Lesson six: intellect + sensation = ?

LESSONS SIX:
An arc of five:
Three of Cups (5), Seven of Swords (3), The Sun (1), Ten of Cups (2), The Empress (4)
Deck: Sun and Moon Tarot by Vanessa Decort

This is very surely my favorite mass market deck. It always makes me happy and we’re presented with The Sun as the first card—which is a traditionally happy card. Here in the very early days of summer (I’m writing this on July 5, though based on the schedule I’ve set up for myself, you may not be reading this until much later), it’s easy to see the sun’s major influence. But of course the question is, “What does this have to do with divination?” And the answer has to do with shedding light on things. 

I’ve spent much of the spring and into summer deep-diving into the esoteric systems that built tarot’s modern foundation. Time and time again I come up against the inscrutable, oblique, and opaque. (Just thought I’d use some five dollar words to match the majesty of esotericism.) I’ve been uniquely smug in my distaste for esotericism. Until recently, that had more to do with my distaste for dogma and anything scented with Christianity (which was quite traumatic for me). These days, it’s got less to do with dogma (though I’m still anti-dogma) and everything to do with exclusivity. Let’s just spend some time on the Golden Dawn, since they were arguably the most notable influence on mass market tarot and magic in the English-speaking world, anyway. There is nothing wrong with having a spiritual goal, even one that centers the self. That said, the entire system is based on a cycle of rote memorization, examination, and recitation. Even the initiatory rituals require memorization (and if you want to initiate yourself, which is possible, then you have to play all the parts in the ceremonies, which means you have to memorize the whole rite—not only what you have to say, but what the gods and entities are saying to you). This implies not only a neurotypical brain (and I frequently make the argument what what we think of as “typical” is in fact the real divergence and what we think of a divergent is more typical—by which I mean I think most people are neurodivergent), but also the leisure time to devote to the pages and pages of material one has to not only memorize but make sense of. And making sense out of much of this isn’t easy, because it’s designed to be opaque. They are, after all, mystery traditions. So, you need an excess of time, a brain that enjoys focus and memorization, excellent recall, a head for arcane language, and the space to sit down with all of this and attempt to bring it to life. That’s to say nothing of the cost associated with fashioning the various tools, buying study materials, or joining orders. (And if you’re devoting all this time to the development of self, you’re really not paying attention to the world around you—which betrays the myth that this focus on the self, on the elevation and evolution of the self, will “trickle down” to the rest of humanity. It won’t. Trickle down spirituality is just as much a myth as trickle down economics. And in both cases, it is something created by the wealthy elite.)

It’s not so much what the GD believes, but rather the philosophy of scholarship that separates the human from the divine. I’m not particularly drawn to the teachings, but I don’t have any especial problem with them (I’ve already documented my feelings about the use of Kabbalah by non-Jewish practitioners—which is that, if you insist on it, you should do your best to understand where and how it emerged, the ways in which it was used against Jewish communities, and offer some kind of recompense for its use). What bugs me is that it is classist (you must be able to dedicate your life to this study and even making it past the neophyte level requires mastery of some really big concepts), it’s exclusionary, it’s pretentious (contact with the divine need not be that complicated), and it’s appropriative.

Now, look: Working with spiritual concepts outside of your culture of origin can be, I think, a good thing—if for no other reason than to understand the humanity and divinity of a people, and also because we never know where we might discover “god.” That’s an unpopular opinion and I understand why. That said, if the key to revelation lives in a practice and if that key can help the human race doff its hatred and bigotry, I welcome it. If done, this must be done respectfully. It is the practitioners job to understand the culture and, if at all possible, honor it—both politically and financially. As the saying goes, “rent is due.” If you want to practice, say, Hoodoo in America, then your political donations and actions best reflect an interest in the libration of traditionally excluded communities, especially (in this case) Black Americans, whose ancestors created the practices in the throes of enslavement, sexual assault, forced imprisonment, and forced conversion, while handling the displacement from home and an attempt to dissolve their pantheon.

