Putting the audio link up here doesn't ruin the effect of opening with the Card does, it?
Death.
Endings, change, transformation, transition, letting go, release.
The Death card shows the Messenger of Death – a skeleton dressed in black armor, riding a white horse. The skeleton represents the part of the body which survives long after life has left it; the armor symbolizes invincibility and that death will come no matter what. Its dark color is that of mourning and the mysterious, while the horse is the color of purity and acts as a symbol of strength and power. Death carries a black flag decorated with a white, five-petal rose, reflecting beauty, purification, and immortality and the number five representing change. Together, these symbols reveal that death isn't just about life ending. Death is about endings and beginnings, birth and rebirth, change and transformation. There is a beauty in death, and it is an inherent part of being alive.
A royal figure appears to be dead on the ground, while a young woman, a child, and a bishop plead with the skeletal figure to spare them. But, as we all know, death spares no one.
In the background, a boat floats down the river, akin to the mythological boats escorting the dead to the afterlife. On the horizon, the sun sets between two towers, in a sense dying and being reborn every morning.
Two towers is interesting imagery to remember in a much later card. It's also a very famous book - and movie.
This card is hilarious to me every time I think about it. But for the most ridiculous reason. I was watching the pregame for the Los Angeles Rams game last weekend, and they were talking to Jalen Ramsey. They asked why he switched his number to 5, and he said something to the effect of, "Five, Biblically, means building on foundations and developing and moving forward." And I was like, Uh, Biblically, no it's not - Numerology is kind of a no-no (but also kind of a secret yes-yes) in "the bible"; but also I don't know what five is, but you're thinking of seven, my dude.
And - yeah, randomly, I was right. A day or two later and I'm drawing a card and the translation I find makes a point to tell me the numerological meaning - of five - and that it is very much not building on foundations and consistency. Lol. It's change!
No doubt you think I'm a crazy person at this point. I have to seem about as credulous as a credulous person can be, right?
It's totally a coincidence that in the second, Present, position of my reading, I get the card about Transitional periods. Can you hear my irony?
The Death card is all about Ego Death.
Change. I've been writing about how I pivot too much. I've written about how I routinely go through periods of deep self-evaluation and emerge permanently changed. Actually... maybe I haven't. I think a lot of that messaging made it into the WIP part 2 to Writing in a Major Key – which hasn't made its way in front of eyeballs since I finished it. My own included.
I've been feeling like if I do this thing and I do it properly, there will be those of you out there who also die. And no few of you will not be most pleased with me about this. But that's not for this piece - this is (almost) an amendment made many days after the original composition.
Rob says it as a joke in his introduction (another WIP I haven't recorded because reasons - actually, I might write about those reasons; I've had another productive Reading since drafting this) – that if you listen to this – and you believe – you will die. But I thought he was joking. I thought he was making a kind of tongue in cheek reference to movies like The Ring. I didn't think.... But his Powers That Be are his to talk about. I didn't think he meant it, though.
And I don't necessarily think that I do – not literally. But you will experience ego death if you read these words. In fact— If you take me even a little bit seriously, you will question something at some point that you wouldn't otherwise – and your reality, too, will begin to crack. And I will be— I've never wanted to be responsible for the death of anyone – not their ego, not their body, nothing. I do want to be someone you can trust to spackle things back to outwardly respectable with, however.
So rather than talk about how not to look at these cards, let's talk about what to be looking for and why. Because I still don't think I've done a great job explaining why keywords matter.
Words have an infinitude of meanings.
We keep crossing that ground like that's the only truth we can say about words. Words also have accepted meanings. Contextual meanings. Personal meanings.
Endings, change, transformation, transition, letting go, release.
When we read each of these words, we're being asked to contemplate it. Because of the infinitude of meanings, but also because we requested words to contemplate by initiating the Divinatory process.
The process – at least the way I do it – is a lot like Mindfulness meditation. I actually don't know if that's true. I do it like Zen meditation. I think that with Mindfulness the goal is to hold on to a thought until its gone, then hold on to the next until its gone, then the next et al until the meditation period is over. I could be very wrong about that. I learned to do the opposite – to discard thoughts as soon as if not before they appear so that there is a profound and resonant nothing. Alan Watts gives amazing talks about Buddhism that are so much better than I could ever give. But I am thinking about the resonant chambers in the mountains ancient Buddhists carved for themselves to meditate in. I wonder if it was to resonate with their chants or with the nothing of Zen?
I doubt it was the latter because that style of meditation came much later. Or did it? Nothing is ever new – Solomon reminds us of that repeatedly in Ecclesiastes. Maybe my favorite book of the bible. Probably, actually - it's the only book of canon scripture I've read many times through.
I treat Tarot like a Rorschach: analyzing the thoughts, emotions, and memories that first come to my mind as I see every word. I start with the keywords as I've listed them. Then I read each clause of each phrase describing the cards for keywords and phrases that have either been in my head or my mouth recently. I prefer interpretations that visually describe the cards to me with words because I can do this more easily.
Inevitably there's something I don't want to think or feel or remember, and that's what we're looking for. So we catch that negative response like a fish, gripping the wriggly-slippery little fucker with our bare hands while it tears them all to shit with its scales and its fins at first... but eventually we get good at not getting hurt in the process – or at least at feeling the hurt when we're a safe time later and we can fall to pieces during a song or something. And we really get in there and look at it. You know, like you do with a fish.
