Tarot lessons – Page 5 – Just the Tarot

The Fool – Alone but not Lonely

In the first (or the last, depending on your perspective) card of the Major Arcana we see The Fool starting off on his Spiritual Quest, a dog barking at his feet, his eyes turned toward the heavens.

And he’s very much alone. But maybe not lonely.

“Just the Tarot,” by Dan Adair – Available on Amazon

What starts us on a Spiritual Quest? It’s certainly not because things are going swimmingly. Sometimes it just a chronic, nagging feeling that something in our lives is just not quite right. Sometimes it’s a sudden flash of insight that’s like the first rolling stone that starts an avalanche.

Frequently it’s some life event that knocks us ass over teakettle and forces us to look at the fact that our assumptions and beliefs have been wrong all along. That what we took for granted isn’t worth a bag of spit. The death of a loved one. The suicide of a coworker. Surviving a crash or a deadly disease.

Even then, many people will embrace what might be called “a pseudo-quest,” or perhaps, “an aborted quest.” Shocked and shaken right down to their toes by some near catastrophe they respond by pulling the covers over their heads and crawling into the safe, warm womb of organized religions. Like the men kneeling in front of the pope in The Hierophant card they look to others for spiritual truth rather than seeking it in their own hearts.

The person on a true Spiritual Quest is there because he or she HAS to be. The choices of pretense, dull lassitude, and being a comfortable member of the herd no longer exist for them. They have a burning desire to know – or at least seek – the truth and that desire can’t be ignored.

And, yes, that can feel lonely at times.

For one thing most people aren’t really very interested in looking at the verities of Spiritual life. The next time that you’re at a family gathering just casually mention that everyone in the room is going to die sooner or later if you don’t believe me. You may not be invited back and, if you are, I guarantee no one will want to sit next to you at Thanksgiving Dinner. People actually seek out toys, money, meaningless sex, and anything else they can think of to AVOID talking about death and they don’t appreciate it when someone puts the subject right up in their faces.

A second factor, though, is that your Spiritual truths are YOUR Spiritual truths and not necessarily anyone else’s. As you tread your way down the path of The Fool you will discover certain things that you know in your heart are true but the people around you, even your loved ones, may think that you’re out of your mind. Or very much a Fool.

I remember when I first realized that visualization actually causes the things we visualize to manifest in our lives. And I don’t mean just reading about it or acknowledging it as an abstract idea. I mean actually sitting my butt down, doing the visualizations and having them actually manifest.

I was blown away. “This,” I thought, “is magic. Real, honest to goddess, freaking magic!”

And that realization was followed by a whole series of other realizations. If my thoughts and emotions can cause things to manifest in my life, then my life is . . . a manifestation of my thoughts and emotions.

Which means that I made this mess. Not my parents, not my environment, not my culture, not random circumstances. This thing I call my life is . . . ME. My thoughts. My emotions.

Which means that I’m responsible for it. It’s my karma that I made. BUT . . . it also means I can change it. And, man, that’s not just magic . . . that’s freedom!

It was a major turning in The Fool’s Path and I was tremendously excited about it. The people I tried to share it with . . . not so much. My New Agey friends sort of yawned and said things like, “Oh, yeah, I think I read something like that a long time ago in Ram Dass. Or was it, ‘A Course in Miracles?’ Maybe it was, ‘Codependent No More . . .”

My more conventional friends either edged slowly away or their mouths hung open for a moment before they changed the subject.

I realized eventually that it was MY Spiritual truth. It was a result of my Tarot readings and my studies and my meditations and it fit perfectly at that exact moment in MY life. The fact that other people didn’t understand it or know it or really, really dig it in their own hearts didn’t matter. What mattered was that I had found one of my truths.

And there’s a Spiritual truth in that realization, too. Just because you’re alone in your beliefs doesn’t mean you have to feel lonely. In all likelihood the people around you don’t share or understand your truths because they haven’t done the work that you have or they just don’t care. That doesn’t diminish what you know by one little bit. Every truth that you find along the path is a jewel to be treasured and uncovers a little bit more of who you really are.

