Still Life with Tarot

Remember a few weeks ago, when I posted about The Tower and catching all the new hip trendy viruses out there ? And then fell off the face of the blogosphere ? That silence was another virus. So while I have a long list of interesting Tarot topics for writing, stringing two sentences together in a concise informative way is not so easy these days.

One thing on my mind was my year’s reading for 2007.

Throughout January I thought of The Devil Reversed. The need to be gentle with ourselves, to admit our vulnerability, our human frailty, to not expect immediate fulfillment and perfection in our resolutions, to know that change takes time and effort.

Judging from my doctor’s report on the viral season in America, I bet I am not the only human who experienced January as a month of rest not a month of renewed effort. And I did feel - with all that time to rest and no energy to work as if my inmost worse habits and thoughts revealed themselves in all their glory.

And now in February, the Emperor. All that Devilish analysis last month brought a commitment to more structure and a constant evaluation of social contracts and roles.

I not only experienced this on a metaphysical level, but also participated in an evaluation of an organization, its purpose, finances, mission and how given its resources that mission can be achieved. I even spent some time reading, editing and printing out new business contracts. And the household Emperor, also known as my husband, kicked off February by evaluating his position at his job in light of another job offer. Discussions of our day to day life, how work effects it and how it effects work reigned for the first seven days of the month.

On one hand, I see the blossoming of the Empress in two weeks, fecund and rampant as she is, and I feel encouraged. On the other hand, I’ve got these two more weeks in February to bring my body, my family’s bodies, our household and routines into the order that will survive the flourishing of all our creative efforts.

Now to find the number of the guy who tilled our garden last year …

Setting a time frame for a card reading is incredibly important, especially if you read for yourself.  Time gives us a sense of scale. Let’s take The Tower for instance. In it’s very simplest interpretation The Tower is Catastrophe with a Capital C.
The Tower can signify escaping from your vehicle as it bursts into a flaming inferno or the natural disaster that drops the neighbor’s fifty year old pine tree through your roof and all your treasured possessions.

Does this mean it’s time to duck and cover everytime you see The Tower ?

Of course not. First of all, it is almost impossible to predict what The Tower will be. If The Tower drives you to hide in your home for months on end, you’ll probably discover your home has mold and you have mold allergies. Not to mention the loss of income from lack of work.

While I am not inclined to anxiety over The Tower as a subject of meditation or appearing representing my psyche or even in the sphere of relationships, The Tower in an ambiguous position of What’s Coming Next leaves me looking for pianos hovering over my head just like anyone else. Take for instance my 38th Birthday Reading, which had just that. It took a lot of discipline to even write down and study the other cards in the reading.

However, scale is important. And while timing a reading to three months or six months doesn’t create immunity from falling pianos, it does mean when that time frame passes you have a clear idea what The Tower was and you’re not spending the next two or three or five years wondering when the pine tree or the piano is going to drop.
As it turns out for me, it was lack of immunity The Tower defined. Since October I’ve been prey to every virus in a hundred mile radius. While that’s not comparable to some other truly frightening and traumatic experiences in my life, during the time frame I gave my birthday reading, the thing that has shaken my life to its core and left me needing to reshape and rebuild has been the inability to become and stay well.

Knowing The Tower would be present in my life caused me to question many experiences in that light. Getting turned down for a festival was hard. Major structural shifts in an organization created a fair amount of stress. But I was also able to keep perspective on the fact that they were not life changing events, because I was thinking in terms of The Tower. It made it easier to get through those days.
Taken with a sense of time which lends scale and taken as a scale to measure the troubles along our way, The Tower, appearing in the future, can remind us to go bravely forth.  Pianos and all.

As a teen I hated July. I used to write about hating July, late at night on a beat up old typewriter because without air conditioning I treasured the hours after midnight as the only cool ones. July, I wrote, is when all our losses return to us with the oppressive humidity and heat. And that is much what The Tower Reversed says about July. What I didn’t understand as a teen is we can grow from our losses, we can grow from healing from them, but we can only heal from them when we understand them. Looking at the preceding cards, The Star, Judgement Reversed and The Moon, I feel the losses we’ll visit in July are not so much or only our unique and personal traumas, but also an awakening to some of the larger losses happening on our planet this year.

The Sun will come out in August, completing the triumvirate of celestial bodies in the Major Arcana. In August, we’ll all grow by doing what brings us joy and what we find easy. When we bring our gifts to the world - whether it’s perfect pitch or rocket science - we expand and the world expands with us. I love this Sun card, because instead of a person or people, the artist chose two robins as the harbingers of doing what comes naturally.

