Like everything, it started in the stars, and then we started telling stories, mapping the movements of the skies on the walls of the caves, planning our own movements, ensuring provision for our survival, tracking the tilting of the seasons as the Earth went round the sun, and the seas warmed and cooled.
The modern festival of Halloween began as a marker of the darkest of the four so-called cross-quarter days in the Northern Hemisphere. A cross-quarter day marks the half-way point between an equinox and a solstice and in the case of Halloween, obviously this is between the autumn equinox and winter solstice, reversing these if you are in the Southern Hemisphere.
Halloween began as a Bronze Age festival, Samhain (pronounced Sow-in) Though it may well be far older. The name meant ‘summer’s end’ and its signal was the sighting of The Pleiades seen overhead at midnight.
This midnight zenith of The Pleiades now occurs 21 November owing to the Earth’s tilt and the wobble on its axis, an effect called precession, and in addition, the Julian calendar was replaced by the Gregorian calendar and further added to the discrepancy in dates.
But this astronomical event did apparently once coincide with the days around 31 October as recorded during the 11th and 12th centuries.
Samhain was a period rather than a single day and marked the start of the winter for Celtic societies, ending one planting cycle and beginning another. Seeds for the next year were often planted at this time.
It began about a week after the modern Halloween or All Hallows Eve, and it was believed that all those who had departed this life the previous year were finally freed from all their earthly ties.
The Pleiades or The Seven Sisters is a star cluster in the north-west region of the constellation of Taurus the Bull. Classicists debate the origin of the name which may derives from πλεῖν (plein -“to sail”) because of the cluster’s importance for the sailing season in the Mediterranean: “the season of navigation began with their heliacal rising” (Wiki)
Here is how to locate them:
The Pleiades feature as prominent stars of winter in the ancient agricultural calendar of the northern hemisphere, and the Greek poet Hesiod wrote:-
And if longing seizes you for sailing the stormy seas, when the Pleiades flee mighty Orion and plunge into the misty deep and all the gusty winds are raging, then do not keep your ship on the wine-dark sea but, as I bid you, remember to work the land.— Works and Days 618–623
Celtic mythology
A bronze disk, 1600 BC, from Nebra, Germany, is one of the oldest known representations of the cosmos. You can see the seven dots of The Pleiades top right.
For the Bronze Age Celts, and probably going back far earlier the Pleiades were associated with mourning and with funerals. At that time in history, on the cross-quarter day the cluster rose in the eastern sky as the sun’s light faded in the evening and this association has persisted even though The Pleiades no longer mark the festival.
Other Stories
Every culture has had its own names and stories about the Pleiades.
The Blackfoot called them the Lost Boys and while they rose high, the buffalo were not available, so that the setting of the Pleiades was a signal for the Blackfoot to travel to their hunting grounds culminating in the buffalo slaughters or ‘ jumps’, that sustained their whole way of life.
In the ancient Andes the Pleiades were associated, not with death or deprivation, but abundance, returned to the skies of the Southern Hemisphere at harvest time.
But for those of us for whom home is the Isles of Britain, this time of year is Scorpio, and in Tarot, its card is the Death card; Transformation and Resurrection when the veil between realities is at its thinnest.
It is ghosts, memories; those who are gone but will endure as long as memory lasts, and will talk with us there, in that place, and walk with us until it is our own time to become memories, and to leave, returning to the stars, ascending through Capricorn and the Gate of The Gods.
Traces
All is lost, in death, they say.
Not all, nor straightaway.
Records of state and memory last a while.
For some, memorials, for others work in word or form,
Sustain their name.
For many, genes still stalk the pool,
Promises of progeny,
If not the immortality
Of Gargantua’s heartfelt plea.
And for all, there’s particle subsistence,
As material laws require.
But if that wasn’t all?
If walls have ears, have they memory too?
If the pendulum distinguishes one
hurled in anger, in a heap of stones,2
And if creatures all had souls, as Pythagoras claimed,
Birthstones: Sapphire- September birthdays. Opal- October birthdays
Lucky Number: 6 (community, childhood)
Tarot card: Justice
Justice from The Legacy of The Divine Tarot, Ciro Marchetti
Astronomy
Libra (technically, it is correctly pronounced Ly-bra as in Library) is a small but distinct constellation, 29th in size of the 88 constellations, next door to the constellation Virgo. It’s been described as looking like a lop-sided diamond and is visible in the northern hemisphere between April and July.
Libra used to be regarded, not as a constellation in its own right, but as part of its neighbouring constellations Scorpio and Virgo. The stars representing the scales of Justice are the same stars representing the claws of the Scorpion.
Libra, like Cancer, is faint in comparison with other constellations, and contains no spectacular first magnitude stars, but contains a very old galaxy cluster, possibly around 10 billion years old, the same age as our own galaxy, The Milky Way.
There also is a red dwarf star Gliese 581 with three orbiting planets, two of which may possibly be suitable for life, about 20 light years from Earth.
The brightest star in Libra is a binary star about 77 light years from Earth. α Librae. or Zubenelgenubi, meaning “the Southern Claw” in Arabic.
The second-brightest star in the constellation of Libra is β Librae, or Zubeneschamali, from the Arabic for “The Northern Claw.”
Mercator
Equilibrium and Equinox
Since 2002, the Sun has actually appeared in the constellation of Libra from October 31 to November 22.
