IMG Abstract: Sagittarius. Own image in watercolour and pen
We’re in the second decan for just a few more days, till the New Moon in Sag 12 December, represented in Tarot by the Nine of Wands.
The keywords here are vigilance and stamina. This figure, stalwart but injured, is resting, battle weary. The second decan Sagittarius native is quick of mind, good with their hands, adventurous, technically proficient, Sagittarius-Aries fire. More generally, this card says we would rather not go it alone. But we’ll do it if we have to. Oh yes. And we’re not done. Oh no. We’re still standing, and we are standing by. Sentinels. Watchmen. Ready. You won’t catch us with our guard down.
Neptune has gone direct in Pisces as of 6 December, having been retrograde since 30 June. We might have been having some mighty odd and vivid dreams just lately. In my own case, there has been a rather entertaining spate of dreams involving raccoons popping up in odd places, possibly reflecting symbolically tricky dealings to do with certain matters. The raccoon can warn against dealing with tricky people and those who aren’t dealing straight with us, wearing its little bandit mask. The raccoon has positive associations too, of course. The raccoon is agile, and endlessly resourceful.
But it’s curious where these things come from. And I wouldn’t mind but we don’t even have raccoons where I am (in the UK, North West W England) I can’t just put it down to watching nature programmes on the box either.
Things have been heavy going in recent months for almost anyone. Something has been weighing heavy on our minds for some time. Problems for which there can be no solutions as such. We’ve just had to do the best we can, maintaining a holding position, and trying meanwhile not to make matters worse.
The New Moon in Sagittarius 12 December suggests new possibilities, and a clearer way ahead. And don’t we all wish that for the whole wide world. Looking into my cards for 2024 there are no clear signs of a lasting resolution in the dreadful conflicts and events in Ukraine and in Gaza. Though there are windows of opportunity, and perhaps I will write more about that later.
But right here, right now, says this card is our individual power of action in our own, personal battles.
The New Moon on the 12 December is in 20 degrees of Sagittarius. We might get the strong urge to go somewhere new, learn something new, change our horizons, however vicariously. Even reading a book is a form of travel. Reading rolls up telepathy, mind reading, space travel and time travel all in one page. Each page a magic carpet.
There are so many sad events, and we might well ask ourselves, what use is philosophy? What use is poetry? (Or Tarot)
We are made that way. Words can lift us up. Why else do we conjure special words for births and weddings and funerals? Words are invocations. Words are comforters. They can help us readjust and regain our equilibrium when everything is dark. Words contain the magical power of Wyrd. We get the word weird from Wyrd, meaning mystery and destiny.
Word. Weird, Wyrd. They are all the same thing.
“I will lift mine eyes up to the hills from whence cometh my help.”
-Psalm 121
The higher we can go, the more bearable or at least, immediately manageable things are when the going is really tough. We don’t have to be religious to feel the truth of this.
“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow (on his pipe. “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails.”
We are coming ‘home’ again, entering the zodiac sign of Cancer the Crab on Tuesday 21 June, the day of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, and the shortest day in the southern hemisphere.
The word ‘sol –stice’ is from the Latin ‘solstitium’ and means the ‘sun stands still.’
The month of June has got a lot going on, calendar-wise. We have got:-
-The meteorological start of summer (1 June)
-The astronomical start of summer, the solstice (20, 21 or 22 June)
-Midsummers Day (24 June.)
Meteorological or Astronomical Summer?
What does it mean?
Public Domain The British Library
The meteorological calendar is a more recent invention based on seasonal temperatures, separating the year into four groups of three months, based on the observation that summer is the warmest time of year and winter is the coldest, with transitional seasons in- between. These seasons are always 90 to 92 days long, and always start on the first of the month except for leap year. This definition makes it easier to calculate seasonal statistics for the purposes of weather forecasting.
The astronomical calendar is ancient, based on thousands of years of observations of natural phenomena used to establish and mark time. This calendar follows the Earth’s rotation around the sun, defining the four seasons by two solstices and two equinoxes. The Earth’s tilt and the sun’s alignment over the equator determine these events, so the two solstices mark the times when the sun passes over the equator, on June 21 and around December 22 and the two equinoxes are on or around March 21 and September 22.
