February 2nd LETTER TO JAMES JOYCE ON HIS 13OTH BIRTHDAY

Today is February 2, a significant day for me. Not only do several good friends celebrate their birthdays this day, but it is the birthday of James Joyce, one of my literary heroes (in retrospect, it might not have been the best choice to have Joyce as my model for the first few issues I wrote of the comic book Doom Patrol).

Every year on this day–which is also Brigid’s Day, the goddess/saint of poetry, prophecy, and the eternal fire– I read out loud passages from Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s mighty dream book, whose first sentence (beginning “river run, past Eve and Adam’s”) is in fact the ending of a sentence that begins as the book’s final words (“A way a last a lone a loved a long the”).

Last year Fern Mercier and Lyn Olds in New Zealand invited a group of tarot people to write letters to people from earlier times, with tarot as a theme. These were then published as a special exhibit in the Southern Symposium Tarot Conference. The exhibit was then shown in France and Italy, and will be displayed next year in Toronto and London.

Some wrote to A. E. Waite, some to famous magicians, but I immediately thought of a letter to Mr. Joyce (as he was known in the Paris literary world). Below is the text of the letter, reproduced with the kind permission of the conference organizers, and not to be copied or reproduced in any form. I hope very much that people will respect that.

river run, past Eve and Adam’s

Dear Mr. Joyce,

Recently the world celebrated your 129th birthday, also called Imbolc, Candlemas, and St. Brigid’s Day. Those ancient celebrations reveal your true nature, that thousands of years before your physical form people began to sense that this cross-quarter day would be the time of reading lines of poetry and prophecy.

As I always do on your birthday I read from Finnegans Wake, the book of all things. And then I wondered how the other book of all things, the tarot, appears in the Wake. There was no question that it would be there. Everything is, especially prophecy and soothsaying.

And will again, if so be sooth by his elders to his youngers shall be said.

What tarot readers can understand from this vital line is how to understand predictions. They are not detached statements that have nothing to do with the events they describe. Nor do they actually cause events…Instead, they allow events to happen, events that need to happen but cannot until the prophecy is made.

So then where is the tarot itself in the Wake? I consulted the modern blind seer, Google, and found that in the book there is a fortune-telling reading with playing cards. In the middle of cards like the King of Hearts and the Ace of Clubs there appears the Wheel of Fortune: the card of eternal recurrence, of Finnegan rising and falling, of the Woman, the River, who falls as rain from the sky, flows among us as the River, then returns to the sea.

Then the seer brought me to a man who revealed/reminded me that your own self is in the book. Shem the Penman, your stand-in, bears the name of Shem, son of Noah, the primordial sailor and the inventor of alchemy, magic, and divination.

Two oracles, the book and the tarot. I asked the cards, the Celtic Wisdom Tarot, what I should ask you.

Card 1 was card 1, The Decider, also called The Magician. How did you make your choices? How did the song, “Finnegan’s Wake” lead you to the great giant’s awakening?

Card 2 was card 2, the Renewer, the High Priestess. This is the card of the feminine, the mother/daughter/river/wife. Does the river carry prophecies only to have them dissolve into the sea?

Card 3 was card 12—1 plus 2 producing 3—the Dedicator, the Hanged Man, which shows a blindfolded initiate. With your thick glasses and your eye-patched eye, this is you, isn’t it? The initiated blind seer—Odin, Teiresias, hanging on the World Tree.

A way a last a lone a loved a long the

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TAROT THE GREAT EMANCIPATOR

TOTH–Tarot On The Hudson, my occasional class here in Rhinebeck, will be meeting on Feb. 12. The date, the birthday of Abraham Lincoln (not to mention Charles Darwin on exactly the same day), inspired some thoughts on Tarot and Emancipation.

I know that most people reading this live too far to come for an afternoon, but I thought people might enjoy seeing the description.

February 12 is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Lincoln was our 16th president, and of course card 16 is the Tower, the image of destruction but also liberation. Lincoln led the country through a true Tower time, and so we might look at readings for when things are blowing up around people, either in their personal lives, or in the greater world.

We also think of Lincoln as The Great Emancipator, who liberated the slaves in his Emancipation Proclamation. Many people turn to the Tarot when they feel trapped, enslaved, stuck in a bad situation. We often see the Devil as the image of such slavery, and it is interesting that the Devil, card 15, precedes the Tower. Might card 17, the Star, be an image of emancipation? Maybe the entire line, from 15 to 21, shows us the path, and process, of liberation. (Something else to think about—Charles Darwin was born on the same exact day as Lincoln.)