This is different to the dates used for this sign in your media horoscope, which is based on modern western or tropical astrology, and says Libra begins around 23rd of September, coinciding with the autumn equinox (in the northern hemisphere).
But astronomy is not astrology, which is a symbolic language, and zodiac signs are not to be confused with the constellations after which they were named.
The Sun did indeed used to be in the sign Libra from the northern autumnal equinox (c. September 23) to on or about October 23, when the hours of night and daylight were the same- hence the Libra’s concept of natural balance.
The zodiac sign of Libra ceased to coincide with the actual placement of the constellation in AD 730 because of the wobble of the Earth, and the resulting effect known as precession – the movement of the equinoxes relative to Earth.
This fact of astronomy does not invalidate your horoscope. The astrological concept still stands, based on the arithmetic model of the zodiac as designed by the mathematician Ptolemy in the 2nd Century.
We have the Romans to thank for the name of this constellation, as well as the sun sign or zodiac sign of Libra as we understand it today.
It is a complicated history. Libra began as part of Scorpio, and was known in Babylonian astronomy as MUL Zibanu (the “scales” or “balance”) but with an alternative name, the Claws of the Scorpion, while in ancient Greece Libra was also seen as the Scorpion’s Claws.
The scales were sacred to the Babylonian sun god Shamash, the patron of truth and justice, and ever since these very early times, Libra has been associated with law, fairness and civility.
Because 3000 years ago, the Sun entering Libra marked the equinox, when days and nights were of equal length, i.e. balanced, Roman astrologers considered that the constellation of Libra represented the principle of natural balance, equality, equilibrium and hence, justice.
In ancient Rome Libra was associated with the scales of justice held by the pre-Greek goddess Astraea, or her Roman counterpart Dike, although in Greek mythology she had always been associated with Virgo.
Claws, scales. Virgo, Scorpio. Confusing? Typically elusive Libra!
According to the Roman writer and poet Marcus Manilius, the best Roman judges were born under the sign of Libra. The Moon, which in astrology governs temperament, was said to be in Libra when Rome was founded, in a historical passage, which states “qua condita Roma.”
The early born Libra may therefore be expected to have much in common with Virgo and Astraea, but the later born Libra may be expected to have quite a lot of Scorpio going on.
This same principle applies to all the zodiac signs, of course, whether you were born early or late in your sign, but is particularly acute in the case of Libra, on account of its shared/borrowed stars and very particular history as a relative newcomer to the zodiac story in its own right.
Libra is one of the three zodiac air signs, the others being Gemini and Aquarius.
Libra is the only zodiac sign that is not represented by a human or animal, but the scales signify the collective and enduring human hunger for justice, as well as Libra’s own especially keen personal need for balance, order, and equality.
Many astrologers view Libra as an especially lucky sign because it occurs during the peak of the year when the rewards of hard work are harvested.
Libra is suave, clever and extremely easy to like. The classic Libra subject has charm and can be a great listener with sharp observation skills and acute perception.
Because Venus, the goddess of love, rules Libra, as it also rules Taurus, the Libra subject is especially, even acutely sensitive to beauty in anything, whether it is a person, nature, art, or music.
Libra intensely dislikes loud or sharp noises, cruelty, nastiness, and vulgarity, as they are naturally kindly and civilized people, and also, may we observe, a teensy bit delicate at times.
Born diplomats, but also anything for a quiet life, Libras try to co-operate and compromise with everyone around them. They can sometimes be a little tiring to be with as they are constantly re-assessing and adjusting their thinking, while remaining emotionally distant, or playing Devil’s advocate and this may be infuriating at times, or even seem to call their personal loyalties into question.
They are not averse to keeping secrets, and can be more changeable even than Gemini. Those Libran scales are after all, seeking balance, which is not the same as attaining it or maintaining it.
Botticelli: The Birth of Venus, ruler of Libra
Libra may not receive or handle criticism as dispassionately as they dispense it. They can show jealousy when they are not the centre of attention, and may at times be moody; a practitioner of passive aggression, or they may be something of an ‘iron fist in a velvet glove’ – smoothly vengeful, or even ruthless.
But lovely Libra, charming, smiling, sophisticated, civilized. Sunny side up, what on earth’s not to like?
Orion The Hunter returns, and in the northern hemisphere can once again be seen bestriding the east at sunrise. So when we say return, where has he been, then? The answer is, he has been invisible, hidden in the glare of the sun since May.
But now he is back and will rise earlier each day until he is visible all evening during the winter months. As a girl I used to like to go out on cold frosty evenings to fill the coal scuttle from the coal bunker in the back garden. Looking up at him. I knew his name. I knew he was The Hunter but wondered about him, and what he was hunting up there.
Those winter evenings still have that same kind of magic.
Orion is only the 26th largest constellation, sitting on the celestial equator, facing the constellation next door, the oncoming, charging, Taurus the Bull. So it’s far from being the biggest, and it’s smaller than another Greek hero, Perseus but Orion’s got more brilliant stars, commanding the impression of its vastness.
(The biggest constellation of all is Hydra, and the biggest constellation of the twelve included in the Zodiac is Virgo.)
Orion’s two brightest stars are the blue-white star Rigel, representing the Hunter’s left foot, and the red supergiant Betelgeuse, Orion’s right shoulder. They’re both thought to be to be about ten million years old, which makes Betelgeuse quite young to be a red supergiant, but it’s evolved faster due to its enormous mass. It is expected to go supernova in the next million years and when it does will be brighter than the Moon and the brightest supernova ever to have been visible from Earth.
