Turning Things Around: The Inner Tarot Revolution Week 24

He's A 10, But He Really Needs To Find Some Work

Aaaannnd Dark Twins is back.

Given the way I left things in the “final” post at the end of last July—Song of Twilight—I was sure it would be. I bet some (maybe even most) of my readers knew it, too. I was clearly swept up while writing my last few posts; working my way up to a climax, I also kept saying in various ways how I was feeling overwhelmed and needed to take a break, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do so without getting certain important statements off my chest…making certain things apparent, expressing them clearly. Fortunately, my cards in Week 23 were helpful, even perfect, for the kind of stopping point I so sorely needed. Nonetheless, while I had promised repeatedly that I would be stepping away for a while to settle down, I also kept saying I was going to write this post, or that post, or address this or that loose end. It had become quite the ongoing vicious cycle for quite a while here. As such, I realized the only way I was going to stop it was to do something drastic and final: Drop a big bomb, then bring this entire project to an apparent end, going so far as to delete the site altogether. Coming back was always part of the plan—no way in hell could I have spent so much time on The Inner Tarot Revolution and not finish it—but if I had let on that I would be coming back, I would have just done so within a few days. I know it.

Among other things, I knew for most of the time I was writing here, especially as I got sober, that I needed to go back to the beginning and overhaul the entire thing. I said that a few times, too. Having the entire site just wiped out was the best way for me to do that. That way, I would be forced to rebuild it from scratch, and I’d do whatever editing and revising and restructuring I would need to do along the way.

Dark Twins had a lot of potential, but I was also really missing the point in some ways by being so intensely wrapped up in the phenomena I had set out to document that I was completely carried away by them, and I think it was obvious from the last few paragraphs of my “final” post that I knew it was all about to collapse. I wanted to capture some of the essence of the world of synchronicity I was living in, and in earlier months, the boundaries between coincidence and intentional coordination on the part of others were totally unclear to me. I don’t think I said it out loud, but one of the focuses of my incessantly writing about the synchs was to “play” with the phenomenon, and I was very often writing as if the people I was vibing with were all reading Dark Twins—even after I had learned that several of them were not.

I will be addressing this in an upcoming post, because in my time away, I figured out what I think that phenomenon really was: “The Theater of the Word,” one of the five steads of the Grade of Magus as outlined in Don Webb’s Overthrowing the Old Gods.

When I left off, I was preparing to attend Father Nathan Monk’s Broom of Doom tour stop here in nearby Houston a few days later, knowing that I would be finding out when I met him backstage if he really was reading Dark Twins and “encoding” messages to me in his own online activity, and I already had a pretty fair expectation that he was not, and was preparing myself for the sense of deflation (but also relief) when I saw for sure that all this time, all of this has been an illusion; a spectacular, absolutely dazzling, even dizzying illusion, but an illusion all the same. Despite having already learned that about pretty much everyone else I thought might be following my exploits here and “conspiring” with me, I knew that I needed the more direct, face-to-face confrontation with Father Monk to sufficiently shatter the illusion, because all of this has involved people I am only connected with online (aside from the really spooky stuff with Veronica) and that level of disillusionment just wasn’t cutting it. I think we’re generally entranced when we’re on social media and doomscrolling, which was where most of these wild synchs had been occurring, so even with the infusion of new information, it was still all-too-easy to get caught up in that flow with all these cats I saw on my News Feed every day.

I was set to meet Father Monk on August 4th (the date will matter soon). It had been quite a while since I had actually cracked the book Overthrowing the Old Gods even though I had been writing so much about the major subjects it covers, and so that morning, I decided to give the chapter on the Grade of Magus a re-read since I had been drawing so heavily from it in my final slew of posts here. I don’t know how many times I had read it before that, but it was a lot, because the concepts that chapter covers have been on the front of my mind ever since I first read it in 2016, and even more so since about 2020 or so. It was one of the most important things I’ve ever read in my life because it seemed to give voice to an inner yearning I have honestly felt for over half the time I have walked this earth. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve mentioned my life purpose here at Dark Twins, of which I’ve been acutely aware from a very young age, even without knowing for certain exactly what it was, or at least how exactly it would look. It’s a mystery for which I have spent years and years chasing down hard-won answers.

