30-Day Tarot Challenge—Q 12

And now, back to Rhee’s really cool original questions for the Tarotist. Today’s question is:

Have you ever created your own spread? If so, how effective is it? (Feel free to show the spread)

I’ve actually created several so far, mostly for the Tarot Blog Hop posts (see previous post). I think it’s really fun and enjoy this creative process. I’ll be incorporating several of mine into my Cosmic Whispers deck. This week, I’ll reprise my first spread, one that goes with the cosmology/quantum physics theme of my deck: The Quantum Focus spread. Here’s what it looks like:

And here’s how it works (I use this spread every weekend to see what to focus on in my too-many-projects life!):

This spread is based on the idea that quantum particles are always in a state of potential, of probability, as to their location and velocity, and don’t stop and become “focused” in a particular state until they are observed.

Card 1: Initial Probabilities, or the theme or basis for the question

Card 2: Black Box, or, what’s keeping you from focusing

Card 3: Measurement, or, what you can do to create focus and see where to go

Card 4: Focused Reality, or, what you really need to be working on right now

And now, and example of how this might work. I like to use my Shadowscapes deck (check it out here at Aeclectic.net) for this spread, because its delicate design and rich imagery make it a great “go inside” deck.

1: High Priestess

2: The Empress

3: Eight of Swords

4: Three of Pentacles

Interesting balance between what’s probable and visible (Priestess), and what’s hidden in the “black box” (Empress). I’m thinking I need to retreat into my inner reality, practice a bit of meditation, but inside the black box is a message of connection to outer reality, to sensual pleasures, to nature, and with this deck, it’s interesting because the Priestess is hanging in the air with an owl below her and pomegranate (symbol of death as transformation) in hand, while the Empress sits below to her left in the second position, sending a big circle of butterflies (souls) in the Priestess’s direction, as a gift, I would assume. So, it seems that approaching my spiritual connection from a grounded place is a good idea.

In order to manifest this probability of grounded spiritual practice this weekend, I have to bring it out of the black box to see what’s really there, with my third card, the measurement tool. In Shadowscapes, the Eight of Swords depicts a large swan struggling within sharp brambles and surrounded by eight swords. A dark wraith hovers above, and the only source of hope seems to be a small hummingbird, also the only source of color in the card. The message I take from this image is that to escape, I have to stop struggling, and allow myself to relax and get help from others to free myself to see what to focus on.

When I do that, I’ll be able to mentally walk the path to my soul workshop and create what I want with true mastery (the Three of Pentacles). The Pentacles card also reinforces what was in the Black-Box (2) card of the Empress, which was hinting that a grounded approach and enjoyment of creation in the real world would be my best bet.

If you choose to try this spread, please do let me know in general terms, how it turned out for you.

In the Tradition(s)–Tarot Blog Hop for Beltane

Weave the flowers, erect the maypole, light the bonfire! Beltane, here we are! Welcome to the Beltane Tarot Blog Hop. You may have come from Joanna’s Sun Goddess Tarot blog or Sharon’s 78 Keys to Creativity blog. Either way, grab a seat by the fire and be welcome!

All the rituals of Beltane have been woven together, starting with the Irish and other Gaels dancing in the summer and taking their cattle to pasture, moving through the flowers and ribbons of nineteenth-century maypole dances, and on to pagan revival fire festivals. Good rituals never die; they just change form and are often re-remembered in later times. And they’re always based on great stories, in this case of fire from the sun that never dies; birds, bees, flowers, and other lovers cavorting and recreating themselves anew in the warmth of that same sun.

And so it is with the Tarot. A simple progression of trumps in a game of cards in the fifteenth century has morphed into an intricate weave of magick, psychology, and New Age spirituality, but still carrying with it a power to see the unseen and that which may be to come. Tarot readers continue to ride this tension between inner and outer worlds, spirit-seeking and fortune-telling.

Arwen Lynch, of “Seek Joy, Y’all,” fame and a regional neighbor of mine from Austin, Texas, has asked this question of us for Beltane:

What traditions are important to you in how you read Tarot?