Orion’s third brightest star is Bellatrix, his left shoulder, and Orions’s Belt is one of the most easily recognized asterisms with its three stars.
You can read them east to west or left to right; Alnitak (girdle), Alnilam (string of pearls) and Mintaka (area) They have many other names across the world; The Magi, the Three Mary’s, and the Mayans called them The Fire Drill, invoking them in an annual fire ceremony to delay the onset of the end of the world.
‘No other constellation more accurately represents the figure of a man,’ said Germanicus Caesar
Orion is identified as a human figure in every culture at every latitude, with countless variations of different names and legends.
Orion, also called Nimrod, was the son of Poseidon and was the most handsome man ever to walk the earth. He was a great hunting buddy and friend of Artemis. Her twin brother, Apollo glowered, seeing that Artemis fancied Orion something rotten, although she had taken a vow of perpetual chastity.
Orion could be a bit of a sex pest, chasing the Pleiades, so that Zeus confiscated them to the sky for their own peace and quiet. And a fat lot of good it did them, because when Orion was killed by a scorpion (THE scorpion) Artemis in her grief, asked Zeus to post Orion upstairs to the heavens, which he did, right next door to the Pleiades, who also represent the celestial bull pen of Taurus. Thanks Zeus. You didn’t think that one through, did you?
Should Taurus ever break free of his pen, said an ancient Arabic legend, it will be the end of all things. Let’s hope he’s happy up there, and that Orion doesn’t chase the Pleiades away.
Orion bravely strides towards the Bull but although he killed the scorpion that also killed him, he still fears it, and dreads its appearance fleeing west as the autumn wears on and Scorpius rises (Scorpio)
Orion in his eternal battle with Scorpius
The stand off between Orion and Taurus the Bull, its red eye, Aldebaran glaring at him, daring him to come nearer, does not fit the Greek legend of Orion, and a question has been raised in some quarters over the identity of Orion, and whether he has become confused with Herakles/Hercules at any time in his identification with this constellation.
The reasons are likely historical. The constellation as recognized by the Greeks originated with the Sumerians, who saw in it their great hero Gilgamesh fighting the Bull of Heaven. The Sumerian name for Orion was URU AN-NA, meaning light of heaven and Taurus was GUD AN-NA, bull of heaven.
Gilgamesh was the Sumerian equivalent of Heracles, the greatest hero of Greek mythology, and one of the labours of Heracles was to catch the Cretan bull, but Orion was never in a fight with a bull. Heracles, it has been suggested, deserves a magnificent constellation such as this one, but has been consigned to a much more obscure area of sky. So has there been a mix-up, or perhaps we could see it as a mash-up, Orion and Heracles in mutual diguise?
Orion and The Tarot
The Golden Tarot by Kat Black
The Tarot card most commonly associated with Orion is The Fool. The most numinous card in the deck, its element is Air and it is ruled by the planet of revolution, Uranus.
It is the portal of the number Zero.
The Fool or as some called him, The Jester, is both beginnings and ending.
In a real life reading it may detect or forecast a birth of a child, or a new offer or a launch or opportunity of some kind. And change happens all the time but this is always major or significant in scope. But although is not associated with Death, unlike the famous Death card, it can mean a death too, representing infinity, the ouroboros.
An ouroboros
The Fool lives in the moment. He may be fun, he may be joy, or he may be frightening. There’s every reason a lot of people are scared of clowns as the living embodiment of The Fool. He represents the wisdom of innocence, or mistakes made through impulsiveness or ignorance rather than stupidity. But he may represent a threat, whether direct or existential, clearly sensed but not as yet clearly identifiable. The fear is visceral, not lightly to be dismissed.
He may be a shamanic, gnostic figure; the stranger, the outcast, the wise Fool or the Fool on the Hill. He dances to his own tune. He takes chances, risks, and sometimes these pay off, but sometimes he steps over the edge of the cliff, heedless of his dog’s most urgent warning.
The dog in the card is not biting the Fool, but desperately trying to get his attention. If someone asks the Tarot’s advice and then I draw this card reversed….someone needs to draw back from the precipice and look again before they leap.
I may bark like the Fool’s dog but will they act on this advice? CAN they? Will they even really hear it, let alone find a way to use it? We are who we are, and we do what we do, based on who we are. It is a rare person who can step back and see things anew once they are committed to Opinion A or B or they are emotionally invested in outcome A or B.
Advice, to be heard, must be sufficiently timely, before the paint dries.
Everywhere the Fool goes, his dog follows, just as Orion is followed in the skies by his two hunting dogs, Canis major and Canis minor. Sirius, the Dog Star is in the constellation of Canis Major and is THE brightest star in Earth’s night sky.
The only objects that outshine Sirius in our skies are the sun, moon, Venus, Jupiter, Mars and Mercury – and Sirius will usually outshine Mercury too.
All Mankind is Orion.
We were hunters at the dawn of man (The Fool) And gatherers too, but we were never gorillas, and never herbivores on our ancestral line.
“We were risen not of fallen angels but risen apes, and they were killer apes besides” – Robert Ardrey, in African Genesis.
Hunting was what brought us together in teams, then communities. Co operation meant compassion.
