ghosts – True Tarot Tales

Stories of Scorpio: Part 2

The Death card and a psychic dream premonition

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is pexels-photo-5005210.jpeg — Photo by Jo Kassis on Pexels.comcaption…

Last time I was talking about on the origins of the Scorpio story: the history, natural history and the scorpion itself, the symbolism, and the astronomy and astrology. Now for a further look at the archetype.

The Scorpio Archetype

The zodiac signs represent archetypes, meaning something that is considered to be a perfect or typical example of a particular kind of person or thing. The zodiac signs paint a ‘poetic’ portrait of a person born at a particular time of year.

Scorpio is The Sorcerer, The Witch, The Investigator, The Hypnotist, The Alchemist and the Necromancer. Scorpio is also the World Serpent, and the Eagle, and the mythological Phoenix, the fire-bird of resurrection, as new life rises from the ashes –The Phoenix.

a blurry photo of a yellow flower — Photo by Egor Litvinov on Unsplash

Scorpio is the season of fast dwindling daylight and with this comes the new season of chills and influenza. The medical salt associated with Scorpio, the tissue cell salt Calcium Sulphate, performs a cleansing and cooling function in the body. Injury or infection may produce pus which may form a boil, and then the boil bursts, expelling infection and with it, expelling the dangerous heat of inflammation. But better out than in. Though like a volcanic eruption, the immediate aftermath may be destructive. This can be viewed as an allegory of world events.

What has been festering, must either turn inward, bringing sepsis, rot and death, or must find a way to break out. Scorpio breaks out with heat and violence and/or conceals by means of stealth, wealth, secrecy and intrigue.

New readers will often discuss the water cards in terms of how healing they are, and and sensitive, ‘spiritual’ and emotional. True. But great emotions will just as readily wreak great turmoil. There are terrifying floods. There are storms at sea. Heaven help Jamaica at the time of writing. There are tsunamis. The fixed water sign that is the Scorpion of the zodiac is ruled by Mars and the red star Antares. It doesn’t freeze. It may steam. It may simmer. But it may scald. It may boil.

a pot sitting on top of a fire next to a log — Photo by Adams Arslan on Unsplash

The cards representing the fixed water zodiac sign of Scorpio are The Death card, The King of Cups, and the Five, Six and Seven of Cups.

The Death card sits in between two mutable cards: The Hanged Man card of Pisces, denoting twelfth house matters, hidden matters, and a time of inaction, and Temperance of Sagittarius, representing ninth house matters, and the power of right timing and targeted action, just as the arrow of the Archer flies to its mark.

Temperance is also the card of healing where Scorpio is Life or Death.

The Tarot is saying that Death too may be a way of healing. Or rather perhaps, that Death itself is healed. That the Dead go forward into the unknowable with the safe escort of the angel of Temperance, thought to be Michael, the angel of Fire, returning home again. They are going home to the source whence they came, reascending though the Gate of the Gods in Capricorn, rising through the Milky Way, straddled by the constellation of The Archer.

As mentioned last time, and the tarot readers here know all this, the major arcana card in the Tarot representing Scorpio is the Death card, one of the most feared cards in the Tarot deck. Note the Biblical ‘pale horse’ of Death and the white rose. The rose signifies beauty and immortality. The rose is meant to suggest all that has ever once been, is recorded somewhere, somehow, forever.

The Death card is rather played down these days. Many readers rush to assure us that the appearance of the Death card does not predict a death, or not in the physical sense. Rather, it is the end of a chapter. And this is often true. But not always. I have learned in my own experience as a reader, the Death card can mean exactly that, and there can be no bottling out. The Death card demands we face the truth of our existence.

A long time ago I saw in a dream the death of a long-ago neighbour, a friend of my parent’s. She was still only quite a young woman, the mother of five children. I woke haunted, the dream was still so vivid, and it sat with me all day. I had not seen this family friend, let’s call her L. for some years. What was she doing in my dreams? So often, when we wake, if we remember them, we clearly see that our dreams have only been processing recent events and conversations.

But what do you do with a dream like that? What can you do? Nothing. You forget it, blame it on cheese at bedtime, or you might log it and put it on one side. A fortnight later I was visiting my parents, and while I was helping my mother in the kitchen, I said, “by the way, Mam, how is L. W.…have you heard from her at all lately?”

My mother turned sharply. Her face set hard like stone.

“Why do you ask?”

“I had such a strange dream about her.”

“Tell me.”

I described the dream. How I had seen people and cars arriving at L’s house one street away from where we had used to live when I was growing up. Some, though not all of these visitors, wearing black. But it was my mother who opened the front door to greet them, and not L or her husband. L did not appear in this dream, herself.

The absence of L, at her own front door, with visitors arriving dressed in black, said this was a dream of death.

And now my mother told me, she had just heard from L’s husband who was a close colleague of my mother’s, that L., only fifty at the time, the mother of five children, a fun, brave and vivacious person, a real fighter always, a local politician, an educator, and something of a social justice warrior, had just a few days previously been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour.

In terms of the date, I will never know how closely the news of this dreadful diagnosis coincided with the dream of the funeral or wake. But how much closer did it need to be, my God.

L. had been in a minor road traffic accident. She had hit another car, no great damage done. But she hadn’t seen the other car. So she went to the opticians who saw something he did not like the look of, who referred her to a specialist and then they found the tumour.

How long did dear L have, my -always very hard-headed- mother now asked. How long did I think?

I am a Taurus sun sign sun native. People may not tend to think of the earthy mid spring sign of Taurus in terms of all things psychic, supernatural or occult. But The High priestess which is widely associated with Pisces, represents Hathor and the Bull Cult of Apis, and Walpurgis Night is in Taurus, April 30, May Eve, the spring time equivalent of Halloween and all things the other side of The Veil. The crescent moon of her headdress does double duty as the cow horns of Hathor, her throne festooned with the pomegranates of Persephone, queen of the Underworld.

Scorpio is the opposite sun sign of Taurus and vice versa. The shadow sun self, one might say, while my own personal Taurus natal sun is in the eighth house, ruled by Scorpio.

We are not defined by our birth charts. Or by our sun sign. We are zodiac kaleidoscopes. But still, we are the children of the place and season into which we were born. The rocks, the light, the animals, the flowers, the birds, the skies at night at the time of our birth. The hours of daylight and the vitamin D of our mothers. The melatonin. Our zodiac sun sign is our touchstone and our totem.

Back to my mother’s grief stricken question. How long did our friend L. have? Those children at home, and the youngest still only little? Of course I do not know the answer to such questions. Nor do I want to. But I told my mother what I felt, that she had maybe two years, and sadly, it was not even quite that. L died at home one night aged 52, sitting up suddenly, fighting for air, in the bed she still shared with her husband, and with her mother who had come to stay to help with the children, there in the next room and beside her when she died.

God bless and keep L. and her mother, now also long gone, detaching gently from the tree like a faded leaf.

But unpopular Pluto, Hades, lord of the Underworld has a compassion all his own. It is not Death itself that is our enemy, or the enemy of Life itself, but despair. Like the song says, after all, the ‘Seasons Don’t Fear The Reaper’.

Scorpio confronts us with Death. But this is not about any kind of a death wish. It is the cry of Life’s own longing for itself.