On the other hand, too many people who find solace and magic in traditions outside their own (usually white people) cannot wait to capitalize off of it. The other thing that happens is historically marginalized groups are judged harshly for their spiritual traditions—until Becky comes along and discovers how “powerful” they are, and opens up a chain of studios exploring it. (We see this not just with spirituality, but music, fashion, etc.) It’s the combination of societal judgement and exclusion compounded with white people making money off things people of global majority don’t or won’t that makes this all so messy. (I also think that advertising the details of your spiritual practice, particularly if they’re “borrowed” from traditions outside your own, sets you up. No one can judge what they don’t know you’re doing, and if you’re doing your work sincerely there’s no reason to advertise it. Just a thought.)

Anyway, this is all to say that the diviner’s job isn’t exclusivity and mystery; it’s access and demystification. We are here to shed light on things. That’s the whole point. The Sun reminds us of our goal—to spotlight the answers, to make the unknown known. That sounds awfully lofty and in saying it I could easily be accused of the kind of pretense that I’m always criticizing in exclusively spiritual traditions. I don’t mean it to be lofty at all. In fact, it’s the base requirement—and, frankly, if you achieve no other goal as a diviner, I think you’re doing pretty well. Too many folks get stuck in the esoteric, in the arcane, and clarity never arises because it’s mired in so much stuff. Clarity is the goal. Of course, one hopes for accuracy—but I’ve also documented my feelings on that. (See my books for deeper explorations of that topic. For our purposes here, accuracy shouldn’t be the thing that readers are worried about at first. We should be focused on clarity. Accuracy comes with practice and cannot be gaged easily because life isn’t a straight line.) The sun tells us: make things clear, visible; make them easy to see; make them bright; bring the light. (Here I must comment on Lucifer’s role as “light bringer” and how he existed as an entity before he was transformed by the church into the devil.) 

How do we do that? The rest of the cards show us!

Let’s broaden out to the Seven of Swords (Futility) and the Ten of Cups (Satiety). The Seven of Swords offers us inner insight because we’re pausing to assess our mental state or how we’re thinking. The title of futility annoys me. It means “ineffective” or “unimportant.” Suppose we say in this case that too much inner reflection is futile, ineffective. For a cerebral over thinker (like me) that’s not easy to sit with, which is one reason I’m sitting with it. (It also happens to be a trend in this blog, which I think highlights how far away I am from it.) Now, let’s pause and consider the Ten of Cups (Satiety). Tens are the climax of their suit. You can think of them as abundant (each new number following the ace adding to the suit) or as drained (every new number from the ace depleting the suit). The word “satiety” suggests that we’ve had enough—which, good or bad, is the salient point here. We can have had enough because we’ve reached the amount that we can take (we’re full) or because we’re over it. In the case of the Ten of Cups, we’re full of water—which makes me think about having to pee. That’s not really relevant, but it just popped into my head. 

Combining the two, and remembering that we’re looking at advice on how to make our readings clearer and easier to “see” (read: understand), we’ve got the intellect (swords) and the senses (cups) working together. We’ve got the introspection of the seven and the totality of the cups. We’ve also got “futility” and “satiety.” The cards aren’t a natural blend in this context, but of course we need to make them work together. We could read this as: “It’s futile to ever think you can have enough.” But, as the kids say, that’s mid. We can reassess (seven) how we give voice to (swords) the many, many sensations (Ten of Cups) that arrive in a reading. That’s definitely getting closer to the topic for sure. But it’s not quite right. Sometimes in readings we have to keep digging. This is one of those times. Let’s pause with these two cards and broaden again. 

The final two cards are the Three of Cups (abundance—a word I used earlier) and The Empress. Threes are expansive, so abundance makes sense. And of course we know what cups are. The Empress is also an emotional being, but a driven one, a powerful one. She also happens to be a three. So we’ve got two threes! The senses (cups) expand (three) a lot (two threes) when we empower (Empress) them. This is a theme I keep finding in these blogs—that one has to let go of the logical and give way to the senses. The Seven of Swords, as the only “logical” card, suggests that it is futile to rely on that part of us. But I know that’s not the answer to the question because we need to communicate clearly. So the reading can’t be about how logic and language are futile. (This is one reason why people get so hung up on the keywords—they often don’t apply. Here I’m making myself apply it, but if this were a real reading for a client, at this point I’d probably recognize that it’s futile to incorporate the word futile in this reading.) Because of that, I’m returning to the seven for a moment. (When I’m reading for a client, this is all happening mentally—which is a swords-y experience.)