Fatboy Slim tells a version of that story here (except that we were apes but not on the gorilla branch). See Orion in the final frame of the video.
We go into the zodiac domain of Cancer the Crab Tuesday 21 June 2022 and we sail once again into the zodiac domain of the mysterious and elusive Cancer the Crab, scuttling across the heavens as we arrive at the summer solstice. The word solstice comes from the Latin ‘solstitium’ – meaning the sun stands still. Now the sun appears to move sideways/crabwise as we pass the peak. The North Pole has now hit its maximum angle of tilt to the sun, 23.5 degrees, and now we are on the return journey.
This is the great astronomical event with which we came to associate the zodiac sign of The Crab. Butwhat does it look like in the night sky, and what’s the story behind it? It’s that time of year again.
Common associations
The pincers: Zodiac symbol of Cancer
Ruling planet: Moon (although it is not a planet, it is counted as such in astrology)
Key phrase: I feel
Body: The chest, breast, heart
Birth Stone: Stones and metals fall under the rule of planets, not signs, but through its association with the Moon, Cancer has affinity with pearls, silver and crystals.
Colour: White, silver
Tree: all trees rich in sap
Flower: Acanthus (prickly)
Tarot card: The Chariot (see how it is a shell?) Drive, Control, progress, teamwork, and the harmonizing of different elements. If someone asks ‘when? and we draw The Chariot, it could well mean to expect developments in early summer.
The Chariot, Rider-Waite Tarot
Astronomy
Cancer, Latin for crab, is in a dark region of the sky. It is the faintest constellation in the Zodiac, with only two stars above the fourth magnitude: Acubens (The Claw) and Al Tarf (The foot.)
Cancer is visible in the Northern Hemisphere in the early spring. Look for it in March about 9 PM . In the Southern Hemisphere, you will see it in the autumn.
It’s almost impossible to see Cancer with the naked eye or even binoculars, looking between Regulus in Leo, the lion, and Castor and Pollux, the twin stars of Gemini. And it doesn’t look much like a crab at all. It’s a faint, upside-down Y shape, more like a crayfish or lobster. It was called the Crayfish in classical astrology, and in Egyptian astrology, The Scarab. But whatever it’s name, it’s always been seen a creature with an exoskeleton; an arthropod, and Cancer appears to rise crab-wise; not sideways, but backwards in the zodiac when the Sun’s entry into the constellation sky space of Cancer occurs at the summer solstice -or used to, three thousand years ago. These events change over time due to the wobble of the earth, an effect known as the precession or procession of the equinoxes.
Wiki: The constellation of Cancer
Cancer may be faint but it’s got a great star cluster glowing at its centre. Praesepe, or ‘The Manger’ is one of two Messier objects in Cancer, identified in 1771 by French astronomer Charles Messier.
Its modern name is The Beehive Cluster. Seen through the telescope it looks like a swarm of bees. To the naked eye it is a small, fuzzy patch of light -like a tiny cloud floating through the stars.
Public Domain: The Beehive Cluster
As the sign of the Sun’s greatest elevation, Cancer was considered nearest to the highest point of heaven – and by the NeoPlatonists was called ‘the Gate of Men’ through which souls descended to Earth to be born. The opposite constellation, Capricorn was the ‘Gate of the Gods’, where the souls of the departed rose back to heaven under safe escort by Hermes, the messenger of the Gods.
Cancer also contains a planetary system; 55 Cancri, containing five known planets. It’s 40 light-years away, and is just about visible to the unaided eye. The innermost of its planets is a “super Earth,” several times heavier than Earth – but none of these planets has the right surface conditions for liquid water, or life as we know it.
Myth
Cancer is associated with the Twelve Labours of Hercules after he went mad, mistook his wife and children for monsters and killed them all. His labours were performed in token of penance.
The first of his great challenges was to kill the Nemean lion. This being done, he had to deal with the Lernaen Hydra, a terrible water serpent with blood so toxic, it could kill you by inhalation. Hercules is shown here wearing no face mask, but he went off to the swamps of Lerna duly armed with a face covering, a sword to chop off its multiple hissing heads, and a torch to cauterize the deadly poisonous dead necks pronto.
Bur Hercules also had another problem. The goddess Hera was his enemy, despite the fact that his Greek name, Hera-cles/Herakles means ‘the fame or glory of Hera’. But she hated him. There were a number of reasons, starting when he was a baby and was given to her to nurse but he was already and strong, chewed her on the- well, never mind- but she had been ill disposed ever since, not to mention resenting Hercules as an illegitimate son (yet another one) of her gadabout husband, the great god Zeus.
Now she sent a crab to harass Heracles, as if The Hydra was not enough to deal with already. The crab faithfully did its best, nipping Hercules again and again, until Hercules stepped on it and crushed it, or in other versions of the story, killed it with his club.
Look at that heroic crab getting well and truly stuck in there. Hera rewarded its courage, tenacity and loyalty by placing it in the heavens. But she had given this careful consideration. placing the Crab in a dark area of the heavens with only faint stars. Crabs need dark, quiet places to thrive and hunt and be at home. However, its shy, retiring placement is also the highest point in the zodiac, and the humble, unassuming but unexpectedly formidable and faithful crab is the highest herald of the heavens, the unassuming usher of the summer solstice.
