A Gift for Resemblances

 

Divination is the effort to discern the divine will: to identify what supports and what opposes an individual or a community. When properly conducted and interpreted, what comes through may show the shape of things to come. Divination has never been out of style.

      The oldest and most effective forms of divination are those in which you look very carefully at what the world, and your dreams, telling you. You have a question on your mind and you pick up a stone, or examine the bark of a tree, and see what patterns they suggest to you that may hold an answer. The women seers of the German tribes, who gave Roman commanders plenty of trouble, liked to find pictures and hear voices in running water. Plutarch wrote in his biography of Caesar: “Their holy women used to foretell the future by observing eddies in the rivers, and by finding signs in the whirling and in the noise of the water.” When the Romans themselves needed guidance on whether the divine will was favorable or unfavorable to a certain undertaking, they sent their augurs up onto the Capitoline hill to monitor the behavior of birds.

      From very early times, humans have constructed divination kits to limit the answers the world can give you to manageable numbers, that can be read according to an agreed and teachable method of understanding. African diviners carry pouches containing stones and pieces of bones and other objects and artifacts that represent certain themes or outcomes. They can be cast as lots, like runes, to make a story.   

      The world’s great divinatory systems, such as China’s I Ching, West Africa’s Ifa, and Europe’s Tarot, are more than tools for fortune-telling. In their design, the hexagrams, the odu and the cards bring together symbols representing all the forces and processes at work in the world, including those that emanate from a deeper world. The magnitude of the design is clear in the oldest text of the I Ching, from Mawangdui, where it is written that the ancient sages “drummed” the patterns of heaven and earth into the hexagrams. Such patterns give form to the ever-shifting dynamics of manifestation. The world is before you, with all of its players, marshaled in finite numbers adapted to the finite understanding of humans: the sixty-four gua of I Ching, the sixteen master odu and 256 derivative patterns of the Ifa diviner, the 78 cards of Tarot.

      A reading is designed to show what forces and factors are at play in a given moment of time, and which are absent. For a devoted reader of one of these systems, what is missing from the field may be as significant as what is present. If you do a daily card reading, for example, and you find that a certain card or suit never seems to show up, you will want to ask yourself why that element or power is absent from your life. A recurring pattern of absence may be comparable to a medical test that reveals, for example, that you do not have enough iron in your body.

     Great readers, using any of these systems, rely on memory, intuition and a gift for resemblances. Phenomenal memory is required to learn and carry the poetic oral recitations that hold the possible meanings of Ifa. A great babalawo (“father of the mysteries”, the title of the Ifa divination priest) may carry in his head a hundred poetic stories about each of the odu, and will scan his memory banks in a reading to see which of these, in which combinations, are relevant to his client in that moment. A great reader of I Ching will remember, as coins or yarrow sticks reveal a hexagram, not only the commentaries of past masters that he has memorized, but incidents that followed when a certain hexagram came up before. In the presence of the Hanged Man, the Queen of Cups or the Seven of Swords, a great Tarot reader may wander through a personal memory palace where each of the rooms holds a living history of each of the cards – its transformations, its consequences – and there is a great room where the cards move together and interact, as in a medieval pageant with its mystery plays.

     Intuition may involve courting, or at least being receptive to, the guidance of past masters. In China, for many generations, the yarrow stalks preferred for casting the I Ching were plucked from the gravesites of previous masters, including Confucius. The babalawo recognizes that certain odu not only feature the ancestors or the orishas (the gods and demigods of the Yoruba) but may announce their irruption into the space. When the pattern of Ogun, the iron lord of justice and retribution, is revealed, everything comes to a stop while his praise-names are chanted. Those who work deeply with variants of Tarot based on Kabbalah or the work of Western esoteric orders may come to feel they are in contact with the intelligences of some of those who traveled before them on the roads of the Tree of Life.

    In all cultures, attitudes to divination range from superstitious credulity to impatient skepticism. The most pragmatic approach may be the one the great Roman statesman and advocate Cicero attributed to his brother Quintus in a celebrated treatise in which he argues both for and against divination: eventa non causae – pay attention to “outcomes, not causes.” If it works, use it.

From time immemorial, dreams have have been the favorite source of divination, for amateurs and professionals. The dream interpreter is never likely to lack business – even in a society that disparages dreams – because people know that their dreams are important, but need help in three important ways: to figure out the meaning of dreams, to determine appropriate action to be taken, and to disperse or ward off bad energies that may be operating during the night.

The prime requirement for a dream interpreter, according to Artemidorus, the most famous practitioner of this trade before Freud, is “a gift for resemblances.”

The meaning of dreams is often mysterious, and in many societies it has been maintained that a professional - shrink or priest or seer - is required to interpret them. The truth is that dreams are a personal oracle that travels with us everywhere, and we don't need someone else to tell us what they mean if we are prepared to do our own work. Asked why dream symbols can be so difficult to read, a wise ancient interpreter responded that the gods who are kindly to humanity want us to get smart, so they set us puzzles to figure out. This was also sometimes cited as a reason why the pronouncements of the Delphic oracle were famously mysterious and ambiguous.

Graphic: Ifa divination tray

 

Text adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

 

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Tarot Cards from the World

 

I have the sense that the world is sometimes slipping us a Tarot card, from an infinite deck. On the literal roads of everyday life, I'm often struck by how the first thing that comes on the car radio, or the first vanity plate or bumper sticker I spot on a car, may contain a clue to the quality of the day. One morning the first vanity plate I noticed while walking my dog read WAT U WISH. This got me thinking long and deep about the nature of wishcraft. What we encounter in life has a great deal to do with what we wish - or fail to wish - and whether our wishes come from the head or the heart, from the little self of the big Self. 

A friend reported that the first bumper sticker she saw that day read "I Won the Time War". That feels to me like an nod of approval from the universe, whether you read it in the mundane sense of managing to get things done in allotted tick-tock time, of in the larger sense of inhabiting a more spacious time in the multiverse (which my friend had been discussing at the moment she spotted the bumper sticker). 

