Upcoming themes: Faery World and the Magic of Flowering

Looking forward to my next workshop: because the month of May opens with Beltane, which is an important festival in fairy lore, I turn my thoughts to special things we can do with fairy-themed tarot decks and oracle cards.  My magical chat session for May will be on the 6^th, (the first Sunday in May), at the Triple Goddess, from 1pm to 3pm.

I particularly like to work with Brian Froud’s “Faeries' Oracle” cards, because the faery personalities portrayed more directly engage the viewer.  (Some of the Froud faeries are from traditional lore, while others are “revealed” faeries.)  I also use the “Fairy Ring” oracle by Paul Mason and Anna Franklin, which portrays fairy types from the British Isles.  Along with these, we might bring in some tarot decks that work fairies into tarot illustrations.

Another theme for May is “the magic of flowering,” because this is when so many wild flowers as well as other flowers are in bloom.  (This follows the “magic of opening,” which we discussed in relation to the beginning of April.)  Faeries are concerned with flowering because traditionally, the good energies raised by their dances, revels, and processions enhance Nature’s fertility.  Because fairies appreciate beauty, laughter, and celebration, anything you do to generate these qualities energizes the fairies, which in turn sends more good energy to the green-sphere and to what my friend Fred Adams called “the Imagination of the Earth,” Gaia Chthon.  There are all kinds of theories about who or what fairies are, but I believe a number of fairy encounters are contacts between human minds and various intelligences in Nature, including the Imagination of the Earth.

So, among other things, I’m planning the usual exercises for May, which include giving out “Faery Friends” (Froud cards) as talismans to keep, pairing the Faery Friends with Doreen Virtue “Fairy Messages” cards to give the faeries a voice, and inserting the faery cards into regular tarot decks and other decks, to see how Faery World energies might open/blossom out into other areas of our lives.  Even if you’ve seen these techniques demonstrated before, there is always something new to learn about cultivating relationship with Faerie.

Faeries and Flowering on May 1st

This Sunday is May 1st, popularly known as May Day or Beltane. Because it is the first Sunday of the month, I will be back at the Triple Goddess from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Because Beltane is a big day for the powers of Faerie, I will be demonstrating techniques using various faery oracle cards, and ways that we can relate to our faery friends. As with all of my “magical chats,” even if you came out for previous sessions, feel free to come back, because the cards are always leading us to new discoveries.

The other theme for the day is “the magic of flowering,” as May is a month when the woodland wildflowers, as well as many of our favorite garden flowers, are at their prime, plus the time around May 1st is the Floralia celebration honoring the goddess of flowers. Some people may think that a goddess of flowers would be kind of frivolous, and something of an afterthought in pagan religion, but this is not the case, as this was one of the Romans’ most ancient festivals, and they took this six-day festival quite seriously. According to E. O. James, “there is every indication that it began as a rustic feast connected perhaps with Aphrodite as the goddess of flowering plants (Antheia), held at the appropriate season at the end of April” [170].

Floral imagery is used extensively in the RWS versions of the tarot. In psychological symbolism, flowers can represent processes of growth within the psyche. For example, in discussing the fairy tale “Jorinda and Joringel,” Jungian analyst Sibylle Birkhauser-Oeri discusses how the hero dreams of a blood-red flower which provides a solution to his problem, explaining, “The flower thus represents a natural process of growth which takes place somewhere in the psyche without the conscious mind initially being aware of it” [“The Mother” 54]. In folk magic, (particularly in Mexican and South American shamanism), the idea of flowering relates to manifesting good luck. So, we shall also do tarot readings to discover areas of life where we can experience the magic of flowering.

By the way, I was going through Arthur Edward Waite’s book, “The Pictorial Key to the Tarot,” to see what he says about floral symbolism, when I glanced at his write-up on The Empress card, and saw something related to the magic of opening as discussed in the previous post, but also ties in with the current topic: “In another order of ideas, the card of the Empress signifies the door or gate by which an entrance is obtained into this life, as into the Garden of Venus … ” [83].

Now, I’m sorry to have to announce that there will be no Triple Goddess session for the month of June, because I am going to have to make a trip to California to attend to some family concerns. However, if the plan should change, I will announce that here.

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."