At the summer solstice, the Northern Hemisphere receives sunlight at the most direct angle of the year with the North Pole tilting towards the Sun at its maximum (about 23.5 degrees) resulting in the longest period of sunlight hours. In the Southern Hemisphere, it’s the opposite and the Sun is at its lowest point in the sky.
Astronomical timing is variable, depending upon when the Sun reaches its northernmost point from the celestial equator, and this date varies between June 20, 21, and 22.
Midsummer’s Day, 24 June is an ancient agricultural festival. It marks the midpoint of the growing season, halfway between planting and harvest. It is traditionally known as one of four “quarter days” in some cultures. Folks celebrated by feasting, dancing, singing, and lighting bonfires to usher in the hot summer days ahead where once the mighty auroch roamed and the prowling sabre tooth tiger crouched low, watching and waiting in hope.
Every summer solstice in the UK, as many as 10,000 people arrive at Stonehenge for a pagan style summer solstice festival on British shores, complete with druids. The main event is sunrise, when the first rays of the sun strike the gigantic Heel Stone and illuminate the centre of the stone circle, and people are allowed to touch the stones- a rare opportunity, and the only day of the year they are permitted to do so.
The Tarot and the Sun card
The Sun card is the ultimate summer card in the Tarot deck; number 19 in the Major Arcana. This positive card signifies all kinds of good news, starting with sunny weather in the literal sense, and overseas travel, usually to a hot country. It is our moments in the sun. It is the state of childhood. It is good health or recovery from sickness. The Sun card is vitality, just as the sun is life itself. The Sun card can therefore be predicting new life- a birth.
The Sun card, when it is drawn reversed is like the setting sun. It can mean the memories of childhood, nostalgia, beautiful, bittersweet twilight. It may mean sadness or delays or getting less than you hoped for.
Every card has its downside, just like every situation in life. The fire of the sun can also be cruel, even savage when ‘reversed.’ We might have drought. We might have wildfires. And then the Sun means death and we pray for rain.
The Sun gods can be cruel; Ra, Arinna, Surya, Mithras, Helios, Apollo, Sol – by whatever name we have called the Sun.
Reincarnation and The Sun card?
As the sign of the Sun’s highest point in the skies as seen from Earth, the constellation of Cancer the Crab was considered nearest to the highest point of heaven. Greco-Roman philosophers (The NeoPlatonists) called it ‘the Gate of Men.’
Decapoda, the Head of The Crab, Acubens, The Claw, Al Tarf, the Foot.
The stars of Cancer, specifically The Beehive Cluster, were the gateway, the portal in the heavens through which souls descended to Earth to be born.
Thee Beehive Cluster also known as Prasaepe, THE MANGER
The opposite constellation, Capricorn, marked the midwinter solstice and was the ‘Gate of the Gods,’ where the souls of the departed rose back to heaven.
But did they later descend again to be reborn, in a cycle of reincarnation?
A true story
From The Golden Tarot, Kat Black
I have sometimes been asked, do I believe in reincarnation? I don’t believe in it. I don’t disbelieve in it. I don’t know. But many people do believe in reincarnation around the world. The Hindu and Buddhist faiths believe in reincarnation, while Easter is the great Christian celebration of Resurrection, signifying the hope of the soul’s eternal life.
Nature is cyclical. The seasons run in cycles and life runs in cycles. Our lives only seem linear because they represent such a short piece of a curve. Perhaps it is only logical and natural that some will see human life as cyclical too, not only in terms of successive generations, but in terms of the individual persona, spirit or soul as something that is continuously recycled.
As the American poet Emily Dickinson famously wrote, ‘the mind has many corridors.’
Many years ago I did a distance Tarot reading by email for a young lady who wanted to know, was her brother OK? This struck me as a strange question. I asked her, what did she want me to investigate that she could not ask him herself?
The lady answered that her brother was dead, and that he had committed suicide. She did not tell me more, nor did I ask about the circumstances, but as one would expect there was great distress attached to her questions:
-Where was her brother now?
-How was he now?
I do not advertise as a psychic medium. Not at all. Nor did I agree to accept payment for this particular reading and am not handling new readings just at present. But I have, all the same, over the past twenty years done a number of Tarot card readings which have been focused on client’s questions about deceased loved ones, when the Tarot has facilitated me in offering feedback which only the client could verify, and there have been some deeply curious and strange, and equally, deeply moving responses.