Many years later, when I started to work with the cards, I was trying to understand more about this dream, and other such experiences. Where did such dreams come from. And what was the point of them? What good did they do anyone?

I did not like it. But it is what it is. And later, when I started to learn to read the cards, I sometimes saw death in the cards, although I will never predict it. But still, a reader should be prepared to “go there” and at least discuss it if someone asks in all seriousness. To walk the road alongside. No ducking the tough discussions. There is much that can be discussed. Not least, family matters. Usually, a legal professional is already being consulted, as is wholly appropriate. But people have still wanted this other kind of conversation and there is a careful, critical line between respect, ethical responsibilities, and officiousness or nannying.

It is important to note that there are other cards in the Tarot deck that may indicate a death. The Three of Swords or the Six, Nine or Ten of Swords, for instance. The Death card, in my experience so far, has tended to denote a peaceful natural death.

The entirety of human experience is encapsulated past, present and the future unknown in a deck of only 78 cards. It is of no use for a reader to seek to work with the tarot or any oracle, shirking the most difficult questions, though we must still adhere to strictest ethics, and like Hippocrates, first we must do no harm.

It’s a tricky line at times. Readers are on the one hand, fallible, and need to remember this at all times, while on the other hand, to be of service, we have to trust ourselves sufficiently to speak clearly, and to the heart of the matter in service to this oracle of the human spirit.

full moon covered with clouds — Photo by Hulki Okan Tabak on Unsplash

“The man, who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight, has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world.”~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Old age is not our natural birth-right. Few animals reach old age living in the wild. The scorpion itself lives 2-3 years in the wild…although in captivity, incredibly it may live 25 years. The price of freedom, hey? But it is this sharp focus of such an awareness that gives Scorpio its drive, intensity, its passion, or its preoccupation with the “darker” side of life, and with the occult and the mysterious, but also its power of regeneration, and the drive to procreate new life.

Thank you for reading.

Back soon…the decans of Scorpio, and Halloween

Till next time 🙂

Halloween, Tarot and a true ghost story

Scorpio Photo by Jo Kassis on Pexels.com

Halloween is designated the season of ghosts. Why is that? We can encounter a ghost any time of year.

But there is an especially potent natural reason for the ghostly season. Halloween or All Hallows Eve is celebrated 31 October each year, marking the cross- quarter of the year, half-way point between the autumn equinox in the northern hemisphere, and the winter solstice, which in 2023 will occur on Friday 22 December.

Halloween began as a pre-Christian Iron Age festival 2000 years ago among the various peoples of Britain and Northern Europe popularly known as the Celts.

In parts of Britain and the Republic of Ireland Halloween is still called Samhain (pronounced Sow-an, from Gaelic/Irish meaning ‘summer’s end.’)

This is a critical turning point of the year from an ancient survival point of view: food production, harvesting and storage as the days grow shorter, the nights longer, vegetation decays, temperatures drop – and more people get sick. We are now in the zodiac sign territory of Scorpio, and the Tarot card correlating with Scorpio is the Death card.

From Halloween in the Anglo-sphere to Alf-blot (Elf Blood) in Scandinavia, to The Day of the Dead in Spanish speaking countries, the period 31 October – 3 November is a festival marking the end of the harvest season.

Russia does not celebrate Halloween as such. It is not recognized by the Orthodox Church, though it has been gaining popularity among young people since the 1990’s.

In France, again, Halloween is not a traditional festival, though certain elements may be catching on nowadays, cultural imports in the twentieth century. But La Toussaint or All Saints Day, is a widely celebrated national holiday celebrated on the first of November.

Now we are preparing for the decay of vegetation, the coming darkness, the time of hibernation of many animals, and the hardships of winter. This is a natural time to be marking the remembrance of the Dead.

Do I believe in ghosts? I have had some deeply strange encounters, and met enough perfectly sensible people who have told me their stories, and had no reason to doubt their common sense, and the validity of their account.

What is a ghost? We have the dictionary definition:

“Now chiefly, an apparition of a dead person which is believed to appear or become manifest to the living, typically as a nebulous image and attempting to right a wrong done in life; this sense of the word is recorded from late Middle English.

The word is recorded from Old English (in form gāst) in the sense ‘spirit, soul’, and is of Germanic origin; the gh- spelling occurs first in Caxton, and was probably influenced by Flemish gheest”. – Source

But the question still remains, what is a ghost, really? Are they sentient? Do they know they are there? Do they have intent? Or are they some kind of an echo? Do they know who they are- or were? Do they know who we are? What do they want?

I recommend reading up about the Cambridge archaeologist and paranormal researcher Tom Lethbridge T.C. Lethbridge

The Moon card

The Tarot card that in a reading can suggest a vivid dream, a vision, a psychic or supernatural experience or even a ghost is The Moon card. And this Halloween, we have only just passed through a Full Moon lunar eclipse. Perhaps you have been experiencing unusually vivid dreams.

From The Gilded Tarot Royale, illustrator Ciro Marchetti

This time of year represents a ‘liminal’ space, a threshold – a doorway of some kind, an ‘in-between’ space between outside and inside, one room and another, or between summer and winter, night and dark, and therefore symbolically, between Life and Death.

Being half-awake or half-asleep is an ‘in-between’ state of mind or consciousness, when we are might have a powerful frightening or psychic dream experience or even experience sleep paralysis, traditionally known as a visit from The “Night Hag” aka The Mara, as portrayed in a famous painting in its several variants, The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli.

This is a not uncommon experience that can occur when the brain is in-between deep and lighter sleep stages. The person thinks they are awake when they are not. There is a strong sense of threat, a malevolent presence, and they cannot move a muscle to defend themselves. I have experienced it myself, very unpleasant. Read here for the scientific medical explanation.

The Death card bears the Rider of the Pale Horse who comes for one and all. But the white rose is a symbol of the sanctity of life, and is a promise of resurrection.

A True Ghost Story

Some years ago, my phone rang one Saturday night, about 8 PM, a lady calling from Preston, about ten miles away from where I live. She had found my number in the psychic pages of the online telephone directory, and she wanted a psychic medium.

Note. I have never advertised as a psychic medium, but there is no separate listing for Tarot readers who are frequently listed under that same heading, along with astrologers and clairvoyants.

This lady was calling to ask me to come over to her house. Right now, please! There was ‘something’ in the hallway and it was blocking the stairs. She, her partner and the children were huddled in the sitting room with the door shut, too terrified to leave the room.

I could not go in person, sadly. Nor do I advertise such a service. But there are others who do. I gave her the name and telephone number of a local lady who specialized in clearing ‘haunted houses,’ -I didn’t know her but she had positive reviews, and meantime I reached for my cards, asking the lady what exactly had happened?

Her youngest child had been upstairs, she told me, when an invisible lady started whispering in her ear. The child panicked. Then her siblings panicked. Then the mother panicked too, and so did her partner.

Now there was something outside the sitting room door; a cold spot, a moving shadow.

I asked, what had this invisible lady said to the little girl?

The caller said, the ghost told her youngest child, her hair was very pretty.

I was looking through my cards while we were talking. This figured. The cards confirmed a benign presence – or influence. A grandmother?

The cards also indicated the lady on the other end of the phone had been under a lot of strain. I asked about this, and she confirmed a prolonged period of acute financial and other worries. Her mother had died three years earlier, and she was still missing her, really quite badly. But, she said, the littlest child was too young to remember her grandmother. Why, the lady wondered, if the ghost was her mother, had her mother not talked to her, but instead to the child, she had never known in life?

