It’s 3:30 in the morning and I can’t sleep. The reason I can’t sleep is that I’m on the academic job market, applying for jobs as a professor to start next academic year. So far, I’ve applied to 22 tenure-track jobs and one postdoctoral fellowship; I have three more postdoc applications to submit in the […]
Read more "Choosing the Tower"There are plenty of ways to draw connections between the cards of the Major Arcana. You can do it through numerology, through astrology, through the septenaries or visual cues in their symbolism. One of the simplest ways to find the connections between the cards, though, is simply to fold the sequence of the Major Arcana […]
Read more "Pairing the Major Arcana, Forward and Backward"Numerologically, we connect the Major Arcana to each other by their numerical values. You take the number associated with a particular card (e.g. Justice is 11), add together its digits and reduce to a value between 1 and 9 (in this case, 1+1=2). Although I, personally, have a pet theory that we should be using […]
Read more "The High Priestess, Justice, and Judgment: Awakenings and Initiations"It’s the last week of the semester. I have a pile of student essays to grade, two large research projects of my own to finish,* a couple of seasonal parties (both Pagan and secular) to attend, and just a lot on my plate, generally speaking. But hey! It’s almost Yule. Even though there’s no snow […]
Read more "Cards for Yule: The Fool, the Hanged Man, and Judgment"Today concludes the three-part series wherein I assign one James Bond film to each of the Major Arcana of the Tarot. You can read Part 1 and Part 2 if you’d like to catch up with the rest of the series. Thanks again to Deborah Lipp for helping me put together this list. XV. The […]
Read more "The James Bond Tarot (Part 3)"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?"
Jack Chanek 