tarot blog – Page 2 – 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.

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

Disclaimer: “As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.”

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.