Mabon Blog Hop 2013 - Persephone, the High Priestess

Welcome to the Mabon Blog Hop 2013!  You may be moving on from Jordan Hoggard's blog, or backward from Christiana Gaudet's Tarot Trends blog.  If at any point you want to see the Master List of participating blogs/people, click here.

One of my favorite myths is that of Demeter and Persephone, and the birth of Autumn and Winter.  As we celebrate the coming of Fall, it's a beautiful myth to consider.  My earliest memories of hearing this myth were as a kid, perhaps 12 years old, as my mother would bring Greek myth to life while doing Tarot readings.  I would sit, mesmerized, as her words brought me into another world. She used - and still uses - the Mythic Tarot (Juliet Sharman-Burke, Liz Greene, and Tricia Newell), which winds Greek stories throughout the Major and Minor Arcana.

There are a lot of aspects of the Persephone myth that attract me.  One is how it highlights the relationship between mother and daughter.  My mother was always one of my favorite people.  I have always loved and respected her, and she was in many ways my first spiritual teacher.  Now I'm an adult with children of my own (two of them daughters) and I have the gift of experiencing this relationship from the other pole, for which I'm grateful.

Golden Tarot - Liz Dean
Cisco Books 2012

Part of this relationship involves the aspect of separation - the child grows up, becomes a young woman, perhaps gets married (or moves away).  The myth touches on the pain of letting go.  I remember going through this stage when I was engaged and married many years ago.  There is some degree of renegotiation of roles in the relationship that takes place.  It's an adjustment, but the relationship is not entirely supplanted.  Mom will always be mom, will always love her kids, and will always be involved in her children's lives, in some way.  Similarly, Demeter was in grief when her daughter Persephone ended up married to Hades, and was taken to live in the Underworld.  Because Persephone had eaten several pomegranate seeds she was bound to split her time between the Under and Upper Worlds.  In Demeter's sadness the plants began to die, the nights became longer, the cold set in, life became more difficult.  But when Persephone was able to rise again to spend time in the Upper World with her mother, Spring came, the days became warm, food became abundant, and all was well with the world.  Demeter's gift to humankind was the knowledge of how to grow and store wheat so that there would be sustenance during the cold days of Winter.  So to me it speaks of the grief inherent in love, and the life that still flows despite working through difficult times.

Persephone has a place in Tarot, as the High Priestess of the Major Arcana.  This also happens to be
one of my favorite cards in the deck, and one with which I identify in many ways.  She represents hidden things, secret knowledge, femininity, intuition, the balance of dark and light, the realm of the unconscious.

As Persephone descends into the Underworld, and Demeter's grief escorts us into the dark of Fall and Winter, I thought I would create a little spread that focuses on our inner sun - the light we carry within us.  Fall and Winter is our time for reflection and renewal, and at times we need to remember our strengths, and the gifts we have to offer.  This is the Inner-Sun Spread:

1: Me, now: King of Pentacles reversed - I'm working on balancing out my inner King. I feel I embody many of his traits (supporting those around me, being even-keeled, etc.), but especially in terms of economic equilibrium, it's something on-going.

2: The gifts I have to share: King of Wands - I have a deep inner energy to make things happen in my life; I'm comfortable in my own skin; when I set myself to a task I know I can accomplish it; I'm not afraid of transformation - shedding my skin, moving on to a new phase of life.

3: The gifts I'm still developing: 3 of Wands - I'm still in the process of building on what I've begun - working toward my soul purpose; that's me out on the hill looking out toward the horizon. I am determining where I want to go and how best to get there, taking stock of the situation.

4: My deepest desires: 7 of Cups reversed - More than anything else, I want to make my dreams and deepest goals come to life, be realized.  The King of Wands suggests I'll be able to get there, but I'll have to be sure to ground my dreams through the King of Pentacles.

5: Advice for manifesting my desires: 4 of Swords - I can best achieve my desires through quiet contemplation, reviewing where I've come from and where I want to go, careful planning, and taking time to gather my energies before leaping forward.

