As the nights grow longer and colder, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about descents to the underworld. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the hero’s journey, the prototypical underworld descent myth laid out by Joseph Campbell in his 1949 book The Hero With a Thousand Faces. This book is flawed, and I hesitate to bring […]
Read more "A Hero’s Journey Tarot Spread"I’m picking up this tag from Benebell Wen, who in turn got it from Kelly Bear. It’s originally a YouTube tag, but Benebell did it as a blog post and I’m going to follow in her steps (although my post won’t be nearly as aesthetically pleasing). The challenge: To list 5 Tarot decks you love, […]
Read more "#54321Tarot"This is the fifth and final post in my series on the opening of the key ritual I did for myself at Yule. You can read parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 before diving into this, if you like. TL;DR: I’ve been struggling a lot with feeling stuck, trapped, and generally dissatisfied with my life. […]
Read more "My Yule Opening of the Key: The Fifth Operation"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"A friend once told me that fighting for justice is like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. It’s hopeless, it’s futile—but if you really care enough, that’s exactly what you try to do. You empty the ocean, one teaspoon at a time. And sometimes it rains, and the ocean fills up again, and […]
Read more "A Tarot Spread for Lost Causes"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"I’ve been doing a lot of shadow work recently. Shadow work is a long, ongoing process, but the specific work I’m doing started a little under a year ago. It’s mostly daddy issues.* Some time back, I shared a spread I’d created for shadow work. I talked about some of the problems I have with […]
Read more "Aristotelian Shadow Work Revisited"It’s two days after Thanksgiving, and I’m lying in bed prewriting this post as I wait for the rest of the house to wake up. My parents live far enough away that it’s impractical for me to spend Thanksgiving for year, so a friend from college has taken me under her wing, and I’ve spent […]
Read more "A Simple Tarot Spread for Love"Years back, I made a spread for the times we just need to hear that everything is going to be all right. But sometimes, when things are really bad, that’s not what we need. Sometimes we need to scream and cry and acknowledge that everything is not, in fact, going to be all right. Sometimes […]
Read more "The “Everything Is Not Okay” Spread"Jesus, I’ve been away. I was on vacation visiting my parents. I climbed a mountain. I breathed the smoke that results from the entire western half of the continent being on fire. I finally caught up on all my schoolwork so that I’m on track as I begin the fall semester. I’m even trying to […]
Read more "A Tarot Spread for When You’ve Dropped the Ball"
Jack Chanek 