Because the cards iof Illumination - The Star, the Moon and The Sun - and to a some degree The Tower as it was originally conceived as a Bolt of Lightning - represent different form of knowledge and learning, the Summer feels like one of discoveries.

After Labor Day, not only should you put your white shoes away but also your fears. First though, you have to identify them. With Strength Reversed, we need to sit back before acting and ask what motivates our fight and flight mechanisms. We can’t act with assurance until we know. Luckily September, as a harvest season, is a time when we coast on reaping what we sowed earlier in the year.  But as the harvest progresses and winter preparations begin, we’ll need to act again.

October brings winnowing with Justice Reversed. Once we know what feeds our fears, we can examine how this influences our thinking. Using Justice’s sword and clarity of division, because Tarot’s Justice is not at all blind, we have to slice and dice through our misconceptions and superstitions, our severity with ourselves, our resulting lack of mercy for others. With Justice Reversed, we recognize that we don’t live in a vaccuum. We live in a society, we live under governments, we live among people who mean us well and people who mean us harm and people who could care less. All of this influences us and our options and thus our choices on a daily basis. When we recognize that we are not completely in control, then we can take better command of our destinies instead of constantly hitting against obstacles, like a  repeat felon who cannot quite grasp that the law applies to him.

Though American Thanksgiving is often the celebration of overindulgence, it will fall at the end of a month of moderation. Zerner Farber’s Temperence is headed by a clock, reminding us all things in due time, to each thing a season and as I like to say - Time is the gift. It keeps everything from happening all at once.  Temperence does the same. One meaning of Temperence, the balance between heaven and earth, is expressed here through the traditional angel of Temperence pouring  from a pitcher held aloft  into a bowl water being presented to a woman without wings. When all of our earhtly i’s are crossed and our earthly t’s dotted there is ample room to take care of our spiritual well being; when we turn our attention to our spiritual well being, our earthly life falls into place with sudden ease. So is November turning into December.

The Hierophant rules December. I could talk about the Hierophant all day. And perhaps I will next week. Suffice it to say - The Hierophant tells us to find a discipline and stick to it. A hard message for the socially demanding month December’s become, but with so many spiritual celebrations occuring during the season of lights, it may be an old discipline that speaks or calls to you again. Whether it’s keeping an Advent calendar, lighting a Menorrah, fasting if Ramadan falls thereabouts or keeping the all night vigil of Solstice.  As well teachers of Buddhism, yoga and other meditative forms remind us that these practises can help us navigate the pressures of the commercial holiday season with greater peace and ease. Finding the new in the old is an apt message for the end of the year and the celebrations of renewal.

My New Year’s Day post was shaping up to be about the challenges of year long readings. After a few paragraphs, I took a deep breath. While everything I had written was true - and I’ll happily share it with you some other time - writing about the mechanics of reading and the limits of some forms left me feeling mechanical and limited. And while I do my own year long inquiries on my birthday, this is the day when we’ve all agreed - Gregorianly - to start fresh. Couldn’t I come up with something fresh to write ?
When I started teaching Tarot classes, I expanded my collection of decks, so I shuffled through my wicker basket for a seldom used deck and picked the Zerner-Farber. All the cards were originally done in fabric and other fibers with generous stitching and beading to create resplendent images, many unique in their interpretation. I shuffled, I looked through the deck and I thought not - what do I really want to know, but what do my readers and my clients - if they’re reading - really want to know this year ? That I can answer. In this post.

Because the answer had to be universal not individual, I laid The World on my table. To keep things simple and familiar, I decided to use an age old format, the year by month as a circle around the center card. And then I did something I never ever do, I took all the minor arcana and court cards and put them aside. Because if you’re going to enter uncharted territory why not go all the way ? Given the parameters, the question became apparent (and paradoxically the answer.)
In each month of 2007, where is the space for the most growth ?

We begin at the twelve o-clock position, that would be midnight last night with the month of January, brought to us by The Devil Reversed, an apt card for all of us makers of New Year’s Resolutions. We can’t make resolutions without looking long and hard at what is working and what is not. Making a resolution means we want to change something that we believe is in our power to change and that means it was always in our power to change and up until this moment we haven’t. Very few realizations leave us so vulnerable, so bare and naked and tender before ourselves and before others if we choose to share our struggle with them. In the Zerner Farber deck The Devil is a mask and when the card is reversed and the mask is removed we see all the ways our flaw caused us or others stress or pain or inconvenience. We are determined to remedy this. But change one thing and we change everything. Resolutions and vows can become quickly overwhelming, but instead of treating ourselves as vulnerable and tender and in need of encouragement, we berate ourselves for the failure to change enough quickly enough or consistently enough. Where we can grow this January with The Devil Reversed is recognizing that forgiveness is the friend not the enemy of resolve.