The behavior of birds and animals sometimes has the quality of one of the Major Arcana coming into play. Once when I was speaking to a group about the character of the Trickster in mythology, a fox appeared on a grassy knoll behind my head, visible to everyone in the meeting space except me. Every time I turned my head, he would vanish, only to reappear when I wasn't looking, until that session was done. Hard to miss the fact that the Trickster card was in play that day - as proved to be the case, richly, beyond that workshop session.

For many games of Sidewalk Tarot, please see my book Sidewalk Oracles. 

Fox oracle card by Robert Moss

Tarot Gate to Atlantis

Working the Tarot can bring us in contact with past masters of this system. On a fall evening, I had been discussing Tarot and did a personal reading in which the last two cards were the Hanged Man and the High Priestess.

When I lay down, preparing for sleep, I had a strong sense of contact with a female personality. I had no doubt she was a priestess. I associated her with a woman who had led a great esoteric order in Britain, and used the Qabalistic Tarot (as they called it) in her teachings and rituals.[1] This woman died six months before I was born, but I had often dreamed of her and her circle.

The priestess invited me to go on an astral journey, and instructed me to put on special vestments, black, white and silver. She led me to an inner temple and showed me the gateway to the path of the High Priestess on the Qabalistic Tree of Life. This is the longest and most challenging of the journeys known as Tarot pathworkings, requiring the traveler to cross the Abyss. I was told that I must on no account veer, or even look, to right or left, where there were all manner of threats, temptations and distractions.

I embarked on the journey. At the place where the road crossed the path of Strength, I learned something new about the Lion. I was required, at this point, to leave my second body – my astral body – behind, as I had left my physical body behind in the bed. This was the condition for crossing the Abyss and “shooting for Kether”, the Crown.

I survived the whirling swords of attackers who may have been very fierce Gatekeepers. I came at last to a chamber with curving walls. Here the priestess reappeared, indicating that I had earned the right to knowledge of secret and essential things. She described the chamber as a “premonistory”, a word unknown to me. Through an observation window, I looked out into an ocean in which people swam about in strange diving suits that looked like the skins of giant fish. Or perhaps they were fish-people. Some of the males were whiskered like catfish. It came to me that these might be the true people of Atlantis.

The priestess explained:

We came from the sea. The Source of Light determined to experiment with several species. Since most of the planet is covered with water, it was possible that the most propitious environment was the dominant one.
    The early Masters came from the waters, in the literal as well as the cosmic sense. This is remembered in the Chaldean stories of Ea, known to the Greeks as Oannes, and in the myths of the Dogon and other African peoples. Our form was human only by adaptation: the equivalent, on the physical plane, of the contact pictures projected by archangels and ascended Masters to greet and educate humans who are journeying into the astral on the paths of initiation.
    Hence the significance of the Hanged Man, in its reference to the element of Water, and of Nun and Tzaddi, associated with Death and the Star, in the Qabalistic Tarot.[2]
    We remember the founding priesthood as Atlantean, in the exact sense of Plato’s myth. It is recollected in a differing version in the Irish legends of Fomorians and invaders.
     To this day, the sea is the guardian and repository of the deepest mysteries. It has absorbed and transformed the effluvium of human waste and veil; this is remembered in the story of the ten thousand sealed vessels Solomon had cast beneath the waves. Great entities live far between its depths, at levels no human has plumbed – or will ever plumb – in the corporeal body.
     It is of the most urgent consequence that the sea should be appeased, its rulers propitiated. Never forget that the Moon is ruler of the sea and its tides. The seas have been ravaged by mankind. The fish are dying. It is time for humans to give back, through sacrifice.

After recording the passage above I picked up Dion Fortune's magical novel The Sea Priestess, and soon found myself reading, as if for the first time, the chapter in which the narrator picks two cards from a gypsy's Tarot deck: the High Priestess and the Hanged Man. 

I recorded this beyond-astral journey in my journal on November 17, 1994. 

Notes 

1. The magicians of the Golden Dawn and its offshoots practiced "Qabala", as distinct from the Jewish Kabbalah. The attributions of the Tarot trumps and the Hebrew letters to the paths between the sephiroth on the Tree of Life are explained by Robert Wang in Qabalistic Tarot.

2. Nun, in the Hebrew alphabet, means "fish" and in Qabalistic Tarot it is identified with trump XIII, Death. Tzaddi means "fish hook" and is associated with trump XVII, The Star. The letter Mem, meaning "water", is identified with trump XII, the Hanged Man, which was chosen by the Golden Dawn as the symbol of the Order.

Journal drawing of Oannes by RM

Tarot by your own design

One of the fun assignments in my Tarot workshops is for everyone to produce a sketch of a personal tarot card, based on discoveries and imagery that came to them during the program. There is no shortage of material, since our Tarot for Dreamers playshops include theater and performance, journeys through the doorways of the cards, monologues in the voices of both major and minor arcana as well as readings for ourselves and each other in many different styles.
     In  a Tarot workshop, I produced sketches of several cards. The card that demanded my closest attention was the Four of Swords. In a Celtic Cross spread, it had come up in the position of my Hopes and Fears. I had seen it in the same place before, in another recent reading, and realized that I needed to explore why this number card - a benign one in the sometimes scary and clanking procession of the Swords - might speak to me of my Hopes and Fears.
     My personal name for the Four of Swords is Rest. My catch phrase for it is "Time Off". Weapons are laid down or hung up on the walls. We have moved beyond the pain and grief and possible self-laceration of the Three of Swords; we are not yet menaced by the terrible mental strife of the Five of Swords. A period of calm and relaxation might certainly figure among my hopes; why would is also be a source of fear?
     In one of our exercises, I drummed for the group, inviting our participants to step through the frame of a selected card, as through a door, to learn more about the character of the card within its own realm. When I let my mind travel through the frame of the Four of Swords, I saw metal pens hanging on a wall. They were the Zebra F-402 pens, inexpensive but elegant, that I often use.
     Inside the scene I strolled from a writing nook through an open doorway into a rather Hawaiian setting with a sandy beach, palm trees, a lounger near the water. A great place for rest and relaxation, imagined or physical. Then why the fear? I looked back into the writing space and saw one of my pens lying on top of an unfinished manuscript. Ah, yes. Now I saw it. The writer in me - who might be the creator and producer in other contexts also - fears rest periods because he knows that starting up a project that has been left for a while requires overcoming the heavy weight of inertia. 
     So I produced a personal version of the Four of Swords with the hope of delightful R&R, but also the implied fear of that pen laid to rest across the unfinished book.