It was because the little girl happened in that moment to be the one tuned in on the ‘right’ wavelength to receive such an incoming message. The little girl had ESP in other words, and was hyper sensitive to atmosphere. This was why she alone had heard it. If there was a ghost, if the grandmother was still around, then she was tuning in to the living, seeking to deliver comfort to the mother who was her child.

The little grand-daughter was the most receptive conduit.

First things first. The lady had called to ask for help. I had given her the number of a reputable medium but she needed support right now, and help to restore order in the household.

To do this she needed to assert herself and reclaim her territory, ‘psych it out’, and show the children it was safe to go anywhere in the house.

The living can talk to a ghost, or say boo, just as it can say boo to us.There was no nastiness in these cards. If there had been, then the living can use aggression too. And tell the presence to GET GONE.

photograph of person facing opposite in smoky spotlight — Photo by Mads Schmidt Rasmussen on Unsplash

This presence was not nasty. Or at least the original one was not. But it was not wanted. I suggested that she tell the family, ‘it’s all gone now’, open that sitting room door, put lots of lights on, go herself down that hallway, alone if need be, put the kettle on, serve up something for supper. Light, movement and noise will shatter such a spell, and fear is contagious and feeds upon itself.

I later heard directly from the medium whose number I had given the lady. The lady gave her my number. The medium and her team had gone to the lady’s house next day, taking with them an array of electronic equipment. The medium confirmed there was an old lady’s ghost in the house, that it was the grandmother, and that the mother’s state of stress had called the ghost forth. The ghost had behaved in character, affectionately, but since the child had been startled, and then the mother had reacted with fear, everyone became frightened, and the thing took on an unpleasant aspect. The medium said that now the mother was consciously aware of it, the house should stay quiet now.

No suggestion of judgement attaches to the lady’s handling of the situation by the way. None whatsoever. Fear was and is a natural reaction to such an inexplicable experience. But if it happened again, now that she had some kind of explanation, however questionable, and reassurance that it was not malevolent, she could choose a more controlled and matter of fact response, whilst not dismissing the child’s experience.

“The Mind has many corridors” – Emily Dickinson

Psychic author Cassandra Eason has written a book with advice for parents with psychic children available from a range of second hand book sellers online.

https://cassandraeason.com/https://cassandraeason.com/

From my point of view, since I had never spoken with this lady medium myself before her visit to the house, but had simply provided contact details, I was interested that my tarot and this lady, this psychic medium, had detected virtually identical stories.

The power of the physical, the element of Earth, is the power of the living moment, here and now. We are exalted in the Earth. We take in air. We take up space.

This time is ours. Our inheritance of Earth. Our ace card in otherworldly dealings, the Ace of Pentacles. A nice cup of tea? How about a biccie? Fed the cat. Take the dog a walk.

Take it a walk to the cemetery.

It’s nice in there.

ALL SOULS

The transient day dies silently, and at its edge,

four grey hounds hunt for signs among the graves,

snuffling in the leaves, they lift their legs

on dead bouquets and faded wreaths.

A wind sprite sneaks round urns and angels,

and whisks the skirt of a woman kneeling

with a basket beside a new earth mound.

Two small children crouch behind.

Lights come on as dusk draws in,

and the woman with her kids drifts away

with the mist, all grey, sky as one,

into the Hesperian town.

The hounds stay running among the stones,

backs bridged over their skittering bones.

Circling together they lift their heads

and howl for the souls of their ancestral dead;

hunters, and all the prey that gave up the ghost

dying together in the close embracing hills.

They know who they are calling; The Host,

All Souls, rising from the earth like smoke.

Torches have blazed with saxophone and drum.

Masked revellers with candles in the town

finally sleep. And, under the windy moon,

the graveyard walks.

-Margaret Whyte

RIP Mam who wrote this poem (23 December 1939- 27 February 2023)

I saw my darling mother’s ghost just once, the day after she died in her own bedroom at home, released from hospital on end of life care. A movement caught my eye and there it was, a faint cloud, a movement on the turn of the stairs.

But she did not linger long. She was out and through “the valley” by the tenth day, and smiling up at hills the other side, clouds chasing sunlight across the tops. A child of the Pennines always. I reckon she has found her way to her own perfect heaven.

Life is for living. But Time is not linear. There is much wisdom in superstition, and we give thanks this All Souls season and every day, for the time we have shared with all those we have loved, who have gone on before us.

Thank you for reading.

Tarot, Farewell To a Queen and a Time of Mourning

On the first anniversary of the death of Elizabeth 11

Original post 10 September 2022

“Our Queen Elizabeth has died at a good old age. She has been gathered in at harvest time, taken away in Virgo season under the watch of the stars of The Virgin and the planets Neptune and Jupiter. She, a queen of fixed Earth, a Taurus sun sign subject born 21 April, has been given back into the keeping of the mutable Earth of Demeter.

Now Elizabeth becomes a different kind of star in the firmament, a chapter between chapters, linking her father George and her son Charles, in a story and in a chain 1000 years long, broken only by the years of the Protectorate 1653-1959, forging the dramatic, complex and sometimes violent history of kingship in these islands.

George never expected or wanted to be king. Elizabeth did not ask or expect to be Queen, or to become Queen so soon and so young. Charles? Now he must change his life, and do it late in life, to assume that added weight of kingship.

Lady Colin Campbell tells us that the Queen died at 14:37 PM on Thursday 8 September.

The State Funeral will be in Westminster Abbey 14 September at 11 AM but then she will be taken to Windsor to lie in the Chapel there.

More Information here

Elizabeth as Queen of Scotland

Elizabeth was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland,Wales and Northern Ireland and was the Head of The Commonwealth, her unique world legacy after the end of Empire. No other former Empire has created its equivalent.

Much has been made over the years of the Queen’s German blood. But she died in Balmoral, in her beloved Scotland, and she was descended on her mother’s side from the beautiful and tragic Lady Glamis, Janet Douglas Lyon.

Lady Glamis was judicially murdered, burned at the stake in Edinburgh Castle in 1537 on charges of treason and witchcraft, cooked up by James v for reasons of personal malice, out of hatred of her family, and especially her brother, the king’s former regent, Archibald Douglas.

Balmoral 1800-1900 Unknown Author Public Domain

I was watching the live television as the Queen’s body was being driven from Balmoral down to Edinburgh, where it will lie in state tomorrow in Holyrood House.

It brought back personal memories too, of happy times up in Scotland when my own children were small and I was still physically mobile, and eager to show them some of the beautiful places I had been taken by my own parents.

There was something immensely poignant at the sight of the coffin, draped in its red and golden yellow flag, the Royal Standard, leaving the place of Queen Elizabeth’s last happiness. The ghosts there were powerful for her.

Now perhaps she will be leaving her own ghost.

We know Balmoral was a place of many happy memories for the Queen. Being there reminded her, she said, of her childhood, playing in the garden at her mother’s home in Glamis, where the sun always seemed to shine. This is the human experience encapsulated in the The Six of Cups, old family times, old friends. Seasons in the sun. Simpler times, and the timeless moments when we were small, and the world seemed full of marvellous mysteries.