The summary card for my reading is Temperance: balance; moving forward; patience and surety; the path ahead is clear; quiet contemplation.

Over all it feels good, and reflects where I feel that I'm at, and where I'm going.  It's a nice confirmation that I have what it takes to achieve my goals, and the 4 of Swords is the perfect card for Mabon, as we move into the time of rest and quiet thought and review.

If you decide to try out this spread, please let me know how it goes! :)

With that I will end my post for the Mabon Blog Hop 2013, feeling very happy to have just participated in my first of hopefully many more to come!

You may now be moving down the list to Christiana Gaudet's Tarot Trend blog or backward to Jordan Hoggard's blog.  Don't forget that you can access the Master list here.  Happy Hopping, and Feliz Mabon!

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Mabon to Samhain: Tradition

Tomorrow we recognize Mabon and in about a month's time we'll arrive at Samhain, the third and final harvest celebration, the old New Year, where the veil between worlds is at its thinnest. As a kind of internal celebration I decided to ask my Wildwood deck: between Mabon and Samhain, which energies will be most important for me to meditate on?

I pulled the 9 of Stones, "Tradition."

I spent some time looking at the card, feeling its message to me (which is so"right on" for me at this time) and I wrote out a sort of stream of consciousness to capture my thoughts and emotions. Instead of forming that into neat prose, I decided to simply share what came to me, as is:

Cernunnos, Spirit of the Wild, connection to the animals

Holds in his hands transformation, energy, and power

Meditates

Peace and surety of being

Sits on a hill with the forest out below and around him
       connected to everything now and before

Mystery, spirit, intuition

Deep knowing, flowing

Grounded

Associated with the Hooded Man
introspection, learning, teaching, solitude

Remembering that you're a part of all that was 
and all that is 
and all that will be

- it's within you -

Standing stones are witnesses to the passing of time
change and transformation
so is the Moon

Connecting us to our past lives, she is also our witness

Alone, yet a part of it all.

*******************************

I'm still ruminating, still "sitting with" these energies which are very powerful and deeply important to me. Perfect food for this time of year.

Happy Fall, y'all.

Wildwood Tarot
Mark Ryan, John Matthews, Will Worthington
Sterling Ethos, 2011

Considering the 7 of Vessels

I dearly love the Wildwood Tarot, and have been enjoying the process of taking the "unusual" cards (where meanings tend to - or seem to - divert from the traditional) and making connections to the more "standard" concepts associated with them.  Today the card is the 7 of Vessels, which correlates to the 7 of Cups.  The latter is often considered to represent living in fantasy, the need to buckle down and make a decision, seeing what you want rather than what's truly there, idleness, being overwhelmed by options, even in some cases being distracted or delayed by momentary flights of fancy that may prove harmful in some way.  So let's see what the 7 of Vessels has to offer.....

7 Vessels. Mourning – The skull sits in the crook of an ancient tree, with seven vessels of various shapes and sizes sitting before it.  We're off to a great, bewildering start! :-D

In a way this card brings to mind a person who has wasted away due to living in a fantasy rather than in reality.  There’s a feeling of a life spent wishing and desiring, rather than doing and making.  The cups in this card are dry, like our opportunities dry up when we don’t take advantage of them.  Nothing lasts forever.

Wildwood Tarot
Mark Ryan, John Matthews, Will Worthington
Sterling Ethos, 2011

It also can symbolize the sense of mourning involved in making a dream come true, or realizing that a dream isn’t possible.  Sometimes it’s easier to live in our fantasies where we can have whatever we like, or can be anyone we choose.  When we have to ground ourselves and think realistically, it can be a painful process.

This reminds me of a close friend of mine who was thoroughly enjoying planning her wedding, and the early months she’d have in her marriage.  She had to leave the country and fly to live with her fiancée in a brand-new place, which was very exciting.  But when D-Day came (the day she had to board the plane) she broke down and couldn’t go.  She wanted to get married, had invested a lot of time and energy and emotion into planning, but she was suddenly paralyzed by fear when she was suddenly face-to-face with “the rest of her life.”  She'd spent happy months imagining what her new life would be like, but in the end she was terrified to leave her old life behind and brave the new reality coming her way. (She did end up working through it, and finally did change the ticket and board the plane).