Now, looking at this lady’s brother, wondering what on Earth the Tarot would make of this. I drew the Sun card, the card of sunshine, happiness, innocence, childhood. Birth.
The Sun is life itself. If our planet were closer to the Sun, or further away, there would be no life on Earth. People like to post images of Earth to make the point that we are tiny and insignificant. I think those images from space, the photographs taken by Cassini from Saturn, showing Earth as a teeny white dot make the exact opposite point; illustrating the enormity of the miracle that was the sweet spot of a ball of rock exactly the ‘right’ distance from the Sun.
But where was this young lady’s brother? Some would say, perfectly reasonably, that the question was nonsensical. That he was gone. That he was nowhere or that he was in the grave.
But it wasn’t them she was asking. It was my Tarot she was asking.
It is hard to describe, but as you look deeper into a card, a door opens in the mind, or in the imagination if you wish to classify it as that. The brain wave activity has switched from conscious, intellectual, beta state wavelength to a more meditative alpha state wavelength.
I gazed into the Sun card and it suggested to me that ‘wherever’ her brother was, ‘whatever’ he was, he was like a child again, sometimes awake, sometimes asleep. I received the strong impression- there is no other word for it- that he did not remember his death. Not at all, or whatever it was that drove him to it.
He was a little boy again. And then I was struck with another sudden but vivid impression. I saw him kicking about, splashing in a puddle. He had his back turned on the Earth. He was neither bored, nor sad nor lonely, simply quietly, happily preoccupied.
He had forgotten how he died. He did not remember whatever it was, however it had been for him, what it had felt like, being him in his life, that had driven him to such a point of nihilism.
If her brother had any memories or consciousness surviving death- if that could be possible, then this was his afterlife, all trauma forgotten.
It may simply have been telepathy, and I was picking up on the lady’s own memories of her brother. I had never met her
But then, and again this was prompted by The Sun card, I told the lady that she would soon be hearing news of a new baby on the way. This was probably a birth within the immediate family, and whether it was a boy or girl, the Tarot was suggesting the possibility, however bizarre, that it was the soul of her brother being reborn. Or that he could be reborn, when he was ready. The Sun card said that her brother would be returning soon, whether or not the coming baby was her brother returning again (down through the Gates of Men)
Some souls, it is said, wait many centuries before they are ready to get in the queue again. Others wait decades. Others only months. Time means nothing to them. It is when they feel ready. Just that.
Stanley Kubrick was a visionary. A seer.
The Star Child, Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick
Has someone been here before? This is not a thing that can ever be known, and in this instance, the coming baby was his or her own unique self. Each birth is unique. And if we are reborn, we are not clones or carbon copies of the person we were before. The soul needs free of old burdens.
I once had a small experience that has sometimes made me wonder. I was in the kitchen, stirring a pan when suddenly the kitchen changed around me. I was now standing in a very different kitchen with white walls, a stone floor, a high ceiling. It was simple, a few notches above basic, an urban kind of rustic, not rural. There was an open door to my left, with an evening light sunshine streaming in at a low angle, and I knew that the door led down a set of steep stone steps to a small, rather dark cobbled courtyard. I was not anxious but I was starting to wonder where Pietro was, and when he would be arriving home. I know no such person as ‘Pietro.’
A vision. A day dream? An hallucination? Of course. It could have been anything or nothing. It has only ever happened that one time.
I sent off the lady’s email reading and three weeks later received an email in reply, telling me among other things that her sister had just found out she was expecting a baby and was about six weeks pregnant. Wouldn’t it be something, she joked, if she was going to be her brother’s auntie this time around?
Again, this story is easily explained away as a co-incidence. But if nothing else, the Tarot was proven absolutely correct in predicting the imminent news of a new birth in the family.
I would like to think the Tarot’s vision offered this lady and her family some kind of comfort, however peculiar, for a truly terrible grief. Some griefs are more natural to be borne than others. Not all griefs are equally terrible.
“There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy”-Hamlet, Shakespeare.
Indeed, Mr Shakespeare.
There are many documented stories of people claiming that they have lived another life before this one; some so detailed, that it does at least offer food for thought.
Image via Wiktionary. Murmuration of starlings at Gretna
Starlings
Coding twilight
Ink-Mark
Stamping
Calligraphic
Wing-beat
Mind as One
And Sacred Prose
In Sonic flight.
