I remember the day I learned the word “concatenation”. It was a Friday, and I was in my eighth-grade* Gothic literature class. We were talking about the numinous experience of the narrator in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. That day changed my life. The definition that I learned on that Friday turns out to […]
Read more "Emergence, Beauty, and Tarot"It must be terribly confusing to be the Knight of Pentacles. Or, for that matter, the Queen of Wands. Or the King of Cups. One of the first tactics you learn when you’re starting to tackle the big, scary Court Cards is that they can be understood as a confluence of elemental energies. Each rank within […]
Read more "The Courts Out of Their Elements"If you don’t know about the way the Kabbalistic Tree of Life is used in conjunction with Tarot, check out my previous piss-poor attempt at an introductory Kabbalah post. The Kircher Tree of Life (pictured above) is the one used by just about everyone who’s interested in Kabbalah these days. Especially those influenced by the […]
Read more "Tarot and the Tree of Life, Part 2: My Way"“The future isn’t set in stone. The cards provide a projection for the way you’re heading right now, but your actions can change the outcome.” I don’t think I’ve ever run across an experienced Tarot reader (in the real world or online) who didn’t agree with the above statement or some variation thereof. But personally, […]
Read more "And If the Future Is Set in Stone?"One of the first Shakespeare plays I truly fell in love with was King Lear. There’s something incredible about that play, about the sheer scope of it. I first read it when I was maybe twelve or thirteen, and I felt that somehow, this one text contained within it the entirety of the human experience. […]
Read more "“I am not what I am”: Iago, the Moon, and the Disingenuous Soul"[If you haven’t read Part 1, you can do so here.] In my previous post, I talked about the idea of having a Tarot patron, a card that represents me and what I do as a reader. I think of this card as different from a significator, representing something aspirational (outside of and higher than the self) as […]
Read more "On Tarot Patrons, Part 2: Pulchritudo in Omnia"As long as I’ve been reading Tarot, I’ve had a patron card, a single key from the Major Arcana that represents myself as a reader and my relationship to Tarot. This card is different from my significator (although we’ve also had that discussion here on the blog). This card is something other than myself, something […]
Read more "On Tarot Patrons, Part 1: The Hierophant"