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"With Pride month coming up, I’ve been thinking a lot about family in all its forms: Chosen family, biological family, spiritual family, and so on. Pride is, historically, an interesting time for me; my High Priestess had to drag me kicking and screaming to my first Pride, because I was still processing a great deal […]
Read more "Family in the Tens of the Minor Arcana"In my last post, I talked about the relationship between the Seven and the Five in each suit of the Minor Arcana: The Five presents us with strife and trouble, and the Seven revisits that strife with a mature perspective that gives us the tools to handle it. Naturally, then, the question arises: What’s the […]
Read more "The Six Is the Tipping Point"I’ve been doing a lot of intense meditative work with the Minor Arcana of late (which led to my recent post on the Swords and Cups). One of the things I noticed in this work is that in each suit, there’s a connection between the Seven and the Five. The Fives are all hard, unpleasant, […]
Read more "The Seven Returns to the Five"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"A spectre is haunting my blog. It’s not the spectre of Communism, nor the SPECTRE of Ernst Stavro Blofeld; it is the spectre of the suit of Cups. I have learned about myself that I cycle through the Minor Arcana every five years or so. Although you wouldn’t know it to look at me now, […]
Read more "In Which I Am Terrified of Cups"The idea of using Tarot in magic(k) is not exactly new. The Aeclectic Tarot Forum has a whole constellation of discussions on this topic, and Kelly-Ann Maddox at the Four Queens did a video on it not too long ago. Here, I want to take a bit of a different tack and talk about how […]
Read more "Tarot and Timing Spellwork"“All men desire to know,” says Aristotle in the opening of his Metaphysics. From there, he proceeds to elaborate on the various reasons that men seek knowledge, and the kinds of knowledge they can attain. He writes: By nature animals are born with the faculty of sensation, and from sensation memory is produced in some […]
Read more "The Tarot Suits and Aristotle’s Five Epistemic States"One of the fundamental underlying principles of Tarot is the idea of duality and polarity. Dark and light, masculine and feminine, creative and rational–it’s everywhere in Tarot. Buried in the very structure of the deck is the idea that the universe is made up of opposites. So it makes sense that one of the easiest […]
Read more "Dichotomizing the Minor Arcana"
Jack Chanek 