Well, it was.

And it is.

Life is inevitably sadder the older we get, our losses etched deeper and deeper.

But that doesn’t make the world any less wonderful and mysterious, and the greatest mystery and miracle is, that we are even here at all.

The Six of Cups: The Gilded Tarot: By Kind Permission of Ciro Marchetti

As for happiness:-

“Happiness we can only find in ourselves, it is a waste of time to seek for it from others, few have any to spare. Sorrow we have to bear alone as best we can, it is not fair to try to shift it on others, be they men or women. We have to fight our own battles and strike as hard as we can, born fighters as we are.”

–Axel Munthe, The Story of San Michele

Harvest Moon in Pisces

The Harvest moon 9 September 2022 was brilliant in the zodiac sign of Pisces, the sign of visions, ghosts and dreams, in the Twelfth House of Unknown Destinies.

Pisces is associated in the Tarot with- well, The Moon card.

This card talks about the cycles of Nature, the power of the wild and the wild creatures, fertility, contagion, danger, high tides, a hunter’s moon. Hear the barking of the dogs and the howling of the wolves.

We are experiencing a Twelfth House event. This is something more than the death of an old lady, however grand, at a good age. It is also the death of something in her people, a link to the past and Britain as it has become after World War 11.

Eminent astrologers see the reign of Charles as an event of ill- omen for the future of the Monarchy as an institution. I can see that potential and the Moon card is anything but comfortable whenever it appears. But this is a benign, deep, visionary Full Moon. His vision may outstrip his means or freedom to execute. At least he has vision. But though he will do his dutiful best, he no longer wants to hold this Cup, if he ever really wanted it.

In The Season of Virgo

The Queen Elizabeth has died in the second decan of Virgo, associated in the Tarot with the Nine of Pentacles, ‘The Lord and Lady of Material Gain’.

This card describes a life that has every appearance of luxury but it has come at great hidden cost. There has been untold personal sacrifice behind the scenes. Personal wishes denied. What has been lost or sacrificed has been normal personal freedoms, symbolized in the Tarot by the falcon sitting on the lady’s wrist.

The ‘Gilded cage?’ Balmoral was this bird’s escape.

Many of us had been inwardly preparing for this news, while hoping that the Queen would get to celebrate her Platinum Jubilee. Hoping that her last months, now that she was living this strange new life without Philip, her husband, ally, friend and companion of 73 years, would not be too greatly darkened by two particular family troubles involving scandals and rifts.

Tarot Predictions December 2021

It is not OK to issue predictions of death. Once upon a time, for reasons of state security, it was an act of treason in England, punishable by death, to issue a prediction concerning the death of a monarch.

However I had been expecting we would lose the Queen this year, 2022, based partly on feeling and observation. Many of us will have felt the same. The feeling was also based on what I had seen in the Tarot, and I dropped a broad hint, based on a Tarot reading written up in mid December 2021, which was later published at AskAstrology.com

The cards had indicated it would happen anytime between July 2022 and the end of the year. This was based on the appearance of the Three of Swords drawn against the position I had allocated to the month of July/zodiac sign/House of Leo. The Three of Swords is severance. Leo is the sign of Royalty and also corresponds with high summer-late summer. So my cards were not completely spot in in terms of the timing. But they came pretty close.

I was working with The Gilded Tarot, and as you’ll notice, this deck is pretty well used but I felt drawn to use it on this occasion.

Extract from an article at Ask Astrology December 2021:

Leo: 5^th House (July-August 2022)

Heartland, creativity, passion, romance, royalty, children

Tarot card ~ 3 Swords Reversed

This is always a challenging card, but is one of those cards that are actually better news, being drawn reversed or upside down. The Three of Swords is about grief, loss, bereavement, arguments, Drawn in the Fifth House, it suggests that tensions between certain countries may ease. On a personal level, we are coming to terms with a family loss, or quarrels may be settling down.

Loss, sadness or disappointment. No-one escapes these experiences. How we deal with them determines whether we learn something new, and grow bigger and stronger, or whether take things personally, and see ourselves as victims and dwell on our grievances, thereby adding to the damage.

Leo is the zodiac House of royalty. There could be national mourning in 2022 for a much loved figurehead.

Whatever people may feel about our constitutional Monarchy, or the Queen, the death of Elizabeth marks the end of an era in Britain.

There is not just a sadness but a profound strangeness on the land.”

A year on, much of that strangeness endures.

Thank you for reading.

Till next time.

Demeter’s Domain: Season of Virgo, vineyards and Harvest home

Most of us know our sun sign or sign of the Zodiac, but what does the constellation look like in the night sky, and what’s the story behind it?

The season is the reason.

It’s time to meet Virgo again, and get to know her better.

Virgo Season 2023

We are entering the zodiac territory of Virgo 23 August and we’ll stay there until 23 September.

Virgo is a mutable Earth sign, representing the changing of the seasons as we approach the end of summer and the beginning of autumn in the northern hemisphere (or the end of winter and into early spring in the southern hemisphere.)

It is harvest time- ‘the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ (From An Ode to Autumn by English poet John Keats) Virgo represents the classical Hellenistic goddesses of wheat and agriculture. The brightest star in the constellation of Virgo, far brighter than our own sun, is Spica, aka ‘the ear of wheat’.

Virgo the Maiden is the sixth sign of the zodiac, and rules the sixth house and the concepts of daily routines; work, service, order, analysis and analytics, food, harvests, health, digestion, hygiene- and crafts

Virgo is traditionally ruled by Mercury, planet of communications, inquiry, science, commerce, trade and travel. This symbolic planetary influence brings to the Virgo-born subject, an enlarged curiosity and a combination of analytical ability, but also a certain contemplative, humanitarian or even mystical quality.

Traditional Associations

Zodiac symbol of Virgo

Date: August 23-September 22

Symbol: The Virgin

Element: Earth

Quality: Mutable (Sagittarius and Pisces are also Mutable, suggesting these subjects are capable and versatile; generally inclined to conform and go with the flow for the greater good.)

Ruling planet: Mercury (Travel and all forms of communication)

House: Sixth, ruling health, habits and routines

Colours: green, white and yellow

Body: The digestive system

Birthstone: Carnelian

Flowers: small bright flowers such as the buttercup

Tarot: Major Arcana card: The Hermit (introspection, perception, analysis, health, care for nature)

Minor Arcana cards: The 8,9 and 10 of Pentacles/ Coins.

*The Hermit from The Golden Tarot, Kat Black*

Astronomy

The zodiac sign of Virgo gets its name from the constellation of Virgo; the largest constellation in the zodiac, and the second largest in all the visible sky after the constellation of Hydra

It’s mind-boggling to consider that our own Sun is just one star of the Milky Way, and the Milky Way is part of a collection of galaxies known as the Local Group. This contains three large spiral galaxies: the Milky Way, Andromeda, and the Triangulum Galaxy, as well as a few dozen dwarf galaxies.

But The Local Group is just one member of the Virgo Cluster; a collection of 1200-2000 galaxies that stretch across 15 million light-years of space. And the Virgo Cluster is just one cluster in the Virgo Supercluster.

The Virgo constellation is visible from all around the world. In the northern hemisphere, it’s most visible in the evening sky from mid-March – the start of the planting season- to late June. In the southern hemisphere, look for it in the autumn and winter.