What are other associations with the Seven of Swords? Deception is one, when we think of the PCS image. But what she was really drawing was “Unstable Effort.” The futility in a way becomes about how futile it is to base divination in logic, in the sense that it is objectively an illogical thing to do. Or an “unstable effort.” The rational can only go so far and must be partnered with a major flood of intuition (cups/water). This is a trend I keep banging up against in these readings, and I don’t really believe it. It’s funny that I keep coming up with it. Actually, this card has been dogging me in a few ways in the last few weeks. I think it wants to show me something I can’t seem to see quite yet, but it keeps coming up. Is it futile trying to understand this? Or, is it futile to divorce our thoughts/words (swords) and feelings (cups)? I’m struggling here!

In the e-book I released recently, Thoth on Earth: The Harris-Crowley Deck for Modern Fortune Tellers, I call this card “the over-thinker over-thinking.” Which may be exactly what I’m doing right now. Laughy face emoji. But I also talk about how water and air are inseparable. Because air as we understand it here on earth (and divination tends to be somewhat geocentric) is oxygen, and oxygen is one of the things that makes up water, we can’t have water without it. Is it possible, then, that our thoughts and feelings aren’t different at all? I always say one reflects the other. We think and feel or feel and think. They dictate each other. Is that the point? Because of this, there is no difference and so the feelings we feel in a reading are also thoughts and ideas that need to be expressed. 

Which is a pretty deep concept, when you think(!) about it. 

Yoav Ben Doc, whose work I greatly admired, said in Tarot: The Open Reading that everything occurring during a reading means something. I frequently admonish folks that the reader isn’t the oracle, but I do say that the reader is part of the oracle. —Hold please. 

This is where I stopped last night because my DoorDash order arrived. Later, as I was reading in bed and finding the stuff I was reading inscrutable (related to esoteric tarot—well written, but I cannot make myself care about this stuff), I realize it was futile for me to jam my head with “scholarship,” when I always say that divination is about life. And while this is a spread of mostly cups cards (joined by The Empress, who is somewhat watery), what water does is flow. Like life. It actually reminded me why my style is so down and dirty, because the more you get lost in the intellectual murk, the harder it can be to read about life. We forget it. 

And that’s actually a really dangerous aspect of both cups and swords. We can literally float away. In fact, the lack of earth in this reading reminds me that it’s not so much about logic; it’s about literacy. By which I mean taking the intellectual and making it understandable to anyone. When air lacks any practicality, it does become somewhat useless because it’s indulging in its own kind of seven-y naval gazing. I’ve written about this a few times, recently—how the introspection of the seven is good sometimes and sometimes it’s naval gazing and self-absorption. Without grounding, air gets flighty, loopy, and in love with its own wit. Much the way a Waite or a Crowley or a Mathers did their own work. In fact, the Golden Dawn’s own insistence that the intellect is really the ego and must be overcome in order to reach the heights of divinity is rather amusing when you think about it. The creators of the Golden Dawn along with its two most famous acolytes were incredibly arrogant! The Golden Dawn splintered because of the egos of the men running it. (There were a few women’s egos, too, but they were nowhere near as destructive to the order.) Why, it’s almost as if . . . getting caught in all that arcana actually takes you away from divinity . . . . It’s almost as though an environment full of editorial cockblocking and pontificating somehow separates the self from what makes it spiritual. 

(Of course, we can’t blame the Golden Dawn for eating itself alive. First of all, the ouroboros is one of its favorite symbols. Yes, infinity; but also a snake eating its own ass. Further, the older I get, the more I realize that all power corrupts. I haven’t seen anyone who has been immune from this. Whether it’s formerly progressive politicos who, we soon discover, are taking in dough from super pacs to the arrogance of CEO’s, even people who are normally quite grounded can be poisoned by power.)