Every deck has a story, a tradition of its own. That’s my philosophy. I believe in the mythology of the deck and its creator. I like to think of myself as an anthropologist of Tarot decks. If it’s Camelot, I’m there with all the trauma and drama of Arthur, Merlin, and Guinevere. If it’s a good deck and guidebook, the writer and artist will have integrated their stories beautifully with the tradition they are following or creating, and I will find the deck wondrous to work with. And that includes the “traditional” decks like the original Rider-Waite-Smith, Crowley and Harris’s Thoth, and the reproductions of the older Marseille decks. Yes, the old woodcut Marseille decks have their own traditions, and instead of trying to use them as I would a later more pictorial deck based on some esoteric system, I go to the historical stories about the cards’ origins and keep the meanings concrete and simple. I do often find a more intuitive approach based on what the pictures seem to say to be easier to read sometimes, but I also like the challenge of reading based on meanings that have been passed down through the centuries.

My favorite deck for integration of mythology with Tarot is the Druid Craft by Philip & Stephanie Carr-Gomm, illustrated by Will Worthington. You get some history for each card image’s role in Druid-based myth, you get significance with an interweaving of that story and RWS traditions, and finally a really nice, succinct message from the card. The card from this deck that’s associated with Beltane is The Lovers. A short excerpt from the pages on The Lovers will suffice to set them in the Druid/Wiccan/Gaelic traditions of Beltane and show off their archetypal universality:

It is Beltane and the mayflowers are in bloom. Lord and Lady, or High Priest and High Priestess, have joined together as Divine Lovers – conveying the idea both of the Great Rite of the union between God and Goddess, and of its reflection in the everyday world of romantic love between two people. In addition, the card depicts the union of the two aspects of the self – conscious and unconscious, inner feminine and inner masculine – while the Divine Self, embodying this union, is depicted as the white hind in the distance.

So, there you go: Celtic myth, archetypal union of opposites, human lovers, the whole package. Cool, huh?

So, let’s play with all three traditions with the following spread; we can call it the Three Traditions spread. I’m going to just do a general draw, but you can use this quite well in the context of a specific question, in which case the cards should tell more of a single story. But this will give you an idea.

Card 1: What does the Earth say?

Card 2: What does the Psyche say?

Card 3: What does the God/Goddess say?

So, I drew the Five of Cups, the Seven of Wands, and the King of Swords.

The Earth says: Mourn your loss, but appreciate the inheritance you have received; it will support you as you move on.

The Psyche says: Reflect on your position and strengths, your depth of character, as you face your inner challenges. You can prevail!

The God/Goddess says: See the big picture with the detached Mind; clarity comes from the universal perspective. See all the possibilities, without attachment.

I invite you to try out this spread, particularly with a favorite deck that you think has a great spectrum of tradition and wonderful stories. And let me know how it works for you.

I invite you also to continue your blog hop journey to either Sharon’s 78 Keys to Creativity blog or Joanna’s Sun Goddess Tarot blog, depending on which direction you chose for your blog path. And if you need to reset and figure out where to go next, just head over to Arwen’s master list, here.

Keep the fire burning, within and without!

Wildwood Tarot, Revisited

Mark Ryan, John Mathews and Will Worthington’s WildwoodTarot: I got it, I got confused, and, well, annoyed. Read on, though. There’s redemption in the end.

Here’s the “rant”: I didn’t like the authors’ “agenda” particularly, even though I agree with a lot of it for us moderns. Well, from the prefaces, looks like its primarily Ryan’s ecological agenda that permeates the book for this deck. I felt like they weren’t being true to the period in which the images seemed to be set. People were into survival back then; they did have more respect for the land than we “civilized” folk, but a lot of that was out of necessity. We can learn a lot from their focus on being in rhythm with seasons and nature’s movements, but they weren’t being that way because they “cared” about the Earth Mother as such. What they seemed to know was that being in tune with the Earth meant survival for humans. We in the modern age have lost sight of that, and although the Earth Mother can survive without us, we cannot survive without her support.

So, this modern environmentalist sensibility seemed artificially imposed on the ancient time frame of the art.

Also, the animal court cards were extremely counter-intuitive at first. Court cards are a challenge anyway, but trying to mentally match the animals with “people” characteristics was difficult (other animal-themed decks notwithstanding).

So, I put the deck away after first reading the book and trying to use it. But I started to keep track of Louise Underhill’s

archer_7_wildwood

Priestess Tarot blog (highly recommended) where she does daily card interpretations from the Wildwood, and I liked her takes on it.

Then, several months later, I felt called to pull it out for a reading for my hubby, who is a very back-to-nature-basics kind of guy. He would have been right at home in the Wildwood’s world. I left the book alone, this time, though, and went directly to Worthington’s rich imagery coupled with my own background in ancient European mythologies.