In terms of readings, how can we use the cards to help liberate/emancipate ourselves or others from disastrous or painful situations? What kind of spreads can we develop for emancipation? What do we do with the images and ideas and information that come up in the cards?

Hopefully no one will be facing any situation right now where they feel enslaved, but try to think of some time in your past, or in the life of people you know, where such a reading/method could be valuable.

And how might the cards have helped Abraham Lincoln if he’d been able to consult a good Tarot reader? Just as Tarot author James Rickleff used to do readings for characters in fairy tales and fiction, so we will do a reading for Honest Abe (with some lucky person getting to act out the part of the Tower president).

PLUS—Our usual round robin of questions, deck sharing, experiences and issues from the world of Tarot. Please think of what you’d like to ask, share, exhibit.

And a BONUS—Many of you will remember our readings to discover the secret histories of the people in the cards. In the past we looked at how the Magician became a powerful magus, and what are the High Priestess’s secret teachings. Now it’s the Empress’s turn. We’ll look at her early days, her marriage to the Emperor, what it’s like to rule an empire.

Supernal Ovations Uncover Lessons – A Spread for the Holocaust

I’ve decided to feature occasional chapters from SOUL FOREST .  When I thought about it, it was instantly clear which one would have to come first.

Recently, a woman named Laurie Hoogland wrote to me with a daring request. She had been reading my book, The Forest of Souls, with its various Wisdom Readings, in which I used the Tarot to explore kinds of questions we usually do not ask the cards, such as how God created the universe, or the meaning of resurrection. Laurie thought about her own great concern of the past few years, the Nazi Holocaust, and wondered if I might do a spread that somehow would help us find a way to grasp this incomprehensible horror.

The sad truth is that genocide is not really all that uncommon. In just the last few years we have seen a monstrous example in Rwanda, and before that, in Yugoslavia. And yet, the Nazis seem to have a special place. Perhaps it’s the fact that it happened in a country thought of at the time as the most civilized, most cultivated, most advanced in the world. If they could fall to such savagery what hope was there for anyone? Or maybe it was simply the cool efficiency, the calm logistical planning that went into it.

The Nazis did not target only the Jews. In fact, the Romany (Gypsies) lost a higher percentage of their population than the Jews. And great numbers of Catholics, homosexuals, and leftists also died. But it’s also true that Hitler and his people set up the entire apparatus specifically to kill the entire Jewish people. So the Holocaust also culminates-though sadly, not ends-thousands of years of murderous anti-Semitism. I decided, however, that I would not focus primarily on the question of Jewish deaths, or even, really, German actions, but rather on the question of how we comprehend what seems truly beyond human comprehension.

I decided to set down a group of five questions that I myself would choose, and then choose cards at random to suggest four more questions. This is a practice that I have developed both for Wisdom Readings and personal spreads. I do it when I am not sure just what to ask. The process is very simple: shuffle the deck in your usual way, and then pick cards in the same manner you would do for a reading. I decided to take three cards from the top of the pile plus the bottom card.

When you have chosen the cards, look at the pictures and see what questions they suggest to you. Then return the cards to the deck, shuffle and turn over cards in the normal way for your answers.

Here are the five questions I chose from my own thoughts:

5 Questions chosen ahead of time

1. What are the roots?
2. How did it grow from those roots?
3. What truth is revealed?
4. What truth is hidden?
5. How does it change us?

The cards that turned up after the shuffle were Speaker of Birds, 8 of Birds, and 2 of Birds, from the Shining Tribe Tarot, designed and drawn by myself. The Birds suit (Swords in traditional decks) deal with issues of ideas, conflict, suffering, truth, prophecy, art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

All three of these cards deal in some way with speaking, the first by its very name, the second because it shows a woman struggling to regain her identity and express herself clearly, the third because it implies silence and denial.

The Speakers in the Shining Tribe deck are like the Kings, but they have less to do with authority than with communication, and the responsibility to share wisdom and power with others.

The 8 of Birds was inspired by a poem by the Muskogee (Native American) poet Joy Harjo. Harjo writes how Native peoples (and nature itself) have lost their language, and thus the power to express clearly what has happened to them. It shows a woman before a volcano, as if for the pain and fury that have built up within her. The volcano contains a house, and above it jagged lines that symbolize anger. On the door of the house, an eye symbolizes memory.

The 2 of Birds shows two birds who steadfastly refuse to look at each other, as if to deny the other’s existence. A snake, however, binds them together. There were many questions we might ask inspired by this card but I chose the issue of denial

4 Questions inspired by cards chosen from the deck:

1. Speaker of Birds:
How can we speak about it?

2. 8 of Birds
How can we bring the pain out from within us?

3. 2 of Birds
What do we deny?

