I have a fairly modest Tarot collection by some standards; the current count is about 35. Nonetheless, when I talk to non-Tarot people, that figure makes jaws drop and heads spin, and I’m inevitably faced with the question, “But why do you need so many?” The honest answer? I don’t. I don’t need to amass Tarot […]
Read more "What’s the Point of Deck Collecting?"Last weekend, I gave a local workshop on the astrological correspondences of the Tarot deck. We went through all the Golden Dawn correspondences, starting with the Sepher Yetzirah and examining the attributions of the Major Arcana, then looking at the Minors and the Court Cards. It was tremendous fun. At one point during this workshop, a […]
Read more "What is Tarot Good For?"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"