Faery Challenges

On Sunday we pondered ways the Tarot can tell us about ancestral issues that can affect us today, and we also drew cards from the Froud "Faeries Oracle" and Mason and Franklin's "Fairy Ring," to consider our ancestral relations with the Faery World. Because cultures the world over have interacted with the Faery Folk, it is unavoidable that a number of your ancestors will have had special relationships with them. In drawing the cards, some people pulled cards with glamorous faeries, and others got scary or trickster faeries. It is to be expected that some of the faeries your ancestors dealt with were trouble makers, and they may have represented challenges that your family deals with still today. Throughout the year, I demonstrate various other techniques using the faery cards, so inevitably a certain number of our visitors get the unglamourous ones. When I can find more time to write, I want to post some thoughts on interactions with the different faeries we have encountered through these card decks.

For now however, in considering how we should approach the scary faeries, I'd like to share some words from Rainer Maria Rilke. The following is from his essay, "The Dragon Princess," published in "Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties," edited by John J.L. Mood.

"We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us."