The Hermit: “For What Does It Profit a Man to Gain the Whole World But Lose His Soul?”

I am fortunate enough to live in one of the most beautiful places in the United States, the Trinity Alps of far Northern California. There are gorgeous rivers and streams and lakes, mountains, two national forests, a plethora of eagles, hawks, ravens, bears, trout, and salmon. And there are only 13,000 people living in the entire county so you can still actually spend hours walking in the woods or sitting by a river by yourself.

We have thousands of tourists come through every summer and a sizable minority of them are just plain miserable. It’s either too hot or it’s too cold, there aren’t enough cashiers in the grocery store, the ATM wasn’t working, the water in the river is too cold to swim in, it’s too quiet, it’s boring, the internet isn’t fast enough, etc., etc., etc.

It’s kind of sad. These people have spent thousands of dollars to go to a beautiful, tranquil place to get away from their problems for a few weeks and it turns out that the main problem they have is . . . them. They’re just not happy people. And they brought themselves with them.

Like the old cliche’ says, “No matter where you go, there you are.”

The Hermit is about a period of withdrawal from the world. About getting out of the stream of time and events for a while so that you can either figure out or remember who you really are. But, as we can surmise from the unhappy tourists in Trinity County, there’s a little more involved with that than just running away from home.

A researcher named Marsha Sinetar wrote a fascinating book on the subject called, “Ordinary People As Monks and Mystics, Lifestyles For Self-Discovery.” She put ads in several papers across the country seeking out people who had chosen to withdraw from everyday life and based the book on her interviews with them.

Several things become obvious as you read through the book. The first is that these people experienced a massive reordering of what they considered to be valuable (also known as, “their values.”) At some point in their lives they simply decided that the new car, the big house, the fancy computers, the pay raise at the job, and yes, even the marriage to the, “perfect spouse,” and 2.5, “perfect children,” were all bullshit. All of the things that we might ordinarily consider important and satisfying and fun had become unimportant distractions to them.

What BECAME important to them were, oddly, the things that used to be part of the human birthright but which many of us have lost in modern life. Time alone. Time to think. Time to meditate. Being in nature. Reading. Silence. Contemplation.

And – again, oddly – claiming these simple things which used to be free to every human being actually, “cost,” them a fair amount. Most of them had to walk away from the high paying jobs and start doing part time jobs and learn to live on less money and with fewer possessions. They walked away from the social status and from the concept that they were, “important people,” as defined by others and walked toward the concept of being, “important people,” as defined by their own hearts.

Some of them became alienated from their families who refused to accept their new lifestyles. “Why are you living out in the woods with a dog instead of finding a good husband and having kids? What’s wrong with you?”

These are mainly seen as sacrifices by people on the outside looking in, though. To the participants in the study they were very small sacrifices to make for having the luxuries of time and solitude.

“Time, not money, seemed to be the element most coveted for their new life. . . they didn’t have to be financially secure, they just had to FEEL secure . . .”

And that was one of the biggest takeaways for me from this book. Modern life, as most of us know it, is a thief. It steals our TIME and in doing so it steals our ability to think about who we are and why we’re here. In exchange it gives us, “things,” – toys, computers, cars, houses, money – and then it hypnotizes us into thinking that those things are actually us, actually the life that it just stole from us.

The Hermit is about throwing away the trinkets and finding the gold. Taking back your time and your Self and your Soul.

Getting Real – The Hanged Man

An exploration of the loss of false identity and the need to create an authentic self as exemplified in The Hanged Man tarot card.

I said in my original definition of The Hanged Man that having this archetype blow through your life is a lot like getting hit in the face with a two by four. It involves an experience that is so painful, so truly devastating that you have to totally reevaluate how you relate to life and the souls around you.

