feel every time, or even that much. So just know that I’m not saying this is something you should be feeling all the time. But there are moments where you know a reading sort of locks like the final puzzle piece. There’s a physical reaction, a completeness. And this makes me wonder if approaching reading with a slightly more indulgent, luxurious (the title of the Four of Cups) quality might be beneficial. I am, I think, somewhat systemic in my reading. There are times, but not often, where I find myself reading by pure instinct. Most of the time, though, I’m doing math. Should I be looking to recreate those instinct-driven readings more?

To find out, let’s broaden the reading’s scope to include the final two cards: The Moon and the Three of Swords (Sorrow). Oh, Golden Dawn and your fucking Three of Swords nonsense. The Moon confirms the power of instinct and swords return us to the mind. That said, The Moon isn’t the clearest-seeing card in the deck. It can be, and frequently is, muddied by dimness and haze. The Three of Swords cuts through the haze with all it’s sad, sad, sadness. (Cue Celine Dion . . .) But, fine. Let’s start with the thing that drives me nuts: “sorrow.” What contextual relationship to this reading does “sorrow” have? Sorrow is a feeling, which unites swords and cups. In fact, I was thinking this morning that swords and cups are uniquely connected because our thoughts are what activate our feelings and moods, and our moods activate what we’re thinking about. They are a cycle together of action and reaction, constantly banging around against each other like those clunky old bodies we were talking about earlier. (Isn’t this sexy?)

That’s about all I can give you to make “sorrow” make sense, folks. Other than that I’m sorrowful this card says that and also I guess we get sad when we don’t read well? Or something? The card is Saturn in Libra. Saturn is the “restriction” planet, which I take to mean “boundaries.” Libra is obviously the sign of the scales, and because my partner has libra rising and ascending, I know this is the sign of people who can’t make decisions (poor guy struggles with every single one). It’s a bit of a people-pleasing sign, too. But let’s broaden that, a bit: Libra likes fairness and balance, and if I use these correspondences we get a balance between firm boundaries and fluid boundaries. Which is a thing that we would do well to find, mentally, given the overthinking that got us here to begin with. Threes, in fact, are expansive. Saturn + Three, then, can be problematic because three wants to grow and Saturn doesn’t. (So maybe that’s why we’re sad? Or something?) Anyway, I think the influence of Libra reminds us the power of balance (maybe of integration?) because balance is a tension, and cool things happen in tension. If we add The Moon back into the equation, we’re presented with more tension—the moon’s pull on the Earth, and, of course, us. Which again takes us back to the balance of firm and fluid boundaries. 

The Three of Swords is maybe the most active card in this reading, operating on a lot of levels. It’s both expansive and contractive, like a muscle, and isn’t that a much healthier way for a brain to function than the ten? Swords cut through the bullshit, so any BS The Moon may offer (and with all those animals wandering around, there’s likely to be some shit on the ground) is lessened by the three. 

The Moon and The Lovers (working now in pairings rather than mirrors) elevates the attraction to intuition. It’s killing me to say this, but this reading is saying that intuition may be more important than logic--which is not how I really feel. But they’re both majors and they’re both powerful cards in their way. They also seem to enhance each other, because The Lovers can be a fairly moony, dreamy card and The Moon is, one could argue, something that makes people fall in love. (Songwriters always bemoan how few rhymes there are for both “moon” and “love.”) They’re dreamy, and of course divination can be a dreamy act. But on the other side of the spread, the stable Four of Cups limits the dreaminess with its squareness. Or, anyway, it limits to the extant it can. This is a very watery card. It’s the moon in Cancer—their home-base (my moon is in Cancer, annoyingly). Very sense-driven. But again we have the squareness of the four to limit it, somewhat. And the Three of Swords brings us back to a mind, one that’s functioning healthy. 

And so here is how I summarize this: When we’re weary of reading, or burned out, or when we’re finding that things are feeling dull and not exciting in our readings, throw out all the intellectuatual stuff and read from feeling. What are the cards making you feel? What sensations can you luxuriate in? What pulls your mind out of its rut and into a functioning organism again? Where can you feel your way through it, like someone navigating by night—only able to see a few feet ahead of them, but able to make the journey that way. In essence, when the brain is weary, let the instincts guide you. 