–Katie-Ellen
Tweeted 29 October
Katie-Ellen@TrueTarotTales I spooked Il Matrimonio today. I dreamed he went to Copenhagen to see ‘the Hanseatics’ and mentioned this to him late this morning (he hates dream talk, but tough) He told me he had just posted a new ship history online- The Hanseatic Inspiration. Like the birds, telepathy.
Il Matrimonio was up very early this morning, busy early bird, while I was in and out of the Land of Nod, zonked like many of us with weeks of disturbed sleep, plus the effects of a short course of meds prescribed to slow the rate of damage to my hands, due to the ongoing predations of a sero-negative rheumatoid problem.
They are helping somewhat. But this has been a relentless adversary the past 25 years.
Il Matrimonio meanwhile, had been at work in his study and tweeted a ship history online on Twitter at 7.19 AM this morning. I may have been dreaming it even as he was typing it. Who knows.
Tweeted
Don Hazeldine@donships1· Hanseatic Inspiration in #Kiel Hanseatic Inspiration 2019 16,100 Hapag-Lloyd by Vard Tulcea/Langsten Image copyright: Capo Franz
But after all, we have been living together for thirty years. Perhaps this telepathy should not be remotely surprising, given the proximity and longevity of the radio connection, and we are all more like the starlings than we think.
I don’t feel a sense of personal connection to Mr Trump, or Mr Biden either, so when I look at them, I am trying to hear-see what the starlings are saying en masse, but with me as one of them in the mass.
I could just switch on the telly but that is NOT the starlings. Even social media is not the starlings. All of it together, which means all that which is staying quiet, that is the starlings.
It should be in the bag for Mr B, so why is this such a roiling sea.
27 October I drew these cards shown below.
Top Row: Mr T, Bottom Row Mr B
Counting out of 7, we count a red card as a yes and a black card as a no.
Top Row Mr T: King Diamonds 6 Diamonds 3 Clubs 9 Clubs Queen Hearts ACE CLUBS 9 Hearts. This is a strong showing.
The cards themselves. Well, 27 October, Mr T drew the stronger cards. But based on the counting system, black v red, yes/no, they were showing neck and neck.
However one cuts it, this is no landslide forecast. For either.
There could be a delay of some kind, or a challenge though Mr T has previously said he will accept the result, as is the norm in democracy, however imperfectly it seems to operate at times. The alternatives are too shocking to contemplate.
But he’d got the Ace of Spades in there when I looked back on 20 September. This is the most notorious…and powerful minor arcana card.
It describes or forecasts an Idea, an act of law, a victory,a coup, or a loss or a demise.
Mr T currently alleges postal ballots are being deliberately dumped while other sources suggest that apparently Mr B could still lose the election, IF Mr T manages to hang on to key swing states including Texas and Florida.
Especially if Mr B should he lose any one of the so called ‘rust-belt states.’
Handsome birds, starlings, but who loves them? Unloved by many because they are too many, noisy, messy, pugnacious, common, ubiquitous? Well, yes, and we are also too many. We better beware hubris, and watch our own step.
There is what we see in plain sight, like the spectacle of a murmuration, and there is what can only see ‘through a glass darkly,’ to quote the grumpy Apostle Paul.
My cards are not in line with the polls or my logic. But I must keep faith with the process or be forsworn in neutrality. One can only be wrong. It looks like Mr B to win in the polls, but it still could work out as Mr T.
This is the future still in the making then. The cards are doing a snapshot in time, reflecting real time, or doing mass telepathy, starling-style.
It has occurred to Mr T that he really might not depart. That the Law (the Supreme Court?) might enable that outcome. This, then, has not reached the tipping point of no return.
There are many weightier matters I find myself investigating with cartomancy; the use of ordinary playing cards for divination, using these instead of, or alongside my tarot cards.
I may find myself investigating business questions. Will this merger go ahead, and when? etc etc
I could be surveilling what seems likely to happen next vis-= a- vis Brexit etc.
I do look of course. Wouldn’t you? I occasional post readings on public matters, but heck, Life is also made of little things, and who needs pointless hate from total strangers on social meejia in this overheated alt-climate.
I don’t see Yellowstone blowing any time soon, or World War 3, and they’re rather weighty matters. Earth will endure it’s natural span, I feel it will be longer than currently predicted, you know, give or take a few hundred million years, but we will be long gone from here and so will everything else by then.