I remember finding that chapter largely incomprehensible the first time I read it, feverishly, in the car on the way to Madison, WI that year. Even without fully comprehending it, I understood just enough to be driven mad with thirst at the certain knowledge that the key to solving this lifelong puzzle would be to eventually get my head wrapped around it. The handful of snippets I did understand on that first reading gave me such sweet, merciful release that there are no words to describe the deep gratitude I felt to Don Webb for sharing that particular wisdom. Given how deeply connected I knew it was to this central drive in my life, that handful of written pages felt absolutely fated, and I knew then that the Wyrd connecting us was deep (or would “orlog” be the better term for it?). I have looked up to Webb ever since. As the for the vast majority of that chapter’s contents, at best, I was able to barely graze the edges of its meaning, enough to get just the slightest sense of its outermost contours and know with a deeper certainty than I had ever known anything else before: The most urgent need in my life from that day forward was to understand it.

I would read it again every few months, and in the intervening period, would have chipped away at it just enough to get one or two tiny new morsels of comprehension out of it, but still, regarding the vast majority of it, I would find myself asking: “What does that mean? What the fuck does it mean?? I need context! It is completely opaque, what on God’s green earth does this shit refer to??” I would read all sorts of other books, and I would pick up fragments here and there from posts Webb would write on Facebook, or the one or two times he deigned to write back to some of my emails. He’d write new books and I’d be first in line to buy them. I just had to figure it out, because I knew in my bones: “I’m here to be a Magus, I know it, and I need to know how to decipher these words.”

When I read the chapter that morning, it was like finally having the key to the Rosetta Stone; the meaning of nearly every word in that chapter was suddenly laid bare. I paced back and forth through this empty house as I read it line by line, bawling very loudly to the point of stopping to pound my fist on the quartz counters, because finally, I understood it from personal experience. I mean it, I was crying like a baby, all because it finally made complete sense, and I knew exactly what that meant for me:

I was right. I was right all along, and all of this madness was justified in the end, all of this doubt and fear and sorrow and insanity and stumbling in the dark: Worth it, because I was right.

I knew who I was all along. I was finally assured in that moment that no one could tell me otherwise.

And all that was left to do (somehow still the most daunting challenge yet) was to express the meaning of my Word, “Hermekate,” so that someone, anyone else, could understand it like I do.

Everything else that stood in my way had to be swept aside because this was it.

With that, it’s time to do cards; however, for the sake of the narrative flow, this time around, I need to do them differently. Typically, I do my Top/Sun Card and then my Shadow Card, but this week I am going to do the Shadow Card first.

Shadow Card

Them are some dark, dark twins.

If it hadn’t been given away through any of my own actions, the pairing of cards for Week 24 came with plenty of foreshadowing of their own that I’d end up back here eventually, continuing with this series. The Shadow Card for this week’s entry is 10 of Wands: Oppression. It has some idiosyncratic implications, but in a nutshell, I knew as I turned it over in Week 23 that I was pretty much doomed to keep going. Yes, I said doomed. Ominously, my mind made a very quick association with the imagery of this card: I took the card as a symbolic reminder that I’m chained down, in a sense, by the Curse of the Magus.

It came up in Week 23 because it formed a chunk of DuQuette’s commentary about that week’s Shadow Card, the Magus, but in short: The Curse of the Magus refers to the utterly ineffable nature of a Magus’ Word and the fact that, given the divine truths with which a Magus deals, it’s virtually impossible to express such truth in the fumbling, finite form that is language without inadvertently giving forth falsehood as well. Anything one can possibly say about it will be like sunlight falling upon one side of a pyramid, illuminating that side clearly while leaving the rest in darkness and casting an exaggerated shadow on top of that. You can then come at it from a different angle to reveal a different facet, but in so doing, you’ll then distort the side you just took care of. No matter how hard you try, you just can’t shine the light on all of it; and yet—this is what makes it a Curse with a capital C—you gotta try to do it anyway. You have to or you will lose your mind. It’s not just some challenge you feel, taunting you from the dark corners of your mind in whatever quiet, restful moments you can steal, although it’s that, too; no, it becomes your very reason for being.

I made it pretty clear in Song of Twilight that the ritual daggers known as phurbas are an important element for me in all of this, and how they’re one of the things that constitute that Wyrd connecting Webb and I, to the extent that he wrote me a Haiku about them; well, that’s what those two central bars are on this card: Two heavy, leaden phurbas (though DuQuette refers to them as “dorjes,” which isn’t exactly wrong).

Oh, the irony.

