I’ve been out-of-service for a while.  I’m back.  I’ve decided to offer a 10% re-opening discount.  Have a reading, and pay only 90% of what you think it’s worth.

maryelizabethb

In overview, Queen of Serpents reversed at the base indicates great unrealized creative and spiritual potential.  You’re on a cusp there, at a decision-point, whether to remain with what you know or undertake a challenging quest.  Queen of Pears in the heart of the spread symbolizes emotional self-absorption, narcissism. Patterns immediately catch the eye:  The green suit of Stones predominates, symbolic of Earth, representing matter, money, property — the physical plane; two fives, two aces, an X formed of 2 cards in the red suit of Serpents (Spirit) and 2 in the blue suit of Blades (Mind).

Fives indicate a crisis, the lowest point in a cycle of experience, the place in time where things start getting better because they’ve gone as far down as they can.  By their positions and suits, they tell me that a material (health and/or wealth) crisis becomes for you a spiritual issue, exhausting your creative energies.  Then, in turn, a spiritual crisis affects your relationships and emotional life in a very positive way, drawing you out of yourself, bringing people into your life.  Having the crisis turn around and begin improving is something you really need emotionally: mentally a much-needed relief.

Resolving the matter requires your presence and attention.  There are just a few issues to settle, loose ends to tie, before it can reach completion.  One of the most valuable things you’re getting out of this is experience, down-to-earth knowledge.  Recognize the value in that, appreciate it, keep it in mind for future reference.

Aces symbolize the start of a new cycle of experience. Their suits and positions caution you to beware a tendency to be over-analytical about your relationships and feelings, and to avoid magical thinking where your health and material well-being are concerned.  That means don’t neglect rest, nutrition and physical care, expecting to get by on higher-plane energies.  You are a holistic being and need to fulfill your needs at all levels.

The four and five of stones at the top show just how much your current focus on material things is draining your spirit and creative energy.  It will begin to ease now, but the crisis of spirit will lag a bit behind the resolution of material issues.  Remember:  nothing is too good to be true, and everything works out perfectly if you are ready to perceive the perfection.

Lastly, the Major Trump, Doer, reversed on the positive side of the spiritual level – progress and completion that hasn’t happened yet, something you need to do, to cause to happen.  It is the realization of your creative potential in the Light of Spirit, and nothing could be easier, because all you have to do is be yourself, no frills, no masks, nothing concealed, just you, like an open book, keeping in touch with your shadow side and finding your purpose in your ideals.

Let me know if I may be of further service.

It has been said that, “Knowledge is power.” (Sir Francis Bacon, Religious Meditations, Of Heresies, 1597.) However, one of the perennial choices a Seeker on the Path must make – usually the very first choice one must make – is between knowledge and power. 

The Fool is faced with that choice but has not yet made it.

The Fool’s image, the first Tarot Trump, represents both the beginning and the end of the Initiate’s Path – the Alpha and Omega.  He is at the still point lying both before the quest begins and at its end.

Zero, empty, void, unformed, ready for anything and prepared for nothing, without expectations or preconceptions, he stands.

Then, when he has realized there is a choice to be made, making his initial choice, usually an initiate chooses power.

He goes suddenly from nowhere and nothing to all and everything.

From having but one single choice between action and inaction, he slips instantaneously into having an infinity of options.

How does he handle the situation?  Traditionally, he does it poorly.  He is often portrayed off-balance or very delicately balanced, dancing and juggling, struggling for control of forces beyond his understanding.

Four symbols appear on virtually every depiction of the Magus.  They represent the four classical elements: Earth, Fire, Air and Water, or, in more contemporary terms, matter, energy, space, and time.

Often, the symbols for the elements are the same as for the traditional Tarot suits: Coins or Pentacles, Rods or Staves, Swords or Blades, and Cups or Hearts.

 Sometimes, new symbolism is used.  Whether the symbolism is traditional or idiosyncratic, usually some esoteric or insider knowledge is needed to interpret it.

In The Book of T: New Tarot for the Aquarian Age, the hooded (unknown, mysterious) eagle (power) has a strong, bloody grip (both unease and surety – It may be uncomfortable, but the power isn’t leaving you now, even if you want it to.) on his left (unconscious) shoulder.  The blank, featureless globe on which he stands (the mysterious – to him – unknown source of his new and extraordinary abilities) empowers him, through his humble (the style of his clothing) acceptance and dependance (the stance) on it, to consciously create (right hand holding flower) while he unconsciously heals (the flow of water from the left hand).  Before him on the cloth of gold (truth) lay the symbols for all things that lie within his power (matter, energy, space and time) as long as he is willing to trust the source and be the humble channel for its power.