We have recently been on our travels, an undertaking by car and ferry, and for me, by wheelchair, touring in France: The D-day beaches, Pornic in Brittany, Rocamadour in Lot in the Dordogne, a night in Nantes, and north again to Bayeaux before catching the ferry home again next day – a 5 hour crossing to Portsmouth.
Rocamadour is spectacular in the extreme. We stayed in a small hotel, Les Esclargies– at the top of the great cliff above the famous sanctuary with the old main street below it. You can go down in a funicular.
The hotel is in an oak clearing or glade and after a stormy 6 hour drive from Pornic, we arrived after heavy rain to see a red squirrel robbing a hanging bird feeder. We had a downstairs room with a good sized bathroom and wet room. We stayed a few days and late one afternoon, I sat outside with my cards while inside with the patio door open, Il Matrimonio snoozed.
Simply heavenly.
I shuffled my playing cards asking, what is Il Matrimonio doing right now?
Why would I bother to ask when I already knew the answer?
That is precisely the reason for doing it. To see if I draw the cards I expect to draw when I already know the answer, and to see if those cards are an accurate or meaningful reflection of those facts already known, harnessing that benefit of hindsight in order to challenge my accuracy rates in randomly drawing a relevant card.
I expected to draw the Four of Spades in its most benign aspects.
Traditional Meanings: Bed, rest, illness, recuperation, the need for caution, the sick bed, hospital room, coffin, a jail cell, rest, confinement, exhaustion, need to take it easy, move at a slower pace, bed-ridden, feeling fenced in, staying at home, an unhealthy situation, feeling trapped, feeling sick and tired.
Gentle snorting noises proceeded to issue from the open door behind me.
But no…I didn’t draw the Four. I drew the Three of Spades.
Traditionally: loss and deception, lies, misunderstanding, confusion, a growing problem, a worsening condition, deterioration, disease, infection, third-party interference, a third wheel, meddling, a love triangle, what goes on behind the scenes, trials and tribulations, a test, an exam.
I associate it with the Tarot’s Three of Swords; heartache, separation, quarrels, mourning and sometimes literally, cardiac or respiratory symptoms.
Il Matrimonio is somewhat prone to indigestion. I found that if he avoids gluten, he doesn’t seem to get it, but travelling, on holiday, avoiding gluten was not such a practical proposition for him, and besides, the croissants and pastries at breakfast were rather too delish.
Uh oh, I thought, contemplating the Three of Swords, what’s this? I hope everyone’s all right at home, and as for him, I wonder if he’s got a bit of heartburn.
And no sooner had I articulated this thought, there came a burp from inside and Il Matrimonio sat up muttering something about wanting the bicarb.
I think that counts as validation.
So, to add to the vocabulary of the Three of Swords, let us add, indigestion, heartburn, bicarbonate…and burps.
Here’s a kicker though.
Here’s the sting in this tale.
Something strange happened our last night there, a Friday night or Saturday small hours. I had the distinct and quite startling impression that someone pulled twice, quite sharply at my bed covers, trying to drag away the small cushion supporting my knees (pain management of rheumatoid disease)
I mentioned it immediately. We had only just switched the lights out when I felt the first sharp tug, but Il Matrimonio hadn’t noticed anything odd, not the first time nor the second time, but a bad night followed, for the first part of the night. Frightening dreams involving being pushed in a bed, a malevolent coven and the fear of imminent death.
I have had such experiences before, not often, and at the time they have made no sense, – one might as well have put it down to booze or something, although I do not drink or use substances likely to tamper with my view of reality. But days later, and on one occasion, eighteen months later, these dreams or whatever they were revealed themselves to have been a foreshadowing. I once dreamed of an earthquake at the end of my road, I was trying to jump a widening crack in the pavement, and a week later to the day, and after an odd, jittery day, the real one arrived at one in the morning. An actual earthquake…in Lytham St Anne’s in the small hours, and it made the national papers
The epicentre was in Market Rasen in Lancashire, and it was teeny, but the experience when it actually happened, was eerie as hell. I don’t want even to imagine the terror of a big one.
I reckon we can sense these things in the same way that birds and animals are known to do…given sufficient absence of distraction.
And the Three of Spades, like the Tarot’s Three of Swords, can mean mourning.