Cancer is the fourth sign of the Zodiac and represents those born between June 20 and July 22. It is a cardinal water sign, one of the four cardinal signs, which are the signs indicating the arrival of a new season. The cardinal signs, Cancer, Capricorn, Aries and Libra are instigators.
Cancer is all about the shoreline, and tides, monthly and annual. Cancer is uniquely both the moon and the sun.
The sign of Cancer, ruled by The Moon, is a cardinal sign, herald of the seasons, announcing the arrival of summer in the northern hemisphere and winter in the southern hemisphere. The corresponding court card in the Tarot is the deity of the shoreline with all its ebb and flow, and its teeming rock-pools, The Queen of Cups,
Ruled by Cancer, the Queen of Cups from the Rider-Waite Tarot
Personality
There is no such thing in reality as THE Cancer personality. Your sun sign is the keynote of your astrological portrait but of course it’s not anything like the whole story.
An archetype is a distillation. An essence.
The archetype of the Cancer personality is complex, elusive and riddled with contradictions. Cancer stands for both mother and father. It is the zodiac sign of the nurturing parent. Cancer famously adores babies and small animals, all wild things; and struggles with separation. The empty nest can be anathema to the Cancer parent.
The old man is tender with the plants and with the child, But he is a tough man, a former fighting man, wearing the uniform of a Chelsea pensioner.
By Rose Maynard Barton
Cancer is the sign of hearth and home, and expanding this theme, it is the sign that records the stories and artifacts of national tribal and family identity, collating and curating ancestral legacy; historical, cultural and genetic.
Cancer it is the sign of memory, nostalgia, sometimes regrets. It is the bittersweet longing embodied in a Welsh word ‘hiraeth‘.
It is the longing to return to happy childhood haunts. Maybe a rock-pool.
Perhaps for those who did not get to enjoy even such simple delights, The Crab is the zodiac’s Peter Pan of Never Never Land.
Public Domain Painting by Albert Edelfelt, Finnish artist 1854-1905
Famous Cancer subjects in history:
Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Robert the Bruce, Garibaldi, Henry the Eighth, Lord Horatio Kitchener, Emmeline Pankhurst, Alan Turing, Nikola Tesla, George Orwell, Benazir Bhutto, Nelson Mandela, Angela Merkel…a few contemporary well known subjects include Prince William, Julian Assange and pop star Ariane Grande.
Commons Wikimedia Mandela voting 1994 By Paul Weinberg – direct donation from Author14 October 2009, 19:07:42 (original upload date), CC BY-SA 3.0,
Cancer sign natives are as we see from this much abbreviated list of its most famous rock-pool denizens – in many ways deeply private, but mighty formidable.
You see in this list of people, the heart of The Crab, the shell -and the giant claws. You can see the longing- the ‘hiraeth’. You see its powers of analysis-and endurance.
We have always had doom-mongers. We will always have them. Ahhh, shaddapp!!!
Someone give them a nice cuppa and a biscuit. We’ve all had enough doom-mongering.
Mind you, if only the Trojans had listened to Cassandra….
But doom is just another word for destiny or fate. Doom is destiny in a bad mood, having a bad hair day. And then the eternal chestnut is, can destiny be changed? Is it mutable?
The Fates of Greek Mythology were three weaving goddesses who assigned individual destinies at birth. Their names were Clotho who chose the yarn (the Spinner), Lachesis who allowed the length (the Allotter -and there’s a deadly venomous snake of the same name; a bushmaster if memory serves) and Atropos who cut the thread (the Inflexible).
Once they had decreed your fate even Zeus couldn’t do a thing about it.
The Fates of Norse mythology, the three Nornir lived at the well in Asgard (home of the Gods and Goddesses). Their names were Urd ‘What Once Was’, Verdandi ‘What Is Coming into Being’ and Skuld, ‘What Shall Be.’
They spent their time at the foot of the giant ash Yggdrasil the Tree of Life, the great World Tree, weaving the threads of fate of every living being into a web. They were the alarm clock for the gods, placing a rooster at the top of Yggdrasil to wake them up every morning, ready or not. Wakey WAKEYYYYY!
One pictures Odin, snorting, startled awake after a heavy night in the mead hall.
And then they would fetch water from Urd’s well, and give Yggdrasil a good watering to keep it green and healthy.
The Vikings believed the Norns were nearby whenever a child was born. Women who had just given birth were fed a bowl of porridge,’Norn porridge’. The mothers would eat it on their behalf and hopefully, this vicarious treat would go down – well, a treat, and in return the Norns would be well-disposed, dishing out good health for the mother and the child.
But – significantly, the Norns, unlike the Fates, could be bargained with now and then to change ordained outcomes.
These days we may wonder about Fate, but in the modern west at least, worship more readily at the altar of free will as a defining mark of our ‘superior’ rationality.
This is good because it makes us responsible for the things we do, and stops us from doing horrific things to essentially harmless people just because we have decided they’re religiously unacceptable for whatever reason. I live in the land of the Pendle witches; a hideous tragedy of a lot of desperately poor people hanged for witchcraft, but including one person far less poor, Alice Nutter; from a well-known local Catholic family…when being Catholic wasn’t safe either, at the time.
So we don’t do that any more, and we separated Church and State. Good. No Blasphemy laws coming back again either please, ever, ever again. Under whatever aegis of tolerance of Islam or any other religion at all.
We can’t ever go ‘back there.’ Blasphemy laws light human bonfires.