The card on the bottom of the deck was the Gift of Rivers(roughly equivalent to the Queen of Cups). This card represents the Gift of love, of healing. The picture shows a bowl for the Holy Grail, resting at a place where two rivers meet to become one. For many people the Holocaust, so enormous, becomes an almost personal nightmare from which they cannot awaken. It requires some energy from outside, a kind of grace, to liberate us.

4. Gift of Rivers
What gift will redeem us?

The Reading:

Just as the question cards were mostly Birds, the element of Air, and the qualities of thought and speech, so here the first four cards all are Trees. Trees represent Fire, the basic energy of life. But they also imply the Holocaust, for the word originally means a great fire (it actually derives from a burnt offering to the Gods, and means literally something that is completely burned). And of course, the suit of Trees responds to the imagery of roots, and what grows.

1. What are the roots? Knower of Trees

2. How did it grow from those roots? 9 of Trees

3. What truth is revealed? 10 of Trees

4. What truth is hidden? 6 of Trees

5. How does it change us? Fool

What are the roots?

The Knower of Trees (Knight of Wands, but with a larger context of meaning) seemed at first an odd image to get for the roots of such a great disaster. The card symbolizes joy, and a willingness to embrace all of life, with its many paradoxes. We might say that the roots come from a tendency to embrace a kind of destructive passion, without any conscious distance that would enable people to realize what they are doing. Many people see the Nazis as having been in love with their own destruction as well as the destruction of the people they victimized.

In fact, this card only really becomes clear when we look at the next one.

How did it grow from those roots?

In the 9 of Trees we see an image of a woman, a Goddess actually, who has split off her own darkness and projected it onto an enemy. Thus, we might say that the roots of all human experience lie in the willingness to embrace life, but when we split off the frightening parts of ourselves then something terrible grows from those roots.

The picture in the 9 derives from a myth of the Goddess Inanna, in Ancient Sumeria. Inanna left the Gods and came to live among humans. We might say, in fact, that the previous card, the Knower, showed us Inanna when she was Queen of Heaven, but also of Earth, with her face filled with stars, and her body in all of nature. The poem describes Inanna as “the morning star and the evening star.”

To believe that she has somehow left heaven to dwell in the world already creates dangerous illusions. In the myth, Inanna had a lovely tree that she visited every day. One morning she came to the tree and discovered it invaded, by a snake (very similar here to the snake on the 2 of Birds), a bird, and a dark figure named Lilith. People will know the name Lilith as a Jewish sexual demon. Medieval Jews projected a lot of their anxieties and guilts onto Lilith. But the image goes back much further; in fact, the poem about the tree is probably the oldest known written work in human history, composed by a princess in the Sumerian court. Inanna becomes disconsolate and helpless, and this is what we see in the card.

Because this is so old a story we can say that the Holocaust comes from very ancient roots in Indo-European culture. In fact, the Nazi myth of the Aryan race comes from the idea of original pure tribes who gave rise to all of European culture. But we also can say that the Holocaust grows when people take their own dark energy and project it onto some imagined demonic group. And further, when others, both the victimized and those who watch on, believe themselves helpless to fight back.

What truth is revealed?

The following card continues the Trees suit, and in fact, shows us the very next card, the 10. Thus, the “truth” that is “revealed” does indeed come out of the Holocaust experience itself. Here we see a sense of renewal. The ten actual trees of the title appear lined up behind the large center tree. In this reading we might describe the ten as all the terrible events. But the center tree is vibrant, with new branches transforming into spirits. This seems to me a very positive statement. It says that through the Holocaust new life actually became possible. We realized that the thousands of years of racial hatred and scapegoating had brought us to such a terrible place we needed finally to put them behind us. It may not have worked fully, but a new ideal has come into the world.

What truth is hidden?

The 6 of Trees depicts the very idea of hidden things. A cartoonish woman makes her way through a strange forest of trees painted with owl eyes and symbols. Below the ground lie more mysterious images. She moves confidently, without stopping to investigate, but also without personal doubt or fear. The Holocaust, in its great horror, contains more fearful truths than we might wish to acknowledge. But perhaps we need to keep moving and not get trapped in its nightmares.

How does it change us?

The Fool carries the idea of “keep moving” to an archetypal level. Card 0 speaks to us of freedom, especially freedom from the past. We become childlike, unafraid to leap into the unknown. In some ways, the only way to overcome, or escape, the Holocaust, is to liberate ourselves from the long history that created it, to become “nothing,” no-thing. In the 8 of Birds we sit and struggle with it. In the 6 of Trees, we don’t stop and look for fear of what we will see. But in the Fool we allow ourselves to become free, to embrace life as if fresh and new.

