a song from the moon to the devil.

to race the arc to nowhere
and to keep shining with reflected light
to be in moonlight's kingdom
one out of all her creatures, pale, revering
of the dreaming
wishing for what they wish for
dancing through themselves, alone
and I'm watching from below
looking up into the clouds
and saying 'yes, today
and I wait for your tomorrow
for you are in our kingdom
as I am passing through your own.'

(as if we were just our numbers on the axes
as if the additions made a jot of sense
as if her light weren't shining on the river
as if I were right, not nice or good
as if these stolen fragments were a whole
under the moonlight
where the cracks don't show, where we can imagine
that the pieces form a whole
and that all began here,
that this is truth, the rest reflection
but we are stranger than we dare to see
built from white nothing
with our own hands.)

the hierophant online.

I'm fail!writing OF cyberpunk lately, and the tarot, it comes back to life.

You know the way cards show up unexpected and uninvited. I'm not very good at the Hierophant, as you well know, but up he pops to ask me, where am I in your world? Not mine-personally, but in this flat, networked earth with its wide expanses and ever narrowing information gateways. If the Empress were a root server, what would the Hierophant be?

The Hierophant, as Agla said way better than me, is an authority that stems from writing and organising knowledge. Not the Emperor's authority of 'you're powerful', but instead an authority that comes from 'you're wise'.

Here, that wisdom is said to come from the crowd.

(Like all paths to authority, this one is paved with bullshit, so watch what you're treading in there...)

Picture it. The Hierophant has followers...on Twitter. The Hierophant says 'citation needed'. The Hierophant delivers. Who wrote the Rules of the Internet? The Hierophant did. Am I saying that the Hierophant is Anonymous? Not really - it's more like the Hierophant is small-a anonymous. We know who matters, who's a must-read on the internet via millions of pageloads and thousands of tiny voices. What do they call it on Technorati when someone's linked one of your posts? Authority. Who puts those crazy queries into Google that lead them to my other blog? The ones looking for Les Miserables slashporn, or fishing for gossip about Jen Sagan? I haven't a fucking clue either.

You've got all those anon comms on Livejournal that serve as digital confessionals. Someone takes their name off and suddenly it's like they expect to get taken seriously.

And it's Hierophant as in hierarchy and here there supposedly isn't one, except that anyone who's ever used the term 'A-lister' or 'BNF' knows how much bullshit that is. But the Hierophant has never just been the person at the top of the hierarchy - he's also the hierarchy itself, the 90/8/2%* who all do their little bit to uphold the edifice, he's the pagerank and everything that drives it, he's the sign on that narrowing gateway through which we all pass to get to information, he's the code, and he says citation needed.

They tell you Wikipedia is the crowd's wisdom at work, but in reality about 50% of the edits are done by a core group of only about 500 people. This is the Hierophant as a stand alone complex: once the code's been written and the concept's been defined, anyone can walk up and do the work of that core group. There is no originator, only an expanding set of information. The individuals come and go, but the project is eternal.

You can add something to a page one day, and return a year later and find it gone. Or find that your tiny add has spiralled into four increasingly arcane paragraphs and a vicious discussion page war. You weren't logged in when you left it; the institution ate your individual contribution, you don't own anything and now it's as if you weren't a person there - just a little part of the Hierophant hivemind. Writing it down makes it real. The Googlecache says so. You made it happen, but the you soon vanishes into the it, leaving only the phenomenon behind.

(Yeah, anonymous means never needing to own your shit.)

And so the Hierophant lays down flat and turns into code, just like all of us; I'll see what I can come up with for the other Majors as and when they next show up. taa.

[*this ratio describes the apocryphal media platform userbase breakdown - 90% of users are lurkers, 8% provide content and write comments on other people's content but do not provide money, and 2% pay for the service on behalf of the entire group.]

coins in the fountain

So, I'm working on this site again, thanks to Agla's prodding - I've done a couple more card entries up in the last few days, and I hope to do another later tonight. But. I draw cards for these musings in threes, and these threes tell interlinked stories. I had the Empress, the Eight of Wands and the Six of Pentacles two days ago, and the Four of Cups, the Knight of Cups and the Six of Pentacles yesterday.

Yep, recurrence, and you know why? Christmas.

I can rarely do much for Christmas, but this year I can't do anything. I'm in a strange place, my immigration paperwork has been delayed due to an RFI, I have no money, little basic liberty, and feel like I have contributed almost nothing to the story of the world in the last year. This sucks because I like giving people things, and as soon as I have any cash I'll likely throw all of it into sending parcels to my siblings and my friends - but that ain't now, and the calendar is running faster than I could keep up with. The Six of Pentacles is the good you get from giving. Not just the warm, fuzzy feeling, but the contribution you've made to someone else's story.

