Turning Things Around: The Inner Tarot Revolution Week 12
Luck Be A Lady Tonight
Well, it looks like Veronica saves me from yet another one.
What’s the theme tying together this week’s two cards? That’s hard to nail down. I do like the little subtitle I came up with this week:
My Grandma Lil (Lillian) really did love Sinatra.
Another option would be “Fortune Favors The Bold.” A better vibe for this would be:
Sometimes, “Lady Luck,” Fortune, Jupiter, Mercy, etc. just comes in the nick of time.
The Wheel of Fortune, as anyone who has observed this Wheel sufficiently can attest, turns both ways. Only those who understand this are able to turn it to advantage without fail. Gogo Bordello tackled such concerns in The World Is Yours.
“One good turn deserves another.” There’s the message here.
I’m 40 this year. Blows my mind. I remember when my mom turned 40.
We lived in Westminster, CO, in a new house in a development called North Park (yes, just like my my most recent school). My father and I were at the Westminster Mall, and he let me pick something out for my mom. Now, being a dumb kid, I picked out something totally impractical that she would never actually wear, but my father hadn’t anticipated that move, so he was stuck and had to buy my mom this tacky, black, sequined dress that was anything but her style.
My mother opened the present on her birthday and, not realizing I had picked that one out, scoffed at my father, “This looks like something Vanna White would wear! What is this?”
That stung.
What stung even worse was the time we watched Vanna White strut onto the stage of Wheel of Fortune wearing that same dress. Swear to gods, that same dress.
Now, my mother didn’t mean to hurt me. She thought the gift came from my father. This was the man, mind you, who, in the course of one of the activities I had to complete to get my Parvuli Dei medal for Cub Scouts (a merit badge for cathechism), when prompted to come up with a compliment for my mother, the best he could do was, “You are a good sewer.” Meaning “seamstress,” but that’s not what he said. He said, “sewer.”
Freudian slip?
It was just one example of some of the weird and subtle ways I was often stuck in the middle of an ongoing war between the two Titans in my life: Mom and Dad. And, of course, that one time the universe bore out my mother’s criticism of the present I picked out for her. Ouch!
I’ve written about my relationship with The Priestess…the woman who (more formally) introduced me to the “Goddess” Hekate. Hekate first called out to me while I was in Norway. It was odd, I was so weirdly “tuned in” to my own Saturn Return that I remember sitting there in Norway one night, and it suddenly came to mind, and I went and checked my chart to find that yeah…at that time, I was right in the middle of my “first” Saturn Return. In my case, that’s a qualification, because from an astrological standpoint, what happened was really more like Saturn rolled like a car over its spot in my natal chart, then it rolled back over me (i.e., it went retrograde), back across that same spot again, then it hit me another time.
The Priestess dedicated herself as a Priestess to three Goddesses when she was ordained into Fellowship of Isis. One of these was Hekate. She gave me my statue that I used in my dedication ceremony to Hekate, as well as the candle. She gave it all to me. That includes the tattoo on my left shoulder of a Hekate-related key with a Strophalos motif that is also tied to Odin via the the rune Ansuz.
The Strophalos. The Wheel. As it turns even in one direction, it has an upturn and a downturn. The Priestess always told me she felt Hekate had brought us together, and I always did tell her, with all the same conviction, that I agreed. Near the end, I even started telling her why I thought Hekate had done it.
The Priestess, in her conceited way, thought without fail that Hekate had brought us together to be together. But this same woman who had “Initiated” me into Her Mysteries had also beaten me, thrown me out multiple times, lied to police, lied to my employers, lied to various other parties in my inbox, etc., all in the name of what?
Did she not understand what a blasphemy it was to beat me with a pipe consecrated to The Foam Born under the circumstances that she did?
Did she not believe Hekate would look out for me, too?
I told her as soon as I saw it (though she never wanted to hear it): “If Hekate put us together, it was to cut you down for daring to poison her name in that mouth of yours.”
Luna Mater was my pledge, after all.
There are three, and probably more, examples: Hekate, Aphrodite, and of course, Santa Muerte…deities whose name that Priestess has waved around in public while privately desecrating each and every one in her abuses toward myself and others.
People don’t understand how significant it is that Hekate is not an Olympian deity. She gets lumped in with them for a couple of main reasons:
She is easily conflated with other deities anyway, especially Diana and Artemis.
There aren’t a lot of sources with much solid information about the Titans as opposed to the Olympians who supplanted them.
Now. We see similar patterns in other world mythological structures. However, for now, we’re going to focus on Hekate as a Titan.
In the Olympian Pantheon, we are used to a paradigm where the land, the seas, the skies, and the Underworld are basically “ceded” to three guys: Zeus (lands and, to some extent, skies), Poseidon (seas and, to some extent, skies), and Hades (Underworld). And yet, Hekate was granted dominion (by Zeus) over the seas, the skies and the land (and, as anyone who has worked with Her knows, the Underworld).
How’d she get such a sweet deal?
This is where I connect Hekate with her epithet of Brimo.
Frankly, as a being who presides over Crossroads, Thresholds, and other Liminal Space, I think she just took practical advantage of a clear “changing of the guards” and knew, despite all their primal might, that the age of the Titans was over. And she helped the Olympians out, especially using her might as Brimo, and that’s how she made her way into the New Order. A war was on, and she threw all her might behind the clear destined victors.