In other words, you have to have a new framework for your existence.

We tend to focus on the central figure of The Hanged Man – the individual hanging from one foot with his hands tied behind him – and not see the background of the picture which includes the frame from which he is hanging. The frame, though, is every bit as important as the person.

A.E. Waite chose to design the frame in a shape which is very much like a cross and evocative of Jesus, but that’s not how the frame was shown in the older cards. It normally consisted of two living trees, one on each side, with a beam laid across their tops. It wasn’t a cross and had zippity doo dah to do with Jesus.

We can, perhaps, get a better grasp of what the inventors of the Tarot were getting at if we look at The Hanged Man from the old Marseille deck.

The name is Le Pendu, the hanging one. It’s related to a slew of our modern words such as pendant, pendulum, dependent, and depend. The commonality is that they all describe something that hangs from something else.

We all have a central point that our worlds (as we perceive them) hang from. You might call it your, “identity.” Or perhaps your, “social fabric.” It’s made up of a myriad of factors that, blended together, make up the way that we see the world and our places in it.

“I’m a conservative hispanic catholic from New Mexico.”

“I’m a liberal jew from Marin County.”

“I’m an african american wiccan from Alabama.”

There are literally millions upon millions of variations, with each of us picking out and identifying with the things that make us feel unique and influence the way we perceive the world and our lives. “This is who I am.”

The Hanged Man has had a forced realization that everything he believed in, everything he thought of as, “myself,” was an illusion. Maybe it was a divorce that caused him to see that. Maybe it was the death of a child. Maybe it was an illness. Whatever it was he KNOWS that his previous life wasn’t real.

No, you aren’t your sports car because that can be taken away from you.

And you aren’t your house.

Or your brand new computer.

Or your family.

Or your religion.

Or even the color of your skin because, in case you haven’t noticed, you’re not taking that with you when you leave this beautiful world.

The Hanged Man has had that kind of a shocking realization. That none of it’s really REAL. Everything he dePENDED on can vanish in the blink of an eye. Everything he hung his identity from was an illusion. He’ll never see the world in the same way again.

And now he has to put himself back together, only this time in a way that IS real and that can’t be taken away from him. He needs to reclaim his soul.

When you look at the trees in the old Marseille card it’s obvious that the branches have been cut off. Everything that was once his life has been pruned away. BUT . . . the tips of the branches also look very much like buds in the Spring. Full of life and ready to grow again.

Here’s how Eckhart Tole put it in The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment:

“Ego is no more than identification with form, which primarily means thought forms . . . What a liberation to realize that, ‘the voice in my head,’ is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that.”

That’s the Hanged Man.

Just the Tarot by Dan Adair – a kindle ebook available on Amazon

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The High Priestess and Growing Your Intuition

A discussion of intuition as a function of the right hemisphere of the brain making sudden contact with the left hemisphere and The High Priestess as a representation of that mid-brain connection.

The High Priestess represents our connection with what some people call, “deep mind.” She is our – frequently unconscious – connection with the higher realms of spirit and magic. She is the exact point where the truth travels through the creative, feminine right brain and emerges in consciousness in the linear, masculine left brain as a flash of, “intuition.”

It all sounds very complicated but it’s not. It’s actually hardwired into our system but we’ve taught ourselves to ignore it. Our language, however, is replete with phrases describing it.

“I had a hunch . . .”

“I just had a feeling . . .”

“Something told me . . .”

“I just knew . . .”

What all of that describes is suddenly reaching a firm, undoubtable conclusion without any preceding rational thought. And, yes, it seems magical for exactly that reason: it seems to burst out of nowhere.

Another way that it manifests is as a, “sixth sense.”

If you’re hiking in the woods and a predator is watching you, you somehow, “know,” it and the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. Combat soldiers describe the same feelings just before the enemy starts shooting at them.

A classic example is thinking of someone you haven’t seen in years and the phone suddenly rings and it’s them.

