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"In my previous post, I sat down with the four minor suits of the Tarot de Marseille in order to get a sense of what those suits signify. Reading the minors in TdM is broadly accepted to be a process of synthesizing a card’s suit with its number: There’s a particular meaning associated with the […]
Read more "A Year of Tarot de Marseille: Finding a Numerology"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"I like to experiment with Tarot in a variety of ways. One of those is to come up with new spreads, new forms I can use to get information out of the cards. Some of these spreads work their way into my permanent repertoire; others, I use once or twice and then discard. Regardless, playing […]
Read more "A Prime Factorization Tarot Spread"Every now and then, I sit down with a notebook and a pen. I write out a numbered list going from 0 to 21 (or, more rarely, four side-by-side lists going from 1 to 14), and I start to take notes, trying to see if I can look at Tarot from a new angle. This […]
Read more "Dividing the Majors: An Experiment and a Spread"The New Year has come, I’m waiting for professorial feedback on my first paper as a graduate student (a terrifying prospect), and I return triumphant to the blogosphere. I figured that, it being the start of the year and all, I would talk a bit about year cards. For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, a […]
Read more "Non-Decimal Numerology and Year Cards"Western numerology likes to focus on the numbers between 1 and 10. Even though there are infinitely many numbers (nay, infinitely many integers), we in the Western occult tradition really only care about the first dizaine. There are a few notable exceptions (e.g. the number 13), but for the most part, once we get above 10, any […]
Read more "Reductio Ad Arcanum: Numerology in the Majors"
Jack Chanek 