For designing minds: Though "Tarot for Dreamers" is not in my current workshop schedule, we are likely to play some Tarot games in my creative retreat, "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" at magical Mosswood Hollow near Seattle in May and on a beautiful country estate in northern Bohemia near Ceska Skalice in August

Image: Four of Swords (c) Robert Moss

A shining tarot from the dark places of wisdom

My very sparky card of the day from the beautiful new Pholarchos Tarot sent to me by its creator, Carmen Sorrenti. I have some reservations about the 10 of Wands in other decks but this 10 of Sparks (her name for the suit) makes me glow with creative fire. I rarely look at assigned meanings for tarot cards since I have known tarot on the inner as well as the outer planes for as long as I can remember. However. since I have just opened this deck I went looking for this sparkplug in Carmen's little book and found this:

10 of Sparks 
"The experience is now feverish with detail and story, eyes are open to the lucid dream of it, conscious of the fullness of this manifestation. A fire can burn too high, too wide, too long - take time out, unburden."

I applauded this one-card reading. I had indeed been feverish with detail and story as I read and re-read a hundred books on world mythology, plotting my new online course on "Living Your Mythic Edge",among other things. A little time out could be a good plan.    
    I like the cat's eyes on this card. In my own tarot deck (created and painted by me for my personal use and trainings I sometimes lead, not for publication) the Court of Wands are all cat people as well as fire people.    
    To understand Carmen's title for her tarot, you'll need to check out Peter Kingsley's provocative riff on pholarchos as "lord of the lair" in his book In the Dark Places of Wisdom, which landed at my door as suddenly as the new tarot when it was published in 1999. This takes us to a wild and primal level of Greek spiritual experience. A pholarchos, it seems, may have been an ancient Hellenic shaman who goes down into a cave for initiation, connection with the animal powers, and to incubate prophetic and healing nocturnal experiences. The word "pholarchos" appears on inscriptions from just one place: Velia, as the Greeks called a settlement in southern Italy. Carmen tells me she grew up just north of Velia.    
    Fascinated by all of this, I asked her to share more of her personal story of creating this beautiful tarot and to introduce us in her own way to three of the cards. Here is Carmen's guest blog

Behind the Scenes with the Pholarchos Tarot

Guest Blog by Carmen Sorrenti

I was living in London and Paris as a young actress when I got called to shoot Gangs of New York in Rome. They were going to recreate the old Hell’s Kitchen at Cinecittà studios thanks to the vision of Dante Ferretti and they needed Irish looking mischief makers to be part of Cameron Diaz’s gang of thieves. Sure, I would go—and with that excuse I took a bunch of friends from the film set down to my birth town, Positano. We were only there for 3 nights and in that fire cauldron of a bay where the elements meet without any half measures, I woke shaken by this dream:

“The healer turns into a woman with white hair, light eyes and immense power. I’m blown away by her and spontaneously enter a trance ritual. She speaks to me, firm and lit up. Words to the effect of forgetting what I’m doing with my life and getting ready for a mission. She then vanishes.”

It was to be years before I managed that first part of changing direction, time spent at a luminous crossroads going through a series of deaths and rebirths, before the power women came with more instructions. 
    By 2014 they were zipping in and out busy as fireflies. It was the year I decided to start work on a deck of cards. It seems simple now but I only got glimpses each time and was confused for great stretches of time. Faith, not patience, kept me afloat. This was the year that I visited the island of Lipsi for the first time. I mention this because Positano and Lipsi are fundamental places that bound me to the vision of this deck. 
    I was unaware that they shared something in common but the first night in Lipsi I had a remarkable experience with another dream. I could sense my sleeping body on the bed as my dream body moved ever so gently up a spiral staircase so as not to wake that me in the bed. Something so uncanny and so intimate. At the top I found myself on a terrace facing the vast sea. Before I knew it, I opened my arms wide in communion with the divinities of this place.
    The next day I noticed that from our tiny island we could almost touch Turkey, or more specifically, Caria. Just as Positano can almost ‘see’ Velia just down the coast… as if both stand guard at the thresholds of the ancient Pholarchos and their liminal existences. That part of Italy was in fact colonized by the Greeks and some of the Pholarchos were amidst the new inhabitants. The caves of Caria came to life again in this new environment. 
    I felt caught in the web of these majestic figures that spent days incubating healing and prophetic dreams in caves that they would then take back to their communities. This is, of course, if the term pholarchos means what we think it does. In any case, symbolically the story holds weight for me. As a child I was terrified of the immensity of dreaming—this window that takes us all the way to the infinite or as the Tibetans would say, the clear light—traveling through every terrain the soul can or cannot handle along the way. 
    Another of these power women in 2014 was from Positano itself and she worked in her own underground lab (or cave) as well as being the daughter of a place called the ‘Buca di Bacco’, a famous restaurant many will recognize but, more importantly: ‘the den of Bacchus’, Lord of ecstatic communion and wild surrender. What will we do to cover up our vital force and then what will we do to try to reclaim it? I’m hoping such a deck of dream healers can inspire those who come across it to walk into those personal caves of limitless potential where dreams and visions lead the way through the labyrinth.    
     The thing is, dreams are phenomenal because they do slowly guide our way home, to the central kingdom, if we just allow. And no matter how often we lose faith, they are always ready to flood us with renewal.     
     My mother had no idea I would make a deck of dreamers. They did all have big dreams for me in town, but of another sort. It does greatly amuse her however that she had my birth predicted by a tarot reader who gave her advice on how to overcome a near death experience of the fetus in her growing belly. I tend to steer away from predictions myself but sure enough she hemorrhaged hard enough for the doctor to say I had died… my mother remembered Pina (who in secret was doing readings for top Italian politicians as once astrologers had done for popes despite the decrees against such practices) and followed her instructions to safety.