Now I can read the Wildwood! I think I did need to read the book first, and then learn what I’ve learned about other decks and systems, then go back to the Wildwood and concentrate on mostly RWS-style meanings, but focusing on just what the imagery is saying about the Earth’s connection with humans in simpler times. I just love having my own special relationship with Ryan and Mathews’ world and Worthington’s art. Thanks, guys!

Find the Silver Lining—Stress Cards

Time to find the light in the shadow. You know those cards, the ones that make you cringe whenever you see them. Over on FB, Alison Cross (visit her court card blog, This Game of Thrones), challenged our group recently to identify the cards in our decks that create stress for us and come up with three good things to say (remember what your mother told you about not speaking up unless you have something nice to say?) about them.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be honest about the negative implications of a card in a reading, of course (I personally have to resist the tendency to spin them all to the good when that’s not useful for the querent). But there is a good argument for bringing balance to the Force, as it were. So, herewith, my difficult cards from the Universal Tarot of Marseille, which is the deck I’m studying in Alison’s FB group. The Minors don’t give much info as cards since they aren’t fully illustrated (I think I’d pick the 10s and 5s as the most stressful of the Marseille Minors), so I went with the Majors and Courts plus the keywords to pick my stress cards.

Hierophant: Stressful because he reminds me of my Catholic guilt trip. I tend to want to rebel and consider him stuffy and arrogant, anti-feminine/woman, etc. But, like my AndybC and historically inspired keywords say, there are lots of good thing about the Hierophant: he represents faith and beliefs, patience, marriage, giving charity and receiving, and conscience. He is also one of the Wise and has his own connection to the eternal wisdom, just in a different way than the High Priestess.

devil_univ_marseille

Devil: Stressful because in the Marseille in particular, he/she/it represents demonic forces, hell, and therefore suffering and temptation to evil. So, what to do? Well, the presence of the card in a reading gives you fair warning that you are letting yourself get sucked into stuff that will make you suffer, so consider this your call to enlightenment and integrity! Also, even in the Marseille card, the nooses that hold the two “slaves” of the demon are loose enough to remove, so your freedom or captivity is your own choice; we have control. And lastly, we can’t have light without shadow, so, the devil just represents the balance in the Force, as it were.

Queen of Pentacles: What? Yeah. In the Marseille, she’s stressful. Check out the severe look. She’s the cold one in the Marseille court, rather than the Queen of Swords. Practical to a fault, she can be totally unsympathetic and concentrates only on the material. The good parts? Sometimes we do need to take a practical and distanced approach to our problems in order to solve them. Sometimes the house does need cleaning, and we can take pride in our grounded accomplishments and the accumulation of wealth that sets us free to relate to others from a position of generosity when we choose.

Death: In the Marseille deck, the Death card provides what seems to be no comfort.

There’s little enough about “letting go” and more about not having any choice in facing a loss. Back in the day when these cards were first drawn, the Black Death was never far away; life was often brutish and short, and the grim reaper always lurked in the shadows. The positive lesson is again about the balance in the force; loss is inevitable, just remember to move on after you grieve. Also, Death is an equal opportunity employer—king or pauper, all will face loss and inevitably death. It is the great equalizer. It is also the foundation of life itself, for only through decay can new life find the sustenance to be born. Death is an important phase in the cycle of life.

30-Day Tarot Challenge—Q 11

Rhee’s eleventh question:

What spread do you use most often/prefer and why?

I use the three-card spread most often, but it’s mainly for practical reasons. Daily draws of more than three are usually a bit more info than I want for a single day. And my apprenticeship as a Free Reader for TABI calls for shorter three-card readings. They are quite useful to build “sentences,” connections between cards, which I’ve become a lot more sensitive to since I started learning the Lenormand fortune-telling system. And one thing I’ve learned about daily draws is to not make them too complex or about your entire life; it’s important to use them for a grounded view of the energies of a single day. Yep, it can just be about the plumbing backing up or a new client with a new editing job.

Preference is another story, and I’ll save that for the next question. When I’m creating my own spreads, I tend to lean in the direction of four cards. I like the pattern of visible, hidden, action, result.

Here’s an example of my daily three-card draw, using the Universal Marseille, for today, April 10:

Hmmm. Looks like a warning to not force things today. Five of Swords indicates a potential business setback, while the Three of Coins can be about planning for the home or maturation (getting old? ). But our young Knave of Swords wants to rush in and create trouble, looks like. I think I need to wait on things and not commit to any plans I may have brewing; they’ll just lead to disaster today.

Take a look at my Marseille keywords in my Dictionaries and let me know how you would put these three messages together. Or you can apply your usual meanings for these cards as well.