Questions “chosen” by cards:

6. How do we speak about it? Speaker of Rivers

7. How can we bring it out from within us? Place of Rivers

8. What is denied? 8 of Rivers

9. What gift will redeem us? Lovers

How do we speak about it?

The question comes from the Speaker of Birds, and now the answer is the Speaker of Rivers. In fact, just as the first group were all Birds, and the second nearly all Trees, so now we get mostly Rivers. In this card we tell our stories, and the stories of others. We speak of emotions, and feelings, not just facts. The large fish’s tail bears a quotation from the Hasidic master, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, who gave up didactic teaching and told stories. He said “And on the way I told a tale of such power that all who heard it had thoughts of returning to God.” Thus, we tell the stories of the Holocaust, not as horror but as ways to remind us to turn to the divine. Nachman also said once “The whole world is a very narrow bridge. The important thing is not to be afraid.”

How can we bring the pain out from within us.

The Place of Rivers (Page of Cups) shows someone willing just to sit and look into the darkness. Unlike the 8 of Birds (the inspiration for this question, and also an image of sitting), the androgynous figure does not try to figure it out, or discover the correct way to think about it. Instead s/he simply looks into what is fearful from a place of peace and acceptance.
What is denied?

The 8 of Rivers shows a group of people in joyous procession. The Holocaust can make people forget that joy exists within us, or that we can join together in celebration. Like the 8 of Cups in many decks, this is a card of leaving things behind. The people here, however, have not simply abandoned something, but have taken on sacred identities; the picture was inspired by photos of African dance rituals. And so we do not deny something terrible but something powerful, our ability to rejoin with others and with the spirits. Notice that the 2 of Birds, which inspired the question, showed two figures who would not look at each other, and here the three dance together.

What gift will redeem us?

The Lovers seems the perfect card for the question and the end of the reading. Profound and moving, it shows us the Tarot’s fundamental optimism. Love will redeem us, love will rescue us from despair and lift us into the heights. This version of the card shows a passionate embrace between a human and an angel, or spirit. Love the people in your life, love the divine energy that animates all of us. Jesus said that the essential teaching of the Law was to love God and love your neighbor. Both come from the Torah (the five books of Moses): “You shall love the Infinite your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your might,” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The Torah also tells us-the most repeated commandment, appearing more than thirty times-“Love the stranger,” that is, the foreigner, the people we tend to see as the enemies, or the scapegoats, or the demons. All these kinds of love lie in this card, as well as the simplest love that redeems us, the passionate love of the people closest to us.

MY USELESS PSYCHIC POWER

For some time I’ve been noticing that I predict, or at least anticipate, things without knowing I’m doing so. I’ll think about something, for no particular reason, and then it will happen. The problem is, the thoughts do not feel any different from all the other things that dash through my mind in any given day, so I don’t realize it’s something I should pay attention to.

They don’t happen very often, but lately they seem to be a little more common. So, here are three examples, all within the last two weeks.

1. December 16th I was riding in my friend’s car and she turned on the classical station, which was playing Da da da dum. So I started thinking about Beethoven and wondering what his sun sign might be.. I suggested Saggitarius, since he had a fiery personality mixed with high ideals. Later I had on some other radio show and they said “Today is the birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven.” Of course, December 16 is indeed Saggitarius. Now, obviously they were playing the 5th Symphony because of his birthday, but I’ve heard Beethoven many times on the radio and never wondered before about his sign.

2. Here’s one from a few days later, We’ve had mouse problems here for a long time, but recently, as part of some renovation work we had mouse-proofing done. Well, there still were signs of mouseage (as a friend of mine says), so we put out live traps for any mice left in the house. Caught one and let it loose in a park a mile or so away, but there signs of another. One night, I thought, What would I do if I just saw one standing in the middle of the floor? This is an odd idea. First, mice come out mostly at night when there’s no one around, and second, they don’t just stand still. Well, the next day I had a friend over and went in the kitchen to get something, and there in the middle of the floor was a mouse, standing stock still, probably hoping I wouldn’t notice it. I pinned it down with the top of the mouse trap, my friend slid a piece of cardboard under it, and I carried it outside to the woods at the end of my driveway. No mice since then.

3. Now today I saw a post from the wonderful Barbara Moore, asking people, if part of what they paid for a tarot deck or book was to go to a health related charity, what would they like it to be. I thought about this for awhile, then suggested Medecins Sans Frontieres, Doctors Without Borders, since tarot crosses borders and boundaries. I sent my reply then looked at my inbox, and the first message was from Doctors Without Borders, asking for contributions.

So there you have it, three examples in exactly two weeks. If only I could harness this!

