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Respecting Your Tools: Lammas Tarot Blog Hop 2017

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© Wendy Andrew

Welcome to the first fruits of the harvest (especially if you live closer to the equator in the Northern Hemisphere). I’m looking forward to having my own harvest again next year when we will hopefully have a house and garden of our own. In the meantime, I am enjoying the locally grown produce here in southwestern Oregon, USA.

Our wrangler for this hop, Morgan Eckstein, has given us an interesting topic for this hop: how do you respect your tools (in this case, your Tarot decks, etc.)?

Good question since there are lots of traditions surrounding how to shuffle, store, energize, draw and prepare to read your cards.

I think we all have various philosophies about how the cards “work” which inform to a certain degree the way we treat our tools. Wiccan readers probably have special rituals for cleansing their decks, while New Age intuitives may want to make sure they prepare their internal energies in a certain way to keep energetic integrity with the cards.

I’m pretty flexible with my deck rituals. I believe that the cards are in fact pieces of cardboard and that any energy that influences them comes from the people around them (reader and querent) in their interpretations of the symbols on the cards, with maybe a more distant influence from the collective consciousness of the planet (or the entire universe, for that matter).

I do like to keep my decks in cloth bags (see really cool handmade ones here) rather than boxes or tins. Just feels nice to me (velvet!!!). I do always light a candle when doing formal readings, and I would “cleanse” a deck by holding it in my hands and giving it my energies if I thought it had absorbed negative ones.

One possibly more unusual way that I give respect to my decks is to work with the traditions of the creators. Some deck creators don’t have a specific philosophy or even a little white book, but for those for whom the theme or world of the deck is part of the method of reading the cards or otherwise infuses the images with special meaning, I try to respect the deck creator’s viewpoint.

For example, I use the Mary-el Tarot for deeper psychological or spiritual readings, and I review the often long and ranging stories of where the images came from for Marie White and how different mythologies contributed to her connections among the cards. Same with the Thoth Tarot: I don’t read it like it’s RWS, but with the meanings given by Crowley (and analyzed by Duquette). I also don’t try to read Tarot de Marseille decks using RWS meanings; I use Lee Burton’s system of numerological, Platonic, and elemental associations to read those cards.

The most difficult deck that I love but have a hard time “respecting” the book on is the Wildwood Tarot. I find the environmentalist mission of the deck creators a bit intrusive in some of the cards, so far off the RWS system that I have a hard time giving an interpretation based on the book. It’s the one deck where abandoning the book and just going with traditional and intuitive nature-based symbolism (especially for the animal court cards) has served me better.

The Lazy Daisies Tarot Spread

To lighten things up and give you all something fun to do, I’m reprising this spread from Lammases gone by:

I know daisies have more than five petals, but I got this vision of sun-drenched fields, lying therein, with grass and daisies all around. It’s been a warm and busy summer, so, time to relax, I’m thinking. So, I asked the tarot these five questions to get reconnected to my happy holiday, relaxed self:

Card 1: What do I need to let go of to relax?

Card 2: And what else do I need to let go of to relax (there’s always more than one thing!)

Card 3: Where’s my field of daisies?

Card 4: How should I get there?

Card 5: What will I bring back with me besides daisies?

I got 8 Pentacles—4 Cups—Judgement—3 Wands—High Priestess. So, let go of work (that fits!), and a sense of there being nothing interesting to do that’s fun; find my field of daisies at a spa or even a cemetery where I can meditate and start anew; find a creative way to get there (probably not the car—boat or on foot?); be prepared to bring back a renewal of my intuitive powers. Let’s go!

Reply with your reading in the comments if you’d like. I’d love to hear about it!

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Sink into the Cushions—Lammas Tarot Blog Hop

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queen_pentacles_uw
© U.S. Games, Universal Waite

Welcome to our late summer/celebrate Lammas blog hop! To navigate our hop and take advantage of all the incredible Tarot and writing talent we have, just use the links centered above and below, with the center Master List as you overall guide if you get lost in the pleasures of perusing all these wondrous Tarot-flavored stories!

Our intrepid and very sunny blog hop wrangler, Joanna Ash, has challenged us to enjoy the comfortable and filling energy of the Queen of Pentacles for this, the time of celebration for the first fruits of the year.

