Return of the ancient deer

I know I am dreaming. I decide to rest my dream body in a high place overlooking a vast rolling landscape of rivers and wooded hills. People may look in on me, but only if they are able to ascend to this level.
    I close my dream eyes for sleep, and at once the landscape comes alive in a new way. Ancient deer are everywhere. Their spreading antlers are immense. They are like a walking forest.
    From my vantage point, I can see that the ancient deer are returning, all over the world. They are even in the cities, though few people are remotely aware that they have come again. This gives me tremendous hope. I am awed by the return of ancient and primal powers of the Earth. They are needed.

I am thinking now about the resemblance between antlers and the branches of trees. In French, the word for antlers is bois; they speak of the "wood" of the deer. As I follow the troubling news from Turkey, I notice that the protests began as a campaign to save the trees of Gezi Park, and I recall that the symbol of Ankara features a deer with tremendous antlers, dominating two bulls.
    May the wisdom of the ancient antlered ones, connected to the trees and to the power of regeneration, prevail over the bull-headed ones today.

P.S. In sketches for my personal tarot deck, I have drawn the Empress as Ancient Mother, seated under a tree whose branches rise like antlers, and the Emperor as a Deer King whose antlered crown resembles the tree and confirms his dedication to the Great Mother.

Tarot card drawings (c) Robert Moss. All rights reserved.

Ancient Mother and the Deer King

In one of my Tarot for Dreamers workshops, I asked the group to journey into the twinned images of the Empress and the Emperor, trumps III and IV.  I had powerful visions, which I sketched.

    I saw the Empress as Ancient Mother, a deep-bosomed Earth Goddess seated with or within the World Tree. From her womb she is birthing a world. From her flows a gentle inundation that feeds and nourishes a vast population - tiny in proportion to her - that is gathered around her. Above her, the branches of the World Tree form the exact shape of a tremendous rack of antlers. At the same time, they are taproots reaching into the Sky World. One-liner for her: "Praise and serve the Mother and re-enchant the world."

    I saw the Emperor as the Deer King, wearing an antlered crown that exactly reproduces the shape of the branches or sky roots of the World Tree. In a total re-visioning of the classic male-domineering Red Emperor of conventional Tarot, this is the sacred king whose power is the gift of the goddess and who joins with her in sacred union. One-liner for him: "The power of the true king is the gift of the Goddess."