Here’s a more serious example: Living in the country I have to drive a lot, and every few years you’re likely to have some kind of fender bender. A couple of years I happened to think to myself how I hadn’t had any problem like that in a long time. Okay, so that should have been a warning. But as I said, the thought doesn’t feel any different, doesn’t carry some sort of charge, it’s just a random idea. Or so it seemed. The next day I took Wonder in the car to go for a walk on a quiet road (I live on a branch highway, where people go very fast). When we got home I put on my blinker and waited for the chance to turn into my driveway. Behind me, a man in a pickup truck was lost in thought (he later said his grandson was ill) and didn’t see a car stopped in the road with the blinker on. He plowed into us at about 35 miles an hour. Bless the engineers at Honda, the car frame absorbed most of the contact, and Wonder and I were unharmed, but the car was totaled. Now I have a wonderful Versa named Alice (I asked her and that’s what she said)–and another example of my useless psychic power.

KWANZAA READING

As I write this it’s the evening of a lovely Christmas spent with friends. And that means it’s also Kwanza Eve, the night before Kwanzaa. Kwanzaa is probably the most remarkable of the holidays held around the Winter Solstice/end of the year, because it was deliberately, consciously, created by a single person, Dr. Maulana Karenga. Dr. Karenga wanted to create something that would strengthen the African-American community, through a connection to traditional African values. He developed a 7 day holiday, from December 26 to January 1, with each day representing a special quality (see below). Candles are lit, each day a different color.

Being white, I know that Kwanzaa is not directed towards me or my background. But then, I’m Jewish, so celebrating Christmas is not exactly my background either! So the interest and respect I have for Kwanzaa is like that which I have for all spiritual traditions. (I have sometimes described myself as a goddess-loving radical Jewish atheist with a Taoist temperament, but recently, when I wondered what I might put down on a form that asked my religion the term that came right to mind was “heretic”).

A few years ago it struck me that Kwanzaa could form the basis of a powerful 7 day Tarot reading, drawing three cards each day (or however many you want) to answer a key question related to the theme of that day.

I hope it is clear that I mean no disrespect to any people who celebrate this marvelous week long holiday. I have been creating readings inspired by sacred holidays and festivals for many years now (my recent book, SOUL FOREST) contains a reading inspired by the coincidence of Ramadan and Rosh Hashanah occurring at the same time). For me the Tarot is more than anything a tool of spiritual investigation. The issues named and defined by Dr. Karenga are obviously of special importance and power to his own community, the people for whom he created the holiday. But at the same time they are universal values, worth consideration by all peoples.

Here then is the statement of themes of Kwanzaa, and the reading to go with it.

NGUZO SABA
(The Seven Principles)

KWANZAA TAROT READING
Rachel Pollack
Based on the work and inspiration of
Dr. Maulana Karenga
________________________________________

Umoja (Unity)
To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation and race.

Kujichagulia (Self-Determination)
To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves.

Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility)
To build and maintain our community together and make our brother’s and sister’s problems our problems and to solve them together.

Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics)
To build and maintain our own stores, shops and other businesses and to profit from them together.

Nia (Purpose)
To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.

Kuumba (Creativity)
To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.

Imani (Faith)
To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.
¬ Maulana Karenga

To be done over the 7 days of Kwanzaa (Dec. 26-Jan.1)
(Candles may be lit for each day, and reading done by the light of the day.)

1. Umoja
How can I promote unity?

2. Kujichagulia
How do I claim who I am?

3. Ujima
How do I help others with their struggles?

4. Ujamaa
How can I help bring genuine prosperity?

5. Nia
How can I encourage the best in myself and others?

6. Kuumba
How do I express my creativity?

7. Imani
How do I deepen my belief, in myself and others?

 

 

You can purchase SOUL FOREST from Tarot Media Company by clicking here.

THE KINDLY ONES, or FIENDS INTO FRIENDS, or HOW TO TRANSFORM PROBLEM CARDS

Recently the wonderful Thalassa, founder of BATS (Bay Area Tarot Symposium), the longest running tarot conference in the world, shared on Facebook that she had to cancel her class on “problem cards” due to laryngitis.

We–the members of her group, Daughters of Divination– started to play with this idea, suggesting that maybe these cards that we all tend to find scary–Death, the Devil, some of the Swords cards–were blocking her from helping people to overcome their fear of what they meant. I suggested placating them by calling them something nice, and billing her workshop as turning fiends into friends.

That got me thinking about the ancient practice, found in so many cultures, of calling frightening forces by pleasant euphemisms. The term “Fairies” is usually said to be derived from “fair folk,” a reference to dark elemental powers that are not evil but certainly not friends of humans.