A silly example is that if a man is walking behind a woman and stares at her butt she will always know that someone is staring at her butt. I don’t know how women do that, but it’s true.

Now, to a rationalist all of that is impossible. You can’t, “sense,” that a mountain lion is watching you or that a guy is staring at your butt or that an old friend is about to call. But we still do. It happens and we all KNOW that it happens.

So, two thoughts on, “intuition,” that we should probably keep in mind. First of all, we live in a society that denigrates it and treats it as if it’s irrational. It’s not irrational, it’s NON rational, or perhaps META rational. It has nothing to do with the left brain, logical, linear thinking process that the western world worships. It, “arrives,” out of thin air, like a telegram from an angel. But it’s also not a metaphysical belief.

It’s important to be clear about metaphysical beliefs. I’ve known christian fundamentalists who believed that Jesus is right there at their sides 24/7 to solve each and every problem that they’ll ever have. And that this beautiful world of ours is positively dripping with devils and demons who have nothing better to do than make people have, “impure thoughts,” about their neighbor’s wives.

I think fundamentalists are total fruit cakes but, hey, they’re welcome to believe whatever they want.

I believe in ghosts and spirit guides and totem animals and the Goddess, and I’m sure the christian fundamentalists think I’m a total fruit cake.

The point with either set of beliefs is that they are metaphysical and totally unprovable one way or the other. They are NOT demonstrable facts. They are beliefs.

Intuition, on the other hand, operates daily in the physical world. There are millions of reported incidents of it and anyone who says it’s not real is either in denial or an idiot.

Second, we can all do it. And we can get better at it. That’s important.

We tend to think that some people are psychic and some people aren’t. Some people can read Tarot cards and some people can’t. Some people can achieve enlightenment and some people never will.

It’s not true. It’s just a function of time and effort. I guarantee you that if you sit down every day and concentrate on your brow chakra for 15 minutes you WILL start to see some magical, astral scenes. If you read Tarot cards over a period of time you WILL become more psychic.

It’s exactly the same deal with intuition. It’s something that you were born with and it’s just a matter of practicing. Start paying a little more attention to your feelings. Start asking the universe (or your angels or your spirit guides or your totem animals) for answers when you’re puzzled about something. And the answers will appear. Just like magic.

You are The High Priestess. You just forgot.

Queen of Pentacles

The meaning of the Queen of Pentacles in a Tarot reading, with definitions for both the upright and reversed positions.

A crowned woman sits on a heavily carved throne adorned with goats and cherubs. She is surrounded by a lush garden and gazes down at a pentacle which she holds in her lap. A rabbit is hopping by in the lower corner of the card.

Upright: This is a very sensuous, materialistic woman. Since this is the Queen of Pentacles, the suit of money and possessions, we know that both of those are very important to this woman. Beyond that, though, there is an awareness of the fact that money really represents the good things in life that money can buy. This is a woman who enjoys – and expects – the finer things in life. A nice car, a lovely home, a good income, and, yes, probably a very nice garden.

And with the goats on the throne and the rabbit at her feet we can interpret that there is a very strong element of sexuality to this woman. Among the other fine things she expects and enjoys are good lovers and slow, delicious love making.

On a mundane level, look for a woman who possesses and excellent business sense and knows how to turn money into more money.

Reversed: A tough, resilient business woman who is willing to get down in the ditches and fight it out hand to hand. Very good with money but there is a hard, materialistic edge to her soul.

EXAMPLES: A middle aged business woman who lives happily alone in a beautiful home and enjoys sharing her bed with the occasional lover.

A sensual, beautiful wife who EXPECTS to be supported in a luxurious manner because she’s damned well worth it.

Knight of Pentacles

The meaning of the Knight of Pentacles in a Tarot reading with definitions for both the upright and reversed positions.

A heavily armored man sits astride an immobile horse. He holds a pentacle aloft in his gloved hand. Sprigs of greenery are attached to his helmet and to the mane of the horse. A plowed field stretches out behind him.