We returned to shortly receive news of a death, a phone call and it was an uncle of Il Matrimonio’s. This was a quiet death in hospital after a short illness and at the age of 82. It happened on the Friday following our last night in Rocamadour and apparently, some tube got pulled out of his uncle’s arm as he lay in his hospital bed, with fatal results although perhaps it would not have made any difference either way.
Poor Il Matrimonio nurses kind memories of his uncle … tears were shed.
A client wanted the Tarot’s particular handle on a relationship breakdown which now threatened to become permanent. He thought he knew where he had gone wrong, but was he reading this right, and what were the prospects for mending the situation? Asking for a Tarot’s eye view of the problem the crux of the story read like this:
King Swords RX – this man has made a negatively perceived decision.
Seven of Pentacles – this woman wants a home, is ready to cultivate an orchard.
Nine of Pentacles Rx – this woman is a highly practical thinker, is queen of her own turf, and gives orders at work rather than takes them, but after more than three years together, not living together and without marriage or babies, she needs to see progress.
Both cards reflecting these very natural motives are earth suit cards; work, money, bricks and mortar, foundations, security, comfort, what and whom pays the piper.
Images by kind permission of Ciro Marchetti and are from The Gilded Tarot
The lady, in her early thirties, asked him to move into her home, which she owns, but this would mean a short distance relocation for the man who declined/deferred/ citing work and family concerns. There were other issues, too, based round mutual trust, but Tarot presented this word ‘home’ as the deal-breaker
Further cards: Page Cups, Ace Wands.
The lady has a job she likes and is good at, in hotel management, but the birth card, the page of cups, talks about the biological clock, asking, when is a good time to start a family? No such thing perhaps as a convenient time, but for the woman in particular there may be a fear of leaving it too late. After so much time together, this lady seemed to feel it was time to put up or shut up. He declined the invitation (challenge) to move things onward and upward so she had withdrawn, although with expressions of regret.
The Seven of Pentacles says she is reluctant to start all over again, however, so perhaps, and unless she meets someone extremely suitable for her in the near future, this card of harvesting a slow fruit may, just may, turn things in his favour if he wants to recover the situation and is willing and able to, but the Ace Wands – think, movement, relocation, speed, fire, (also conception) suggests he needs to take decisive action, and soon, to make that happen. To win the fair lady for keeps, he needs to ‘man up’, and fast.
However, people tend to do whatever comes most naturally; advice will often fall on fallow ground and this is why my Tarot does not offer advice, except in the form of answering the clients clearly stated question.
My client saw this as his predicament, and so it was, but he had unwittingly also created one for the lady, not seeing that her needs had changed while his had not. Many women seem to find themselves in just this same sort of predicament these days. That’s a whole other can of worms, but some choose the bird and afterwards they build a nest together. Some women nowadays build the nest themselves, then choose the bird to come and join them there or else they tire of waiting and looking and proceed to fill the nest, a queen alone.
Carl Jung speculated that the Tarot works according to the principle of ‘synchronicity’- that psychic insights are triggered by apparently random and yet meaningful co-incidence, which he thought might be explained by Quantum Mechanics.
I was once doing a face to face reading, when the focus was the client’s job, and I drew the King of Pentacles or Coins.
The image below is from The Gilded Tarot by kind permission of Ciro Marchetti.
This Tarot ‘king’ represents a man who is patient, practical, kind, industrious. He is the salt of the earth. I said to the client that I thought he was a manager, and the work was practical in nature but also involved communication.
I could see that this job demanded utmost precision or the ‘thing’ wouldn’t work. But I didn’t yet quite ‘see’ what his job might be and he wasn’t volunteering. No matter. We are a species of hunter, we card readers. This is part of the fun and fascination of doing a reading.
‘I might get at it though,’ I said, ‘I might now that my ‘computer’ is talking directly to your ‘computer’.’
What I meant by this was, I felt we were on the same wavelength.
His reply?
‘But that IS my job! I work for the government. That’s what I do…I make computers talk to other computers.’
Last time here on True Tarot Tales, the Moon card caused me to enquire about whether there had been a recent instance close by, of an upset tummy, possibly food poisoning, and it turned out, just as the Moon card classically depicts two dogs barking at the moon, two of the client’s dogs had been unwell after retrieving a ball from a dirty ditch.
Infection and disease may be flagged up by an appearance by the Moon card.