Possibly the strongest example is “The Kindly Ones,” or Eumenides, a very pleasant term for terrifying beings whose true name, Erinyes, is usually translated as Furies. In Ancient Greece the Furies were seen as creatures of darkness and blood. They came out of the ground to terrorize anyone who broke primal laws, especially the killing of a mother. Calling them Kindly Ones was a way to placate these terrible Furies, in the hope that they would stay away.

But there is more to it than that. In Aeschylus’s great trilogy, the Oresteia, the Furies pursue Orestes, who has killed his mother after she murdered her husband, Orestes’s father. Orestes did this under orders of Apollo, but the Furies couldn’t care less. They hound Orestes into madness until finally he comes to the Goddess Athena, who saves him by holding the first trial by jury, in which Orestes is found not guilty.

Athena then turns to the Furies. Instead of sending them away, or fighting them, she gives them a new home, under Athens, as protectors of the city. They are still frightening–any rites done in their honor were done in silence, without songs, or poems of praise–but their power now goes to a positive purpose. The Erinyes have truly become Eumenides, Kindly Ones in fact and not just as a euphemism.

How can we use this myth in dealing with the cards that scare us in the tarot? First of all, we need to recognize that it doesn’t really address the energy of these cards to simply give them a “nice” interpretation. Take the Death card. It’s too easy to call it simply “Death-of-the-old-self” or jump right to “transformation.” The idea of something dying, of loss, of pain, needs to be addressed. Even if we say it’s probably not physical death, it still has a fearsomeness.

The Five of Cups in the Rider deck is another example. It shows someone cloaked in black looking down at three over-turned Cups, whose liquid has spilled out onto the dirt. Now it happens that two Cups stand upright behind him (some see the figure as a woman, and it’s interesting that the cloak of sadness hides any identification of gender), and many people just want him to turn around, see the unspilled Cups, and pick them up to go on with his life. This may be the goal, but right now the card shows sadness.

So how do we genuinely change these cards?  One thing to do is to identify just what cards they are and what about them scares us.  We can go through the deck and pick out those that cause us to tense up, or we know we’d rather not see in a reading, especially for ourselves.  They might not be the same for everyone.  A card that one person sees as great courage might strike another as overwhelming tension.  A card that many people see as their worst fear might seem reassuring to someone else.  For example, the famous Five of Pentacles in the Rider shows two wretched beggars, sick or inured, making their way barefoot through a snowfall, with a church behind them.  While most fear this card, some appreciate the bond of the two people as they make their way together through hard times.

Once you have identified your Furies you can begin to explore just what it is that scares you about them.  You can write down your understanding of them, perhaps make up stories about them, examine all the details that make up the picture, as well as confront your overall disturbance.  Make sure to really look at what bothers them and not rush to make them safe or comfortable.

Set each one aside and shuffle the rest of the deck to ask such questions as “Where is the energy in this card?”  “What lies underneath it?”  “What does it ask of me?”  Eventually you can ask “What will transform it?” but don’t try to go there right away.  Make sure you understand it first, and what hold it has on you.

And when we think of the story we can realize another vital aspect–the need for justice.  Athena does not chase away the Furies, or overpower them, or even cajole them.  She first must address the crime, and the battle for Orestes’s soul being waged by the dark Earth Furies on one side and Apollo, the Sun God, on the other.  Her invention of a jury trial takes it out of the arena of personal power and into the realm of justice.

So, for our own Erinye cards we need to ask, Where is justice in this card?  Or maybe, what justice can transform it?  What justice does the situation demand?  Now, of course there is a card titled “Justice,” and you might want to set this card on the table when you work with any of your own group of fearsome cards.  Or you might prefer to leave it in the deck, to see if it comes up.  Here is another possibility–if one of your Fury cards turns up in a reading, or if you’ve just picked one out to work with it, search through the deck for the card of Justice.  Then look at the cards on either side of it.  Let these tell you what justice is needed to transform Fury into Kindness.

FREE! STORY IDEAS! ABSOLUTELY FREE!!

Do you want to be a writer? Do you worry people will ask you “Where do you get your ideas?”

Now you can answer: “Rachel Pollack’s blog!”

I get lots of fun ideas for stories with very little chance I will get to actually write them. So, I’m offering them here for anyone might want to take and run with them. The first begins with a title, the rest are just the ideas–you’ll have to make up the titles for those.

1. A Priest, A Rabbi, And A Minister Walk Into A Crime Scene.
The title says it all, doesn’t it? This would be a mystery series, with each story featuring our dauntless trio of clerical amateur sleuths as they battle villains, unruly congregations, and meddlesome hierarchies. Future titles could include A Priest, A Rabbi, And A Minister Walk Into A Kidnapping, etc. This could be a fun project for three writers, each one taking the sections of their appropriate religion–then switching around in later books.