I look around me and see the other people in my life; a wooden snake Agla gave me, the running shoes my sister got me last Christmas, letters from the blue one and the sparkly one, a book that the green one gave to me. Pieces of others, but nurtured by the use I put them to; a book is just a bit of dead treeflesh until you open it and learn its secrets, find how to use them. The shoes are worn to my feet, and I run in them daily; they're my life, and I love them.

Somehow the frustration and the need to be with these people again has stopped me replying to the letters - something that would be very possible becomes hard, because of the distortion of the Six of Pentacles. And what is there here for me? The Four of Cups, sighing into his hand, and that knight, who seems to urge patience and reassessment. Of the previous lot, the Empress is the earth and her hateful expanse of distance, and the Eight of Wands is what I am, what I do, where I've been.

I am not happy, but I might be if I can find ways to give back.

Daisy brings truth.

The easiest tarot reading is the skeptical person who has never had it done before. The archetypes represented by the tarot deck freak them out in a big way; they didn't realize they had consented to Jungian psychoanalysis as conducted by a hippie herbalist.

"Who's the Emperor?" I asked one such skeptic. "Your father?"

"You're supposed to tell me that!" he barked, condescendingly.

"Okay, your father."

He grunted.

And let's not forget: Occam's razor works well for tarot, too.

link

a useful thought:

From a Christian thread on Feministe

When I say that religious doctrine is a “social construct,” I mean that individual religious believers don’t need doctrine to explain their experience. Religious institutions need doctrine to explain the experience of believers to nonbelievers, which, to my mind, means doctrine is meant to fill a social rather than a religious need.

This is something I run up against in my head. Often. I don't have that social construct, and the lack of it makes me feel a bit insecure and adrift with all this; humans have social needs, and these are real needs even at the religious level. I have no means of explaining my experience to nonbelievers. My intention was that this blog would help out with that, but I've found it hard to push the writing past the practical - cards and what they do in the consensual world, to consensual people. I get nervous any time a post tiptoes past that. Like the Emperor one, though I'd promised myself I'd do that, because it is true.

Well. The Strength post is up (no thanks to me) and I should be back to regular updates within the next few days. I have about 30 cards left. Beyond that, I don't know how far I can go, but, hope.

another post about Metal Gear.

So the tarot blog has stalled, on, of all things, Strength. It'll be moving again soon enough; I'm having a dry patch on all three of my blogs, and on my other writing projects. :/ My words will return from their holiday eventually. Til then, I can play with other people's words.

I like taroting fandoms. I've done it a few times before - might dig up some links from my Deadjournal, mmm. Til then, have some Metal Gear. And because it's Metal Gear, all these cards are reversed unless stated otherwise.


The Fool - Raiden. "I don't want to share my past with anyone. I just want to forget about it."

The Magician - Otacon. "I realised you can't wish for happiness - you have to make it happen."

High Priestess - Frank. "An undying shadow in the world of lights."

The Empress - Olga. "No, not just comrades! Family!"

The Emperor - Ocelot. "It's all part of our plan to make the world she envisioned a reality."

The Hierophant - Vulcan Raven. "The path you walk on has no end. Each step you take is paved with the corpses of your enemies. Their souls will haunt you forever - you shall have no peace..."

The Lovers - Eva. "Does it have to be one or the other - love or hate?" "Between a man and a woman? You bet."

The Chariot - Liquid Snake. "We're losing our place in a world that no longer needs us. A world that now spurns our very existence."

Strength [upright] - David. " Never doubt yourself. Just let it make you stronger. Learn something from it."
[reversed] - Roy. "I know those feelings of powerlessness, frustration that you feel everyday. You've tried to play the boy scout out there in Alaska, but you can't race dogs in the snow forever."

The Hermit - Sniper Wolf. "Now I could see war, not from the inside, but from the outside."

The Wheel [upright] - Naomi. "You mustn't allow yourself to be chained to fate, to be ruled by your genes. Humans can choose the kind of life they want to live. The important thing is that you choose life, and then live."
[reversed] - Fortune. "Lucky in war and nothing else."

Justice - Jonathan. "Prove your loyalty... Not to justice, not to your country, but to yourself."

The Hanged Man - BB. "I'm not going to live my life the way The Boss did!"

Death - Vamp. "I died once already. I cannot die twice."