Any questions? …comments?

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(Edited September 8, 2011)

Previously on the path:  The Fool and a brief comparison between Divination and Magick.

missliss67

Greyfox saw details of only one life for you, but he mentioned a feeling that you have “warrior karma” from other lives as well.

In this life, you lived during the Viking times, around the turn of the first millennium C.E., plus or minus a century or so.  Your husband was one of the seagoing reavers who raided coastal settlements in Europe and the British Isles at that time.

Greyfox saw you as a, “big robust Xena-esque figure.”

not like this

Childless, feeling both guilt and rage about your childlessness, and probably lonely at home, you decided to accompany your man on a raid.  There was lots of flack from the other guys.  To the first one who protested about how it was unlucky to have a woman on board, you just replied, “Unlucky for you, maybe,” and decked him.  After that, you were accepeted as a member of the crew, dressed as a man, and kept up the life of a reaver even after your man was killed.

not like this

You took to that lifestyle happily and comfortably.  It was your right livelihood, due mostly, I’m sure, to the warrior karma from lives previous to that one.  In this life, in addition to complex feelings about violence and conflict, you are likely to have strong feelings about having kids, and about feminism in general.

more like this, but with breasts instead of a beard

@missliss67

A gentle reminder and heartfelt appeal –

Many readers might be too young to remember the character, Wimpy, from old Popeye cartoons.  Wimpy’s signature line was, “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.”

Having always practiced the divinatory arts under the age old system now being called, “the new anarcho-capitalism”:  “pay what you think the service is worth after you receive it,” I have had plenty of opportunity to observe human behavior in its many commercial and economic facets.  I observed, for example, that some people will value a product or service according to its cost, rather than evaluating it on its usefulness, beauty or some other criteria.  In my opinion, that’s absurdly simpleminded and counterproductive.

Another trait I observed is something Greyfox and I call the Wimpy Effect:  those who tell us in advance of a reading that they will pay afterward, generally tend not to pay.  A corollary to the Wimpy Effect is that we’re more likely to get paid by those who don’t even mention payment beforehand than by those who vow to pay.  This has long been a source of bemusement and wry amusement to us.

I’m here today to appeal to you — if, in the past, you pulled a Wimpy on me or on my partner Greyfox, who does all the past-life readings, now is the time to make good on your pledge.  Greyfox is losing his eyesight.  The conditions are treatable, but physicians and surgeons don’t work under the new anarcho-capitalistic system.

Greyfox provides details on his personal blog, in an entry titled, please help me not go blind.  He supplied 3 payment options, and you could also use the PayPal link below.

Apocatastasis

I see several indications in the reality check spread of impending change:  a ten adjacent to a reversed ace (completion of one cycle, and another ready to begin); Kings at both crown and base, with the one at the base reversed (symbolizing a potential, not yet manifest); and the only Major Trumps in the spread are opposite each other on the same level, reversed (again, something existing in potential), with both cards symbolically related to change or unstable situations.

King of Stones in the Crown position, denoting where you are on your spiritual path, suggests a concrete, earthy, materialistic and pragmatic view of or approach to spiritual matters, and/or some adamant, stubbornly held beliefs.  King of Pears reversed at the base indicates a potential shift to a more intuitive approach and more fluid, flexible perspective.

Two cards in the suit of Stones, denoting the Earth element (physical matters or material things) are on the material level of the spread.  Four on the left side and six in the center indicate that the worst of an ongoing crisis is past, but you drag it out through negative expectations.  The reversed Ace of Serpents (suit of elemental Fire, spirit, energy, creativity) on the right indicates that inspiration and/or creative action can potentially provide a solution and way out of the crisis.

The next level up:  feelings, emotions and relationships, has the two of Serpents on the left, suggesting that your discontent stems from difficulty at the beginning of a cycle of spiritual experience or a creative endeavor.  It is as if you took the first step and ran into an obstacle.  The ten of Blades opposite that two suggests that you have reached an intellectual plateau or anticlimax, and that this (probably an awareness that you can neither go back nor stay where you are) gives you the motivation to keep trying to break through that initial obstacle on the new path.  Seven of Pears (suit of alchemical Water, emotions, intuition) in the center indicates emotional growth, progress, and improvement in interpersonal relations.

