Thoughts. Ramblings. Notes on history. A generous sprinkling of tarot.
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Notebooks.
This little blog is just a place to keep track of my historical forays, developing tarot practice, thoughts on the craft of writing and teaching, observations, foraging adventures, book reviews, or general notes for myself and friends on various types of practice and little tidbits that catch my eye. Whether you’re just curious or looking for some ideas for your own practices, I hope readers will find something of value!
Deep Creek
The idea for this excursion started out innocently enough. It was my first day in the LA area for my summer archival trip, and I’d stopped in the San Bernardino Mountains, in Big Bear, for a couple of nights. Some of my scientists had places in nearby Lake Arrowhead where they would take their friends for LSD experiments and I wanted to see the area so I could write about it better. At any rate, when the proprietor of the place I was staying heard what I was working on, he suggested that I should hike down to some natural hot springs at the base of the mountains where a bunch of old timer hippies hung out. “Hell, as far as I know they practically live there,” Sarge told me. He wasn’t sure exactly how to get there, but it was called Deep Creek, and he said I’d have to hike in for two or three miles to get to it. But if I was looking for old hippies to tell me stories about the old days and wanted someone to offer me acid, that was the place to do it. “Oh, I almost forgot. I think they mostly hang out down there naked, so if that bugs you, heads up.” This was like a cherry on top of what already sounded like an awesome research adventure. For science, of course. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Idiot
The mythology of science is that it opens the world by clearing away illusions and mistakes and that this frees us. In practice, however, what that usually looks like is an anxiety around things that don’t fit. It’s often in such a hurry to do its job and do it well that it speeds past understanding what’s in front of it and leaps to what to do about it. Instead of “it doesn’t fit, I must be wrong,” science rushes to “it doesn’t fit, it must be wrong.”
Giving Real Giving Vibes
You have a tremendous amount of generosity, wisdom, and stability to offer those around you, but you may be struggling to manifest that fully. What are you hung up on?
Persistence
Traditional ways of doing things persist. Constantly. All around us. If we do not see them, most of the time it isn’t because they aren’t there. It’s because we don’t think them important enough to notice. Another way to put it is that we’ve made them small or even invisible in our minds. And what do we do that with? Things we think have less power than we do, things that don’t need to be attended to. The invisibility of certain kinds of knowledge is often linked to power relations, bound up in things like class, race, gender, religion, and culture. It shows up as people denigrating traditional medicinal knowledge because that knowledge is traditionally feminine, or brown, or poor. It’s the “loss” of skills like metalsmithing that are in fact still vibrant and alive, passed on in industry and also through hobbies by people who are only a generation or two removed from having to do that kind of work for a living.
Augury (aka the birds and the bees)
I’ve been spending the last few days going for a brief nature walk each evening to learn more about the flora and fauna in the local area. There’s a little tributary running nearby (too small to be a river and a little large to be a creek, I’m inclined to call it a bayou for its size, but that seems like a regional faux pas) that has its own ecosystem I’ve been enjoying. This morning I watched some birds doing their bird thing while I sipped my coffee before turning my attention to the daily woo. As I was deciding on a deck to use, it occurred to me that I could try my hand dabbling at a bit of ornithomancy for a change.
Enough is Enough
It’s time to have a healthier relationship to material things. A scarcity mindset can manifest in a lot of ways. Some may find themselves grabbing everything in reach only to hoard it like dragons while others burn through resources like there’s no tomorrow. Still others may find they deny themselves or those around them the minimum to live a full life. Many will also find they struggle to trust in a way that allows them to connect with others — if they fear losing the wealth they have, they’re liable to distrust others’ intentions and view the world with suspicion.
Two to Tango
Part of the reason the number six is the domain of family is that it seeks to combine the direction and goals (3) of two different people in a way that, ideally, balances both. If those goals are working against one another or point in off-kilter directions, you may run into trouble. That’s why in some sacred geometrical systems that treat 6 as two balanced triangles (e.g. Jewish mysticism & Indian chakra mandalas), one of the triangles represents the masculine and the other the feminine. The two brought together in opposite directions balance one another to draw the heart as a six-sided star.
Push and Pull
I found myself laughing at myself today as I started to lay out the latest spread, because I defaulted to my go-to draw of three cards. Three is an excellent number for when you want to point the way forward; there is something particularly active about the way it whittles problems down to their barest essentials: On the one hand. On the other. Solution.