*Own image. Free to share. Credit Katie-Ellen Hazeldine, True Tarot Tales.com*

It’s a bit of a stretch, picturing a person. But add in a few more of her stars and now we can see her, lounging semi-recumbent, dangling something, holding it in one hand. This is the star Spica, a blue-white giant. Its name comes from the Latin, meaning an ‘ear of grain’- a sheaf of wheat.

The star Vindemiatrix, ‘the Grape-Gatherer,’ as soon as it was seen at daylight, is the sign, or used to be, that now was the optimal time to pick the grapes.

But if the constellation of Virgo is most visible late March- late June, then why are the birth dates for the sign of the zodiac August 22-September 23^rd?

The constellations of the zodiac are not to be confused with the signs which were named after them. Once upon a time, the dates of the signs reflected the constellations directly overhead at the same time, but they have since separated.

This drift away from that real time matching up of constellations and zodiac signs is due to the effect of the Earth’s wobble over a long period of time; every 26 000 years, creating an effect known as the precession of the equinoxes.

This does not change the symbolic link between the constellation and the sign named after it. Western or Tropical astrology is based on a symbolic, and an arithmetic, and not a strictly astronomical model. The western zodiac as we know it today, the celestial wheel of 360 degrees divided by the 12 constellations fully straddling the ecliptic, and with the signs named after those 12 selected constellations, was codified in the second century AD by Ptolemy, Greek astrologer, astronomer and mathematician.

History & Mythology

*Virgo from Urania’s Mirror, Public Domain*

Shala was an ancient Sumerian (Iraq) goddess of grain -and also compassion. Why link these two things? Famine is suffering. A good harvest was seen as a blessing of the gods. What is planted in the spring must yield a crop in the autumn or famine follows. But this cannot be guaranteed from one year to the next.

From early times, more than ten thousand years ago, Shala was associated with the constellation of Virgo and vestiges of symbolism associated with her continue, such as the naming of Spica, the ‘ear of grain’, even as the deity’s name changed from age to age, and culture to culture.

The Shala Mons is a mountain on Venus named after the goddess Shala.

In 10^th century BC the Babylonians called part of this constellation, “The Furrow,” again, referring back to Shala.

While this is only one myth of the origin of Virgo, she is seen as a bringer of crops throughout all myths. In Egyptian mythology also, the arrival of Virgo in the night sky meant harvest time. Ceres (we think of the word ‘cereal’) or Demeter, the Greco-Roman goddess of the harvest, was the mother of Persephone.

It was the same with the Greeks and Romans “Spicifera est Virgo Cereris” — “The Virgin with her sheaf belongs to Ceres,” The Astronomica“, Manilius, 1st century AD.

When lonely Hades abducted Persephone to live with him in the underworld, her distraught mother, Demeter, went searching, and was enraged to discover that Zeus had known all along where Persephone was, but had turned a blind eye to Hades’ abduction.

Demeter demanded that Zeus help her bring Persephone home, and when he didn’t, she went on strike and the harvests failed. The people and the livestock starved. Humanity might have perished altogether had not Zeus finally intervened and insisted that Hades send Persephone home, and sent Hermes to collect her.

Hermes descended to the Underworld where he discovered Persephone, no longer a wretched, weeping, homesick girl. She had become a woman, a wife. She was the radiant queen of the gloomy Underworld, the apple of Hades’s eye, and he had built for her the most beautiful gardens he could contrive, with underground pools, and gems and stalactites.

Persephone now loved Hades. But she missed her mother, Demeter, and she desperately missed the light, and if she hadn’t developed the most almighty vitamin D deficiency by now, she was either eating plenty of fish or the nutritionists don’t know their stuff.

So Hermes passed on the order from Zeus, “send the girl home, pronto,” and Hades agreed that Persephone could go home. But he had conditions. Persephone must not eat anything until she arrived home again to her mother.

Hades had no intention of giving up Persephone, Zeus or no Zeus, and he gave her a handful of pomegranate seeds, knowing how much she loved them. A few seeds didn’t count as food, he said. And Persephone believed him and ate some on her way home. Or who knows. Perhaps she knew perfectly well what he was up to.

*Painting by Frederick Leighton, Public Domain*

Persephone went home to her mother. But a deal is a deal, and because she ate the pomegranate seeds, she returns to Hades and her life in the Underworld for four months of the year, and then Demeter mourns her child’s absence, the winter returns and the land lies cold and fallow.

The Virgo Archetype

All zodiac signs are archetypes, meaning something that is considered to be a perfect or typical example of a particular kind of person or thing,

The signs of the zodiac paint a ‘typical’ portrait of a person born at a particular time of year, in a particular season. A baby born in the summer arrives into a different physical environment from a winter born baby. Different conditions; temperatures, available hours of daylight, seasonal foods available to the mother and so on, with potential physical and constitutional effects.

The archetype of Virgo is the Craftsman, paying careful attention to every detail, taking pride in doing the job, whatever it is, to the highest standard possible. There’s no substitute for skill and hard work, according to Virgo.

The major arcana card in the Tarot representing Virgo is The Hermit, as previously mentioned, denoting a deep-rooted sense of connection to Nature. Here is wisdom, maturity and the value of solitude and self-sufficiency. The Hermit represents work and the principle of service – the desire to help Humanity.

Virgo is ruled by agile Mercury, the fastest moving planet of communication. Virgo’s brain is in overdrive most of the time, but they stay anchored and grounded in common sense by their associated element, Earth.

Virgo is practical but artistically gifted. They are hard-workers who love to better themselves. They think deeply, they love to analyse, and their perceptiveness means that they can always find or create order within chaos. They are honest friends although, being discerning, and analytical, they might have a tendency to analyse you, and point out your strengths and also your mistakes and weaknesses. This can undoubtedly be annoying, though it’s well meant. They may also give great advice because of those same analytical abilities.

The Virgo appearance is generally neat and well groomed.”Slob” is not in their vocabulary. The quest of self-improvement includes personal presentation. They can be incredibly concerned about the impression they give, and even worry about it, but at the same time, they are very ready to help others, maybe sometimes even too generous. Others may try to take advantage of Virgo in a way they would not with, say, Aries, Leo or Scorpio..

But of course there is no such thing in reality as THE Virgo personality. We are all unique individuals. Your zodiac sign (sun sign) is a major clue, the keynote, the baseline, but doesn’t claim to represent the full picture in real life – or even in astrology.

But the Decans tell us just a little more.

What are the Decans?

The decans are nicknamed the ‘thirty six faces of astrology,’ and though they are not regarded as powerful influences in a horoscope chart, they do provide added insights and texture. The first ten days of your zodiac sign are the first decan. The second ten days or so are the second decan, and the last ten days are the third decan.

The decans were a feature of Egyptian astronomy, later adopted by the Greeks and incorporated into astrology.

The visible area of sky as seen from earth is what we call the wheel of the Zodiac, and represents an imaginary circle of 360 degrees. This circle divided by arithmetic into twelve ‘slices’- the zodiac signs we know today.

Each of the zodiac signs represents a 30 degree slice of this imaginary ‘pie in the sky,’ as seen from Earth. Each zodiac sign can be further sub-divided into three blocks of ten degrees, equivalent to about ten days in length. This is not exact, and may vary by a day or two because not every month is the same length. These three sub-divisions of all the zodiac signs are what we call ‘decans,’ from the Greek word for ten.