Point is, the futility of the Seven of Swords doesn’t have to do with logic; it has to do with un-tethered intellectualism and cold reason. When we look inside ourselves intellectually, we may do so with the kind of cold, clear-eyed “objectivity” of a scientist (the Six of Swords is called “science” in the Thoth decks—“earned success” in the GD traditions), and — wait for it — that’s not who we truly are. When we look at ourselves only through the lens of one of the suits, we’re going to find ourselves wanting because we’re made up of every suit. We can’t fully be the suit of swords because we (pardon the expression) contain multitudes. When we judge ourselves (or our work) purely though this lens, we aren’t looking at ourselves accurately, either; we’re looking at ourselves as though our goal should only be cold, clear-eyed, somewhat emotionless critique. 
 
If you’ve read my book Your Tarot Toolkit, you’ll have seen my self-reflection assessment. This is designed so that readers have an objective way to view their readings that doesn’t rely on the client’s feedback or our own biased judgments. The checklist comes from my theory that if you focus on giving a clear, logical, appropriate reading that both answers the question and makes sense given the cards drawn, you can rest assured the reading was good. And I still believe that. But thinking in terms of this Seven of Swords, which, frankly, is taking up undue space in this spread (and my life, currently), it also suggests that a barometer of how how well we read is the feeling we get about it. 

Honestly, I don’t agree with that. While clear-eyed objectivity can be cruel and (maybe even more important) nearly impossible (leading to grand frustration), relying on our “feelings,” too, is problematic, because our feelings are bias. Or, you could say, the come from our bias. Our reactions to things are formed through our bias for or against them (or our indifference). This is one reason I’m so emphatic that readers should have some foundational learning to support their readings. The purely (supposedly) “intuitive” reader (a reader with no actual foundational learning) can’t demonstrate that they’re not just reading from confirmation bias, say, or otherwise framing the cards in a way that reflects what they feel rather than what the reading is saying. Readers who rely only on their feelings wind up not being able to read when they don’t “feel” like it, which is difficult to deal with when you’re reading for others. We read when clients want us, not when we feel like it. (Of course, there’s no requirement anyone read for others.)

The Sun card makes steam of water, evaporating it, and converting it into “air” (in the esoteric sense). It is the combination of air and water (intellect and instinct) that makes good readings, and it’s futile to deny it. Because the seven and the Ten of Cups directly flank The Sun, it blends them—making steam. The Three of Cups and the Empress take that steam and make something cool out of it, something expansive, something creative. This makes me think of the way myth can take a banal idea (the change of seasons) and make it into an epic tale (Persephone’s story), illuminating it and poeticizing it, while also make it understandable for the “masses.” Fairy tales, after all, were written to teach children “morality”—what is “good” and “bad” and who to be afraid of (generally anyone “other”). (We still have these lessons impacting us today, which is why anyone who was obsessed with Disney Princesses since the release of The Little Mermaid likely has a fucked up relationship to relationships.) 

The myth takes the intellectual and transforms it into the emotional. And as an adult learning specialist, I can tell you that the best way to get people to remember dry (intellectual) information is to create a link to the emotional. In divination, we already have the benefit of the topic being important to the client—but it does make sense that we might want to try to blend the intellectual and emotional into a “myth” that is both clear (understandable) and felt (emotional). And, ultimately, that’s (I think) what this reading is telling us. Or me. As the Seven of Swords has been following me me for a few weeks, now. Hopefully I’ve released it from its spell. 

A read of one’s own
Whenever I get a message like the messy one above, I have a tendency to try to fundamentally alter my entire worldview. Like, somehow the reading tells me that I’ve been “doing it wrong.” And why shouldn’t I think that way? Most of what we see on Social Media is someone telling us we’re doing something wrong. It’s rather a litany of abasement. Let’s think, instead, of evolution. How do we evolve into a more integrated reader, one for whom the logical and emotional are united in service of a clear, impactful, resonant answers. 