February is ruled by The Emperor, the builder of foundations. The Emperor is all the laws of the father, social contracts, government of nations and countries and counties but also families. I am always reminded of that archaic slang of “governor” for “father”. When The Emperor appears we are called to assume authority and responsibility. If we don’t like the way our government behaves, if we don’t like the way we interact with our families, then we have to act change the existing laws and the unspoken rules. February is a short month, so we probably cannot end poverty of resources or emotions in every venue in those 28 days, but we can define what contracts serve us and others best and which serve us poorly. February is the last of the comtemplative months before we leave our hearths for longer sunnier days. The creations of the Spring and Summer will be stronger if we begin with a firm foundation in what we will and will not do.
March brings Spring and Spring brings The Empress, the awakening of the earth. Imagination and vision becomes manifest with the flowers. Where I grew up March is the months that smells of the dirt turned by the plow. The Empress demands we get out of heads and into our bodies as the increasing sun calls us out of our houses. March looks easy. We can grow and expand in March by giving reign to what we love.

The Star graces April. Our intuition guides us. Coincidences, synchronicity, a song stuck in our head. The Star is clarity in the midst of the confusion. Clarity is not always directive. Quite often the experience of The Star is one of recognition not decision. We can navigate by The Star as our ancestors navigated by the stars, but the drawing of the chart is not the making of the voyage.

In May, Judgement Reversed brings us down to earth and reminds us that while we are the same stuff as the stars, we are also the same stuff as our next door neighbor and the person who cut us off in traffic. Our vision of our work here on this earth may be the things of which Nobel Prizes are made, but in May it’s time to recognize our limits as well as our talents and get down to the work of what we can do instead of what we can imagine. There are always fine things to be done, in our homes and our offices, in our classrooms and communities. The call to responsibility is daily and in the details and the divine is expressed in each and every one of us. At the root of all great and small callings is the remembrance of that shown here in a giant hand reaching up from beneath green rolling hills and the hand of an angel reaching down to touch those same hills.
Under The Moon in June we’ll spoon and croon - deep in our subconscious where both castles and dragons lie. I never see The Moon that I don’t advise keeping a dream journal and mining the rich stories we tell in our sleep for a better understanding of our waking world. With The Star in April and The Moon in June, the crops sown this season are within us more than without us.
One of the things I like about the Zerner Farber deck is the lack of crayfish or lobster on The Moon. While The Moon is associated with the astrological sign Cancer, crabs are not crayfish or lobsters and I always find the shellfish imagery more confusing than naught. This Moon cards gives us a crescent moon shedding a tear and surrounded by wispy clouds while a girl looks to a manor in the distance and her dog looks away from it.

And with that, I am concluding the first six months of the year 2007. I didn’t expect one of the challenges of this challenge to be staying awake long enough to write it. Or starting a fire, which I also failed to do three times in the midst of the composition.

In some systems of Tarot reading, the Major Arcana follows an order from 1-21 with the 0 thrown in for good measure somewhere. If a card of lower number appears after a card of higher number, then there’s been a regression on the journey to enlightenment.

I’m never sure what to think of that.
If at 33 I have attained The Hanged Man and Temperence and then I decide to have a baby and The Empress appears hailing all the new creations emerging on the earth, have I regressed ?

I tend to think of the Major Arcana visually as a spiral. There is a beginning and an end, but everything is connected and like a spider in her web we can move easily from the center to the outer edges and back again.

And then there is the matter of The World. You know - gnosis, enlightenment, samadhi, transcendence for some, immanence for others, powerful in any language. Some do work, progressing through disciplines and practise to acheive such a state and to stay as close to it as humanly possible.
And others have The World thrust upon them. They walk around in a porous state, amazed by every breath, by the connection of all things, a little elated, greatly awed, and perhaps a little frightened. And then they lapse back into laundry or driving the car or that exam or appointment. Or they forget the exam and the appointment and lapse hours or day later into apologies and catching up.

The unbiddeness and lack of knowledge makes it no less an occurence of The World and the sinking back into life here in this body on this earth with the memory of the experience is one that can move a soul ever closer to their ideals not farther away. Maybe it is ever a case of one step forward, two steps back. Or maybe it’s the dance that we were all born to do.