  Flanking the King of Stones on the top level (spirit), are the two reversed Major cards:  Changer on the left and Hanging Man on the right.  Changer represents an Aquarian Age evolution of the old Magician.  In this placement and the reversed position, it suggests that impediments to spiritual progress exist in reluctance or conceptual inability to own and exercise your creative power, to consciously co-create your reality.

  The reversal of the card on the right or “positive” side means that the ideas symbolized by this card are what you need to understand and internalize in order to progress further on your spiritual path.  Essentially, this man is hung up between past and future.  One foot is stuck in the past, while the other just lightly rests on the future, uncertain about what lies ahead, hesitant to move on.  Nostalgia gets you nowhere, but keeps you in discomfort and sadness — and not just you but everyone to whom you are attached, by their bonds or your own.

Synthesizing both these Major cards, what is needed to get moving is more openness, courage, curiosity, confidence, conscious action instead of unconscious creation  — in other words, more acting from intention and less reactivity.  Before you can exercise your full power, you must realize it is yours and trust yourself to use it.

———————–

Your question concerned the “troubled dynamic” in your relationship with your mother.  For this reading, I’m using a 21-card Gypsy spread (also called Horseshoe Spread) and the Golden Dawn Tarot.

Your part of this “dynamic” comes essentially from the fact that you didn’t come into this life as a blank slate.  You possess wisdom gained in past lives, and you carry expectations born of those other experiences.  These expectations are unreasonable given your present circumstances, but that doesn’t make them any less compelling.

Your mother, of course, knows nothing of this.  She fights you.  She responds to your need for autonomy by trying harder to control you.  She expects, consciously and self-righteously, as the elder, the kind of deference and subservience from you that your past experiences lead you to unconsciously expect from the world.  She reacts with sterner repression if you rebel against her.  Conflict escalates.

She loves you with all her heart and understands you not at all.  In fact, there’s a lot about this reality that she fails to understand. The soul connection that might resolve your conflicts just doesn’t exist.  Matters of the soul, and beliefs about soul matters, are further sources of conflict between you.  Her father or father-figure was controlling and domineering, which impaired her emotional development.  You expect her to display emotional maturity she doesn’t possess, while she wants things from you that you can’t give and she has no right to demand.

You need to be concerned more with yourself and your own “dynamic” than with your mother or any of your other relationships.  It is time for you to own your power and begin to attain your creative potential.  The fifth section of this spread echoes the theme of the reality check, above.  Your current material circumstances:  work, home, lifestyle, habits, etc., are acting like a cork in a bottle, a dam across a stream, a lid on a boiling pot.  I don’t see your conflicts easing or a ticket to paradise dropping into your lap, but things do have to change.  As the other spread indicated, the current situation is unstable.

To make the kind of break that will work to your advantage, don’t think too much about it.  You could spend the rest of your life weighing pros and cons.  If you don’t make the move toward the monastery soon, you might find yourself committed to another course, and never make it.  If it is what you truly desire, now is the time.

na-relle

The most obvious aspect of this reading, an impression that immediately jumps out at me, is a clear conflict between intellect and spirit.  The intellect involved is immature, programmed by culture, with a bottom-heavy education focusing on the material plane and deficient on the mental/emotional and spiritual planes.  The entire left-hand column of the spread, the side dealing with “negatives” –  obstacles, challenges, lacks — is in the suit of Blades, the element of Air, symbolizing intellectual thought and verbal communication.

The “overview” card at the base is Page of Blades reversed, a young person expressing the negative aspects of Air qualities:  competitiveness, inconstancy, inconsistency, two-facedness, deceit, ego-driven striving for attention.

On the physical/material level, fearful emotions are the result of a mind monopolized by linear logic, and excessive attention to material needs, wants, losses and lack, with an incomplete understanding of The Flow, creativity, holistic thinking, and spirituality.

The emotional level further expands on those fears.  The card in the center is the first of two Major Trumps in this spread:  Actor.  The “mask” the subject wears is bland and purposely non-threatening, more defense than disguise.  Anyone with perception who pays attention can see the real person behind the mask.  He or she hides more from self than from others.  There is some idealism involved, a desire to project what is judged as “right” or “good,” without regard for the value of truth.

