SHINING TAROT MAGIC FOR JULY 3RD

Hey all—I’m back from my California hiatus, and I’m preparing for the next MAGICAL CHAT, which is Sunday a week, July 3rd. Even though it’s a holiday weekend, people still like to drop by the Triple Goddess, whether for something fun to do on their staycation, or something novel for out-of-towners. (If you have 4th-of-July houseguests who are open-minded, consider bringing them down.)

I will bring my seashell oracle, and also have a number of deck-mixing techniques to demonstrate along the themes of “mysteries of the deep” (which I always like to do for the July workshop) and “the magic of shining,” which ties in with the heightened powers of the recent Summer Solstice, and is also a widespread theme in world magic.

So, the agenda is roughly that we’ll start out by mixing bibliomancy with tarot to see if we can provoke any “shining images” to shoot forth. Then, we will do the seashell oracle, which involves reaching into my basket of shells with your left hand to grasp a shell that represents your unconscious motivations, and with your right hand for one that represents conscious aims. All the shells have different divinatory meanings, and as always, can holographically convey many levels of meaning. Next, we’ll do a three deck combination reading involving the Mermaids deck, the Pirates Deck, and the Shapeshifter Deck. Your Mermaid card will represent something meaningful from your fantasy life; the Pirate card some area of life where you are forced to deal with some gritty reality, and the Shapeshifter a suggestion of what sort of hybrid being you can emulate to harmonize fantasy with reality. Because both the Pirates and Mermaids decks also feature multiple images of treasure chests, we will also do a little treasure hunt to find the buried treasure in your life.

We’ll continue the deck mixing experiment by mixing the Boticelli deck with the Mantegna deck to discover where you can activate the “magic of shining” in your life. Both the Botticelli and the Mantegna are lavishly embossed with gold and silver detailing that really makes them sparkle. They are from the same company and the same size, so it is easy to shuffle them together. While the Botticelli is a modern deck that uses Botticelli imagery to illustrate standard tarot meanings, the Mantegna goes back to the 1400s, but it is not a conventional tarot. Although a few of its cards overlap with conventional tarot, others bring in the muses, as well as the planets, the human conditions, the geniuses and virtues, and the arts and sciences as different allegorical figures.