I’m a fan of the Dungeons & Dragons (and occasionally other TTRPG) show Dimension 20, which airs on CollegeHumor’s streaming service Dropout. In this season, the players are a group of cognitive functions belonging to the mind of a scientist named Elias Hodge—his impulsiveness, his curiosity, his conscience, and so on. Over the course of […]
Read more "The Eights of the Tarot: What We Do When We’re Threatened"Picking up where we left off in my project on the Tarot de Marseille, we come now to the Eights. These cards take their meaning from two of the trumps: Justice and the Moon. At first glance, these two trump cards really don’t seem to go together; Justice is rational and ordered, whereas (in RWS […]
Read more "A Year of Tarot de Marseille: The Eights"I was doing some meditative work recently with the suit of Cups. Longtime readers of this blog will know that I am not, by nature, a Cupsy person, and this has always been the suit I’ve struggled most to connect to. So I did some intensive reflection and writing exercises to try and establish a […]
Read more "Mirror Images: Cups and Swords"I’ve written before about themes that seem to dominate the Tarot deck. Viewed from a certain angle, it seems like every card in the Tarot means “change”. Or, alternatively, that every card means “balance”. Or “growth”. And so on. As a reader, this can be useful, because every now and then you get a reading […]
Read more "Running Towards, Running Away: The Six of Swords and Eight of Cups"There are a few major themes that recur frequently in Tarot. Perhaps the greatest of these themes is capital-C Change. The entire Tarot deck is threaded with motifs of cyclicality and perpetual change. Off the top of my head, I can think of ways that at least one third of the Major Arcana could be […]
Read more "Death, Judgment, and Change in Tarot"Whew. I’ve been away for a while. My apologies for that; a blog that isn’t being updated on a regular basis always looks necrotic to me, but sometimes life rears its ugly head and the real world has to take precedence over things like Tarot and the internet. I haven’t done a reading in weeks, […]
Read more "What Comes After the Eight of Cups?"This is Part 3 of what is intended to be a three-part post on my personal take on Tarot. And this is the big one. The whopper. The doozie. The great, big, messy, complicated, never-in-my-life-could-explain-it version of what I do in a Tarot reading. Fasten your seatbelt, gentle reader, because I fear it’s going to […]
Read more "How I Use Tarot, Part 3: Form Without Content"
Jack Chanek 