CONTINUED TOUR OF THE HOUSE OF 2022

Having walked through the downstairs chambers of the dollhouse symbolizing the magical, metaphorical House of 2022, we now head upstairs.

But before going farther, I want to emphasize that because the Tarot works holographically, in a New Year’s reading to look into my house or your house, issues that affect you or me will be reflected in our larger society—and vice versa.  That’s why I say the divination done here is a way of looking at what is in store for myself, but also in relation to what’s we might expect for the world at large in 2022.  (By the way, if your birthday is January 1^st, any New Year’s forecast will be especially relevant to your year ahead.)

For the upstairs hallway, which pertains to how well one moves through the different compartments of one’s life, (and therefore how well the different areas of one’s life are integrated), I pulled the reversed Herald of Autumn (i.e. Page of Pentacles).  Because this tarot personality is focused on the needs of everyday life, the reversed card may indicate some setbacks in getting around to attend to different needs.  At this point, it should be obvious that a number of the cards that have been drawn can predictably relate to the inconveniences of the ongoing COVID situation, as it surges, subsides, and surges again.

Stepping into the master bedroom, the card drawn is the Two of Autumn, (Two of Pentacles), reversed.  For people in intimate relationships, the card symbolism associated with the bedroom can apply to the quality of the relationship, while for solitary persons, it may have more to do with their ability to rest and regenerate.  In either case, this is not an auspicious card for the bedroom, because it depicts the challenges of balancing one’s own material needs with the needs of others.  The balance is even more difficult as portrayed in the Victorian Fairy Tarot, where an elderly fairy rides a unicycle as he attempts to clutch a bunch of hazel nuts.  Here, the reversed card additionally suggests the graphic image of falling off the unicycle.

The next room is the bathroom, which relates to health and body issues, as well as purification.  The card that came up for this room is the Ten of Summer, (Ten of Cups), which denotes the well-being we enjoy through family and community relationships.  This particular card portrays fairies enjoying themselves as they swim and play in a pool by a waterfall.  (Note the parallelism between the Ten of Summer and the Ten of Autumn, which both portray happy community scenes.)  As this card is very auspicious for health and happiness,  I wonder if this could foretell the end of the pandemic, or maybe we’re all just more health conscious as a result of it.  If aligned with a timeline, this card position relates to Lammas, (the cross-quarter day which falls in August), and this is significant for me personally, because that’s when I plan to retire, so that I can start rebuilding my health (as well as my writing career).

 The final room is the nursery.  If you have children, cards in this position can relate to their concerns.  (Due to the fact that many of us live with other people, we do have to expect that their issues are going to be encountered in certain rooms of the house.)  Otherwise, this can relate to issues concerning your Inner Child, as well as your capacity for creativity and generativity.  The card that came up for this room is the Empress reversed, which is quite striking, because this VFT deck portrays the Empress as a fairy queen surrounded by four children of different ages, who are pulling on her skirts.  I don’t offhand recall any other tarot decks that show the Empress with children, though she is often portrayed as pregnant to emphasize her own qualities of creativity and generativity.  However, because the card is reversed, it could warn of challenges in parents’ relationship with children, (possibly due to the social isolation of the pandemic).  Otherwise, it could pertain to challenges in creative work.  To turn this around to stimulate creative vision and inspiration for the year 2022, we might try reconnecting with the things that gave us joy when we were very young, as these have the power to generate new vitality in older age.

Although that completes the house tour, there was one more card.  While I was shuffling, the Temperance card almost fell out of the deck, and then when I had pulled the eight cards for the rooms, Temperance was the next card in line in the deck order.  The illustration for this card shows a fairy in green, who drips droplets from a green leaf into a green elixir in a golden goblet.  As Temperance is about living in balance and often pertains to health issues, I think this sums up much of the advice offered in this overall reading.

The Magic of Shining in the Art of Life

As one of the themes for my July 1st workshop was “the magic of shining,” we touched on the idea of shining deeds/actions/gestures, etc. which then led to discussion of related concepts, including “glamour bombing” and the Judaic practice of “the beautification of a mitzvah.”  These things are on my mind, because I’ve been thinking about how to tie them in with my most recent daily one-card tarot readings from the “Art of Life” tarot deck by Charlene Livingstone.  So, I got the Temperance card, which features a Pissarro painting of a “Woman Washing Her Feet in a Brook” along with the Heraclitus quote, “The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony.”  Prior to that, I got the Two of Pentacles, featuring “Blue Dancers” by Degas, and FDR’s quote that happiness “lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.”  So, I’m concerned with applying creative effort in bringing the unlike together in a shining manner.

A mitzvah (plural mitzvot) tends to be a ritual obligation related to fulfilling a commandment, and also acts as a blessing or brings blessings.  On a practical basis, this is often applied to a family’s ritual paraphernalia.  For example, in fulfilling the commandment to observe Shabbat, one might take extra care in setting out the Sabbath table with the most beautiful tableware and settings, Kiddush cup, candlesticks, etc.  When you can perform a ritual action or blessing beautifully, artfully, elegantly, you are making a shining gesture.  If your ritual calls for paraphernalia that can be beautified, this also brings in qualities of shining.  The extra attention you put into this brings a heightened level of mindfulness to the ritual act.  In addition to enhancing your attunement with Deity, you create shining moments.