A read of one’s own:
This spread is designed to detect when we might benefit from a less intellectual approach (how to tell we need one), and how to make it happen given our own unique way of being. 

1. Shuffle the deck and then look for the Ten of Swords. From the deck, pull the three cards that follow it. 
2. Put the deck together again and give it one more shuffle. Find The Moon, The Lovers, and the Four of Cups and pull the single card following each. 
3. Put the deck together again and give it one more shuffle. Find the Three of Swords and pull the card following it. 
4. The three cards following the Ten of Swords represent when you need to take a less brainy approach, or how to tell it’s time. 
5. The three cards chosen after finding The Moon, The Lovers, and the Four Cups suggest how to make that happen. Essentially, what to do to get yourself working that way. 
6. The card following the Three of Swords is a way of integrating the two. 

A quick example: Using the same deck, the cards I found following the Ten of Swords were, The Ace of Swords, Adjustment (Judgment), Prince of Cups. I just laughed, because I think this is suggesting that any time I’m using my brain (Ace of Swords) I should be biased (Adjustment) toward the great emotional hunt (Prince of Cups). So, in essence, anytime I notice I’m being “thinky,” I need to tilt the scales over to the sensational (here meaning of the senses, not, like, really good). 

The next three, which followed The Moon, The Lovers, and the Four of Cups were: Two of Swords(!), Prince of Disks(!), The Emperor(!). Why did I put exclamation marks after those? Not a single one of them is what I would have expected. An airy, thinky sword; a grounded prince; and the luddite of all luddites, the heavy Emperor. And yet: this has to speak to how I get out of my head and start feeling my way through. Normally, I think of twos as magnetic, pulling things toward them or pushing them away. The Golden Dawn title of peace, though, feels like a more likely access point for this card: peace, as in quiet the mind. How? By sniffing for clues like a bloodhound. Where the hell did I get that from? The bull on the Thoth Prince of Disks looks like he’s sniffing the ground like a bloodhound, and why shouldn’t he? This earthy suit can get down and dirty, which is a necessary thing for what we’re talking about. Start sniffing around the reading (dear lord, I hate that term), start acting like a detective who operates based on gut (earth, again, is gut-like to me—especially if we think of the swords as the mind). And then there’s Maude—I mean, the Emperor. Man, if this is the last card I expected to see here. 

The Emperor is no one’s favorite card, but recall that I’m very into this moment of opposites in fact being part of the same thing—which means that if The Emperor is everything we hate about christo-colonial patriarchy, then he’s also everything that isn’t christo-colonial patriarchy, which I usually take to mean men who aren’t toxic. Here, though, I taking the strong, sturdy, powerful emperor as a champion of the gut, so to speak. He’s really into the Prince of Disks—in this case, we’re getting an icky daddy vibe, because the Prince of Disk is most definitely, as they say in the south, nekked. The Emperor looks at the Prince like, “yeah, baby, ride that bull.” (Gross.) But, intrusive thoughts aside, the powerful entity endorses the tendency to operate from the gut. It’s also worth noting that the Aries vibes in this Golden Dawn-y deck are strong, and Aries is the first cardinal sign of the zodiac—so there’s something instinctual about that, because Aries moves fast and so must move based on instinct. (I guess sometimes astrological correspondences can be useful. But, again, you don’t need them.) 

The Emperor gives shape to things, because four contains. Think back to the way that four offered some stability to the watery reading that began this chapter. So, in his way, he provides a container for this gut-hunting. I think this means that, because I have such a strong structure, I need to remember it’s there and I don’t have to push it. Overall, it’s saying that the only way to do the thing is simply to do it. 
 
​The final card, which followed the Three of Swords in the shuffled deck, was the Five of Disks (worry). Helpful! Another one of those keywords! Ugh! (Yes, yes, I know they’re “titles.” I’ve read the books, too.) Fives mess shit up. Disks are earth, so life; thus, the Five of Disks messes life up. What in hell does that mean? Well, really I think it’s just about changing. Challenging ourselves. Messing shit up. Trying new stuff. Doing it, even though we’re worried (there it is!) we’ll screw it up. As I always say, every reading is an experiment. It is helpful for me to remember my own advice from time to time. 

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