But there is a drawback. This Enlightenment has had the unfortunate side-effect of over-promoting us, at least in our own imaginations, at the expense of all those tiresome gods of previous superstitious generations who knew no better, or so we may tell ourselves, and now we ourselves are the gods with the feet of clay.
Fate however is not about superstition, but is at its heart simply the recognition that we are a world in ourselves on the one hand, a microcosm in our own individual right, but also very tiny in the scheme of something older and bigger than our ability to comprehend, let alone perceive. The Hubble telescope is amazing, staggering in the things it has revealed to us…again, that great eye in the sky of the World card, but a thousand Hubble telescopes still can’t tell us…the meaning of X – The Unanswerable of Everything.
So what’s my question for my Tarot today? Or my preoccupation? Do I have one? I’m a little unsettled, a bit under the weather – a longstanding health issue- and I am somewhat procrastinating on another writing job. I know my own mood perfectly well, but I want to see what the bit of my mind that operates through the Tarot will make of it.
Tweeted today 22 May:
Katie-Ellen@TrueTarotTales· I ask #Tarot diagnose my question? I draw The World. Traditionally, completion but I’m seeing ‘eyes in the sky’, satellite technology (support of reefs and forests?) Feb-Apr 2021 may see global burnout of this pandemic chapter though widely easing 21 June+ IMG Ciro Marchetti
The World Card from The Legacy of the Divine Tarot by Ciro Marchetti
The World is a positive card. It is about a global vision, and suggests the successful completion of a cycle.
It’s big all right. It’s bad and desperately sad. It’s a weird one, a real Frankenstein virus, born out of our own messy destruction of whatever we need and want, and also of whatever we don’t need or want.
This card is not a vision of doom for humankind though it contains warnings. Notice that the artist has placed him standing on an egg-timer, symbol of infinity? Look where the sands are.
We are too many and it’s not our ‘fault’. We’ve just been doing what we do as an animal, but if these projections manifest, these figures will not be sustainable, except at the cost of great changes to our individual lifestyles and freedom of movement.
The figure in the World card feels as if he can fly. And so he can, aided by his machines and now we have satellites, eyes and ears in the sky. He thinks he is master of the globe, but the sands have emptied out. The resources are not infinite, and actually, he has his arms out for balance.
The card is Major Arcana 21, suggesting the year 2021 for completion of the current pandemic cycle.
I wonder if 2001 A Space Odyssey, Arthur C Clarke was actually a prophetic vision of 2100 AD, and the 21st century may prove a crunch time for humanity, the great turning point. We can’t grow to those numbers and keep our individual freedom of movement. We’re already now at the limit of our natural range, says that egg-timer.
The World card seems to imply 2021 before this situation will be declared under control. The Spanish Flu of 1918 lasted 3 years.
Tweeted 21 May 2020
Katie-Ellen@TrueTarotTales·#cartomancy ‘graph’. Risk of second wave of #covid19UK? Readers don’t ‘know.’ But what is shown? 10 Spades absent – good. Risk detected as 2/5, characterised as 2 spikes on a graph between now and June 20/21. Stay CAUTIOUS! Cards= 7S, 9C, Ace C, 2D, QH
Freedom or safety?
They are both illusions. Do we want to be protected or do we want independent agency? A degree of personal autonomy? Whatever we would choose, nothing is for free. The birds sing because they must, or lose their territory, the food that it can deliver, and their mating rights. It’s life and death to them. Robins are liable to fight if they meet outside mating time, the male and female may even fight to the death. It’s all about territory, and territory is all about access to resources.
This was our local Robin Goodfellow, waiting for his suet, because he is not stupid, and he has got staff working on the case. The science is survival but it’s also the miracle, the beauty and the charm; the way he wins our hearts.
I am not a fan of banning things, or pointing fingers, or being told what to do, or telling other people what they should be doing, but the World card says we came into this world. We are of it, no less deserving than any other living thing. But it is not ours.
Some long ago fellow wrote in the Bible that the Lord gave us dominion over the lot, and it caught on big-time, a very convenient thing to believe while our numbers were small. But the world is not our oyster, we’re sailing on board but not steering this mother-ship, Earth, which made the bones which built us, with what came from the stars.
Wherever we go, however far we go, the party isn’t somewhere else.
30 April is known as May Eve, marking May Day and the beginning of the ancient Celt festival of Beltane.
Beltane begins at dusk on 30 April and is matched by its European counterpart, Walpurgis Nacht, or St Walpurga’s Night in Germanic tradition.
St Walpurga or Walburge was born in Crediton in Devon, but travelled widely as a missionary in the service of her uncle St Boniface, and eventually became abbess of a monastery in Heidenheim in modern Bavaria where she died 25 February 777 or 779. She was canonized 1 May 870.
Walpurga is reputed to protect sailors in storms at sea, reputedly thanks to a miracle when she was sailing to Germany and a terrible storm broke out, and she knelt on deck and prayed and the storm cleared as if by magic…
And yet, interestingly, Walpurga is also a protector against witchcraft. Curious, isn’t it. That someone’s holy prayer is someone else’s satanic spell or witch’s invocation.
Origins
Two great festivals in northern Europe long pre-dating Christianity were Samhain (Halloween) marking the start of winter, and Beltane (April 30/May 1) marking the start of summer.