2. “Oh wow,oh wow, oh wow.” Those were Steve Jobs’s last words. Was he seeing all the possibilities to transform heaven with new tech? Imagine a story in which Jobs is stunning the angels, and even God Hirself, with cool devices–until he comes up against Walt Disney. A new war in Heaven!

3. People watching TV notice very strange transmissions breaking into the signal. It turns out that these are television signals from another world. Scientists, linguists, and cultural anthropologists begin a frantic study to make use of this great opportunity. Then they notice odd things about the transmissions–they’re all commercials. All we know of this world is distorted through the lens of TV advertising. And further, they discover that our transmissions are breaking through into their world as well. But only commercials.

4. A time travel series about people who repair breaches in time. Sample titles:
Making Good Time
Time Made Good

5. A man who takes a shamanic workshop and becomes a vessel for the weather. If he gets drunk and falls into a swimming pool a huge rainstorm develops. If he gets sick and has the chills a deep freeze takes over his town. Once he realizes this, the responsibility becomes unbearable. To break a drought he has to drink two gallons of water a day. To prevent a blizzard he has to spend an entire day in a sauna.

6. A safety box belonging to a mysterious old man is left unclaimed after his death. The bank is about to drill into it when a woman bursts in saying she’s his ex-wife and only just heard of his death. By no means must they open that box! But unfortunately she lacks the paperwork and even though they give her six hours she can’t stop them. Turns out the old man was a wizard who trapped a demon in that box, like the bottle in the old Arabian Nights story. Now it’s unleashed, and can the woman trick it back into a new box before the world is destroyed?

TAROT ON THE HUDSON–FROM THE PRACTICAL TO THE MYSTERIOUS AND BACK AGAIN

For those of you who live near Rhinebeck (including those in the city who don’t mind taking the train up the Hudson), I’ve just announced our latest class, to be held on November 12.   Since it was partly inspired by the blog I did on Yes/No questions, and the interesting responses, I thought I would share the description.  After the class I hope to write some posts about the techniques  we developed as well as our discussions.  And the games–I’m looking forward to Hi-Lo.

The workshop runs from 1-5 and costs a mere $40 (people have been telling me I’m not charging enough, but we want to keep it accessible).  For more information, including trains from New York City, contact Zoe Matoff, at zoemaat@hvc.rr.com.  Write Zoe as well if you want to be on the mailing list for future classes and other events.

Here’s the class description:

As we enter full swing into the Holiday Season—Halloween over, Thanksgiving ahead—we will look at Tarot high and low, including just that, a Hi-Lo game to see where the energy is in a situation, and how we might change it.

 

Here are some of the activities:

Yes/No readings.  Recently I did a short blog on this subject then posted it on Facebook where the subject generated some interesting techniques, both to coax a simple yes or no answer from the deck, and how to take it a step further and look at the issues.  We will try out some of these, so think of a question.

 

Creation, creativity and the Tarot.  This week I attended an event very loosely structured around the seven days of Creation, and I realized it’s possible to match these up to the early cards of the Major Arcana.  For example, the Fool embodies the state of chaos before God says “Let there be light” a moment symbolized in the Magician.  We can do the same thing, maybe even more closely, with the scientific myth of Creation, the Big Bang theory.  We will look at both, and then consider how such understanding can translate into readings, and using the Tarot for our own creativity.

 

Hi-Lo.  There are many hi-lo card games, and as we’ve done with Tarot poker, we will adapt one or two to looking at how we can use the cards not just to look at events but take risks to help shape our destiny.  Such games are fun, but they also can be profound, and the more deeply we choose to enter them the more powerful they can become.

 

Saturn Return—many of us know people (possibly including ourselves) who are experiencing this most difficult of astrological transits, when Saturn returns to the point where it was on our birthday.  Saturn moves very slowly so this only happens every 29 years or so, and as a result, a Saturn return can bring in major shifts in a person’s life.  As Tarot readers, how can we use the cards to help people understand and work with such life events?

 

As usual, we will start with questions, stories, sharing of new decks and other Tarot tidbits.  I plan to bring a new alchemical deck by Christine Payne-Towler and a Minchiate recently issued by Lo Scarbeo.  See you all there!

THE HISTORY OF LIGHT–A POEM

Here’s something a bit unusual, a poem I wrote some time ago. I just realized, I could have given it the title of that famous poem many of us studied in college “Elegy Written In A Country Graveyard,” since that’s exactly where the idea came to me, sitting in the car with Wonder, waiting for a friend to come so we could walk together.