The effect of this deception is self-disempowerment.  Creativity comes through the true self.  The greatest artistic masterworks are those that reveal the artist’s innermost self.  Relationships based on false projections and false impressions eventually get down to the truth, or they either end or proceed unhappily.  The card’s symbols denote how one can gain power, prestige, wisdom and contentment by dropping the mask.

Two of Blades on the left, denotes an inability to wrap one’s mind around the reality here.  That difficulty of logical, linear intellect to adequately describe or understand emotions or higher spiritual realities presents an obstacle to happiness and emotional fulfillment, as well as to the formation of healthy lasting relationships.  Balancing it on the other side, the strengths or resources represented by the right-hand column, the two of Serpents suggests that spiritual experience and/or creative fulfillment can provide the way out, but one has difficulty opening to inspiration.

On the top level, spirit, the center card is the Mother, representing creative energies in stasis.  Symbolically she is pictured as pregnant, delicately balanced, in possession of power and creative energy but keeping it cloaked and unexpressed.  Like pregnancy, this condition cannot endure forever. How it ends depends on the subject’s choices and actions.  Inaction characterizes the present situation.  It feels to me like a fearful paralysis.

The “obstacle” card here is three of Blades, a student’s status, still learning and in this case (because of the card’s placement) learning things that will only increase the difficulty of breaking out of the creative stasis, a dead-end course of study.  The balancing card on the other side is five of Stones.  In a seeming paradox, a material (physical or financial) crisis is the asset that can set the subject on a more productive course.

Please let me know if I may be of further service.  You will need to consult further with Greyfox about the past-life reading you requested before he will be willing to begin on it.

quitchick 

Change is coming.  Change is due, and it might feel like overdue.  Spiritually, you’re on an anticlimactic emotional plateau and you know — you are inescapably aware — that you couldn’t stay there even if you wanted to.

And yet you resist change.  There are choices to be made, and thinking about them does not resolve your indecision.  You just don’t know, and without knowing the right move, you could make a wrong choice.

Gone from your life now is a mentor and protector, a father figure you could never replace.  Instead, you are on your own in a way that you never have been… on your own, but not alone.  Relationships and human bonds are the only areas I see where you are securely in control and unafraid.  Even though you face the unknown in every aspect of life, where your loved ones are involved it is with more of a sense of adventure than uncertainty.

First, let’s look at your strengths.  In your comfort zone of people and relationships, generally, you are optimistic, lucky and secure.  You have put a lot of effort into self-mastery and it has paid off in a poise that is largely unconscious now.  You are comfortable in your own skin.  Your conscious focus is creative.  Conflicts exist at the edge of your awareness, but you choose happiness.

In order to make the decisions facing you and initiate changes that will work in your best interests, you need the courage to trust the inner guidance of Spirit.  You are now being challenged to make the “empty-handed leap into the void.”  In symbolic terms, you are called upon to “drink the cup of fire,” to do something that seems risky, even self-destructive.  That’s the seeming.  The reality is that you would be submerging one self in a Higher Self.

A cup of fire or a cauldron of fire doesn’t seem like something to approach too closely.  When the “fire” is the power and energy of Spirit, taking it in, opening to inspiration, empowers us.  Jumping into it, immersing ourselves in it, transmutes us.  When we place ourselves where spiritual “fire” meets the “water” of the unconscious mind, we are energized by the steam erupting from their joining.  That is where the knowing that you seek can come from.

-Technical notes:  10-card Tree of Life spread, Book of T (I AM ONE) Tarot.  Minor cards:  Blade King rev. bottom left; Pear 10 center top; 3 of Blades top right; 3 of Stones mid-left; 3 of Serpents center bottom.  Major Trumps:  Knower rev. top left; Victorious One center; Nameless One mid-right; Deliverer rev. bottom right; Changer rev. at Base.

OneSweetWorld

The cards suggest that you recently experienced an emotional and spiritual crisis that could have impelled you into a new world view.  Instead, you responded to the crisis by returning to past patterns, the same ones that had led you into that crisis.

It is not too late to learn from experience.  Especially in your emotional life and relationships, you are ripe for big changes.  You probably don’t feel ready to launch yourself into a new paradigm.  There is some comfort for you in the old ways.  However, this troubled time is your springboard.  Emotionally, you need change, relief — and the idea that it can be found by regressing is an illusion.

