There occasionally comes a time for many of us (hopefully not often) when our personal "house of cards" topples to the ground and hope temporarily vanishes, eclipsed by despair. West Coast blues master Charles Brown once memorialized the aftermath of this traumatic scenario in the dirge-like tune "Black Night." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-71jfEwX-xQ Tarot has a card that … Continue reading The “Tower Moment”
Venus and the Horned Moon
“ . . . while close above the Eastern bar the horned Moon, with one bright Star almost between the tips." (from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge). On Sunday night, July 16, 2018, we observed a rare celestial phenomenon, technically called an occultation of Venus by the Moon with Earthshine, but … Continue reading Venus and the Horned Moon
The Nasties
When I returned to professional reading at a local New Age shop a couple of years ago, the proprietress gave me a piece of good advice: the tarot contains a few trump cards that really throw sitters for a loop if they pop up unheralded as the "outcome" in a reading, especially if those clients … Continue reading The Nasties
Binning My Spreads
UPDATE #2: OK, let's try this again. All of the tags have been turned into formal categories and the search function seems to be finding what it should. The "Categories" drop-down is the way to access them. Let me know if you find glitches when using it. UPDATE: Unfortunately, the WordPress search engine isn't robust … Continue reading Binning My Spreads
A Maxwell Primer
I frequently speak of British-born French tarot writer Joseph Maxwell in admiring terms, mainly for his numerological exploration of the Minor Arcana (despite the fact that my forum friends in France assure me that Ivor Powell's translation of Maxwell's book, The Tarot, is an inadequate one and the book is a difficult read even in … Continue reading A Maxwell Primer
Natura Abhorret Vacuum: The Fool and the Aces
This post started out as a riff on the postulate "horror vacui" attributed to Aristotle and later restated by Francois Rabelais as "Nature abhors a vacuum," and was going to be a cautionary tale about filling blog space with miscellaneous "stuff" when nothing new presents itself to the blogger's scrutiny (in this case, me and … Continue reading Natura Abhorret Vacuum: The Fool and the Aces
The Fool and Me
It never occurred to me that this 1974 hard-rock song from Robin Trower's Bridge of Sighs album, co-written and sung by the late, great James Dewar, most likely had its roots in the tarot; the timing was certainly right for a veiled New Age allusion. With lyrics that seem to play off the Fool's heedless … Continue reading The Fool and Me
In the Beginning . . .
. . . there was the Word, and the Word was Good. Most of us began our tarot journey with books. The more "senior" among us probably found our way to Eden Gray's The Tarot Revealed first, followed by Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot. I surmise that it's a rare person who picks up the … Continue reading In the Beginning . . .
The Small Pond
When I started this blog in July of 2017, I was recovering from the shock of the imminent demise of the Aeclectic Tarot forum and hoping to find (or create) another active venue for discussion of the more esoteric side of tarot and divination in general. A few upstart forums rushed in to fill the … Continue reading The Small Pond
Human Conflict: The Tarotscopic View
Human conflict is one of my favorite areas to explore with the tarot because it is such a target-rich environment. I don't do much with multi-party conflicts because they are much rarer than the one-on-one face-off, but here is the latest example of my current approach. Tarot is an excellent microscope through which to scrutinize … Continue reading Human Conflict: The Tarotscopic View
