Today we’re continuing my project of exploring the Tarot de Marseille on its own terms, setting aside preconceptions about what the cards mean and trying to let the deck itself tell me its significance. If you’re new to this series of posts, check out my introduction, my posts on the methods behind my numerology and […]
Read more "A Year of Tarot de Marseille: The Twos"The Wheel of Fortune is an odd card to turn up in a reading. Generally speaking, when people ask for a Tarot reading, it’s because they’re looking for knowledge about their lives. They have a question, some open thing that’s murky and unclear to them, and they’re hoping that you (with your transcendent mystical hoobedy-hoobedy […]
Read more "The Wheel of Fortune: Sometimes You Don’t Get to Know"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 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)"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"I’ve written a couple of times before about the devotional work I do with Tarot. One thing I haven’t much discussed, though, is the notion of myth-making as it factors into my personal Tarot practice. Religion involves myth. Before we have theology (and arguably before we have praxis) we have stories, which structure the things […]
Read more "A Tarot Fairy Tale"I’ve been thinking a lot about boundaries lately, both in the abstract philosophical sense and in the more practical, personal sense. In popular culture and in the hoobedy-hoobedy world specifically, we talk about Halloween as a time where the boundary between life and death is blurred.* And in the buildup to Halloween (excuse me: Samhain) […]
Read more "Samhain Musings on the High Priestess and Boundaries"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?"
Jack Chanek 