The loss of your anchor and support was what triggered the crisis, and your own Earthy tendency toward inertia, a natural resistance to change, has worked against you.  Giving in to fear, retreating, is not to your advantage in this situation.  Acknowledge your doubts; express them.  You can find your own inspiration, through meditation or altered-state work, and move into a new, productive, satisfying and happy reality.

You asked me three questions.  The first was, “Am I heading in the right direction?”  The cards seem to be saying a resounding “no” to that, but this reading focuses mainly on your inward, spiritual life and, by extension, on your creative fulfillment and personal growth.  In the short term, for your immediate material needs, you are doing the right thing — to the extent that you are guided by your higher instincts and keeping your fears in check.

You asked, “Are my instincts serving me well?”  If by “instinct,” you mean that urge to regress, to retreat rather than go forward, I’d have to say no.  If you mean those niggling doubts you have, the impulse that led you to question those “instincts,” I’d have to say yes.  But I don’t think it is as simple, black-and-white, as that.  I also don’t think you’re listening to your instincts in every aspect of your life.

Finally, you asked, “Are the people I trust really worthy of my trust?”  This is a complex issue.  In a literal sense, the answer to that one is more “no” than “yes”.  Are stupid people worthy of trust?  Is it wise to allow yourself to be guided by misguided people?  My first flash when I read that question was that if there was malicious intent it would be easier to detect than it is with benign errors.

Again, I urge you to get in touch with your own inner guidance, through meditation or shamanic means.  There are too many logical options, too many varying opinions, for your intellect to be entirely trustworthy, and TRUST — confidence, positive expectations, a positive attitude, is more important than questions of trustworthiness.  When you are relying on your own internal compass, the trustworthiness of others is irrelevant.

Let me know if I may be of further service.

namere

There are three columns to this Tarot spread:  challenges and/or obstacles on the left; resources and/or benefits on the right; realities, things that currently are, down the middle.  Levels, from the top down, are spiritual/creative, mental/emotional, and physical/material, with a tenth card at the base giving an overview of this slice of your life.  Except for one card, the only major trump that came up in this reading, I will synthesize the rest and write only my interpretations, not each individual card and position.

In your physical, material life now, in matters of health, finances, domestic arrangements and/or employment, you’re hovering, hesitating to bring one phase to an end and make a change.  I think you know it is necessary, and it is all but done, yet some doubt or denial, or a few loose ends, are keeping you from making the final decisive move.

There are some emotional strains and unhappiness for you now involving the absence or loss of a beloved young person of mercurial character with a love of winning and glory, generous with everything, right down to the blood in his veins.

You have also lost a benefactor and caretaker, someone who anchored and supported you.  You remain in somewhat of an emotional crisis, but the worst of it is past.

Your emotions are beginning to heal, leaving you in the depth of a spiritual crisis, with doubts and questions that nobody, nothing in your life experience or the world around you, can resolve for you.  You have hit upon an idea, a thought, of someone else’s recorded or encoded ideas, that you think will elevate your spirit and bring you peace, but it is a spiritual detour that can lead only to a dead end for you, a road better not taken.

The base card in this spread, the overview of your current reality, is The Way Shower, also known as The Star in older symbolism.

 

It says that ultimately your choices are up to you, and your most reliable guidance comes from within, from your own spiritual resources, symbolized on the card as the white light shining from above.  Gold symbolizes truth, and a massive amount of it flows down one side, the left, inner, unconscious side.  On the right, the conscious, outer, reality, is a city, symbolizing society, culture, the world around you.  The cup of gold over the city symbolizes each person’s individual “truth” which all are willing to share (as indicated by the upturned position and full flow of colors from the cup).

Those colors include some gold, but the truth you get from others is not the whole truth and nothing but.  It is always filtered through the awareness and experience of the one sharing his or her truth, flavored with their bias and distorted by their misconceptions.  Your primary need is to tap into your own Spirit, listen to your Spirit Guides, and make your own way.

You have mastered the masculine, active, expressive, aspect of creative inspiration.  Now your challenge is to realize the receptive, feminine side of Spirit.  Meditation is one way.  I know another that many people find to be easier than traditional Eastern meditation:  The Shamanic Path.

Let me know if I may be of any further service to you.