Similarly, when we have illusions about a relationship, or when we become side-tracked by fleeting desires, it can be painful to face the truth or the consequences of our actions.  Our “bubble is burst” and a change takes place.  We can no longer live in blissful ignorance, there’s no going back.

Finally this card brings to mind the sense of honoring those who have come before – it doesn’t get much realer than our ancestors who struggled and sweated and toiled away in order for us to have the opportunity to be born.

The spirals and lighting bolts painted on the skull could represent the great circle of life, of the Universe, and those "ah hah" moments where we break through haze and make the decisions that need to be made.

So at first, the images combined with the keyword "mourning" seem so utterly unrelated to the traditional understanding associated with this card that it may initially present a sort of block or deterrent.  But in the end, it simply provides deeper layers of the experience:

The death and rebirth of people, opportunities, relationships, lifestyles, dreams and desires, goals and plans, the never-ending Wheel.

10 Arrows = Instruction

In standard Tarot decks the 10 of Swords is a rather gruesome depiction - often a corpse laying on the ground, pierced through with...well....ten swords!  It's not a favorite to show up in a spread because it carries connotations of pain, difficult endings, perhaps even betrayal.

In the Wildwood, many cards are presented with non-traditional imagery, which at first glance can make a reader think "what?? This is so different from what I'm used to, how can I work with this?"  Upon meditation and consideration, however, many of the Wildwood meanings do intersect with the traditional meanings - just from an alternative perspective.  This is what I love about the Wildwood.

So the 10 of Arrows carries the keyword "Instruction" and shows an elderly man apparently teaching a young child (his grandson?) how to use a bow and arrow.  There is a tapestry hanging on the wall showing 9 Arrows in a circle formation.  Anyone thinking "painful endings" would be at least initially confused as to how the authors came up with this set of symbols.  But it's really not so strange.  Let's look a bit deeper....

Wildwood Tarot
Mark Ryan, John Matthews, Will Worthington
 Sterling Ethos, 2011

An elderly man is "instructing" a young boy.  He is dressed in brown, representing a return to the earth, the dying leaves of autumn.  His age represents the closing of a cycle.  The child is wearing green, the color of healing, peace, the new leaves of the springtime.  His age speaks of fresh starts, new beginnings.  That the older is teaching the younger brings to mind the lessons we take away from deeply challenging experiences and heartbreaks in our lives.  If we're engaging with spirit, with our pain, with the movement of the Wheel (represented by the circle of arrows on the the wall), we are changed by our hardships.  We take what we've learned and use it to move forward into a positive new phase of life, where we are less likely to repeat the past.

So I feel that the Wildwood 10 of Arrows simply shows the deeper, more mystical side of the major endings in our lives - the focus is not solely on the pain we've gone through, but the healing and new knowledge and understanding that comes along with it.

The Shaman

The Shaman in the Wildwood Tarot is essentially equivalent to the Magician in a more traditional deck...except he's so much more.  When I pull this card in a spread I see mystery, healing, spirituality, and power.  He will catapult you forward to meet your destiny, to make things happen, to find yourself, to make your dreams into reality.

There are so many symbols in this card my head swims, but I'll discuss a few.  His robe has images of the Horned God, representing wildness, humanity's essential nature, the power in self-mastery and balance.  The Shaman wears the cloak of a bear, symbolizing (according to the Druid Animal Oracle, P. and S. Carr-Gomm) the unity of instinct and intuition, "primal power," and the ability to govern oneself.  He has before him all the elements essential to life, and the swirling tattoos on his arms are reminiscent of the great spiral Universe.

He invites us into the dark forest to know ourselves better, and come into our power.

Wildwood Tarot
Mark Ryan, John Matthews, Will Worthington
Sterling Ethos, 2011

                                           

   

8 Pentacles: Improving Your Craft

When I first started down the Tarot path I did a 3-card reading for myself regarding the potential to turn my craft into a career some day.  I pulled: The Queen of Pentacles, the Princess of Pentacles, and the 8 of Pentacles.  I found it a beautiful and very encouraging sign that I was walking down the right path - it was a lovely confirmation from the universe.