And so can flooding. I first saw this manifesting in my own cards during a Skype reading of 2010 for a client whose father lives in Pakistan, and her father had had to move house after flooding.
November 13, reading for someone in respect of a property in Hawick and the prospects for sale, I felt it might sell in August/September 2016, but, having drawn the Moon card, I asked the client, was there a river close to the property, and if there was, did it flood? Because I sensed flooding as a barrier to sale.
I was told the property is a top floor apartment, and is close to The Teviot but it had not flooded during the time the client had lived there (not many years) Nor had the client been aware or deterred by the proximity of the river when buying.
But, and very unfortunately for all affected, and by no means for the first time in its history Hawick flooded badly in early December.
I still sense my client may move home in 2016, I draw the Six of Swords which indicates progress and very often a domestic relocation, and certainly within the next two years, but the pathway may be more complex than anticipated when the property went on the market, and may, suggests the strategic Seven of Swords, involve the unwanted complication of a letting arrangement.
And, let us hope this is unduly doomful, no reader is infallible; I see signs we may well not be done with this Moon business yet. I draw the Moon card again, when asking about UK weather into February. Greater accuracy would demand a regional or even more break down, but there seems to be more ‘warm air’ coming where we don’t want it; the King of Wands Reversed.
A skeptical friend, who lives in Cumbria joked recently, that of all the religions he doesn’t believe in, the one he could perhaps go for is the Norse gods, and he may perhaps, even ask Freyr for help. Maybe it’s not such a crazy idea, and this morning, there is snow lying here on the Lancashire coast. But whatever you do, ask politely.
An outing for the Tarot’s Moon card, with Katie-Ellen, UK Tarot reader, writer and business consultant.
Happy New Year, and the tummy bug in question was nothing to do with me, I am happy to say, or the seasonal festivities. I was doing a Skype reading, investigating questions to do with ongoing and future creative projects- the client is an artist and sculptor, when I drew the Moon card.
The image below is from The Gilded Tarot, by kind permission of Ciro Marchetti. Also available from Amazon but the publisher Llewellynis getting this shout-out.
Classical meanings for this card are; the Moon itself, Fertility, monthly cycles, tides, floods (alas), conception, confusion, deception, secrets, vivid dreams, visions, leaps of imagination, fantasy, art, animals, hunting, secrets, fraud, theft, surveillance, risk, travel with danger attached, disease.
Reversed/Upside down: the meanings take on a different complexion, and may suggest any of these things- but they are fading away and now belong to the recent past.
The key challenge for a reader is to decide which meanings are relevant, and quickly, not to bore witless and alienate the client. One must say the first thing that comes to mind. I call it ‘gob-shiting’and I really shouldn’t; it’s hardly elegant and perhaps this should be a New Year’s resolution. The thing is, the reader needs to just speak.
I said the first thing that popped into my mind and asked whether a loved one had been ill, just recently, and perhaps they had gone down with a tummy bug? Or, could it even have been a bout of food poisoning, but whatever it was, they seemed to be better now?
I held up the card to the camera. ‘Look at this,’ I said, ‘see the two dogs?’
The client has several dogs, and said, ‘I don’t believe this! Two of my dogs have been ill. We went out a walk and they went into a ditch after a ball and they were quite poorly for a few days afterwards, both of them. A filthy ball in a nasty, dirty ditch. But they are over it now.’
The reader of Tarot or any other divination system must learn not to self- censor. If they do, because their first thought seems just too stupid, they will likely get it wrong, and then want to kick themselves. Learning to trust yourself enough to do that is the hardest thing, or at least, I found it so and I still sometimes have to tell that inner critic, aka saboteur of the oracular mind, to shut up.
People may well say, and many do, sod all the soothsayers. Wits or just good old common sense is what is called for, in working out a response to a problem. This is fair enough and often true…at least, it may be from where they are sitting. Nine times out of 10, in making their own predictions, they may prove quite correct. But what the oracular reader sniffs out, like a wild animal, using whatever oracle as a spade for digging in the primal mind, is what is hidden and could not wisely or even reasonably be expected.
The Tarot is nothing but printed card stock, physically. But the imagery and its many and deep rooted associations facilitate telepathy, triggering both receiver and transmitter. The client is equally active in this process, at a level they are not consciously aware of, any more than the reader is consciously aware of why they said A and not B.
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True Tarot Tales 