I don't know if you know this, but gutting and preparing a fish for eating is an intensely intimate process.
Alright – so I've been lying about or lied to about some aspect of my nature as The Magician, someone who can change the world – and that version of myself has died. What's next?
The Four of Swords.
The Major Arcana are so impressive (in this case The Magician and Death) that when two of them get together, it's almost a letdown to get a normal card. Tarot has four suits, by the way, just like a normal deck of playing cards. (And then the thirty-something? Major Arcana. So nothing like a normal deck of playing cards. But there's some shared DNA, here. I think the playing cards were developed from divining cards and the Tarot deck emerged from the complex- and corporatizations of that tradition. But I'm probably wrong. I have efforted to remain very ignorant of this except where it might pertain to Rob. And learning that Rider-Waite, basically as I understand it the first official divining deck, was long after the tenth century was enough for me.)
Swords is one of the four suits. But you remember this from the description of The Magician and I'm wasting another paragraph of your time. Unless this is your entry point to the series, in which case welcome - pull up a chair, maybe get a pipe or a cup, this is going to take a while.
I said earlier that I don't really understand Tarot. Not like I should. Each of the suits is representative of an element, and each of the elements is representative of a whole myriad of things— And I don't want to know any of that stuff. It's all added complexity that makes the reads... logical. And more than that, it makes magick and my magickal thinking process dogmatic - it gives me a pre-existing structure to either argue with or apologize for. It's background data, noise that can make any card mean any thing. I'm not looking for that. I'm trying to find the specific message – or at least I'm trying to make sure that I take away a specific message, even if it's just me reading what I need to find out of the noise.
I'm trying, in other worse, to blind this experiment as best I can, however I can.
Because that's ultimately what we're doing here – shamans, magicians, Readers, when we attempt divination for other people.
I haven't done it much because I haven't much gotten feedback, but when I read for others, I don't let them tell me their question. I do the drawing and the reading and I give them their answer. I always feel strongly like I've hit a nerve after doing readings, though – that's why I don't often do them.
This might be a Me skill. That's like a Me problem, but instead of the problem its the skill I developed to adapt to it.
Because I didn't have anyone besides my parents and, later, siblings, around to socialize with, I didn't really learn how to socialize. I wasn't allowed to have friends once I started school age, and I was weird anyway – so I wasn't going to make them. And the friends I did make never came over a second time and their parents didn't want them hanging out with me anyway. My parents were “weird”.
Yeah, tell me about it.
Anyway. I developed several strategies for learning how to engage with other humans. I've discussed this and them more than a few times, I feel like at this point. But one of the things I learned to do was to study the subtext of books and movies and television for the underlying emotional moral.
It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that children's entertainment has morals. I figured it out pretty quickly. You know, because I was straight-up told by four years old that there would be one. So after a while, I stopped waiting for an adult to prompt me to think about what the moral was – or, worse, to outright tell me – and I started trying to figure it out for myself. It is probably uniquely interesting to the situation that my mother loved detective fiction and impressed upon me the “fun” (and it is fun) of solving the mystery for yourself – before the detective can announce it.
I apply those skills – that what's the moral thinking – to reading Tarot, too.
This all matters because the Four of Swords seems on its face like it won't really play to the same story as the other two. Also, it's reversed. So, what does that mean?
The Keywords are Recovery, Awakening, Re-entering the World, Release from isolation, Restlessness, Burnout.
I read this and all of these words sound exactly right about me and what my future holds if I dive as deeply into this work as I can – and then I see Burnout and my eyes pop a little bit. Don't prophecy burnout to me! I just left a period of overworking and burnout. I'm looking for something sustainable!
So what else has the card got for me?
There is a quiet stillness that is present in the Four of Swords, a sense of calm peace that is contrasted so deeply with the pain in the Three of Swords. Here, in a church, there is a carving of a knight that lies upon a tomb with three swords hanging above him while the fourth one lies beneath him. These three swords are a reminder of the suffering that he has endured in the earlier card. The position of the fourth sword seems to be a signal that the fight has ended. A child and a woman are depicted by the stained glass placed behind the statue, giving the scene a sense of warmth and welcoming after the retreat. The knight has his hands positioned as if he's praying.
Well, damn.
All of this describes me as I was this morning the moment before I opened that Tarot deck. I'm floored.
Because the Reversal of the card doesn't mean respite – it means restlessness; it means that my mind and my body want to be working on something but I'm not letting them. Which is absolutely right. I've been very carefully trying to pace myself and manage my workload (that is both with my writing and my bass, but also wit the rest of my life). The site I'm reading even goes on to use the phrase self love, which is just too funny to me.
But, more than that, it speaks specifically to me. Because it's not a Major Arcana, I could tell myself that these things are just the kinds of things you see when you're looking for them. But the second thing I ever wrote was a fan fiction of the third Indiana Jones movie. The scenes involving the Crusader's sarcophagus impacted me in about as deep a way as possible without being assault when I was a child. And I can't look at this card, nor read this description, without thinking of that scene and that movie.
This card feels like a finger in my eye – and I reacted to it like that and did a second reading. Because she wouldn't give me two drawings this specific.
Don't tell a woman what she wouldn't do – not ever. Not even if you're not sure whether she's actually real. Especially not if you suspect she might be an entity as ageless as the idea of Entity.
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