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 do not know these good people,” the prisoner replied. “Truly?” “Truly.” “And now tell me, why is it that you use the words ‘good people’ all the time? Do you call everyone that, or what?” “Everyone,” the prisoner replied. “There are no evil people in the world.” Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita This […]
Read more "The Devil and the Star: There Are No Evil People"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"One of the frustrating things about Tarot is that it’s fundamentally passive exercise. It can give you a peek at the future and arm yourself to what’s coming your way, or it can provide an interpretive framework to process and understand the events around you—much the way that I processed the recent wave of protests […]
Read more "A Tarot Spread for Protestors"Welcome to Part 2 of my James Bond Tarot series, where I match up one James Bond movie to each of the cards of the Major Arcana in the Tarot. If you missed Part 1, which ran from Casino Royale as the Fool to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as the Lovers, feel free to go check it […]
Read more "The James Bond Tarot (Part 2)"Patricia Monaghan, one of the most badass scholars of women’s spirituality in the modern age, had a really cool talk she used to deliver about taxonomizing goddesses. I never actually got to see this talk (for lo, I am but young), nor have I been able to find any published writings where she rehashes its […]
Read more "Five Goddess Prototypes in the Tarot"Of the various odds and ends I’ve posted on this blog, three of my favorites are on the relationships between the Hierophant and Death, between the Lovers and Temperance, and between Strength and the Star, respectively. These posts all take a similar approach: looking at the astrological correspondences of the Major Arcana and exploring the […]
Read more "Ugh, Fine, I’ll Talk About Politics: Justice and the Emperor"Walking home today from the undisclosed location in New York City where I spend most of my days, I passed a woman from Amnesty International who was very intent on stopping passers-by to discuss human rights. I smiled, avoided eye contact, and waved her off with a polite “not today” before I continued my walk […]
Read more "The Cardinal Virtues, Value, and Justice"Why do bad things happen to good people? Every philosopher has to deal with it at one point or another. It’s one of the few questions that will never be definitely answered, quite possibly because answers don’t exist. Christian theologians have wrestled with this question for millennia, but no one has managed to come up […]
Read more "Fair Lady Justice and the Problem of Evil"
Jack Chanek 