This is of course a gross simplification of the kinds of problems we tend to face in reality, where there may be fifteen moving parts, five parties, and eighteen realistic paths to take, but there’s something absolutely seductive about the way three cuts to the chase.
Messy Questions
Plato once had Socrates describe his hermeneutic method as approaching from below in such a way as to seem nonthreatening or even beautiful, because when placed in a situation in which one feels safe, one overflows oneself and thereby reveals their true nature. If I have understood it correctly, this is how revelation works. It is not the same as torturing information out of an object, nor is it the same as asking to what degree the object in question looks like you and then concluding how well it does or doesn’t measure up. When you torture something, all it sings back to you are falsehoods and nonsense. And when you measure others against yourself, all you get are dark shadows of yourself rather than any information about the object in question. This is what it means to see through a glass darkly.
Ancestral Tarot: Between Past and Future
To continue thinking about ancestral readings, I decided today to create a trinity spread with a twist. The first card for the past — what do our ancestral mothers wish from us? The second for our future — what do our daughters wish of us? And the third for that impossible space between, the one that gives meaning to both and animates the directions we choose to take them.
Tickle Your Fancy
I find myself coming back again and again to different decks featuring animal archetypes. I imagine there are a number of reasons, but one in particular is a fascination with the ways that multiple different cultures have come to similar conclusions about different animals’ “energy,” even as other cultures have come to wildly differing interpretation. The snake, for instance, was considered to embody healing and transformative energy in Indian, Greek, Celtic, and Mayan traditions, among others, but neighboring Native American tribes might have vastly different beliefs about it, with one people seeing it as an omen of bad luck. Christianity, meanwhile, has historically treated the serpent as a symbol of betrayal.
Open Wide
Today’s deck initially drew my eye for its minimalist artwork and juxtaposition of black and white with focused, strong colors, but it’s held my interest for the ways that it incorporates an eclectic hodgepodge of different magical practices and narrows them down into an extremely focused interpretive point. The Naked Heart Tarot uses crystals, animal familiars, shadow work, tarot, and sacred geometry to focus specifically on getting your heart right as the first step towards manifesting your goals.
Let Go, Move Forward
Today I did a little experiment where I used a pendulum to pick the card for the day, because why not?
Hoodoo Economics
Today’s deck comes from Tayannah Lee McQuillar, who designed The Hoodoo Tarot to connect the traditional Smith-Rider-Waite deck with her own spiritual roots in hoodoo, a uniquely American set of magical practices derived from the historical interplay between the peoples of new world America, with particularly strong roots in the southeastern US. While that includes a multitude of newcomers and natives alike, it is especially drawn from African rootwork and Native American traditions, with strong Christian influences and lesser influences from other immigrant traditions.
Solstice Draw
I’ve been looking high and low for a desert deck in forests of forest decks. Neo-pagans have made up a disproportionate number of the tarot revival, and their spiritual project has largely been trying to reclaim older European spiritual traditions that were forcibly displaced by Christianity. And Europe is…well…mostly forested. So there’s a real dearth of tarot decks that draw inspiration from other natural places, whether the sea, the desert, the jungle, or even plains.
Spinning in Circles
The layout today has five cards, which is the number associated with change in a number of different knowledge traditions…And in a case of the cards stating the obvious, we start our path to change today with the Eight of Wands, or change itself. In the first position, this marks the point or goal of the journey. How we accomplish it is read through each of the next cards.
Fish or Cut Bait
I’ve chosen another three card spread, as three is the number traditionally associated with doing things, and I have some things to do today! Whether you have a project that you’re planning, need to motivate others into action, or are trying to identify a goal to focus on, three can point the way.
Balancing Acts
When I want to think in more nuanced ways about how to draw boundaries, I find it useful to look to other sources than the Rider-Waite tarot. Western thought is notoriously bad at seeing the big picture holistically and in terms of mutual dependence. It’s a little too obsessed with drawing clumsy dichotomies and putting fences around things, as if one could simply cut out undesirable things from life as easily as slicing a visible piece of mold off bread. More interesting and realistic approaches imagine the world as a web of mutually dependent interactions that come together to create a whole that goes beyond the sum of its individual parts.
Triangulating Desire
The centerpiece of today’s reading is The Devil. In tarot, this card doesn’t generally mean the Christian devil, it’s not usually like The Devil Devil. It’s generally read as saying that, while yes, there may be negative forces out there, you are the one letting yourself be held back by them. If the devil approaches you, you have the choice to walk away. So why aren’t you?