The deck has the traditional structure of 78 cards and can be used in conjunction with other books on tarot if you should want to do so. Here is a flavor of a magical trio of cards: Lovers, Tower and Queen of Sparks, posted along with their fragments of dreaming. It is for you to ride the waves with them and see where they land you. May you travel safely, feeling your own deep and numinous pulse.

Lovers

Venus drops her precious stones in your blood stream and Vulcan nimbly makes jewels of them. You plunge and surge onto a shore of deep belonging. Now you are vast, the waters of love dissolve your mold yet passion is always glistening inside you, setting a course for life, not only now. Within the fiery dragon of the heart is the lookout point. Keep the taste on your tongue and rather than burn right through, seek an underlying design. This is you unfolding.

Tower

The elemental forces all rush through you. Will it be a trial by fire, water, air, earth or all of the above? Lightning strikes and splits your soul into a thousand colors. This is an awakening. Every particle gets charged and when you knit yourself back together, the transmissions work differently; you may need to learn a new language that bonds you with the world. Here is the complete annihilation, the revisioning, a new incarnation in your old body. The ancients called this the “House of God”—are we ever prepared for such a meeting?

Queen of sparks

A huge parade with thousands of people. She places her feet firmly on hot coals, clear that intent is as important as action. She sits on the throne and fingers the fulgid wee dragon that lives in her heart chamber till they both cast the velvet green of their eyes upon you. Your turn to unleash enchantment, the crazy magnetism of creativity.

The world as seen by the Queen of Swords

I pull a Tarot card for the day, drawing from a deck called Navigators of the Mystic Sea. I have drawn the Queen of Swords, In this deck, she is tagged with the word "Subversion". Instead of thinking about what she may represent for me today, I decide that I'll enter her perspective and try to grasp what part of me may be like the Queen of Swords, and what strengths and challenges come with that.

I am seated in a high black throne on the edge of a chasm. My robes are gold and purple, and I wear a gold helmet with a long back-plate that protects my neck. A huge solitary raven perches on the top of my throne, above my head. Though I am seated, my right arm, brandishing a sword, is vigorously outstretched, pointing to the far side of the abyss, as if am ordering an army to attempt the dangerous crossing – or warning off an unseen force on the other side. In my left palm, I am holding what may be an orb but could also be a pocket watch.
    Where my robes flow over the armrest of the throne, they burst into other colors – blue and lavender, teal and pink and gold again. The same colors stream like ribbons through the sky above the high orange peaks in the background, and – joining my streaming robes – along the edge of the abyss.
     In the distance, a strange brown dog (if it is a dog) is leaping over the chasm, from the far side towards my side. When I inspect his jump, I see that the far side of the abyss is higher than my side.


I remember that, in other images, I am represented as holding a severed head, and that I have been called the Mask Cutter. My sharp sword gives me the power to strip away illusion and pretension. But I know that the sharpness of my intellect can suppress my essential feminine gifts and that, misused, my sword can cut down the brightest hopes and ambitions. I cut deep.
     A solitary raven is not to be trusted. The raven you can rely on is one of a pair. The head is not to be trusted without the heart.
     I have come to the very edge. I may order others to take the jump, but do not take it myself. Yet I am barefoot, which gives me the ability to touch and feel the earth if I am willing to listen to my body.
     I am beautiful but cold and aloof and unforgiving. I place myself above others. The dog, jumping to my side, could help to soften me.
     There is a story to be written about me, and why I sit, with sword unsheathed at this high and wild and lonely border. My throne is also my prison, from which I can be released only with the help of the dog and the second raven, the one who does not appear on the card. There is a clue in the arrangement of the scene. I sit on the left side of the chasm, and on the left side of the brain.

Note: I first posted this piece a few years ago. I am posting again because of a friend's question about the significance of the Queen of Swords. Entering the perspective of this court card is as an example of how we can learn to meditate or journey with tarot. I am leading a "Tarot for Dreamers" weekend workshop involving this and other practices for active dreamers who are interested in tarot at magical Mosswood Hollow on May 9-10.

Tarot for Dreamers: The Priestess gentles the Serpent

I often use synchronicity to get a second opinion on what is going on in a dream.
     Sometimes I do that with the help of tarot. Often all that is required is to pull a single card; sometimes I am moved to draw a series of cards corresponding to different scenes, characters or elements in a dream on which I would like some further insight.
     I never consign the meaning of a dream to what the cards reveal, because dreams are vastly deeper and more various than any set of 78 cards designed according to someone else's ideas. Nonetheless, what the cards show can be provocative and illuminating.
     I see many examples of this when I lead my Tarot for Dreamers workshops. Upon occasion, the tarot can even produce an ally to help a dreamer move through a stuck place or confront a terror, in dreams of the night and in passages of the day.
     This is what happened, in a memorable way, in a Tarot for Dreamers playshop I led at a site with the perfect name for such things: The Dragon's Egg, Mystic, Connecticut. A dreamer named Ann recounted a dream in which she was terrified by a giant snake.

The snake was enormous. It looked like a giant python. I was holding it by the neck, with my right hand. The huge, pale yellow head, lolled over my hand. I was trying to break its neck, but I couldn't. I woke up terrified.