Beltane ‘the fires of Bel’ began as an ancient fire festival celebrated since at least the Dark Ages if not long before. The celebrations began at dusk on April 30th when great bonfires were lit to welcome the height of spring now associated with the zodiac sign of Taurus the Bull, representing the fertility of spring in full bloom.”
Traditionally,” writes Glennie Kindred (in Sacred Celebrations), “all fires in the community were put out and a special fire was kindled for Beltane. This was the ‘balefire’ or the Teineigen, the ‘need fire.’
Bel or Belenus (Celtic: possibly, Bright One) was a deity associated with pastures, meadows and animal husbandry and other agriculture. He was a fire god rather than a sun god as such, though the sun was used as a common motif in religious imagery.
The cattle were walked between two bonfires in a symbolical purification ritual, to be protected by the smoke from Bel’s fire before being put out to the open pastures for the summer. Bonfires were lit on sacred hills too, and the smoke was considered a magical blessing on the fields, animals, and community, and was also supposed to maintain a fragile balance, keeping up a smokescreen, literally, between the human and faery realms.
The month of May got its name from Maia, also called Flora, the Greek goddess of spring and new abundance. Maia was the oldest of the seven sisters known as the Pleiades, and she was the mother of Hermes (Mercury.) The last zodiac sign of Spring, Gemini, is ruled by airy Mercury, as the air fills with butterflies and pollen.
Flora, or Maia by Botticelli
The name ‘May’ has been used in English since about 1430. Before this time the name of this month was spelled Maius or Mai. The Anglo- Saxons called it Tri-Milchus because all that lush new grass meant cows could now be milked three times a day.
The celebration of May Day has its roots in astronomy, celebrating the halfway point between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. It has been celebrated in the British Isles and through much of Europe as a fertility festival since the Dark Ages, and probably before that, with many stories and superstitions attached.
Superstitions
Like Halloween, May Eve and May Day is a magical time of year, liminal, when the veil between different worlds and realities is thinner than at other times of year.
Beltane or Walpurgisnacht is the mirror image, the spring season’s equivalent of Halloween when witches are said to dance at the Devil’s Sabbath.
This is a time for ghosts, but this is also the time of year when folklore suggests you are most likely to meet a supernatural being from the realm of ‘faery.’
The Fae are an ancient race, and they do not like humans whom they view as destructive, and who is to say they do not have a fair point there. The Fae are afraid of iron. To keep them at bay-
Touch wood no good
Touch iron, this you can rely on…
In this sense the Fae could be said to represent the spirit of humanity before the Iron Age.
They are not the cute creatures of fairy tale. Encounters are dangerous and are best avoided – or you may never be seen again. Do not, whatever you do, go to sleep on a fairy hill at any time, but especially not on May Eve or May Day and especially beware of going to sleep under flowering hawthorn bushes ….
Sex and Scandal
The Christian church made attempts to ban May Day festivities outright because of their overtly pagan nature and “lewd” context as an open celebration of male and female sexuality and fertility – ‘a heathenish vanity generally abused to superstition and wickedness.’
May Day meant drinking and fighting, another reason for the church’s disapproval, but this in itself harks back to the ancient traditions of the sacrifice of ‘The Green Man’ – a mythical figure representing the eternal battle waged between summer and winter, feast and famine. Many pubs in England are still named The Green Man.
In Padstow, Minehead and some other places in the UK, mischievous hobby-horses (‘osses) roamed the streets in search of unsuspecting young ladies to ‘carry away’ for undisclosed purposes.
Morris dancers up to no good riding with hobbyhorses, Richmond embankment,1620
Men who had been disappointed in love would make straw men representing their rivals and stick them on bushes. These depictions were needless to say, often deeply unflattering, and fighting might well follow once they were discovered and identified and the maker was known.
May Day harks back to the ancient traditions of the sacrifice of ‘The Green Man’ – a mythical figure representing the eternal battle waged between summer and winter, feast and famine. Many pubs in England are still named The Green Man.
This splendid depiction is on a boss in Rochester Cathedral, thanks to Wikimedia Commons.
The Puritans banned May Day under Oliver Cromwell but Charles 11 brought it back into custom after the Restoration.
Maypole Dancing goes back at least to the 14th century, but it seems the custom was very old even then, though the dance as we know it today, so pretty and decorative(and tame) -children dancing in village squares, is probably a Victorian invention . The maypole is generally assumed to be a phallic symbol, but the Norse peoples connected it with tree worship, and this connects British and Germanic tradition going back to a shared proto-germanic culture which is part of the common root culture in British life even today.
The Maypole dancing which so upset the Church and the Puritans comes down to us from the rites of spring dedicated to Freya.
The maypole originally represented a living tree, in particular the giant ash tree Yggdrasil, the great “world tree” of Norse myth, linking the nine worlds of the Norse cosmology including Asgard, land of the gods, Midgard, or Earth and Hel, the underworld.
“Ygg” means terrible. It was on this tree that Odin chose to hang nine days and nights, thirsty and fasting in exchange for the knowledge of the runes. The Norns sit beneath it and when every new person is born, carves their names into its bark…and with it, their destiny, although this can change. The Norns will allow us to rewrite it, unlike the destinies woven by the three Fates of Greek mythology.
Walpurgis Night
Also In the Germanic tradition, Walpurgis Night, on April 30th is a moon festival sacred to the goddess Freya.