Upright: A good money card, though hardly exciting or glamorous. Unlike the Knight of Swords, this Knight isn’t going anywhere. He sits still, solidly planted on his very solid looking horse. The plowed field represents the routine, day to day, hard work that’s necessary to bring projects to fruition. This card shows a dependable, hard working individual who takes care of details and keeps money coming in.

On a mundane level, this may show the presence of a young, conservative individual in the questioners life.

Reversed: Problems with money due to the disruption of the daily routine. A young, conservative person who is causing problems in the questioners life.

EXAMPLES: The single mother or father who reliably shows up for work every day, does the job with no drama or complaints, and put food on the table and shoes on the baby.

A college student who grinds his or her way through to a PhD by taking a few courses every year while working a full time job.

Page of Pentacles

The meaning of the Page of Pentacles in a Tarot Reading, including definitions for both the upright and reversed positions.

A young man in a fancy hat stands in a beautiful field and holds a single pentacle aloft with both hands.

Upright: Good news about business ventures is on the way. Look for the possibility of a promotion or a raise.

There may be a young person present in the questioners life who is doing exceptionally well. Perhaps graduating with honors or receiving a scholarship.

Reversed: Financial news may be discouraging for a brief period of time. The young person may be experiencing difficulties rather than honors.

EXAMPLES: A fairly junior employee who is promoted for doing excellent work.

A young man or woman who totally nails the college entrance exams.

Ten of Pentacles

The meaning of the Ten of Pentacles in a Tarot reading, with definitions for both the upright and reversed positions.

An elderly, bearded man draped in a shawl sits and pets some dogs. A man, a woman and a child stand just beyond him and the child reaches out to touch one of the dogs. A tower and part of a castle complex are visible through an archway and ten pentacles are arranged in the pattern of the tree of life.

Upright: This is the end of the pentacle or money cycle and indicates good fortune and financial success. There is a strong, multi-generational presence of family in the card so it may indicate a family owned business which has done very well. The elderly man may point toward a happy, secure retirement.

Reversed: Money is on the way. It may be of the unexpected sort such as winning a lottery. May point toward securing a good pension and medical benefits.

EXAMPLES: A family owned store that is thriving and expanding.

Turning your business over to your children or grandchildren and entering a happy, well deserved retirement.

Nine of Pentacles

The meaning of the Nine of Pentacles in a Tarot reading, with definitions for both the upright and reversed positions.

A woman in a long, flowing robe stands in a garden surrounded by pentacles. Her left hand is covered with a heavy leather glove and a bind folded hawk perches there.

Upright: A card of financial success with an emphasis on the home. Perhaps redecorating or redesigning the questioners residence. There is also an odd element of a lack of freedom here. Possibly someone who has compromised his or her desires for freedom in order to have security. In any case the card is very positive in terms of money.

Reversed: Bad news financially. If the questioner is involved in some sort of money making project she should cut her losses and walk away. Continued efforts along these lines can lead to financial ruin.

EXAMPLES: The trophy wife who has oodles of cash and a brand new luxury car but is very much under the thumb of her husband.

A writer or artist who has given up his creative ambitions but is still doing very well financially.

Eight of Pentacles

The Eight of Pentacles in a Tarot reading, including definitions for both the upright and reversed positions.

A craftsman sits astride a wooden bench carving a pentacle into a tablet. Six pentacles are displayed on an upright beam and one lies on the ground.

Upright: Profiting from your skills. Learning new skills that will advance your career. Possible promotions or awards at work.

Reversed: Employment problems that may involve a need for retraining or learning new job skills. Possibly the questioners position being eliminated or some sort of a reshuffle of employees that will place him or her in a job requiring different skills.

EXAMPLES: The office worker who knows how to do ALL of the jobs at the office and gets promoted to supervisor as a result.

An apprentice electrician, carpenter, or plumber who is studying at night to get his contractors license.