In discussion, Ann revealed that she had been frightened by snakes in a series of dreams over many years. She was evidently uncomfortable talking about the latest snake dream now. Yet she told us that she had been inspired to do some research and had discovered that the snakes in the ancient temples of Asklepios, regarded as medicine allies of the god of dream healing, were pale yellow in color. Thus she was open to the suggestion that there might be a power in her dream that was waiting to be claimed - if she was ready to brave up to the giant snake and see what needed to be done with it.

     I suggested that she might want to pull a card from her tarot deck for guidance on this. She drew one of the keys: Trump II, the High Priestess. The Priestess card, for me, offers a path of initiation, a way of going beyond the veil into the heart of the Mysteries. In pathworking on the Qabalistic Tree of Life, the path of the High Priestess, running from Tiphareth to Kether across the abyss of Daath, is the longest and most challenging, requiring the journeyer to pass a series of tests and brave up to a series of challenges. I also thought of the snake priestesses of the ancient world, especially the famous statue from Crete, and of the Pythia, the priestess-seer of the oracle at Delphi whose name literally means The Pythoness.
     The entry of the High Priestess into our circle of dreamers prompted me to suggest a travel itinerary to Ann: to journey to the High Priestess and seek her blessing for a close-up encounter with the giant snake. "See yourself stepping through the border of the card, as through the frame of the door, to meet the Priestess. Seek her counsel and protection for a further journey, to the place of the python, to see what you need to do with it." We agreed that, with Ann's permission, all of the participants would travel with her, as family support.
     We shared powerful and mutually confirming experiences during the group journey, fueled and focused by my shamanic drumming. The most important and profound travel report came from Ann:

I found myself at once before the High Priestess. From her throne, four snakes darted forward and wrapped themselves around my arms and my legs. To my amazement, I felt neither fear nor revulsion. The Priestess told me that the easiest way for my to connect with the serpent power was to let the giant snake swallow me. Now I was facing it. I saw its great jaws open and I let it devour me. I felt myself traveling at amazing speed through a series of landscapes. Then everything turned inside out and the serpent was inside me. I felt it move through all of my energy centers in a zigzag path, clearing blockages, raising a terrific vital energy inside me. I have finally conquered my fear of snakes and I am ready to dance with the Serpent Power.

And she did. We were delighted to see her move into the midst of the circle with the sinuous grace of a snake dancer.

Note: "Qabalistic"? Yes: the Tarot system inherited from the magicians of the Golden Dawn is related to the Western "Qabalah" rather than to Kabbalah. A useful guide to the correspondences is Robert Wang's The Qabalistic Tarot.

Tarot for Dreamers workshops: My next one is at an even more magical location, Mosswood Hollow, in the wild woods east of Seattle, over the weekend of May 9-10, 2015.

Image: This unusual version of the Tarot Priestess is from the Navigators Tarot of the Mystic Sea.

Chicken tarot

My sketch for the 3 of Disks, inspired by the contribution that chickens in the yard made to our lunch breaks during my Tarot for Dreamers workshop at The Dragon's Egg, Mystic last weekend. I have always thought of the 3 of Disks or Pentacles as a positive card, but suggesting that there is a price for manifesting good things on a physical level. No windfall here. Rather, the need for honest labor, and to take your time to do a job well.
    Now "Hatching" seems a suitable name for it.

Speaking Land

Everything is speaking to you.
The tarot Fool is out of the deck
and walking up the drive
with the patterns of the world in his sack
to remind you (if you’ll listen)
that to be wise you may need to be crazy
in the eyes of others - and not confuse this
with behaving like a bloody fool.

The chickens in the yard can teach you
multiplication and what you need
to hatch that dragon's egg you have inside.
Hawk will come over, more interested in you
than a chicken dinner. Are you ready
to soar on his wings, and claim his vision
and see your life roads from his sky?

Everything is conspiring to show you
what heaven and earth want to happen.
When you think your way is lost,
when there are mountains of glass
and concrete between you and your dreams,
the ones who move beyond the curtain
of our consensual hallucinations
and speak as the wind in the trees
as the call of a bird, as the bark of a fox,
will open ways where you least expect them.
All you need are new ears and fresh eyes.

-          - March 25, 2013

Art: "Dream Path II" by Dorothy Englander

A lost and found twenty

In the category of I Couldn't Lose It If I Tried: 

Standing in line at the bank, I take out my cell phone, which I keep in the same pocket as some loose $20 bills, a couple of which come out, jammed under the lid of the phone. I cash a check with my favorite teller who says, "Whoops, I nearly gave you an extra twenty." 

     There's a stir in the line behind me. They've found something.
     "Something good?" I ask, turning to the people behind me.
     "A twenty dollar bill!" 

     "It's probably mine," I say to the old boy who's got it. This is probably true, given what happened when I pulled out my phone. "But it's found money, so you keep it."
     "Oh no, I'll hand it in to the teller." Honest fellow.
     "Really? I think you deserve the good luck."
     "Someone may claim it." He gives the $20 bill to the teller.
     "I guess that would be you," the man behind him says to me.

     "Maybe you should keep it," I say to the teller.
      "Oh no, we're not allowed to take money." She hands the $20 bill to me. 

      It's all but certain I am the one who lost the $20. Nice to think it touched so many people before it came back to me.

The 20th trump

I must add that before this incident, I was reflecting on one of the most powerful and original images in the Wildwood tarot. It is the depiction of the 20th trump as the Great Bear. In older decks, this is called Judgment and sometimes shows the dead rising from their graves. Aleister Crowley didn't care for the Christian eschatological reference and renamed it the Aion in his Thoth deck. My personal name for Trump XX is "Showtime!"
     I love the Wildwood image. It makes me think of something being called up from the dark places of wisdom, and of the bear rising from winter hibernation. Between two ancient yew trees, we see the mouth of a passage tomb. A fierce white bear stands guard, holding the space for the one who will rise through death and rebirth. The constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, shines in the sky, suggesting that the cave initiation can carry you to the stars. There is no judgment here, in the old moralistic or theological sense - rather, the promise of rising into an expanded, superabundant life. Showtime!