Shining gestures need not be limited to religious devotions or magical actions: they can also be brought into ordinary routines, including personal transactions.  For example, when paying your babysitter or the kid who rakes your yard, rather than just handing him or her a wad of dollar bills, you could put the money into one of those little red envelopes with gold-embossed characters used for making cash gifts at Chinese New Year—even when it isn’t Chinese New Year.  (You can get the envelopes at Asian markets.)  

Putting extra style and flair into one’s actions is very much part of the African aesthetic.  At our workshop, I mentioned Robert Farris Thompson’s theories on how “the flash of spirit” is brought into Kongo decorative and performative arts in order to activate spiritual power and magic.  We also find this aesthetic at work in ordinary transactions.  So, if I recall correctly, (sorry—I have forgotten the source), I read the account of an anthropologist who loaned a local chieftain his typewriter, and as a “thank you” gesture, the chief had his head wife’s beautiful younger sister deliver the anthropologist three mangoes on a decorated plate.  The anthropologist noted the chief could have just handed him a bag of rice as an equivalent offering, but such a prosaic gesture would have gone against the culture’s way of doing things.  Instead, having a beautiful, high status woman present an arrangement of fruits that was decorative yet elegant in its simplicity elevated the act into a shining gesture, as well as a performance.

I will try to pursue the idea of bringing artfulness and beauty into magic, as well as the magic of everyday living, (and also try to explain a bit about glamour bombing), in upcoming blogposts.  Meanwhile, if any of my readers have ideas or personal examples for bringing the quality of shining into your actions, or just doing common things with a little extra flair, I would really enjoy hearing about them.

Mixing Fairy Cards and Tarot Cards, Part II

One of the things that distinguishes “The Heart of Faerie Oracle” from Brian Froud’s previous Faeries Oracle is the inclusion of nine Faerie Queens: The Queen of the Golden Bough, Bedlam, Night, Day, Passage, Owls, Hearth and Home, Shadows, and Laughter. In folklore, there is a certain amount of crossover between fairy queens and goddesses such as Diana, Holda, and Freya. Fairy queens also have Ancestor World connections, as we see with some of the Irish fairy queens depicted in Mason and Franklin’s “Fairy Circle” Oracle, where certain fairies (such as Aine) have been regarded as clan mothers. Consequently, when you get one of the fairy queens in a reading, you might consider the possibility that some protective maternal powers are coming through.

At our May 2nd workshop, two persons drew fairy queens as their “fairy friends” (cards to take home). Coincidentally, these are sisters, one having gotten the Queen of the Golden Bough, and the other, the Queen of Passage. In such a case, it would be interesting for them to compare notes as to whether they have sensed any spiritually protective and guiding energies associated with a strong maternal presence at pivotal times in their lives, (as both of these fairy queens have liminal qualities, i.e., they are concerned with life’s transitions.) Because I had only one of each type of card in my give-away deck from which people drew these fairy talismans, it is possible that a single maternal entity is trying to connect through the two different cards—though of course, all of us have a multitude of maternal (and paternal) energy streams from which we can draw inspiration when we consider our genetic heritage.

When we mixed the fairy cards into our respective tarot decks to see how these fairy energies/entities might express themselves and offer guidance in different areas of our lives, the one sister got The Moon and the Two of Pentacles in association with the Queen of the Golden Bough, and the other got the Five of Swords and the Three of Pentacles in association with the Queen of Passage. (The latter was using the “Princess” tarot, which I don’t have, and I failed to note what the former was using, so I can’t reconstruct whether there were any unique image combinations, and so will have to stick to general interpretations.) Wendy Froud emphasizes the Queen of the Golden Bough as a card of soul healing, and also for healing “World Sorrow,” which is that sense of grieving for everything that’s wrong with the world. Because the Moon has a lot to do with the Unconscious, including dreams, dream exploration and the like can be a good way for this person to access the sort of healing that the Queen of the Golden Bough has to offer, and, indeed, this fairy queen may well be sending her comforting communications through Unconscious channels. The Two of Pentacles would suggest finding a way to bring the Queen’s healing, nurturing energies into the demands of daily life, to create a greater sense of balance by infusing life with soul. In the other reading, the Five of Swords, in common with the other Fives cards, can signify a time of transition, when a previously secure situation has become destabilized; with Swords cards, the changes in question can activate the survival instinct, sometimes also challenging a person’s ideals. However, the Queen of Passage is good for offering guidance when things are in flux, because she enables us to see events as part of a progression, as well as the creative opportunities present in times of change. This relates to the pomegranate which she holds, a fertility symbol showing, “[t]here is growth in the future.” Here, the Three of Pentacles reinforces the idea of applying these energies to creative projects.

To be continued.