1. Shuffle the cards and draw from 1-3 cards representing the best aspects of our logical/intellectual aspects. 
2. Draw from 1-3 cards representing the best of our emotional/instinctual aspects. 
3. Draw 1-3 cards representing how to integrate the two into exceptionally good readings. 

Note: If you’re anything like me, this overall concept can make you feel like you need to rethink your entire methodology. Try not to go to extremes. It’s not what we’re “wrong”; it’s that we want to evolve.  

A quick example: My first set of three, representing the best of my intellectual/logical aspect, are: Death, Four of Swords, Four of Wands. This is an easy one: I cut through staid thoughts and dullness (the four of wands is a fairly dull fire). The keywords on the two fours are “truce” (swords) and “completion” (wands). In fact, the Death card smacks both of those concepts: no, this isn’t a pause, and no you’re not done. My mentality makes it possible for me to get through “stuck” perceptions and ruts. 

My second set of three, representing the best of my emotional/instinctual self, are: Adjustment (Justice), Knight (King) of Wands, The Fool. (There’s a connection with two fire cards—that may mean something, but it may not. There’s also a lot of majors, now: Death, Adjustment, The Fool. Also maybe meaningful.) Let’s see: My instincts are, in fact, the opposite of staid (the fours above) while being quite stable. The Adjustment card (I’m using the Thoth again) has quickly become one of my favorites, because it represents the imperceptible-yet-constant movements happening to keep things on course. The Knight of Wands brings all the energy into the equation, and the complete lack of expectations in The Fool. (I often read The Fool as “foolish,” but here we’re looking for its best aspects.) The Fool is often thought of as curious. No. Curiosity implies expectations. That’s the realm of the pages. The Fool has no expectations and so can’t wonder about what’s going to happen. The Fool simply looks at things and sees them as they are without assigning motive, meaning, or intent. It sees things and looks at them as though for the first time. 

The energy of this trio, thanks to the Knight of Wands, carries us from right to left. The Knight fervently drags The Fool toward Adjustment. Adjustment synthesizes all these various impulses, kind of the way the brain does for us as we, say, navigate uneven terrain. The way our body responds to bumps in the road and divots and we can (generally) keep ourselves walking. It does that automatically. In fact, if you try to think of it you’ll likely notice that getting across this bumpy path is harder now. When we draw attention to it, it becomes labored, effortful, tiring; when you simply let your body do what it knows how to do, it generally makes it easier to navigate this uneven path. Adjustment reminds me that I’m always responding and reacting to the information and when I’m at my best, I approach the reading with energy but without any expectation. 

The final set of three suggests how to integrate those two elements. In this case, I pulled: Two of Pentacles (Change), Princess (Page) of Disks (Pentacles/Coins), Ace of Cups. Where a lot of advice readings fall down is the lack of action items that are actually doable. When we’re giving advice readings, and I hate to pull from my corporate life but there’s value here, we should be thinking in terms of legit goal setting. SMART goals. S = Specific; M = Measurable; A = Actionable; R = Reasonable; T = Timely or time-bound. We should be able to see the behavior and the results of the behavior; it should be doable in the amount of time we’ve set and within reason for our abilities. This is what advice readings should offer. So that’s what I’m attempting to achieve here. Luckily, we have two Disks/Pentacles cards, so we’re firmly rooted in the earth. In fact, here’s all the earth we didn’t find in our earlier reading. 

The Two of Disks (Change) is an integrative card, because twos draw things to it. But how do we do that? If we think of earth/disks, we’re talking about application. What do I mean by that? In the emotional realm, we simply feel; in the intellectual realm, we think. In earth, we do (frequently in fire/wands, too). This means that we have to apply what we’re attempting to do into the real world. This is one of those times it’s actually difficult to explain what I mean. But, OK: the things we do intellectually and emotionally just kind of happen without us noticing. Consider your mood at any given time. Likely it was arrived at without a lot of intent on your part. How are you feeling right now? You probably didn’t decide to feel that way. If your mind drifted while reading this, you didn’t ask it to; it just did that. With earth, now, we’re noticing. We drawing our attention (the two’s attractiveness) to what we’re doing. Which is a change (the keyword on the card) because we’re just learning to notice how we’re navigating a reading. This is intensified by the Princess of Disks, who (unlike The Fool) is curious. She pays attention because she expects something to happen. Now, she may not know what it is—probably she doesn’t. But she has an expectation that something will happen. So she’s on the lookout for it. Unlike the Knight/Prince, she isn’t going hunting; she’s just noticing. Consider the way Harris’s Princess gazes at the disk in her hand (or even the way PCS’s Page of Pentacles simply holds up and gazes at her Penty—a term I just coined [see what I did this?] to mean “pentacle”). 