Stoat on the path

I am getting to know the Wildwood tarot, whose beautiful images are painted by Will Worthington. I love the animals that take the place of the usual face (or "court") cards.
    The Stoat, tagged here as the Page of Bows (=Wands in other decks) has come up a couple of times in recent readings. Better known as the ermine or short-tailed weasel in North America, the Stoat is described in the book (written by Mark Ryan and John Matthews) as a fierce hunter who lives underground, adept at changing colors with "mystical links to the sovereignty of the land."  As a person in your life, the appearance of this card may flag "a charming and adventurous individual who may act as an ambassador."
   I note, researching the natural habits of stoats, that they don't dig their own burrows; they take over the homes of rodents they kill. They have that great ability to change with the seasons, by putting on and later taking off those thick winter coats. In folklore, they are iffy as omen beasts. In Ireland, the old ones said it's not likely to be a good day if a stat crosses your path - unless you greet it as friend and neighbor. In history and society, the ermine has often denoted rank or royalty, and not only as a fur collar. There is a portrait of Elizabeth of England with a white stoat (ermine) on her arm.
   When the Stoat comes up in the place of the Page of Bows, or the Eel as the Knight of Vessels, I am less inclined to think about the procession of the court cards familiar from other decks and simply to go with the qualities of the animals that show themselves - whether as aspects of the querent, or of someone entering his or her life, or as denoting an inner or outer event.

Tarot card for Grace and abbondanza of dreams

It begins at night on a strange, wild beach. The waves are dark and strong, dark trees bow in the wind from the sea. I am reminded of the mysterious Island of the Dead in the famous painting by Arnold Böcklin. I have companions, but on waking I am not sure who they are, or which side of the waters I am on.
    The dream was eerie, but left me thrilled with excitement. I was eager to go back inside the scene and discover more. I rolled my head on the pillow, ignoring the gray light of morning, and willed myself back. I smelled the salt air, and plunged into the waves.
     Now I was moving at fantastic speed through great sentinel rocks that came alive at my approach and became giants and monsters. Some resembled the creatures Odysseus had to survive, others seemed to come from Northern imagination. There was a storybook, cinematic quality to these stone monsters. Uneasy to begin with, I soon found myself delighted by them, because I realized that I was now traveling in the imaginal realm of a child self, or of several of my Boy Roberts.
     A slightly older Robert, old enough to be avidly curious about girls, took charge, and now I was in a kind of harem dream, in which women of every type were flirting with me. This was fun, for a while, but some instinct took me to breakfast at the most elegant hotel buffet. I did not linger too long over coffee and croissants, because I felt the tug of another mind.
     I followed it into the presence of a true priestess, the leader of a great Western order of initiates who died around the time I was born. I had met her many times, in encounters between the worlds, and felt I had known her, in a different body, during her own time on Earth. I felt blessed by this renewed contact. She was a gentle teacher, in this encounter. She wanted to remind me of my connections with  certain personalities in other times and other dimensions, and how our actions in any one of these lives change the patterns of the others.
    She gave me an image to bring back from this lucid dream. It looked like a Tarot card, hand drawn in ink with washes of color, from a marvelous draftsmen. Through the open flaps of a medieval tent, a city appears on the horizon, and at the heart of the city is a pavilion arranged for a special event, perhaps a marriage.
    The Roman numerals VI appear at the top of the card. In most decks, the VI trump is called The Lovers. But here, the word written on the card was Grace.

There was more, much more - at least a dozen separate episodes, including ones in which I was inspecting books I haven't written yet and contributing to the translations of ones I do know. The gifts of this night were tremendous. A sense of grace (good word!) and bounty, which I want to name with that boisterous Italian word, abbondanza! Synesius of Cyrene, that great dreamer of the Greco-Roman world, wrote that the crowning gift of dreams may be simply that the Creator "infuses us with his own courage." Something like that. I have no desire to analyze experiences of this kind, simply to live and create with the energy and sense of grace they bring.

"Island of the Dead" by Swiss symbolist Arnold Böcklin. Freud had this on his wall, so did Lenin. The artist described his painting as “a dream picture: it must produce such a stillness that one would be awed by a knock on the door.”

Inner Tarot

I sometimes find myself doing complete Tarot readings in my head.
    At a recent workshop, when we chose partners for a shamanic tracking exercise, a woman I'll call Mikki asked me to bring her guidance on creating a small holistic center. This was one of her longstanding ambitions, and she felt she was nearing the point in her life where she would have the resources and independence to fulfill this life dream. I asked her to give me an image I could use as a portal in embarking on a shamanic journey with the aid of drumming to find what she needed to know.
    She smiled and said, "I see myself doing Tarot readings at the center."
    This was perfect, given her intention. As I drummed, I let my bird allies fly part of my consciousness to an old brick building in a downtown area that was being brought back to life. I toured the rooms in the rented space that was being used - in a possible future - as the holistic center the woman wished to create. I had the impression that building was previously industrial, possibly a gasworks. I was drawn to a pleasant natural foods cafe on the ground floor.
    I saw life-size paintings of major arcana on the walls, and found Mikki's double seated at a table with a Tarot deck in front of her, ready to do a reading.
    I invited Madame Mikki to spread the cards to provide guidance for the Mikki who was waiting in the workshop space. Madame Mikki laid ten cards face down, producing the ten-card spread widely known as the Celtic Cross. One by one, she - or my secret working mind - turned the cards over, producing one of the clearest readings I have ever seen.
    I was able to retain exact memory of the sequence of the cards, and drew this in my journal after I ended the drumming for the group. When I was able to share directly with Mikki, I took her, one by one, through the sequence of the cards, giving her my own attributions and associations, and weaving in hers. At the center, the High Priestess seemed to embody her big dream of moving to a new level of life and spirit, crossed by all that bound and bedeviled.
    She was moving from the mature Queen of Swords part of herself that had an excellent brain and excelled at reason and planning (Mikki was an engineer) towards a less developed, passionate Princess of Wands part of herself that wasn't afraid to ride the tiger. In her own position was a powerful personality willing to cross the wilderness by inner light. On the horizon of possibility, the Lovers trump held the vision of union with the beloved, perhaps on several levels. In the position of her hopes and fears, the Tower, the prospect of the overthrow of familiar established structures. In her immediate environment, the Sun smiled on her; I reminded her that old-time Tarot readers sometimes say that if the Sun is in your spread, you have nothing to worry about. At the root of all, the King of Disks (called Knight in the Thoth deck); we talked about a history of patriarchy, in the family and at the job, to be recognized and moved beyond. The outcome? The three of Disks. Solid, steady work.
    We noticed that six of the ten cards were greater trumps, suggesting that big forces were at play around her intention, to challenge and to support. Three face cards, suggesting the necessity to recognize and work with others (certainly essential to bringing clients and other practitioners to a center) as well as aspects of the self. A lone number card as the outcome, solid and steady. I like the three of Disks very much. She liked it too, saying she wasn't afraid of work.
   Our discussion led Mikki to decide on concrete action plans, involving reaching out to others and scouting rental properties in a neighborhood she identified from my description.