Temperance - Psycho Mantis. "But you...you are different. You're the same as us. We have no past, no future. We live in the moment. That's out only purpose. Humans weren't designed to bring each other happiness."

The Devil [upright] - Volgin. "I am about to show you what hell is really like."

The Tower - George. "We're all born with an expiration date. No one lasts forever."

The Star - Gene. "We'll meet again, in a new world, one of my own creation."

The Moon [upright] - Ursula. "Kill you before you spawn your accursed snake children."
[reversed] - Elisa. "It was the first time in our lives our visions weren't one and the same."

The Sun - Meryl. "Listen, I've used a gun like this since I was eight years old. I'm more comforatble with it than I am with a bra."

Judgement - The Sorrow. "But make no mistake...the dead are not silent. Now you will know the sorrow of those whose lives you have ended."

The World [upright] - The Joy. "But the Earth itself has no boundaries. No East, no West, no Cold War. And the irony of it is, the United States and the Soviet Union are spending billions on their space programs and the missile race only to arrive at the same conclusion. In the 21st century everyone will be able to see that we are all just inhabitants of a little celestial body called Earth. A world without communism and capitalism... that is the world I wanted to see. But reality continued to betray me."

the phoenix dancing.

This is from Terry Pratchett's Carpe Jugulum.

'I used to watch them as a kid. My granny told me about 'em. Some cold nights you see them dancin' in the sky over the Hub, burnin' green and gold. . .'
'Oh, you mean the aurora coriolis,' said Oats, trying to make his voice sound matter of fact. 'But actually that's caused by magic particles hitting the-'
'Dunno what it's caused by,' said Granny sharply, 'but what it is is the phoenix dancin'.'

Thankyou, Pterry, for this infinitely useful catchphrase for anything that, in being overanalysed and deconstructed in order to explain this, that and the other, remains itself.

the why.

The World asked me. I'd been doing three a night up til she turned up. About the same time, Agla sent me the most amazingest email, which I'm going to wind up c/ping around here in bits as and when it's relevant.

Exploring the Intuitive deck? Yes - I want to swim through like this before using it to read. My ideas about what's what are becoming more concrete. But why here, like this? The format's easy to use, a pattern easy to maintain day after day; but it's also a performance; an awkward word-dance exhibited to an audience of almost none. It's posturing, it's me pushing my ranty voice about again. Or it's me missing the Goddess pages at Owlsdottir [I will get back to that later], hoping to use my own accumulated knowledge like that even though it's not nearly enough and not used nearly enough, especially not with others, not for years.

I've not been whoring this, though once I'm done with these initial sketches, I think I might - go swimming on the pages of others and keep it growing from there. (That would create google-fu, of which this blog has none, and will have none until I want to go make some. I didn't even link it on my Blogger account, because I compartmentalise too obsessively, even though it never works in the end).

One problem I always have with blogging is the gap between I-statements and the cold third person. I'm not sure which is more irritating to read; I do know that when I'm at my worst, my least being, I can't do I-statements. I hope to learn how best to use language to frame the unframable, especially within the confines of YMMV. I hope to not be cringeworthy, but the best way to do that is simply to not cringe.

Today is March 23rd - the second of the three twist' days that lie between the Equinox and Lady Day (the trad New Year). I may be a bad person and write cards tonight; I should be a good person and twist a few dreams instead.

On elements.

In tarot (and also in astrology) elements are often used to describe similarities between groups of symbols and properties. It is perhaps best to say that elements are a way of taking the giant mess of the world and framing it in four more-or-less neat boxes which can then be used to interpret life and steer it (though life steers like a cow).

The four Greek elements are Earth, Water, Fire and Air (other element systems exist, such as China's five elements); in tarot these are represented by Pentacles, Cups, Wands and Swords respectively. (Some readers refer to Court Cards in the same manner - Pages are earthy, Knights are fiery, Queens are watery and Kings are airy - but this is less common).

These elements are said to have the same qualities that their adjectives evoke:

Earth is about the body, and about work - both paid work and other labour, such as the care you take for your personal finances, your home and your health and the maintenance of your skills. Earth situations are those that call for practical thinking, hard work, and good planning. Earth may also refer to the Earthy parts of your life - work, your home life, possibly sex or money.

Water is about emotions, and about communicating; it asks you to be aware of the way you communicate, the way you express your feelings, and of the currents on which your feelings flow. It can describe your social and emotional life; a Water situation calls for recognition of needs, for compromise and above all for compassion.

[edit: Agla, who is much better than me at this stuff, sent this in email:

"It's odd that water means communication to you-to me it's always been more of something uncommunicated or hidden, if you know what I mean. Air's the message element for me-way traditional I know, but it seems to fit.

