For years I had been stewing over the fact that I can no longer buy oil-based deck stain due to environmental concerns over its manufacture. The regulations were a Clinton-era initiative (1998), and resulted in the replacement water-borne products being entirely unsatisfactory. I decided to vent my frustration in a little humor. This one is … Continue reading A HazMat Fable
Month: August 2017
I, Gadfly
I confess to being more than a little curmudgeonly when it comes to all things political; I think the only good politician is a retired one (even I'm not cruel enough to say a "dead one"), and then only if the obscene life-long retirement benefits are rescinded. My displeasure is of the non-partisan "equal-opportunity" type, … Continue reading I, Gadfly
Window to Another World
I no longer remember where this came from, but it offers helpful advice for the unalloyed (if there is such a thing) use of intuition in reading tarot cards. Personally, I agree fully with the last sentence but find the rest just a little too ingenuous, since human mental activity - no matter how inspired, … Continue reading Window to Another World
Gerald Suster’s New Age Rant
I've already expressed my growing lack of enthusiasm for all things "New Age" (aka "the Piscean Pipe-dream" and "the False Spring") due to its slow decline into commercialism and faddish superficiality. But I'm an absolute piker compared to the vitriol of esoteric writer Gerald Suster; his rhetoric could peel paint. "The Three of Wands is … Continue reading Gerald Suster’s New Age Rant
Serena’s Tarot Light-bulb Joke
I haven't read this one in a while, but thought I would share it because it offers a lot of sound tarot wisdom in humorous form (© 1999 by Serena Powers). Q: How many Major Arcana does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: All of them: • The Fool has already started … Continue reading Serena’s Tarot Light-bulb Joke
The “Aha!” Card
Ever wonder why most tarot decks at one time contained 80 cards and not 78? Modern printing practices seem to have changed, but not so long ago tarot decks were printed on sheets of card stock that produced 40 cards per sheet. So the deck creator - or more often the publisher - had two … Continue reading The “Aha!” Card
Gematrial Heraldry
Gematria is a numerological technique whereby the letters in a Hebrew word are converted into their numerical equivalents and the resulting string of numbers is used to find other Hebrew words with the same numerical value, thus drawing symbolic parallels between them. A text like Godwin's Cabalistic Encyclopedia is invaluable in locating meaningful matches. An … Continue reading Gematrial Heraldry
The “Flavor of the Month” Spread
This monthly forecast spread is segmented into four weekly lines and involves using at least two decks: one that is reassembled and reshuffled between pulls and one that is used to populate the spread positions (more decks may be needed to do this if the same card keeps appearing during the weekly pulls). It makes … Continue reading The “Flavor of the Month” Spread
The “Waypoint” Life-Reading Spread
This is the first spread I created when I returned to the full-time pursuit of tarot and other esoteric studies upon retirement in 2010. I was looking for a more comprehensive and organized life-reading spread to substitute for the "messier" Celtic Cross, one that also brought in astrological (planetary) correspondences. I developed this long before … Continue reading The “Waypoint” Life-Reading Spread
“Cheap Shots” #6
Now don't get your back up here, but . . . Who comes up with these crazy notions? First it's "You should leave each and every card in a spread face-down until you're ready to read it," apparently so you don't contaminate your fragile intuitive apparatus with undigested premature details or derail your narrative train-of-thought … Continue reading “Cheap Shots” #6
Parsifal's Wheel Tarot & Astrology 