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"One of the great frustrations of Tarot is that the Swords get short shrift. Tarot decks contain unpleasant cards—they have to, in order to accurately represent the wide range of human experiences and emotions. A deck that has good vibes only is not actually terribly useful for divination, because it can never give you warning […]
Read more "In Defense of the Swords"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"There’s a trend in some of my blog posts, where I introduce a card, briefly outline how “most of the Tarot community” reads that card, and then reject the alleged mainstream view and offer my own interpretation. Of course, I never really offer evidence to support my claims about what constitutes most of the Tarot […]
Read more "The Eight of Swords: Sometimes It’s Not Just in Your Head"I hate beginnings. I hate that moment at the start of a new project when I have to consecrate it, to name it, to finally take the beautiful, completed masterpiece I have in my head and translate it to a sloppy, material work in progress. It’s so disheartening to remember that I’m not yet at […]
Read more "And So It Begins"
Jack Chanek 