Down here in the subtropics, it’s definitely still full summer (92F/33C), as it will continue to be into September. But the summer tropicals are in full bloom, and the air conditioning sure does feel nice! Oh, and the figs are beginning to ripen. We even saw a lovely hummingbird the other week, blown down from the north, I expect, since they usually don’t migrate back through here until late August. Although it can get dry and hot for August here, this year has been regularly wet and a little more lush than usual (I think I just heard thunder), so everything is just laughing green and yellow and red and whatever other color the Earth Mother chooses, even here in the suburbs (suburbs are generally boring, but there are birds, trees, in America definitely LAWNS, and also sometimes flowers). 😉

The Queen in question, that of Pentacles, most often represents this touch-it, taste-it, indulge-it abundance. She reminds me of that mother you know who, even in this super-electronic age, loves to bake cookies and make sure you have a good lunch everyday. She’s the one with the lovely vegetable garden that provides really tasty veg (nothing like the sterility of the local grocery store). She’ll always make sure you have an umbrella for a rainy day, and that you open a savings account to set aside a little something every month and be a bit more steady in your activities, like her son, the dependable Knight of Pentacles.

potato_salad
Click on the pic and check out the recipe I’m using…

So, Joanna challenged us to “channel” our own Queen of Pentacles in this post. Hmmm. I do love taking care of loved ones, feeding them when they visit (my children being grown, that’s not so often), but I’ve taken up knitting and…potato salad recently. Very (flu)filling, both “tastes.” And potato salad is quite the art, I’m finding. A delicate balance of textures and flavors (don’t overcook the potatoes or put too much relish in!). I shall be making my second potato salad chemistry experiment tomorrow, just for Lammas, and I will also make a point of continuing my knitting learning as well.stockinette_swatch_white

Look around, look around you. So many things beyond the computer screen to savor with your eyes, your ears, your fingers, your tongue. Have a glass at wine o’clock or taste a tangy tomato from your own garden; listen for the birds colonizing the trees and power lines. Sink into the cushions near an open window (if you’re farther north than I am!) and feel the cool breeze of summer raise the the hairs on your skin. Let the Earth Mother cradle you. Breathe. Be here now. Be at peace.

The Summer Breeze Spread

Lay out five cards in an rainbow’s arc, left to right or right to left. Do this outdoors if you can. Ask for comfy be-ings, like this:

1) Where’s the pillow to rest my head?

2) Where’s the morsel to fill me up? (could be body or soul, or both)

3) Where’s the wave to rock me to sleep?

4) Where’s the birdsong to awaken my heart?

5) Where’s the breeze to move me forward?

These are the resources you’ve been seeking, the support you’ve been waiting for. Take the messages and use them to bear your own fruit. 🙂

fig tree
The figs…

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Lammas Tarot Blog Hop—Salsa and Daisies

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lammas fireplace carving

Blessed Lammas! Welcome, whether you come from Alison Cross’s blog or Joy Vernon’s.

And Happy Blog Hop anniversary to me! I love cycles. This is the season in which I began participating in the Tarot Blog Hop in 2012. We survived the Mayan calendar predictions to start a new cosmic aeon cycle and here we are!

Still in Texas, which was not my intention (moving to Idaho next year, Goddess willing and house appreciation happenin’!), so the harvest has already passed, and we wait for the heat to abate before planting again. I would imagine others of a more northerly persuasion are getting their tomatoes in now. We do still have some jalapeño peppers left, though. So, a small, hot harvest continues. 🙂

Lammas is the European pagan festival of the first harvest, brimming with the first fruits, which were often summer fruits like berries, and in America, early corn. All that spring work of planting, watering, and waiting starts to pay off. Time to shower our people with gifts and celebrate! Although the

3_cups_uw

Tarot Queen of Pentacles, generous soul that she is, is usually associated with this festival, hey, I did that last year, so since cycles shift dimension into a beautiful spiral through time and space, I’ll designate the Three of Cups as my Lammas tarot card for this year. Time for a glass of the first wine and sharing with friends and family.

