If Brian Williams' Post-Modern Tarot deck from 1994 had a motto, it would be "Nobody likes a smart-ass." Williams managed to put his finger squarely on the pulse of bored, self-indulgent, late-20th-century American culture, and then tweaked its collective nose hard. I've had it since 1994 but seldom used it until recently, when I had a … Continue reading The PoMo Tarot Deck Interview
Tarot Opinion
Cheap Shots #19: Dr. Doolittle on Rulerships
While putting together my table of active and passive affinities, I got to thinking about the sometimes schizophrenic relationship between the seven traditional planets and the sign(s) of their rulership. Not that there isn't an internal logic to all of the correspondences (as we shall see), but some apparent anomalies do crop up. For the … Continue reading Cheap Shots #19: Dr. Doolittle on Rulerships
Cheap Shots #18: Justice Restored
No, this isn't about the impeachment of Donald Trump. It alludes to the fact that Aleister Crowley returned the trump cards Justice and Strength (aka Fortitude) to the positions they held in the historical decks of Italy and France: Justice as the eighth in the series and Strength as the eleventh. For his part, A. … Continue reading Cheap Shots #18: Justice Restored
Cheap Shots #17: Tone vs. Substance
One complaint of the tarot novice that comes up quite often on the forums is "Nothing happened the way the cards said it would." This is sometimes accompanied by a profound loss of faith that drives the discouraged neophyte away from the practice of divination entirely. Even the trite remark that "the cards weren't wrong, … Continue reading Cheap Shots #17: Tone vs. Substance
Confessions of an Incurable Thothie
By all reliable accounts, Aleister Crowley was not a nice man. Yet he fathered one of the enduring icons of modern tarot - the Thoth deck - along with its remarkable companion volume, The Book of Thoth or BoT. A revisionist attempt is afoot to give the lion's share of the credit for the excellence of … Continue reading Confessions of an Incurable Thothie
The Alchemy of Silence: A Temperance Poem
Yesterday, in the tarot and Lenormand blog My Curious Cabinet, I was reading Le Fanu's explanation for his retirement from active posting. His comments on the need to regain "silence" in his life, to fend off the intrusion of social and cultural malaise into his private space, got me thinking about my own perception of … Continue reading The Alchemy of Silence: A Temperance Poem
Daily Draws: My Back Pages
In the 1964 "political apostasy" song My Back Pages, Bob Dylan's refrain perfectly nailed my evolving attitude toward drawing one or more cards on a daily basis for anything other than learning purposes. "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." Back in "the day" (mid-1970s), only a couple of … Continue reading Daily Draws: My Back Pages
The In-between
In a recent essay on David Spangler's (he of the pioneering New Age pedigree) Lorian Association website (see "Strange Attractors" at http://www.lorianassociation.com), Susan Beal described how she eventually resolved the apparent conflicts between her inner and outer worlds - those of private spiritual practice on one hand and routine daily existence on the other - … Continue reading The In-between
The Art of Reading
Cartomancy is fundamentally a story-tellers art, in which each card in a spread forms a scene in a narrative that logically advances the story from the preceding card and segues neatly into the next. The true test of the raconteur's skill occurs when facing what at first appears to be a hopeless jumble of mismatched … Continue reading The Art of Reading
Swaggin’ It
At one time, tarot was used primarily as a tool for divination; its forte was getting under the skin of outward appearances in order to examine the roots of causality found within a querent's subconscious grasp of his or her personal reality. This was usually expressed in terms of the chance for occurrence of some … Continue reading Swaggin’ It
Parsifal's Wheel Tarot & Astrology 