There is more than one decan system. For the avoidance of confusion, we are using the traditional system, based on the seven planets known to the Ancients.

The Tarot cards shown below are from the Rider- Waite deck, which many Tarot practitioners now refer to as the Waite-Smith, in recognition of the artist, Pamela Colman Smith.

First Decan Virgo

Dates: 23 August-1 September

Planetary ruler: Sun

Tarot card: The Eight of Pentacles: ‘Lord of Prudence,’ art, craft, industry, skill, concentration, application, studiousness, apprenticeship, crafts, heritage, buildings

Look at him. This person is absorbed in his work, and he seems to be enjoying himself. This work has meaning and purpose for him. This is typical of this decan. There is a mixture of quiet warmth and a cool mind with a talent for acute observation and incisive analysis; however this is expressed artistically, commercially or scientifically or in administrative tasks. Virgo is a master of the spreadsheet.

They see more than they say, but they have a talent for communication via the spoken and written word; making many of these subjects potentially great teachers. They are hard-working, industrious. ‘We reap what we sow,’ goes the old saying. This is not necessarily always true or fair. Misfortune strikes plenty of people who have done nothing to ‘deserve’ it. And plenty of wrong-doers escape justice.

However, it is broadly true to say, we can’t reap what was never sown. Wild berries had to be first sown by the wind, or by birds. First decan Virgo understands this better than almost any other sign, except Capricorn and Taurus.

They are serious people but they are cheerful company, faithful friends and partners, devoted in their quiet way.

Second Decan Virgo

Dates: 2-11 September

Planetary ruler: Venus

Tarot card- Nine Pentacles: ‘Lord of Material Gain’ beauty, luxury, hard work that pays off, horticulture, agriculture, viticulture, gardens, vineyards

This decan is associated with Venus, planet of love, beauty –and money. A perfectionist; conscientious, devoted, and above all focused, they can turn anything they do into an art form in its own right.

Notice the hooded falcon on her wrist. She has ‘tamed’ wildness – or chaos. She has tamed her own impulses, learned patience and self-discipline. She will not trade away her tomorrows for today’s gratification.

She has cultivated a home, a garden, a business, and made it thrive, healthy and beautiful. She is financially self-reliant but that doesn’t mean it came quick or easy, any of it. To achieve this she has learned to control the wild falcon representing her impulses, wants and desires. She has learned self-discipline and self-control, the power of deferred gratification.

A squirrel will have no nuts in the winter if it scoffs them all at once, or if it can’t remember where it hid them, because it wasn’t paying attention. This, the second decan of Virgo is often the most capable, conscientious provider for themselves and for others, and they enjoy spoiling their loved ones. But though they have learned how to do without (and at times, life, they have probably had no choice) still, they do crave and value beautiful things.

Third Decan Virgo

Dates: 12-22 September

Planetary ruler: Mercury

Tarot card- Ten of Pentacles: keywords: ‘Lord of Wealth,’ commerce, messages, deliveries, Hermes, home, homeland, ancestry, genetics, inter-generational relationships, inheritance, gifts, legacy, bequests, town planning, art, museums, banks.

Third Decan Virgo is both a creative and a practical thinker. These are proud people, not vain, but dignified – big difference. They need to be their own masters and it’s not about the money, or at least, not for its own sake. These people are careful, prudent, but they are not misers. They have a winning way with people and may work in the public eye; such is their talent for communication; personal, professional, artistic, written and spoken.

Notice the old man surrounded by family, adults, children, and dogs too. Virgo cares for animals. What he or she has built, was created in order to share, to pass on, seeing themselves as part of a bigger picture, a link in a chain of legacy. This could mean money. It could mean ideas. It could mean a place that means everything to them, their own home or their homeland, with a sense of belonging, of being in the right place – to feel this way is a treasure beyond price.

These are family minded people. They enjoy family outings, a walk in the woods, or a trip to the seaside. And they will organize it. Realists with a ‘can do’ attitude, Virgo are makers and menders, and they are usually good with animals too, as shown by The Hermit cards. Eco-warrior is not really their style. But they do care about the environment. Virgo is about food for the mind and the spirit, as well as the body.

Virgo has both feet on the ground. And yet, it is something of an artist, something of a scientist. Like the Hermit himself, something of a sage.

Grounded, rooted in the earth, but looking inwards and upwards, moving to its own dance, steering by your quiet inner star.

Planetary influences this Virgo Season

The month of August 2023 began with three of the five outer planets (Saturn, Neptune, and Pluto) in retrograde, along with the inner planet Venus retrograde in Leo, and the “wounded healer” Chiron.

Mercury goes retrograde on the day of writing, as Virgo season begins on August 23, and then Uranus goes retrograde on August 28

So what?

Retrogrades symbolize a time for reflection and review. In this case, many of us may be feeling that a whole way of life is coming to an end, and we are feeling our way through it – at times it may feel like a veritable sh*t storm.

We may need a cool head and a calm nerve this Virgo season, and Mercury retrograde advises that when the going gets tough, we need to be very careful how we react, and to guard what we say in the heat and stress of the moment.

It’s not necessarily anything to worry about. It’s just, change happens, and sometimes a lot of it happens at once.

“I beg your pardon

I never promised you a rose garden.”

Change is inevitable. We take the rough with the smooth and we learn. We may be wiser and sadder but that’s just Life.

We have a Blue Moon in Pisces 30 August. A moon to dream on. To daydream on. We may experience powerful dreams or even have psychic experiences at this time. We are physically and psychically subject to the tidal pull of the Moon, and the Moon card in tarot is associated with Pisces; 12th House of deepest mysteries. This is a moon for seeing ghosts (though Pisces also rules the feet, and we can hardly get more grounded than that.)

Venus, planet of money matters, luxuries, pleasures, self image and relationships stations direct again 3 September, and The New Moon in Virgo 17 September, start bringing things more back to normal again. Back to school, and all that.

But for so many of us, this will be a new normal. Something has shifted so profoundly, that we know nothing will be quite the same again.

Till next time.

Lady Fortuna’s Wheel

“The ceremonies you have seen today are ancient, and some of their origins are veiled in the mists of the past. But their spirit and their meaning shine through the ages never, perhaps, more brightly than now.”-Queen Elizabeth, Cape Town, 1947

I drew a card at random, just to see what I would get and I drew the Wheel of Fortune.

Change will and must come, even as we resist it, fear it or mourn it. This card is associated with both the ancient Greek father of the gods of Mount Olympus, and with the giant planet Jupiter, which basically says, let go, let it be and go large.

Rolling with the punches.

Love shows itself more in adversity than in prosperity; as light does, which shines most where the place is darkest. I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink.’

-Leonardo Da Vinci

Wikipedia: This portrait attributed to Francesco Melzi, c. 1515–1518, is the only certain contemporary depiction of Leonardo

The Wheel of Fortune is associated with the classical figure of Lady Luck. It is also associated with our British proto-Germanic roots, the Norse thunder god Thor, his great war hammer Mjölnir and the Thorn rune, THURISAZ.