So, two gifts for you. First, my recipe for salsa, made totally with ingredients from our subtropical spring garden (which we began harvesting in May). Being a northern New Englander by birth, salsa is not a natural for me, but I enjoyed learning. We made three batches and tweaked as we went, so this is just a base for your own experimentation. We are not into super-spicy food, so this is a mild recipe, although it depends entirely on the power of your jalapeño chili peppers. We did discover by growing them that the younger and greener they are, the hotter they are, and the more of the white “meat” and seeds you leave in the hotter they are. This one is based on a lovely recipe by Alton Brown on the Food Network. Here goes:

Matt & Joanne’s Fresh Salsa

Ingredients

4 to 6 small-to-medium tomatoes (roma are good if you don’t have a garden), chopped
4 garlic cloves, minced
2 minced jalapeño peppers (seeds taken out—milder or left in—spicier, your preference)
1 bell pepper, fine dice (red or green)
1 small onion (red, white, or yellow), fine chopped
Fresh cilantro, snipped, quantity to taste
2 T white vinegar (or lime juice—we liked vinegar better)
Extra salt to taste

Directions

I did buy a little food processor to get the chopping/mincing/dicing right. If you are a good manual chopper, go for it.

Just put all the ingredients in a single container and leave in the fridge for about 12 hours to get all the flavors “fused” as Alton put it. It won’t be like the kind of salsa from a jar at all; kind of a cross between pico de gallo and salsa. Great with tortilla chips!

The Lazy Daisies Tarot Spread

I know daisies have more than five petals, but I just got this vision of sun-drenched fields, lying therein, with grass and daisies all around. It’s been a warm and busy summer, so, time to relax, I’m thinking. So, I asked the tarot these five questions to get reconnected to my happy holiday, relaxed self:

Card 1: What do I need to let go of to relax?

Card 2: And what else do I need to let go of to relax (there’s always more than one thing!)

Card 3: Where’s my field of daisies?

Card 4: How should I get there?

Card 5: What will I bring back with me besides daisies?

This one was really fun. I got 7 Wands–Hierophant–Wheel–8 Swords–Page Cups. So, let go of the struggle of being in charge, throw out the traditional rules, go to the auto races or a gambling resort (!), get there by releasing yourself from your imagined restrictions, and bring back new or renewed feelings/relationships (new lover!). Let’s go!

Reply with your reading in the comments if you’d like. I’d love to hear about it!

Thank you for stopping by. You can use the links below to navigate through the rest of the hop. They are all well worth your while. 🙂

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Lammas Blog Hop–Pentacles Fav

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lammas fireplace carving

Blessed Lammas! Enjoy your first harvest of love and maybe blueberries and corn.

Favorite Pentacles card? For me, definitely the Nine. The number 9 is important to me since it reflects my life year in numerology (Hermit and Moon cards in the Tarot). I am often drawn to the nines in my decks, but actually most of all in the Pentacles/Coins/Disks suit.

Now, the question is, which imagery, which deck? I have them arrayed before me (just the RWS ones that have pictures of scenes and people, not just pip cards).

Four cards have the traditional RWS landed gentry or noble woman of means in solitary enjoyment of her property, although not a one is smiling, it seems. And then we go off in different directions with the other three. One with a maiden, yes, but in very different circumstances (a tree coming out of a piano–Shadowscapes deck), one with a woman and a man riding horses out of the mist (Shapeshifter–Success), and one with an antlered old grey male shaman figure and no harvest that I can see (Wildwood Nine of Stones).

Hmmm. The charm has always been the woman of power and comfortable wealth. You’d think I’d prefer the Ten of Pentacles, with its family theme, but I like the independence of the woman in the Nine, even though she’s not quite complete in the harvest of love and family, she’s enjoying her own power at the moment, and the fruit of her own labor (or perhaps also the labor of her farm workers–I do hope she’s treated them well).

I do note that all my decks with the more traditional woman and her garden show some flowers and stone or other structures, except one. And I will go with that one as my favorite because it’s true to the idea of the harvest of the fruits of the land and not just those of beauty. And we are more than just figures of beauty, although we are that, too. 😉

nine of coins, universal waite deck

Pamela Colman-Smith’s original drawing, recolored by Mary Hanson-Roberts for the Universal Waite deck seems to be the truest to the meaning of Lammas as the early harvest. Our lady carries the energy of Venus (see the pattern of her over-gown) in Virgo (the order of of her land and togetherness of her person) in a vineyard filled with ripened grapes. Now that’s something to harvest! And perhaps soon a small mammal for the table caught by her little hawk.

It can be wondrous to see the artistic freedom and new themes taken by various artists, but the reason that the traditional RWS images have lasted so long and been derived from so many times is the way they include just what is needed to express a comprehensive interpretation of the card.

So, a Lammas wine-cup salute to Ms. Colman-Smith and her lady of the Nine of Pentacles.

Blessings!

 

 

 

 

© 2013 – 2020 Joanne Sprott