Did I speak of doing Tarot readings "in my head"? That language may be inadequate. Tarot images can open doors into the imaginal realm, which is not inside our heads but rather, a realm we may sometimes succeed in getting our heads inside. Let's add that here the Tarot images may come alive and reveal themselves in forms beyond any of their painted representations.

I am leading a new workshop on Dreaming with Tarot in March. My latest book Dreaming the Soul Back Home contains a section on games to play in the Tarot Corner of your Secret Library.

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."

Tarot cards from the world

I encourage people to be open to receiving tarot cards from the world, in the form of symbolic pop-ups and coincidences. Sometimes it's rather hard not to see this playing out, as when on my morning walk I found part of a deck of Bicycle playing cards abandoned on my street just a few doors up from my house. Most of the cards were face-down, but four presented themselves as a possible reading for the day, in this order: 10 of Clubs, Queen of Diamonds, 8 of Clubs, 9 of Diamonds.
     The Clubs in a deck of playing cards correspond to the Wands of tarot; the Diamonds to Disks or Pentacles. So, in the abandoned Bicycle cards, sodden and soiled under the rain, I found myself looking into a tarot mirror and a possible story for the day. The Ten of Wands, for me, cautions about a great energy confined in too narrow a space; a creative outlet is required for all that passion and fire! The Queen of Disks, whether an aspect of me or a woman in my life, brings the grounding and earthy approach that I often require to balance my energies. The Eight of Wands, for me, is a great card for rapid and effective communication, an invitation to connect with others through all available media. The Nine of Disks, as an outcome card, can hardly be beat, suggesting a powerful forward movement into abundance and physical manifestation.
    Not a bad bunch. As I smile at myself for spending these moments reflecting on the possible tarot attributions of a few cards abandoned on the sidewalk, I am reminded of an entertaining thought expressed by Papus (Gerard Encausse) in his otherwise tedious 19th century book The Tarot of the Bohemians. Giving his own twist to the legend that tarot is originally an Egyptian book of wisdom, Papus  dreamed up the story of an Egyptian priest who, “observing that virtue is a most fragile thing, and most difficult to find, proposed to confide the scientific traditions to vice. The latter, he said, would never fail completely, and through it we are sure of a long and durable presentation of our principles." So he invented a card game to perpetuate the secret wisdom while hiding it from the understanding of the uninitiated. "The game chosen as a vice was adopted. Since then the players have transmitted this tarot from generation to generation far better than the most virtuous men ever could have done.” 

Designing your own tarot cards - 4 of Swords

One of the fun assignments in my tarot workshops is for everyone to produce a sketch of a personal tarot card, based on discoveries and imagery that came to them during the program. There is no shortage of material, since our Tarot for Dreamers playshops include theater and performance, journeys through the doorways of the cards, monologues in the voices of both major and minor arcana as well as readings for ourselves and each other in many different styles.
     In my tarot workshop last weekend, I produced sketches of several cards, including a Priestess inspired by the snake journey I described in my last article here. The card that demanded my closest attention was the Four of Swords. In a Celtic Cross spread, it had come up in the position of my Hopes and Fears. I had seen it in the same place before, in another recent reading, and realized that I needed to explore why this number card - a benign one in the sometimes scary and clanking procession of the Swords - might speak to me of my Hopes and Fears.
     My personal name for the Four of Swords is Rest. My catch phrase for it is "Time Off". Weapons are laid down or hung up on the walls. We have moved beyond the pain and grief and possible self-laceration of the Three of Swords; we are not yet menaced by the terrible mental strife of the Five of Swords. A period of calm and relaxation might certainly figure among my hopes; why would is also be a source of fear?
     In one of our exercises, I drummed for the group, inviting our participants to step through the frame of a selected card, as through a door, to learn more about the character of the card within its own realm. When I let my mind travel through the frame of the Four of Swords, I saw metal pens hanging on a wall. They were the Zebra F-402 pens, inexpensive but elegant, that I generally use. I strolled from a writing nook through an open doorway into a rather Hawaiian scene with a sandy beach, palm trees, a lounger near the water. A great place for rest and relaxation, imagined or physical. Then why the fear? I looked back into the writing space and saw one of my pens lying on top of an unfinished manuscript. Ah, yes. Now I saw it. The writer in me - who might be the creator and producer in other contexts also - fears rest periods because he knows that starting up a project that has been left for a while requires overcoming the heavy weight of inertia. 
     So I produced a personal version of the Four of Swords with the hope of delightful R&R, but also the implied fear of that pen laid to rest across the unfinished book.