THE HISTORY OF LIGHT

Rachel Pollack

The first thing you see is the house,
square, with a low pitch roof,
white, with tan shutters and a black door.

Matter is light slowed down

And then, just in front,
the trees that frame the doorway,
skinny, November bare, young,
just old enough for the branches
to trace a third story
above the two of the house.
Before that, just a step closer,
the patches of lawn,
rusty green before the ice starts,
a whisper of color to soften the dark earth.

Let there be light

On your right the grass ends sharply,
the stone fence of the cemetery
like the hand of a traffic cop.
On the left the lawn gives way
to gravel, the spillover from the church parking lot.
You see all these things first,
before the scattered gravestones
that stand between your car and the rectory.
The stones are the old-fashioned kind,
thin gray slabs that tilt backward,
as if offended by their lofty children
on the other side of the fence.

If we dug them up,
would we find white bone,
the brown and pink of muscles and organs
long decayed, indigestible whiteness
all that’s left?
White is all color blurred together,
reflected back, as if our bones
reject the generosity of light.

Matter is light slowed down

We see first what is furthest away,
what blocks our vision yearning to escape
the limits of bodies and stone,
and return to light.
Matter is light slowed down,
and all we ever want
is to speed ourselves up again.

Let there be light, God says,
as if God pleads for permission,
like a mother who brings her son
to a noisy playground
and silently asks the tumble of kids
to make room for a shy child.

The darkness never needs allowance.
In the beginning, God created
the heaven and the earth,
and darkness lay upon the face of the deep.
If darkness was the face,
what dead white bones
were hiding underneath?

Let there be light

Matter is light slowed down.
If you could speed up your body,
find a really good spaceship,
break free of gravity and keep on going,
if you could make a run at catching light—
time would slow down,
and you would get shorter and shorter,
and yet your mass, your presence,
would grow and grow, until—
if you could make the jump,
if you returned to light,
you would find yourself
everywhere and nowhere, all at once,
outside of time.

All light is a single flash,
the same photon everywhere and forever,
given permission to exist, that one time,
those four words.
God is speaking them,
right now, to you, to me,
to the damp bones buried
in the cold November dirt.

Matter is light slowed down.

If only we could move fast enough
To finally listen, to know
We are free.

A MYTH OF THE TAROT’S ORIGIN

Today I was going through the book for my Tarot deck, The Shining Tribe in preparation for two exciting developments–an iphone app, and a full scale printing of the “Art Deck” version we’ve been selling as a limited edition of 78 copies (over half sold so far).

As I looked at the intro I was reminded of the origin myth I created for the deck, and for the Tarot in general. I make no claim for the historical accuracy of this story. It’s exactly that, a story. I do hope that it will say something meaningful about Tarot and the way doing readings connects us to the spirit world and to each other.

Here is the story, quoted from the book for Shining Tribe Tarot.

The earliest humans knew the Spirits as seven bright figures of golden light and gleaming darkness. They appeared to those most ancient of ancestors all over the world and were known everywhere as the Shining Tribe.

They could be seen emerging from the walls of caves at night, or in the sky where they outshone the stars. They helped humans understand fire, and what plants to eat, and how to make tools, and how to skin the animals they killed.

Their greatest gift came when they touched certain people with the power to see and understand the world as a parade of images and stories. Inspired by the Shining Tribe, people began to paint on rock and cave walls–magnificent bulls and horses, vibrant people with heads of pure light, bird-headed women, even abstract symbols that would carry wisdom to new generations.

Those whom the Spirits touched themselves carried the radiance of words and knowledge. They became the seers and journeyers and they shone with truth. Though they did not leave their families they too became part of the Shining Tribe.

Many centuries passed. The original images, once alive, hardened into doctrines and rigid rules. The radiance had drained from them. The Spirits decided to give the images in a new way, one that would preserve their purity and at the same time draw people even more deeply into them.

They came to creative humans while they slept and breathed their radiance into the humans’ dreams. Inspired, those people took old images from many sources and placed them on cards.

You could do many things with the cards–play a game, teach lessons, memorize information, code ideas, tell stories, learn about the very structures of existence–even predict the future. Most of all, you actually could use them as doorways back to the Spirits themselves.

And they could never be corrupted, because the Spirits had inspired people in different places and different times, so that there was no single set of images with absolute doctrines, and no matter how many people set out theories about the cards and their meanings, the pictures themselves would always dance away, ready to accept the next person to approach with openness and love of the images.

Those who use the cards to enter the sacred world receive the radiance of the Spirits. They themselves become the Shining Tribe of diviners.

This deck is my small gift to that tribe, through all their generations and in all cultures.