"A very long time ago I remember reading somewhere that the sea is often used in the Bible to symbolise the unknown and the terrifying. The place where people can't live and monsters lurk. God's power over the sea (Jesus calming the storm, etc) is seen as what you might call the opposite and complimentary side of his power over the world to the side invoked with the business of the water and wine or the feeding of the five thousand. In those miracles it's pointed out that God made and regulates all that sustains us. In the sea-calming it's made clear that he's holding the reins of all in the world that terrifies, too.(He calmed the storm, yeah. But that implies that if he wanted to he could whip it up again.) (Although the five-thousand were fed with fish as well as bread, so it's clear the sea is necessary as well as scary and that if you dare it you can bring back rewards!)"]


Fire is about the soul, and about taking what is in your soul and making it manifest. Fire tells you to explore your dreams and your deepest perceptions, and then to seek them out; it calls some to write, draw or craft, guides some through their religion, and sends some on impulsive and life-changing journeys. Fire describes your creative life and your religious life, and the dreams of adventure that you've always had burning in your core. In fire situations, you must follow your instincts and dreams, and if in doubt, always do rather than not do.

Air is about the mind. Air is learning and logic, debate and reasoned moral judgements. Air tells you to detach and do what's right; whether that's what adds up to the best outcome, or what you think your gods want you to do. Air could describe what you know in the cool of your mind - it can describe your academic life, or your most cerebral connections with others and with the world. In tarot, air often carries pain and conflict within it. Why is this? I don't know, but I do know that within the body (and all awareness starts with the body), air is the least stable element; homoeostasis can keep your body warm, wet and earthy even without shelter or sustenance, but our air needs to change over every few seconds.


But. But. This is how elements are in tarot - it's how tarot uses elements, rather than what the elements actually are, when you dig past their use for demarcation of little people's little lives.

If elements could be neatly defined in words, they wouldn't be elements. If you look for elements, and the feel of elements, in scrying and in energy work (and energy games, which are perhaps more important), if you explore what you're drawn to and what you're made of, then elements soon become more than ways to divide; they become the stuff the world is made of - deep-running, fuzzy-edged stuff that can be expressed in words or on card images, but can only be seen below all this.


[I originally put this in the Ace of Pentacles entry, but realised it needed its own. It's a technique I learned from someone who I haven't spoken to in a while, but who I hope is living well today.]


Here's something you can try, a way to bring element to the surface of your world:

Relax, and explore your proprioception - your awareness of having a body. Notice where in your body you seem to have the strongest sensations of awareness - places that feel as if they are ready to be touched. (I find these mostly in my feet and spine - YMMV.)
'Push' this awareness and sensitiveness toward your hands, until they feel a bit buzzy.
Put your hands close together (not touching), with the palms facing each other. Move them in circles.
Move your hands slowly further apart, to about 8 or 12 inches.

So, that thing between your hands now - what's it like? What does your imagination say it's made of? (Closing your eyes might make it easier to imagine this). YMMV, but, this is a way you might find that you know the feel of an element, or a mixture of elements.

The Best Decks Ever:

...as far as I know. I'd love to hear which decks you find good to use - beautiful decks, decks with strong characters, decks that have shown you something new.


While I don't physically use it any more, the Rider-Waite-Smith was the deck I learned from, and I've found that it provided a strong foundation for my understanding of tarot in general; in some of my card articles, you'll see that I've framed cards in other decks in terms of how they differ from the RWS, as if the RWS is the default. I'm sure many readers do fine without this; after all, there are other important decks that have echoes everywhere, the Visconti-Sforza, the Marseilles, or the Thoth. But knowing the RWS has helped me out a fair few times.

There are a million zillion RWSs to choose from; I used the Universal Waite, which is less bright than most available options, but I find that makes it easier to explore the images, to see them as three-dimensional. YMMV.

RWS aficionados might like to read the RWS Copyright Faq: barring rapid new legislation, the RWS copyright will expire no later than 2012. At this point it will be legal to take the original RWS and print it, mod it, do anything you like with it; no one will own the images any more. But as JB Hare's comparisons point out, good luck getting images of the original deck; it's been subject to numerous tiny modifications in the past century. (The Pictoral Key To The Tarot is more cut and dried; in 2012, those words will be yours, mine and everyone's, end of story).