I just discovered that if I’m at a loss for what to do for a belated post, I can always draw a card.

Today’s card for me - the 3 of Wands Reversed. Ain’t it the truth ?

Wands are desires and passions, ambitions and actions. 3 s are dynamic. The 3 of Wands is a world set in motion by acting on one’s desires toward a goal or goals. And I’ve got a bad case this twilight of “what have I wrought?” Everything is in motion, house cleaning, my cooperative job at my daughter’s school and seasonal celebrations. There’s not one thing I can say is done and I can’t get out of a bit of it even if I wanted. And that’s the trick of the reversal, the 3 of Wands Reversed says - So you set all these things in motion and you don’t know how it will end up or how you’ll feel when it ends up. Anticipation is replaced by doubt, but doesn’t eliminate the necessity of following through. And actions engaged always result in consequences - favorable or not.
Though the Winter Tarot Season is one of the things underway, the lovely thing about being a professional Tarot reader is that  reading cards is actually restful. Each Tarot reading is a world in itself.
As long as the cards lie on the table before me, I can forget the many stages of the laundry and the gifts shipped direct that now need wrapping, the learning curve of the new work I’ve taken on and how did we end up celebrating three spiritual traditions anyway.

Each Tarot reading becomes a time of peace and contemplation, a time for studying the patterns of what makes us human and what puts us in touch with the Divine, a time removed from time.

How fortunate I am that my work requires this in light of my 3 of Wands Reversed week.

I’m having a 5 of Wands kind of week. In some traditions 5 is a number of unity or even eros. It other traditions 5 is a number of strength and in some interpretations this became force, victory or battle. I think of the 5s as the struggling with others than can lead us closer to unity. Or farther from it. Not so great for my week, but wonderful as a subject.

Let’s take the 5 of Wands and look at it in  the 5 different contexts of my favorite reading the Gypsy.
The iconography of the 5 of Wands often shows a group of people at cross purposes. They are either hitting each other with sticks on purpose in a battle or they are hitting each other with sticks because they are trying to acheive a similiar goal and getting in each other’s way. Wands are our ambitions, our desires, our passions and our actions.

When I see the 5 of Wands in the column of cards designating the present, I can simply say - Hey look, people in your life are not cooperating with each other. They either can’t agree on an end or they can’t agree on a means. When I see the 5 of Wands in a column of cards designating partnership, I can say the exact same thing.

But what happens when the 5 of Wands appears in the column of self. A possibility is a similiar interpretation. People in your life are not cooperating with you and it is effecting your sense of self. It’s dominating your thoughts or keeping you from moving on with your own intent. However, the 5 of Wands can also represent conflicts in the psyche. Your own passions and ambitions may be at odds. Or your actions are not expressive of your actual desires.

It can be easy to confuse the self with the internal action of meditation, but when the 5 of Wands appears in the meditation column it poses a question or two or three or even five. Questions derived from the 5 of Wands might be:
Why are the people around you not cooperating with each other and you ? Do they have different goals ? Different desires ? What part do you play in this ?
And finally, what happens when the 5 of Wands appears in the column for recommended actions, Yang, where to put your energy ? The first time I ever saw that I was puzzled. Why would the cards say to put energy and effort into clashing with others ?

And then I recognized we shouldn’t always cooperate. Sometimes resistance is a good thing. Sometimes we need to stand up for our passions. Sometimes we need conflict for a group to establish its motives. Wouldn’t it be awful to discover too late that you were never working toward the same goal at all, because no one ever pushed the point ? Sometimes we do need to take our ball and go home. There are times when going along to keep the peace doesn’t serve our needs or the needs of others.

I tend to read from Tarot decks based on the old Renaissance style decks with no scenarios depicted on the Minor Arcana. I see the Four of Coins and it’s four coins and a number four. Fours represent foundations and stability and coins represent labor, fruits of labor and sometimes health. I extrapolate from there.
When Pamela Colman Smith drew the 4 of Coins, renamed the 4 of Pentacles, she drew a king sitting on a throne, with countryside and city in the background. On his crown is a pentacle, beneath each foot is a pentacle and in his arms is a pentacle. Being more intuitive than calculating, Smith didn’t take notes so we don’t know what she intended to portray. Arthur Waite wrote “The surety of possessions, cleaving to that which one has, gift, legacy, inheritance.”