I mean, by then, it was kill or be killed.
Good for her. Queen.
Let’s do cards.
Top Sun Card
This is one of those weeks when I really wish I had gotten these cards in the reverse of their positions (in other words, why did I have to get 7 of Swords as a Sun Card?)
Now, as many Tarot veterans know, traditional Tarot decks and Crowley’s Thoth Tarot are…ahem…”different beasts.” As DuQuette masterfully details in Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot, Crowley took not only formal liberties in the depictions and even meanings of individual Minor Arcana cards, but he even went so far as to “fix” an “error” inherent in the traditional order of things that…despite the disputes surrounding the actual claims he made, Crowley did nonetheless show to be much more…aesthetically pleasing, depending on how one views the resulting macrocosmic perspective. But that is a bunch of wizard stuff irrelevant to people who don’t believe in magic(k). And you’d have to read the book.
Anyway, this card is one of those places where Crowley took a decidedly…hmmm…”nuanced” stance in his interpretation of a traditional card, in directions that make it so I always hate getting this card in readings I am doing with this deck in particular, in ways that I might not be so inclined toward in using another deck.
Now. There are lots of questions we can raise about how Crowley sort of…waved the “Big Ace of Wands” of his male privilege around to just kinda….”remake” the tarot. BUT. The very fact that he did that is also the very reason you can now buy all sorts of other individual interpretations of the tarot. Crowley changed the tarot in ways that, by being the first to so openly flaut the prevailing order, yes…did sort of come to dominate the “secondary” tarot landscape that was opened up by that act. However, it also gave subsequent generations of visionaries the permission they needed to break from convention in similar ways themselves.
Like it or not, we are all freer to be ourselves because of these “arbitrary” changes Crowley made with his overblown Big Dick Energy.
And much the same can be said of LaVey, by the way, and even Aquino. This is sort of what Magi do.
So anyway. As Crowley had it, this card means “Futility,” because in it, Crowley had Harris pit the energy of all 6 of the Classical Planets of astrology against the Sun itself.
I guess, in his mind, the point was about how the power of these things balance one another out: The planets have their might, and even their collective might, but in a sense, they still need the sun about which to revolve. But there’s still the point that he named this card “Futility.” What was that about?
It’s about stalemate. It’s about how the Sun is not, in fact, the real “axis” of the planets. Honestly, this solar system was almost a binary system, where Jupiter would have been a Twin Sun (like we see on Tatooine in Star Wars). But Jupiter never quite ignited, its total mass being just too low to do the trick. Still, the real “axis” of our solar system thus stands somewhere between the two of them. It’s not even the Sun.
This card brings us a message about how our minds tend to parse ambiguous and otherwise “slippery” situations into one category or the other; and, given all that must be weighed, Crowley teaches us, apparent situations of balance are indeed “futile” in their static appearances.
Still. I can’t help but “slide” over into the traditional interpretation of this card, which I like much better, to wriggle my way out of this one:
Here, we have the sneaky thief making off with at least 5 of the 7 Swords available. Much better odds than the 6-against-1 of Crowley’s depiction, no? And, in a way, much more reminiscent of the title of “Netzach,” or “Victory,” from which this card derives its sevenfold nature.
It speaks, to me, of that same cunning that Hekate used to see her way through the war between the Olympians and the Titans.
Even DuQuette had to admit there was hope for optimism here:
Crowley observes: “It is like a rheumatic boxer trying to ‘come back’ after being out of the ring for years.” Nonetheless, it is well to remember that, sometimes, even old boxers get in a lucky punch.
Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, p. 248
Shadow Card
So, uh…how far into my entry on this card can I make it before I associate it with Veronica? I mean, really. My readers knew this was coming.
So, I have associated the Word of Hermekate with the VSigil already, and given the timing of Hekate reaching out to me, it seems clear that all of these things can be easily “wound up” under the “spool” of this “wheel.” What is this thing?
Some people liken this “wheel” to the solar system itself. And that is a valid interpretation that can bear fruit on a lot of levels. It leads to places like astrology and astronomy (two fields that are much more interrelated than most people realize).
So some liken this to the “wheel of the year,” which is a related, but separate concept from the above. Thus, it gets linked to the four seasons, and this is not without its merit insofar as the “four season” model of the wheel holds true. We basically maintain it because this wheel is defined by the equinoxes and the solstices, which will hold true astronomically even as our seasons give way to climate change.
It can, with much benefit, be likened to the simple wheel of night and day. That, too.
I often think of past pieces of writing that I have had published, including No Left Turn, a defense of the Left Hand Path, where I alluded to the “Wheel of Samsara,” which connects this wheel to the idea of this physical world and its limitations, and also to the greater wheel of karma.
Every action I take, even those intended to liberate others from this wheel, holds the same potential to further ensnare another as it does to free them.
I cannot control that.
The only way to prevent this wheel from harming another is to also prevent it from benefiting another.
I cannot be responsible for the outcome; only the intention.
This wheel is like a “cosmic buzzsaw blade” that will hit each person differently, outside of our ability to control the outcome.
The message behind this wheel’s attribution to the planet Jupiter is that, as long as we are acting with sincere Mercy in our hearts, this buzzsaw will cut the way it needs to.
This happens to be playing as I finish this post up: