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Syncretism Unbound: The Octile Horoscope and the Trigrams
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’ve been reading about the origins of the esoteric alignment between the 12-year Chinese zodiac/calendar and the eight trigrams of the I Ching, and I was struck by the notion that – with twelve “branches” and only eight trigrams resulting in an apparent ideological disconnect – there may be a more symmetrical formulation…....
Deep, Distant, Dire or Ditched: Competing Views on the Major Arcana
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Every time I encounter a new observation about the significance of the Major Arcana I feel compelled to revisit the subject in order to re-examine my own position. When I was learning to read the tarot cards back in the early ’70s the consensus was that the 22 Major Arcana were a “big…...
Deck Selection and Spread Dynamics
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’m not proposing that there are “scientific” answers to these questions but, humans being the insatiably curious and highly critical creatures that we are, I tend to think in those terms. “What is the best deck to use? What is the best spread?” I hear these questions all the time from beginners who…...
Tarot Reading: Words and Pictures
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I believe I’ve found the perfect aphorism to describe the art of tarot reading. It was in a 1989 short story by science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling, of all places. According to a quote in the story, “underground” (an old cultural buzzword) cartoonist R. Crumb (he of Fritz the Cat fame although you may…...
“Putting A Face To It”: Physical Profiling with the Tarot
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Most of us have felt the quandary expressed in the trope “I know the name but I can’t put a face to it.” I’m often asked whether the court cards of the tarot can be used to reliably describe the physical characteristics of someone involved in the querent’s life. Here is my answer…...
Breaking Into Spreads: A Beginner’s Syllabus
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Here is another essay prompted by a “frequently asked question” from the online tarot community. Tarot beginners who follow the conventional wisdom of learning the cards one-at-a-time, both in a sequential “card-a-day” manner and via single-card pulls, are often unsure how they can break out of that narrow box and into more complex…...
Schrodinger and the “Fabric of Reality”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I once described divination in fanciful terms as “running my mental fingers through the warp-and-woof of the fabric of reality, trying to tease out threads of truth.” More recently I encountered the ideas of physicist Erwin Schrodinger, whose example of a metaphorical “cat” that can be both alive and dead at the same time…...
Rolling Back the Golden Dawn’s Syllabus
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’ve known for some time that those who prefer classical decks like the Tarot de Marseille to the esoteric reveries of the post-Occult Revival don’t subscribe to the conflation of Hebrew letters and trump cards in general, and particularly not to the model proposed by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Rather…...
The Star, the Moon and the Sun: An Optical Analogy
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Here I’m using the analogy of a telescope to examine the transition between the three consecutive “lights” of the Major Arcana. As the series of tarot trumps nears its end, we are faced with the necessity of refocusing our view of the world from all angles – mental. emotional, spiritual and practical –…...
The High Priestess and Fidelity
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The High Priestess is above all a paragon of fidelity. Sallie Nichols describes her archetypal mission, in part, as “obedience to true spirit,” but here I will attempt to ground that observation in more mundane terms. When the High Priestess appears in a reading, it suggests the need to root out any irregularity…...
