lesson 20: Stasis, expertise, and comparisons

​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.)