Public Domain. Detail, Thor fights The Midgard Serpent by Emil Dopler, 1905

The thorn rune stands for the sound ‘th’ in the rune alphabet. This is a runic glyph and letter of both attack and defense. It is the war hammer of Thor, but it is also a hedge of thorns for keeping out the enemy. The invocation of Thurisaz is also directed in magical workings for success in matters of the law, and for focus and concentration when studying for examinations.

The Hawthorn and the Blackthorn have many superstitions attached to them in British folklore. The Hawthorn is occasionally benevolent, the Blackthorn more frequently ominous.

Lady Luck was known to the ancient Greeks as Tyche. She was the daughter of Aphrodite and Hermes or she may have been one of the Oceanids, a daughter of Oceanus. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says that that the first dice were invented by a prince called Palamedes and were offered as a tribute to Tyche in seeking her favour.

*Public Domain. Tyche with her baby son Plutus, god of Wealth, 2nd century Ad, Museum of Istanbul*

One look at this statue reminds us of, well, whom? The world has always been globalist. For good and ill, by means of travel, trade and war.

We live with the daily conundrum of The Wheel of Fortune, Fortuna’s Wheel. We are subject to events over which we have no control. But we can position ourselves. We can plan and prepare. We can choose how to respond.

We are seeing it in ceremonial action at this time. The Queen’s funeral has been planned for over many years. The Queen herself was consulted about the design of the hearse, agreeing to the lighting, so that the coffin could still be seen transported back to London in the hours of darkness.

The death of the Queen was planned for, anticipated – and yet, for all that, and as with even the most peaceful deaths at a good old age, it may be still experienced as a shock, both emotional and environmental.

Symbols are the currency of the collective psyche. The zeitgeist changes but the roots go deeper. There will be a new face on our coins and banknotes, and on our stamps. These are tiny changes, and yet, like a rearrangement of our oldest family furniture, they will take getting used to.

I’m spending a lot of time down memory lane this week, not only because of the death of the Queen, but I’ve been sorting through a box of old family photographs.

Photo by Miray Bostancu0131 on Pexels.com

Images of sorrow

Pictures of delight

Things that go to make up a life

Let us relive our lives in what we tell you

-Genesis, Home By The Sea

Till next time 🙂

Tarot 2022, The Queen and a Time of Mourning

Our Queen Elizabeth has died at a good old age. She has been taken away in Virgo season under the watch of the stars of The Virgin, under the planets of Neptune and Jupiter. She, a queen of fixed Earth, a Taurus sun sign subject born 21 April, has been gathered up in harvest time and given back into the keeping of the mutable Earth of Demeter.

Lady Colin Campbell tells us that the Queen died at 14:37 PM on Thursday 8 September.

The State Funeral will be in Westminster Abbey 14 September at 11 AM but then she will be taken to Windsor to lie in the Chapel there.

Information here

Elizabeth as Queen of Scotland

Much has been made over the years of the Queen’s German blood. But she died in Balmoral, in her beloved Scotland, and was descended on her mother’s side from the beautiful and tragic Lady Glamis, Janet Douglas Lyon.

Lady Glamis was judicially murdered, burned at the stake in Edinburgh Castle in 1537 on charges of treason and witchcraft, cooked up by James v for reasons of personal hatred of her brother, the king’s former regent, Archibald Douglas.

I was watching the live television as the Queen’s body was being driven from Balmoral down to Edinburgh, where it will lie in state tomorrow in Holyrood House.

We know Balmoral was a place of many happy memories for the Queen. Being there reminded her, she said, of her childhood, playing in the garden at her mother’s home in Glamis, where the sun always seemed to shine. This is the human experience encapsulated in the The Six of Cups, old family times, old friends, says in the sun. Simpler times, and the timeless moments when we were small and the world seemed full of marvellous mysteries. Well, it was.

But as for happiness:-

Harvest Moon in Pisces

The Harvest moon 9 September was brilliant in the zodiac sign of Pisces, the sign of visions, ghosts and dreams, in the Twelfth House of Unknown Destinies.

Pisces is associated in the Tarot with- well, The Moon card.

As an omen for the Accession of Charles, it is a benign, potentially visionary Full Moon. His vision may outstrip his means or freedom to execute. But at least he has vision.

In The Season of Virgo

The Queen Elizabeth has died in the second decan of Virgo, associated in the Tarot with the Nine of Pentacles, ‘The Lord and Lady of Material Gain’.

This card describes a life that has every appearance of luxury but it has come at great hidden cost. There has been untold personal sacrifice behind the scenes. Personal wishes denied. What has here been sacrificed has been a normal personal freedom, symbolized in the Tarot by the falcon sitting on the lady’s wrist.

The ‘Gilded cage?’ Balmoral was this bird’s escape.

Tarot Predictions December 2021

It is not OK to issue predictions of death. And once upon a time, and for reasons of state security, it was an act of treason, punishable by death, to issue a prediction concerning the death of a monarch.

However I had been expecting we would lose the Queen this year, 2022, based partly on feeling and observation. Many of us will have felt the same. The feelng was also based on what I had seen in the Tarot, and I dropped a broad hint, based on a Tarot reading written up in mid December 2021, which was later published at AskAstrology.com

The cards had indicated it would happen anytime between July 2022 and the end of the year. This was based on the appearance of the Three of Swords drawn against the position I had allocated to the month of July/zodiac sign/House of Leo. The Three of Swords is severance. Leo is the sign of Royalty and also corresponds with high summer-late summer. So this was not quite right, though it was close in respect of the actual timing.

I was working with The Gilded Tarot, and as you’ll probably notice, this deck is pretty well used but I had felt drawn to use it on this occasion.

Extract from the article published December 2021:

Leo: 5^th House (July-August 2022)

Heartland, creativity, passion, romance, royalty, children

Tarot card ~ 3 Swords Reversed

Leo is the zodiac House of royalty. There could be national mourning in 2022 for a much loved figurehead.

Other Comments, December 2021

This was a very general reading for the year ahead in 2022, using just 12 cards, in which I was looking for the tone and feel of the coming year 2022, looking out for anything that jumped out as a recurring theme or a spike.

I saw a turbulent year in general in 2022. I sensed deepest waters, seismic levels of trouble. It looked and felt like Moby Dick.

‘Canst thou draw forth Leviathan with a hook?’ -Book of Job

I did not like it. It looked both Neptunian and Plutonian. It still feels like that and I still don’t like it. America too, is in a strange place. But it will start to feel different March- May 2023, and not just because we have come through winter.

I did not, back in December 2021, see the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022. I may do divination but I am not Nostradamus. I commented on risks of invasion, but I was mainly thinking of the Strait of Taiwan. I mentioned a possible breaching of boundaries in February 2022 as signified by The Hanged Man. This card is ruled by Neptune in Pisces and it shows a lack of boundaries. So it was this card, The Hanged Man, that was the clue to Russia’s invasion.

I further commented on likely problems to do with energy and specifically NordStream2.

Like many other people I am anxious about Ukraine, especially with winter coming. But I remain reasonably sure, as I have been since the invasion, that Putin will not succeed in annexing Ukraine. If he does manage it, we will be on a clear road to a pan-European conflagration and another World War.

But the Tarot has consistently shown me a nemesis for Putin, in the shape of the Ten of Swords. Failure. Ruin. A possible Night of The Long Knives.