What are we noticing? We’ll know it when we feel it. The Ace of Cups. We return to the senses, now, but we’re paying attention to them. Each little feeling (one/ace and water/cups) can tell us something. 

In the blog post, you’ll note that I started to talk about Yoav Ben Dov’s sense that nothing happening in a reading happens without reason or meaning. I got distracted from that, but what I was going to say is that the sensations we experience during a reading are worth paying attention to. If we start to feel antsy (“I can’t wait for this reading to be over!”), excited, cranky, defensive, pay attention to those things. What are they telling (implied swords) you about the reading? Let’s say that our emotions become signals during a reading. Our emotions are signals to us generally. They tell us when some part of us needs care. But in a reading, perhaps they tell us something more external. Perhaps they’re relevant. 

Something I didn’t mean to do in this reading but did was wind up with a nine card box—because I drew three cards for each question. So, let’s consider them as columns, too. Why not? My first column is made up of Death (the thinking row), Adjustment (the emo row), and Two of Disks (integration row). This whole fukkin column is about change, transformation. And it may mean that these changes, these evolutions, are inevitable (Death) once you become aware they’re necessary. In a way, Death is the most trustworthy card because it’s the only one we can count on. Trust, then, the process (Adjustment/Two of Disks). 

The middle column is: Four of Swords, Knight of Wands, Princess of Disks. Harris’s Knight of Wands rides up to the Death card, positionally, so there’s a connection between those two. It’s almost like he bypasses the Four of Swords and goes right for Death. (“Your little knifes aren’t good enough. Give me that big fukkin scythe!”) I hear this row saying, “You’ve got the brains (Four of Swords) to count on (fours are stable). You’ve got the experience (knights correspond with kings in this deck) and the curiosity (princess/page). Again, the influence of Death’s inevitability are important. “Don’t think too hard about it.” Fours sustain, so they can also suggest thinking a lot. It’s not the same as overthinking, which is more active. The four is more like “dwelling.” Recall that the “truce” is a break, a stoppage, a halting. Of what? War. Which is action. It’s pointing to the fact that the four is an inaction, and dwelling on things is kind of inactive thought. Don’t linger on the idea too long. Don’t overthink it. Be energized in approach (Knight of Wands) and elegantly open (Princess of Disks—admittedly a value judgement on my part, but the card is stunning).  

The final column consists of: Four of Wands, The Fool, Ace of Cups. The Four of Wands (Completion) is sustained, again. Sustained energy (fire) in this case. It’s another keyword I just don’t like, but I’m trying to reconcile with my way of reading. In this particular case, I don’t think it’s particularly relevant, but I may come back to it. This card represents, again, the thinky, logical aspects because it comes from the first row. Actually, OK: “your education is complete”: the Four of Wands in the realm of thinking—the stability of the four, the sustained effort of the fire, and the fact that I can obsess (which, if you think about it, takes the passive “dwelling on” of the Four of Swords and translates it into the fiery realm—actively dwelling) on trying to be something better, to learn more, to not settle. Just go in without expectations (Fool) and see what you feel (Ace of Cups). Again, it’s a way of noticing. And this reading seems so much to simply be about noticing, which—honestly—is a thing I’m not particularly good at. The thing about The Fool is that he’s present. He’s never anywhere other than where he is. 

We can’t work with our intuition if we don’t notice it. Notice more, think less. Experience, rather than interpret. Notice. Feel. Communicate. Don’t use the swords at their coldest, use them at their most generous. 
    
Which makes total sense to me. 
    
Aaaand scene. ​

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