“Walpurga” is another one of Freya’s names. The re-dedication of the holiday to “St. Walpurga” was a later Christian addition.
Freya (Old Norse, Freyja meaning “Lady”) is one of the pre-eminent goddesses in Norse mythology. She was the goddess of love and beauty in Norse mythology, the goddess of marriage and family and a great prophetess – a seeress. She taught her husband Odin how to read the runes, and like Odin, she had a fiercer aspect as a patron deity of war and death in battle.
Freya wears a cloak of falcon feathers and has a magical gold necklace called Brísingamen. She rides in a chariot pulled by two cats and a sacred boar called Hildisvíni runs alongside, though he is not shown in this picture.
The cats, it has been speculated, were two male kittens found by Thor. They had been abandoned by their mother and he took them to Freya. What kind of cats? I’d have thought Norwegian Forest cats, but legend suggests the kittens were grey-blue and on that basis it’s speculated they were Russian Blues.
Bringing in the May
I washed my face in water
That had neither rained nor run
And then I dried it on a towel
That was never woven or spun
The rhyme suggests we go out barefoot very early on May morning and wash our faces in all that magical dew (or late snow) Your complexion will instantly improve. Let the wind and sunshine dry our faces and we’ll have good luck all year.
Bringing in ‘the may’ means gathering cuttings of flowering trees for magical protection of the home. Bring in branches of forsythia, magnolia, lilac, or other flowering branches. Decorate the doorway to keep away unfriendly fae and other spirits
Make garlands or decorate a basket or a ‘May bush’ with flowers and coloured ribbons. This would often be a hawthorn bush but it doesn’t have to be.
If you need to move a bee hive, May 1 is a traditional day for doing it, hopefully clement for the bees.
Turnips are traditionally planted on May 1. Plant now for lovely mashed turnip later. What are you waiting for?
Fishermen expect to get lucky with catch on May Day.
It’s a powerful day for spell-casting…any spells to do with bringing in health, wealth, and abundance. Light a red or pink candle for love or passion…but be careful what you wish for, and it is unlucky to try and take what is not rightfully available to you.
Traditionally it is unlucky to get married in May. ‘Marry in May, regret it for aye.’ But not to panic if you’ve got the date already booked. The writer of this article was born on May Eve and got married in May – 30 years ago this year- and like all of us, has had mixed luck in life. But so far at least is still married.
This Beltane, Venus has moved into her astrological home turf of Taurus. Good for money, the Stock Exchange. Good for all things green and growing. Good for glamour…an old term for magic. Venus will stay here for almost a month. And Mars moves into its home sign of Aries on 30 April. Pow. Action time. Vim and vigour.
This Walpurgis baby turns 61 on 30 April. Vim and vigour, not feeling it so much, but we shall see…..I may report back.
I am at pains to stress I don’t work as a fortune-teller. I work as an adviser, working to a brief, and I offer forecasting within a specific context, because otherwise, who am I reading for exactly? And I aim to deal in relevant specifics wherever possible.
Context is key for meaning, relevance and precision.
However, I also like to challenge myself. General ‘scrying’ of ‘the’ future, Nostradamus style, is part of a very ancient tradition, and I sometimes work with a well known astrologer, Jessica Adams, writing as a guest contributor for a monthly feature, Tarot Tuesday at JessicaaAdams.com.
The challenge is to pick just one card, and share my intuitive impressions triggered by this card for the coming month. But without benefit of any other context than this loose time frame. One or two other Tarot card readers also write up their one card readings for the month to come, and Jessica then correlates these Tarot findings with current astrology.
Artist Albert Anker 1880
My chosen card for this February 2020 was the Six of Swords.
Book meanings: relocation, progress, exploration, charting a new course, mourning, travel by water, self determination, east
From the Legacy of the Divine Tarot, Image by Ciro Marchetti.
Lick your finger, hold it up…what is the prevailing wind?
Winds are changeable of course, from day to day, even hour to hour, but still, it has been interesting for me as a reader, to correlate my previous one card ‘crystal ball’ readings with events of the ensuing month.
An earlier one card reading said ‘wild fire,’ (you can see previous readings via the link provided below) and it is still playing out, tragically; particularly the Australian wild fires, of which the first were actually in September, and now it is known that several of these were started deliberately.
These single card readings are actually drawn 2-3 weeks ahead of publication, so that I am drawing a card mid January for the first Tuesday in February, and mid February looking ahead to the first Tuesday in March and so on.
Logically, none of it ought to make any sense at all, unless by sheer coincidence. Except that isn’t how it works, when it works.
It works on animal sensing.
Click below to read February’s Tarot Tuesday feature, courtesy of Jessica Adams.
There are many depictions of animals and birds in the Tarot. They form a great part of the human landscape physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and symbolically. If there’s a heaven, what would it be without them? I wouldn’t mind, personally if mosquitoes, maggots, deadly snakes and komodo dragons didn’t make it. Spiders would be all right as long as they were non-venomous and less than two inches in diameter. However, it’s not me in charge.
The songbird traditionally most associated with Christmas, or to give the winter festival its older name, Yuletide – is the robin redbreast. The cheeky, dumpy little European robin, Erithacus rubecula is a member of the flycatcher family.
Its preferred habitats are woodlands, hedgerows, parks and garden. Its staple diet is worms, seeds, fruits and insects. It will fight over sunflower seeds and it adores…
True Tarot Tales 