Ukraine is right now fighting a fierce counter-offensive in Kherson and Kharkiv. There is much hopeful talk on social media tonight that Putin’s demise is well nigh imminent, people mightily encouraged by events such as this footage of a fleeing Russian tank in Kharkiv Oblast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J2AQ6NyQqo

Putin is taking a pasting. Municipal councillors in 18 municipal districts in Russia are calling for his resignation,and putting their signatures to it. The Ten of Swords could be coming over the horizon now. But theirs is no longer a functioning democracy. What kind of leader would they get next?

However, for now, Putin is sure to push back hard, says the Four of Swords followed by The Eight of Wands. If the counteroffensive should falter, not for lack of will, but for lack of support, and Putin hangs on and launches back, then we hit winter and then, should Europe bail on Ukraine, then for all the courage of the Ukrainians, Russia COULD still get Ukraine under its hammer. Confronted with certain failure, Putin could decide to try and send us all to Kingdom Come if only to spite everyone. He’s not mad. But he is shameless, and he dare not, and cannot be seen to lose at home, which makes him exceedingly dangerous. And Biden is not strong.

It still looks most likely that it is Putin who will fail, and Lukashenko with him, but I don’t expect it’s going to happen quite yet. Some astrologers however, suggest his collapse is imminent.

The dates that correlate with the cards do not necessarily match up with the card meanings. President Putin is in trouble. But if he gets through this patch, then the Ten of Swords may be seeing that he will be in heap big trouble by or before late Gemini time, 2023, 11- 20 June.

For now, although the Ukrainians are giving the Russians a richly deserved kicking, while unearthing new horrors all the while, Putin is still looking confident that he knows who he is dealing with. That ‘we’ softies, we self-indulgent pampered degenerates in Europe are the real antagonist, and that we won’t take the pain required to defeat him. That we’re soft, that we’ll fold, and leave Ukraine naked unto his vengeance, and he has shown himself utterly bestial. ‘All’ he has to do is take a financial hit himself, and keep turning off the gas taps.

The Pisces Full Moon said that we are living in a Twelfth House moment. A Destiny moment. It clearly is.

The ghosts in these lands are louder than usual right now, and not just in these lands, while we reckon with our memories, ancestral, shared, and deeply personal.

“We know that we are going to die, in fact it is the only thing we know of what is in store for us. All the rest is mere guesswork, and most of the time we guess wrong. Like children in the trackless forest we grope our way through our lives in blissful ignorance of what is going to happen to us from one day to another, what hardships we may have to face, what more or less thrilling adventures we may encounter before the great adventure, the most thrilling of all, the Adventure of Death.”

-Axel Munthe, The Story of San Michele

―

God Bless the Queen. RIP.

God Save the King.

As The Queen's Committal Service comes to a close, Her Majesty's Piper plays a lament. pic.twitter.com/4DVIUuCoPO
— The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) September 19, 2022

Summer Solstice, Reincarnation & The Sun card

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?

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

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.’

Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh on Pexels.com

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.

Till next time 🙂

Stories here:

The ghost who came to tea

One day on a rather gloomy Saturday afternoon, late July 2007, my younger daughter went to a friend’s house for tea. It was the friend’s fourteenth birthday. The little girl, let’s call her Nadia, had, if I remember correctly missed a lot of school in recent months, due to health difficulties.

There were four girls altogether; and Nadia’s mother and father.

Nadia blew out the candles, and her mother was cutting the cake when the lights began to flicker out in the hallway, and the mother said, ‘oh, here we go again. You really need to come and see this, everyone.’

She shepherded them to the foot of the stairs, calling to the father in the sitting room, ‘it’s happening again!’

He grunted some reply over his newspaper but didn’t move to join them. My daughter didn’t hear what he said. There they stood, four girls and the mother as the lights flickered and then my daughter saw a man standing at the top of the stairs.

One minute, there was no-one there. The next, there he was, looking entirely solid and real as real; a young man with brown wavy hair, dressed in jeans and a pale yellow shirt.

They stood looking up. He was looking down as if looking at them, but gave no sign that he saw them, or any indication of being in any way aware of their presence.

Then, just like that, he disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared, and the lights stopped flickering.

Nadia explained, the family had been terrified when it first happened, and had asked the council to re-house them, but now they’d got used to it.

They had no idea who he was (or who he had been) But was he necessarily even dead, or was it some manifestation of astral travel…though transference on the part of the young man who had presumably, once lived in the house.

But because the hosts were so matter of fact about it, my daughter wasn’t frightened, though a little freaked out. Well, you would be, wouldn’t you.

“Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him well…”

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”- Hamlet

It’s like that old conundrum, does a falling tree make a noise if there is no-one there to hear it? It takes a living person to perceive a dead one, and in this case, if there was a conduit, or a conjuring, the Tarot suggests it was the father who was the psychic ‘enabler’ in this household, though it was completely unconscious on his part. Maybe he had been worried about his daughter’s health.

My reason for wondering was the appearance of the reserved, moody, kindly psychic King of Cups, a man of deep waters, particularly associated with mature males born under Pisces, Cancer and Scorpio.

The young man was shown as The Hanged Man, suggesting all manner of tragic possibilities.

I once did a reading for a young man, and this card appeared with other cards in a troubled picture that prompted me ask if a friend had died recently, and his friend had hanged himself, and he was hoping I could tell him.

I couldn’t. Nor would it have been right. He was not a family member. But no-one had realized he was so deeply depressed, and there was a strong sense of a secret, and a great fear this secret would be discovered.

The Hanged Man , it is important to note, almost never refers to suicide. But the Tarot can talk in absolutely literal terms, and does what it says on the tin, such that a card means exactly what it says in the picture.

Say I draw the Eight of Swords, for example. Most interpretations will talk about entrapment, helplessness, passivity, and so on. But I have learned through doing readings for other people, that tarot might well be telling me about a problem with someone’s plumbing or drains.

Yes, the Tarot talks toilets. Quite right too. It needs to go wherever someone needs it to go. Just as when you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go.

As the famous anchoress, and one of the earliest woman authors Julian of Norwich once put it, ‘God does not disdain to serve the body.’

It is thought that the Lady Julian kept a cat, shown here in a depiction in a roundel in Norwich cathedral, to hunt rodents, and this too, served the health of the body; hers and the cat’s.

Source: https://www.winged-heart.com/acatalog/copy_of_Cathedral___Angel.html

Am I saying the Tarot is God? Of course not. We are discussing the interconnectedness of the Everything, though I see no reason why God would be a man in the sky with a big white beard either, and if he is, does He need to go to the toilet?

The Hanged Man is ruled by Neptune – the suit of Cups again. This is a deep, Piscean card.

Once upon a time, the Tarot was saying, there was a young man who was very worried about his future. He felt somehow shut out from other people (The Five of Pentacles) But he couldn’t seem to make his mind up what to do or where to go next, or to muster the effort required. Maybe he managed it in the end. I feel that he did. But probably not undamaged.

Meanwhile, he had left his mark. This.

Surprisingly, only a small percentage of paranormal sightings are true ghosts. The majority of them are really sightings of what we call “residual energy” — when an emotional event is replayed over and over again, at the same spot, and at the same time. SOURCE link to SummitDaily

Maybe the young man was a complete stranger, or actually an echo of a living psyche, or if we want to go truly spiral, the ghost of the father himself as a very young man.

Welcome to The Twilight zone.

Who wants another piece of cake?