This one took me a little longer than I wanted because I decided to try an experiment with the audio recording. This time read with music!
I was approaching productivity last post when I was talking about reading reversals, complexity, and what's actually happening with Divination. I got close. Then I got way sidetracked with necessary information.
In order for you to understand the significance of Divination as the attempt to interpret the mind of God, you have to understand that we are dreamers experiencing that Mind as everything.
So you can pick out patterns anywhere. It's what the human brain does.
This is how a Skeptic will tell you Divination doesn't work: It's just confirmation bias and motivated reasoning and the quest for cognitive closure playing tricks on my mind! And it is. That's why a Reader either has to be completely ignorant of the way the brain works from a mechanistic standpoint and has to be completely immersed in the belief system – a True Believer in that sense— Or they have to know how the brain works and they have to either manipulate the brain – or they have to understand how the Divination practice manipulates the way our brain expects reality to behave in order to send us intelligible communications.
...Or something like that.
That's how it works for me.
I've listened to what feels like a lot but which is probably only a few Mediums talk about their craft. Not so much Psychic Mediums, although I know that is a thing that exists. I know that I'm not a Medium. I don't see things, for example. That's a Mediumistic trait, as I understand it. In fact, as I understand it, being a psychic in general – that is someone who is gifted with mental rather than spiritual extra-sensory perception (holy shit, I suddenly understand why things are called what they are when I try to call them other things) – is a very different and much more difficult and confusing experience than that of a Medium.
Which could explain some things about me.
I literally once heard a Medium say he was glad he wasn't a Psychic because the Psychic experience would drive him insane – and he lives with an immaterial dead cat that talks to him and helps him send dead people to The Light. So.
I don't see things, but I can feel things in a way that doesn't make sense except to say with sensory receptors in my mind I am not sure I shouldn't have.
So, anyway, that's how it works for me— I read the cards like a conversation with my Goddess, as one half of a conversation anyway – like text messages. For me, it reduces the infinitely infinite complexity of what I'm attempting to something at least manageable to conceptualize.
Some of what I'm about to reveal about myself in these Tarot cards probably necessitates that I actually explore what the previous paragraph suggests – even though I really want to try to get to the actual first reading before the fifth part. That was only supposed to be a joke.
I don't have a conventional relationship with “Spirit” - whatever that means. Spiritually, men and women are very different, and are meant to go down very different courses. For example, men are typically – you know – masculine, spiritually. They talk to, you know, God, the Creator, the All-Father. The women in their lives are meant to be their surrogates for the Goddess. And a healthy man with healthy relationships with women will indeed surround himself with Her surrogates.
I have never sensed a “Father”, spiritually. That's my own father's fault, but it's something else about me.
And the women I've known have been... confused, spiritually is the vastest sort of understatement. I've mentioned before that very nearly every person, especially every female, I have known my adult life has thought I should transition. I've been told by people that spiritually I “feel like a woman.” Like they sensed a female presence, then saw me.
Which is interesting, but it's all self-reporting.
There is something about me, though. Something I don't quite understand, yet. It has to do with The Son – that particular godly archetype. The problem is that modern scholars don't understand the character, and ancient thinkers either knew and assumed everyone else did, didn't know and weren't bothered by their ignorance enough to write about it, or deliberately occulted the god.
Which— Deliberately occulted he has definitely been. In his ancientest representations, he's depicted as curious and surprised, like a boy playing with frogs. Later, as Civilization was coming into its adolescence, The Son was depicted as keeping some sort of a secret. And now... now, The Son is all sorts of confused because of Christianity and the 2000 years of debates about Him since.
I mean, he's been mutilated and murdered, hung on a cross, raised from the dead.... And everything else between.
The thing that only the ancients seem aware of, though – that modern writers and thinkers either do not understand or are themselves deliberately being obtuse about – or are deliberately occulting – is that The Son is not the Father's son. That is, The Son is not in the Father's pantheon, although he will certainly inherit the Father's throne – his Scepter and his Orb – in imagery to come. The Son is in The Mother's pantheon – and The Mother has been persecuted for 7000 years.