The most beautiful decks in the world are the Osho Zen, the Intuitive Tarot and the Roots Of Asia. I've worked with all of them; the the Osho Zen has a heck of a personality, and - just watch it - will give you far more Major Arcana draws than is remotely statistically possible. It has a Zen sense of humour. It gives its own names to all the cards, often showcasing an aspect of the card that other decks ignore. Its accompanying book contains many extracts from Osho's writing, and they will make you feel happy when you read them. Most of the card articles I'm writing here include Osho Zen images. While it doesn't seem like it'd be a good starter deck, the one I used to play with was the first deck of a great reader (and great friend).

The Roots of Asia is very calm and full of new insights. It's a deck so good you'll hardly ever need it. I confess I barely used the Buddhist booklet that came with it, but Buddhist tarot users may be interested in integrating dharma with Tarot. It's full of life, and uses nature/animal imagery heavily. Human figures are a gorgeous mixture of Indian art and Cubism.

And I've only just started working with the Intuitive deck; this blog is partly an attempt to get to know it (her?) better. It's quite pastel, and surrounds each card-image with a coloured oval, on a card almost as wide as it is tall. I was also drawn in by the notebook approach - that it was a deck that you can write yourself - though I seem to have started a new blog instead. ;_;


There's a few other strong decks I've used;

The Dragon Tarot was one of the first two I used; my sister and I purchased that and the RWS together one January afternoon in 1999. It wasn't so useful for learning as the RWS is, but it's got strong elemental energies.

The Mythics came with their incredibly useful hardback book. The cards, and the book, assign a Greek god to each Major card, and a story to each suit from Ace to Ten. Each court card is represented by a hero. It's a wonderful way to learn more about the Minor Arcana, one I still hold in mind when I read; I had to give the deck itself up, however, because its fierce personality grated a bit with my own; it's the only deck I've ever argued with.

The Medieval Scapinis have quite a pull, and they're smart as hell, but they're difficult to use, partly because of the pip cards - ornate, but not representing anything.


Yoshitaka Amano's Tarot has very plain pip cards, but the illustrated Majors and Court cards are of interest if you want a look at the Tarot that is rooted in Japanese myth rather than in Western thought. If you want them, you'll probably have to order them from Japan.

I've never used the Robin Wood, but I've flipped through it, and if you've known the RWS then the Robin Wood is a really fascinating rewriting of that. It seems to use a lot of Wicca imagery.


A word on the Thoth deck; it's quite beautiful, in a way that relies heavily on its symmetries, but it gives me the creeps. I don't think anyone comes to the Thoth with an open mind, and certainly before I first saw it I'd heard enough stories about its energy being unsettling... As with everything, I'm sure someone likes it, but I don't. Every image looks like an idea I grew out of years ago, and it feels unpleasant to look upon. However, I believe it's Alan Moore's preferred deck, so there must be something to it.

the order they came about:

This is entirely dictated by the whims of the Intuitive deck. I've been adding three cards a day, and thus far, the chosen path has been suspiciously easy and insightful.

1st: The Fool
2nd: The Empress
3rd: Queen Of Swords
4th: King Of Swords
5th: High Priestess
6th: Queen Of Pentacles
7th: Two Of Wands
8th: Four Of Pentacles
9th: Six Of Swords
10th: Nine Of Pentacles
11th: Knight Of Wands
12th: The Star
13th: Death
14th: The Hierophant
15th: The Sun
16th: Three Of Swords
17th: Nine Of Cups
18th: Three Of Wands
19th: Nine Of Wands
20th: Page Of Swords
21st: The Lovers
22nd: Queen Of Wands
23rd: Page Of Wands
24th: Five Of Pentacles
25th: Ace Of Pentacles
26th: Ace Of Cups
27th: Four Of Cups
28th: Six Of Wands
29th: Two Of Pentacles
30th: Eight Of Pentacles
31st: The World
32nd: King Of Wands
33rd: The Hermit
34th: Three Of Cups
35th: Five Of Swords
36th: Ace Of Swords
37th: The Emperor
38th: Seven of Cups
39th: Seven Of Pentacles
40th: Six Of Pentacles
41st: Knight Of Pentacles
42nd: The Magician
43rd: Queen Of Cups
44th: Ten Of Cups
45th: Five Of Cups
46th: Justice
47th: Strength [a guest post because I was stuck]
Agla's Hierophant
48th: Eight Of Wands
49th: Knight Of Cups
50th: The Chariot
51st: King of Cups
52nd: Six of Cups
53rd: Page of Cups
54th: Knight of Swords
55th: Three of Pentacles
56th: Two of Cups
57th: Judgement
58th: Two of Swords
59th: Ten of Wands
60th: The Devil
61st: Ten of Pentacles
62nd: Eight of Cups