In a recent class, a student speculated on the relationship of Smith’s king to the sacred king of the land, a popular mythology among Waite and Smith’s contemporaries. That creates a powerful connection to number 4 in the Major Arcana, The Emperor as well. However this is not the prevailing explication of the icon.
Sometime in the 20th Century, the 4 of Coins or Pentacles became popularly known as the Miser Card, described as selfish, possessive, greedy, controlling. In a recent adaption, the king’s stance and dramatic expression communicates nothing so much as constipation. Though the miser interpretation is fairly comtemporary, it’s become predominant.

The disagreement is not whether the 4 of Coins or Pentacles is a card of financial stability, but rather how we view or value that.
As a young woman reading the Waite Smith I leaned toward the miser camp, on this card and several others. I was impressed in one deck to see the devil on The Devil card replaced by a trunk of jewels and coins.
After years of watching underemployment, lack of health insurance and other financial stresses impact people’s overall well being and their ability to bring their gifts to the world, I sit firmly as the 4 of Coins king in my belief that a little fiscal surety goes a long way. Prior to the trend of reading Smith’s pictures for deeper meanings, the 4 of Coins was almost universally a card of benefit and that is how most folks receive the word that their financial position is either stable or stabilizing.

Now what they do with that I leave to the other 77 cards.

(As an interesting aside, Rachel Pollack gives the miser meaning in her work, Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom. But in the design of the Vertigo deck on which she advised, the king/miser is gone and the card is the simple four coins again. Writing is added to imply that stability can come from creativity and creative work.)

On Wednesday, we’ll have a daylong visit from one of my 5-year-old daughter’s favorite friends. Just last Spring, we attended a birthday party at her house and the little girls all came in costume. Some were the standard fare these days, puffy with a Disney label. Others were homemade concoctions of tulle, velvet, beads and pipe cleaners. The party treasure hunt yielded yet more mardi gras beads, rhinestone sunglasses and sparkling disco head bands. By the time we reached the last party game, every outfit had evolved into something stunning and new.

For the final activity each girl had a marbled print balloon tied to her ankle. The object: to stomp the other contestants’ balloons while protecting your own. With great enthusiasm and surprising lack of tears balloons were busted and girls eliminated until it came down to three.
The three remaining preschoolers in all their best finery resumed competition by chasing each other until they spiralled into a circle.

Round and round and round they went, beads and scarves and hair flying, balloons bobbling on their ankles, round and round and round, wild grins on their faces, gleams in their eyes, laughter in the air, faster and faster.
Their dance was not a model of the daily revolution of the earth or the orderly spinning of the planets around their sun. Calamity or time would bring their spinning to an end. The party favors would be offered, car seats buckled, finery tossed in the dirty clothes, dinner served, nightly baths and bedtime rituals faithfully administered.

But none of that mattered. All that mattered was the immediate joy.

I thought to myself, now if only I owned a video camera, I could have filmed this as the perfect illustration of the Three of Cups.

Tarot cards are like potato chips or my mother’s buttermilk biscuits. I can’t have just one.

When I practise daily, I always lay out two cards. I like the tension. I like the dialogue. Two always gives me something to ponder. While one sometimes leaves me with a feeling of - Yes, well, tell me something I don’t already know.

For example, let’s say I turned up the 8 of Wands. The 8 of Wands tells me that I am in constant motion, acting rapidly and decisively in everything I do, compelled forward toward my goals and desires. All of them. And maybe some other folks goals and desires too. With discernment out the window, it can all be for good or for naught.
The 8 of Wands is what I call a descriptive card. If I’m having an 8 of Wands kind of day or week or life, it’s hard to miss. Clients tend to feel the same way about it. What I want to know is where all that forward compulsion is leading and the 8 of Wands tells me almost nothing about that.
Sometimes a second card doesn’t reveal an end as much as it reveals a context.
Take the 2 of Wands. If it appeared I would need to pay some attention to the tension between what I have and what I want. All those 8 of Wands pursuits are changing my usual way of being. While the 8 of Wands shows the cow being well out of the barn, the 2 points out that some part of me wishes I had closed the barn door and may even wonder if it’s too late. The tension between the two cards may explain my apprehensions or warn that my own ambivalence might threaten my success.

Other times a second card can be like a bolt out of the blue.

Replace the 2 of Wands with The Chariot and the whole picture changes. Those eight things I am doing will pay off in the most splendid way, compelling me forward to a place of not only of success, but a triumphal feeling, a new confidence, a clear voice and direction. Hooray.
If I started with The Chariot, I would still want the second card, because I would wonder how. And if the 8 of Wands appeared, I would take a deep sigh and say Oh, by doing everything all at once.

The constant interaction between the cards captivates me. This vital aspect of reading cards can be missed in the memorize or meditate on a card a day approach.