Or has she?
It's not my place to tell that story. Not yet. It's coming, actually, in the developing episodes of The Lesvos Serpent, believe it or not.
I don't know what I am. I don't know if I'm some version of the Son or what – but I do know that I have been called to speak for and represent the Goddess in at least her triune forms as Maiden, Mother, and Crone.
Talk about a guy who thinks he's Goddess's gift to women, am I right, ladies?
I don't know what half the stuff I say means. I certainly don't mean to say – because I don't think – that I'm here to speak for anyone. Not literally. I don't think. But I do know who I'm kind of talking at - toward - to.
People interested in the Goddess. I guess.
So— Reversed The Magician, Death, Four of Swords.
The Magician is a card I'd never gotten before, in all my maybe 100 previous drawings. I've stolen this. But it all seems to be stolen in one way or another either from the original interpretations provided by Rider-Waite, or from Wikipedia. So....
The Magician card is numbered One – the number of new beginnings and opportunities – and associates with the planet of Mercury. He stands with one arm stretched upwards towards the Universe, and the other pointing down to the Earth. His positioning represents his connection between the spiritual realms and the material realms. The Magician uses this relationship to create and manifest his goals in the physical realm. He is the conduit that converts energy into matter. The Magician's robe is white, symbolizing purity, and his cloak is red, representing worldly experience and knowledge.
On the table in front of him are the four symbols of the Tarot suits – a cup, pentacle, sword, and wand – each symbolizing one of the four elements – water, earth, air, and fire. It is also a sign that he has all the tools (and elements) he needs to manifest his intentions into being. Above his head is the infinity symbol, and around his waist is a snake biting its own tail – both of which signal that he has access to unlimited potential. And in the foreground is an array of foliage and flowers, symbolizing the blossoming and fruition of his ideas and aspiration.
On the face of it, this is the kind of card that everyone wants. And this is where we have to start talking about worldview and how you read these things – the cards and their descriptions and interpretations.
I mentioned previously that I read these cards as Words. Here are the keywords associated with Reversed The Magician: Manipulation, cunning, trickery, wasted talent, illusion, deception.
These are words I've been obsessed with the last two weeks, but which I'm never really not thinking about. People are constantly telling me that my standard for them is too high – and that's many rungs lower than my standard for myself. They say that leaders should never ask anything of anyone they wouldn't ask of themselves – so I ask more of myself than anyone can ask of anyone.
The card is also in the Past position, as though the Goddess is suggesting to me that this is the person I have been before the reading. Or to tell me that these things are things I have spent a lot of time thinking about, but haven't needed to be thinking about.
Want and need and the conflict between is at the core of drama – of character development – of Life as it is lived. What do I want, what do I actually need, and how are they in conflict? How are they the same but pursued from an angle such that their reflective corridors are refracted and broken? And how can I course correct?
I have emerged from my most recent Creative Illness feeling more empowered to change my reality – more prepared to exercise my will – than ever before. That is who the Magician is.
But the card is reversed – it's reminding me that in some way, either obvious or subtle, I am not and have not been this person. If I have portrayed or thought of myself as this person, I have been lying. Manipulating someone – maybe even just me – into thinking I was this person.
Or I'm being manipulated into believing I'm not.
When I saw this card, I immediately thought of my Trickster visiting me before bed last night.
I had a very productive day for a person who spent it all noodling on his bass. For starters, I was able to get several hours of audio consumed that I otherwise would not have. A podcast, some of a book. But more than that, I made some observations of myself and my situation and I'd come to some difficult decisions about plans to change some things.
And just as I'm settling into the rhythm of sleep where the magic of the day's intention is allowed to incubate, and tha-whump, I'm suddenly being invaded by a not-threatening, but unhappy presence in my sleeping space. The same kind of presence my father used to present when I was a boy and I hadn't fallen asleep fast enough for his liking – the same kind of presence that could explode with violence at any moment for any reason— At least, at any moment and for any reason in the mind of a little boy.
Does it mean anything? Maybe not. But tune in next time where I'm going to try to explain how you can glean meaning out of these keywords with the next card: Death.
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