Three fires

In dreams last night, I am staying in an immense hotel suite; it is as much like a well-appointed office suite as guest rooms. On an island in the kitchen there are central controls for three (presumably gas or electric) fires that will come on in fireplaces in three different rooms.
    I don’t need to figure out the controls. As soon as I indicate interest, a glass door from the kitchen slides open and a charming, respectful black hotel employee in a suit comes in to assist me in igniting or adjusting the three fires as I wish.

    I woke with a sense of quiet satisfaction.
    In my dreams, over many years, the state of the kitchen often reflects my creative state and sometimes my progress, or lack of progress, in relation to creative projects; a kitchen is where things get cooked up. I am cheered by the thought that I may have three projects that can catch fire – and that I don’t need to try to control anything, because help is available.
    If I were to pick a tarot card for this dream, it would be the Three of Wands. In the stream of the tarot numbers within the suit of fire, passion and intuition, there is the sense of thrusting energy, moving forward and expanding into new areas.
     In the Thoth deck, the image on the card is three blossoming lotus stalks, nicely balanced, against a rich orange background. In this deck the Three of Wands is labeled "Virtue", which confuses card readers who are not into etymology. The word "Virtue" is used here not in the sense of medieval morality, but in the old sense of vertu, meaning "excellence" and deriving from the Latin vir ("man") and evoking what is virile. When the Three of Wands is in play, there can be some risk of cockiness or arrogance; sage counsel may need to be sought. In my dream, this is available.
    My personal name for the Three of Wands is Spring Fire, and a dream on this theme feels just right for the vernal equinox.

My next adventure in Tarot for Dreamers will be held next weekend at the perfect address: the Dragon's Egg, Mystic CT. 

The Tarot of writers

Triumph of Death fresco (1480) at Oratorio dei Disciplini, Clusone

In an afterword to his novel The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Italo Calvino described Tarot as "a machine for constructing stories." In his two-part story, travelers who are trapped or stranded communicate through cards drawn from two early decks, the Visconti Tarot and the Tarot of Marseilles.
    In the time of the Renaissance, a Benedictine monk named Teofilo Folengo wrote poems in which the fortunes and characters of individuals are revealed by the Tarot cards that are dealt to them. His Tarot poems appear in his 1527 work Caos del Triperiuno, written under the pseudonym Merlini Cocai. In one of the sonnets, he finds room to mention all 22 of the major arcana in a bragging contest between Love (the name for the Lovers card at that time) and Death personified as female, as in the macabre and magnificent 1480 fresco by Giacomo Borlone de Buschis at Clusone, where all the powers of this world bow down before La Morte.


“What a Fool I am,” said Love, “my Fire, 
that can appear as an Angel or as a Devil 
can be Tempered by some others who live under my Star. 
You are the Empress of bodies. But you cannot kill hearts, 
you only Suspend them. You have a name of high Fame, 
but you are nothing but a Trickster.” *


The monkish author was a living testimony to the power of Love. He abandoned his monastery and roamed Italy with a lovely young woman of noble birth named Girolama, though he returned to the cloister, in Sicily, to seek a peaceful Death.
    Fr Teofilo's use of the cards to compose poetry started a literary craze among the sixteenth-century Italian nobility for a game that came to be known as Tarocchi appropriati, or "Appropriated Tarot". As described by Paul Huson in Mystical Origins of the Tarot (Destiny Books, Rochester VT, 2004), "Here trump cards were selected by one player and presented to another, who would interpret them thematically by a process of idea association to create verses about himself or herself, about another person, or most popularly, to praise certain well-known ladies around the court."
    Many writers have been inspired by Tarot. The Tower and the Hanged Man fascinated W.B.Yeats, whose magical diaries are filled with personal Tarot readings and was thoroughly familiar, as an adept, with the use of the major arcana in ceremonial magic and pathworking by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
    Leading Tarot authority and novelist Rachel Pollack published an anthology of Tarot Tales (co-edited with Caitlin Matthews) and more recently produced a strange and wonderful solo collection of Tarot stories, The Tarot of Perfection (Magic Realist Press, Prague, 2008). In her Introduction, she explains an exercise in "Tarot for Writers" that she developed for her students in a course at Goddard College in Vermont.
     In this spread, you draw seven cards in sequence with the idea that they will answer the following questions about the characters, themes, and plot development of a story:

Who is my character?

What situation does he or she face?

What is the outer motivation?

What is hidden?

What opposes her or him?

What helps?

What is at risk?

I tested this just now, with a deck I like a lot by rarely use for personal readings, the Tarot of the Spirit. My "character" proved to be a theme, presented here as the Three of Water (3 of Cups in other decks), Love abounding and overflowing, going beyond duality. The "situation" is the ultimate Three, the Empress, Trump III. Perhaps the "situation" my character faces is to encounter and claim (or be claimed by ) the Threefold Goddess. The "outer motivation", by a curious paradox, appears as the High Priestess, one of the most "inner" of the cards. Perhaps the "outer motivation" is the desire for initiation and admission to the Mysteries. 

    What is "hidden" is the Father of Wind (King of Swords elsewhere) shown here as a double being riding a rearing bull through a flaming sky. What "opposes" is the arcanum numbered I, here called the Magus; he is shown leaning over a cubical table where the four magical weapons are laid out, a whirling golden lemniscate (figure of 8) above his head. What "helps" is the Mother of Wind, shown here as a glamorous woman in a swirling marigold dress, weaving the reins of power the Father may or may not be able to hold into a larger figure of 8, a Möbius power strip.What is "at risk" is the Brother of Wind, the reckless, sometimes tormented Son of the family. 

    A family drama then, with greater forces in play. So many clues to follow. Who or what is the Magus that opposes? What is in the visual echo between the figures of 8 above his head and in the control of Wind Mother?
    Will I write from these cards? Maybe, but writing this reminds me that I have an unfinished Tarot novella that was first inspired by a dream, one of those dreams that haunts you - with its mystery and its invitation - down all the long corridors of the years.

*There is a complete translation of the sonnet, with all the attributions to the Greater Trumps, at Mary Greer's Tarot blog, an excellent resource on all things Tarot.