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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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Fitting Art to Tradition: A Tarot Deck Creator’s Challenge

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starrynight_vangogh
Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh

I’ve noticed that each deck creator has the challenge of taking their vision for a Tarot deck and fitting it (at least somewhat) to the existing structural tradition for the Tarot. We do have more than one tradition to work with (Thoth, Rider-Waite-Smith, Marseille, etc.), but to be a Tarot deck, we still need to work with something like the 22 cards of the Major Arcana and at least four suits for the Minors.

I’ve taken on the challenge of working with existing abstract images from the cosmos (because I can’t create like Van Gogh) to create a deck (check here for earlier examples), and I ran into a creator’s block over the past several months because seeing recognizable patterns that match a Tarot card has become more difficult.

I’ve been tempted to move into collage, much as the Quantum Tarot did, in order to introduce shapes that would make a card look more immediately like a traditional Tarot card, but I resisted. I really do believe that all the right shapes and colors can be found if one looks and crops/rotates the images in the right way.

But a good friend of mine, Jean Hamilton-Fford, told me recently to try being less strict about seeing the pattern in the image so clearly, and allow the viewer/reader to take a little more time to figure out why an image has the shape it does to illustrate the theme and symbolism of the card.

Yesterday and today I took her philosophy to the NASA website and gathered some more possibilities for cards.

swords_12_knight_cw_watermarkKnight of Swords

The Knights are associated with men on horseback and the idea of swift movement. Although the idea of a horse is not obvious with this flying knight, an irregular galaxy still shows the almost-human form and the visual of sword moving swiftly across space. So, the Knight of Swords he is.

disks_1_ace_cw_watermarkAce of Disks

I’m using “disks” for the traditional Pentacles suit in Tarot. Still trying to decide about how much brown and how much green to use in this Earth-centered suit, but planetary nebulae (out-gassing from a single star) like the Eskimo Nebula create a great single round shape to use for this Ace, with brown colored dust that is consistent with an Earth element. Of course, I could transform some of the color to green to make a better fit to my theme for the Disks, but we’ll see.

wands_6_cw_watermarkSix of Wands

Normally in the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition, this card depicts a young man on horseback returning victorious from the wars and enjoying the accolades of the populace. He usually has in hand a long staff or lance with a pennant on it. Also, in accordance with the association of Wands with the element of Fire, I’ve been looking for images that produce a red color (there are lots of these in NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope infrared imagery). I found this one at the bottom of an image of the NGC 1333 star cluster. Lots of assertive young stars burning in this region of space.

Let me know what you think of my choices for these cards!

Cosmic Outposts

To see how the Tarot can guide even the most mundane of tasks (if you are brave enough to allow it!), check out my friend Katalin Patnaik’s contribution to the last Tarot Blog Hop in September. We had a foodie theme and many of the contributors came up with great recipes. But Kati’s was unique: she asked the Tarot for the recipe and used the “random” draw of the cards to decide what ingredients and quantities to use for the recipe. The results were much more coherent than you might think. Magical!

 

 

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