The 8 of Pentacles is about taking your talent or passion and working hard to turn it into your life.  It's about understanding that success isn't immediate, and you have to dedicate yourself to your task and to your craft in order to improve it.  Taking a class, reading books, practicing, networking, studying, the list goes on.  And if you truly understand what learning is all about, you realize that you never "know it all" - there are always more layers to unfold, and ways to go deeper.

So I decided to sign up for a course (as mentioned in yesterday's post) on "intuitive" Tarot. The title of the course was funny to me, since all Tarot is intuitive (though I suppose there are "cold readers" who may not engage their intuition as much, but I digress).  But I'd been curious about the instructor, a local psychic-medium who seemed very down-to-earth and wise.  I thought she'd be a wonderful person to work with and learn from.  Well, my other 3-card reading (about whether I should take the course - I got Hanged Man, Queen of Cups, 6 Wands) told me to go for it, and I went for it, and after my first evening I was not disappointed.  The instructor is the very embodiment of the Queen of Cups, and the focus is on really going into the cards - not the traditional meanings we all know and understand, but what each card "says" to you, even if that may stray from more intellectual understandings.  That is precisely what I was hoping for.

Radiant Rider-Waite Tarot
(US Games)

Cards speak deeply and loudly, most especially if the deck you're working with is the right fit for you.  If the images mesh with your soul, you get a lot more out of readings.  My most intuitive, in-depth readings have been with the DruidCraft and Wildwood Tarot, whose themes and artwork resonate with me at a fundamental level.  Don't get me wrong - I love my other decks, and enjoy reading with them.  The Rider Waite and Morgan Greer are great working decks, and have a special place in my heart.  But for those moments that leave the ordinary and venture into psychic-land, I find the tool that helps bring me there are those two aforementioned decks.

So last night, after spending quite a while "going into the cards" we did short readings for each other.  The woman who read for me was great.  She is just beginning her journey, and has not formulated strong associations with any of the cards yet.  I chose three cards and when she turned them over they were: 5 Pentacles, 10 Pentacles, 8 Pentacles.  Ah, the lovely 8 Pentacles makes an appearance again, at the precise setting that the original 8 of Pentacles had pushed me toward!  What I loved most was her interpretation of 5 Pentacles.  This can often be kind of a downer card - yes, there is light coming through the window, and the understanding that all things are temporary, etc.  But the main focus is on being shut out, not having enough (attention or money), struggling to make ends meet, etc.  Not having these associations, her interpretation was based solely on the images on her fairy-themed deck.  She said "I think this card is saying that in the past you had a lot of resources around you, but you didn't see them or recognize that they were there for you."  Brilliant.  The materials were always there, you just didn't see them, or know how to tap into them.  It was a beautiful take on a challenging card.

So 8 Pentacles.  The journey never stops.  All of us are eternal students, and taking advantage of opportunities to deepen and expand our craft is not only good practice professionally, but makes our experience richer and more profound and rewarding as well.

Queen of Cups, It's Tarot Time!

Tonight I begin my intuitive Tarot class, and I'm excited and also a little nervous. The Hermit is one of my favorite cards for a reason!! But I'm intrigued to see how the class is run, as it's being given by a local psychic-medium who's been practicing for over 30 years. I figure, no matter what it should be an interesting experience, and hopefully I'll learn some new methods to try out with my readings. A few weeks ago I did a mini reading for myself to determine how the class might go (I wanted to make a good investment) and I pulled the Hanged Man, Queen of Cups, and 6 Wands. In other words, though I hadn't entirely made up my mind it would be a worthwhile investment, the instructor would be great, and it would prove encouraging for my own practice. Okay, sounds like a yes!

So naturally I'm still hesitant about an hour before I'll have to depart, but I'm planning to force myself because I figure I'd better trust my own reading! ;-)

I'll post a follow-up later!