I’ve been working my way through the suit cards of the Tarot de Marseille, trying to get to know them on their own terms and without any preconceptions about what they ought to mean. Largely, I’ve been doing this by looking at the cards in conjunction with cards from the trumps, seeing how the meaning […]
Read more "A Year of Tarot de Marseille: The Fives"Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Beverly Keane. For those who don’t know her, Bev Keane is a major antagonist from Mike Flanagan’s small-town Catholic horror series Midnight Mass on Netflix. She is the embodiment of sanctimonious self-righteousness; an early scene in the show has her admonishing the town’s new priest for wearing the […]
Read more "Bev Keane, Hierophant"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"I love James Bond. I grew up with him. The Bond movies are the only films my parents own, and I’ve seen each of them (yes, even Never Say Never Again, which isn’t canon) so many times I’ve lost count. My family’s Thanksgiving tradition during my childhood was always to get Chinese takeout and watch James Bond […]
Read more "The James Bond Tarot (Part 1)"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 High Priestess is such an incredible, powerful card. She is the initiator, the guardian of the threshold, the one before whom we must pass if we are ever to attain higher knowledge. (Wow, I just reread that passage after a couple of days away from this draft. I sure do sound pompous, don’t I? […]
Read more "Who Is the High Priestess’s Consort?"I had a reading last week with the best querent ever. Well, perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but during the course of the reading she did the best possible thing that a querent can do, and I am immensely grateful to her for it. I pulled up a couple of cards that screamed […]
Read more "Client Feedback Rocks"As long as I’ve been reading Tarot, I’ve had a patron card, a single key from the Major Arcana that represents myself as a reader and my relationship to Tarot. This card is different from my significator (although we’ve also had that discussion here on the blog). This card is something other than myself, something […]
Read more "On Tarot Patrons, Part 1: The Hierophant"I have a complicated relationship with the Hierophant. Truth be told, I think most Tarot readers do. The Hierophant is dogma. He represents tradition, the kind of authority that expects us to submit ourselves without question. He is a fear of innovation and a desire for permanence and stability in the world–the powerful need to […]
Read more "Tradition and Innovation"I hate beginnings. I hate that moment at the start of a new project when I have to consecrate it, to name it, to finally take the beautiful, completed masterpiece I have in my head and translate it to a sloppy, material work in progress. It’s so disheartening to remember that I’m not yet at […]
Read more "And So It Begins"
Jack Chanek 