Notes DuQuette in Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot regarding this card:

Crowley writes that Malkuth, “depends from the other nine Sephiroth, but is not directly in communication with them. It is become a blind Force; so, the most violent form of that particular energy, without any modifying influence.” Blind force, Crowley points out, in the suit of Wands means “Fire in its most destructive aspect.”

Harris ingeniously illustrates this by transforming the two dorjes (which in the Two of Wands were the symbols of celestial power) into dark iron prison bars.

p. 222-23

Yay.

In The Book of Thoth, Crowley writes of this card:

The whole picture suggests oppression and repression. It is a stupid and obstinate cruelty from which there is no escape. It is Will which has not understood anything beyond its dull purpose, its “lust of result,” and will devour itself in the conflagrations it has evoked.”

pp. 194, 195

So, basically, spiritual burnout…which fits me to a T when I took Dark Twins down last year in August.

Notably, the dates covered by this card are December 13th - December 21st, ending on the South Solstice.

Yeah, it’s always darkest just before the dawn, isn’t it?

All of this gives a fair description of how things have been for me since I left Dark Twins.

I did go on to meet Father Nathan Monk on the evening of August 4th, and it was just as I expected. I was one of maybe 2 or 3 people with VIP tickets to meet backstage with him at the talk, and he did not act like someone who recognized me and had been dropping me hints in his Substack and Facebook posts. He was very kind and welcoming, but he was a total stranger. Made the obligatory small talk with me and a couple of women backstage. Then another Facebook page creator I recognized—someone else whose posts frequently synched with my shit over the previous several months and about whom I had come up with a few conspiratorial conjectures, known online as “trans skater boyfriend,” entered the room and Father Nathan definitely recognized him, even leaving the rest of us for a time for a crossover selfie with him, and that totally sealed it: ALL of the incredible synchronicity that had saturated my awareness for months on end was really just that: Happenstance—in the purely mundane sense, at least.

I wasn’t even let down that neither of them knew who I was, I was actually relieved; not only did it mean I didn’t have to live up to anything in carrying on with them, but even more importantly for me, it meant the synchronicity itself was genuine “kairos.” For the purposes of all this “Magus” stuff, that was actually a big plus. It was validating.

The secret of the Grade—despite the apparent ego inflation—is that no one can see that if their ego is in the way.

Sitting in the same room as those two people, being completely ignored after all of the bizarre experiences I’d had involving them, was like touching a metal door handle after shuffling around barefoot on a carpet for months: It was an immediate “static discharge” of the built-up “voltage” of months of odd coincidences. It was like meeting them was a “lightning rod.” Suddenly, the entire bewildering saga was over.

And I was suddenly real tired.

The synchs didn’t stop—Father Monk’s entire talk was still filled with what sounded to me like little nudges and nods intentionally woven into the narrative by him to speak directly to me—but it all suddenly hit different because I knew for sure it wasn’t.

With all of the madness now behind me, I was free to settle into my new life and clear my head here in Texas…but that proved much harder than I thought. Oddly, about a day after we arrived here, Veronica damaged her car in a way that made it undriveable, and the part she needed to fix it went on back order for months. Since she worked remotely, that was okay for her, but it basically meant that we were both largely on house arrest, save for a handful of occasions when she’d pop for an Uber to take us somewhere. And it meant I was severely restricted in my job search, because I could only realistically apply for remote positions, and with employers pushing for RTO, those had largely dried up. I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands and no imminent sign of seeing much outside these four walls for quite a while.

So those dorjes as “prison bars” certainly took on new meaning. And between the bleakness of the job hunt, which was mostly fruitless, the long “hermitage” in this isolated house, and the sudden gap opened up that had previously been filled with writing here, I very soon became depressed and lethargic. It felt like there was very little to get up for.

Having the “illusion of intention” collapse in that room with Father Monk and trans skater boyfriend also saw the paranoia with Veronica that had taken up so much of my recent writing here tone itself down as I understood that, too, had really just been “blind” synchronicity, and not the mind games I thought it was. This was a good thing in that sense, but it meant I had a lot of trauma work to do, because that’s where all the suspicion had been coming from. Things got more difficult before they started getting better as I began the process of digging deep to understand what had been happening in the back of my mind that stirred up such mistrust, and instead of being fearful that V was playing tricks on me, we just had fights instead; but we’ve also worked through a lot of the emotional clutter. It’s still not easy, but in short, I’m learning better ways of coping with my BPD and things are rising steadily to a better place.

But I’m not gonna lie; without Dark Twins, I was quite listless, and filled with despair as I saw my friends online carrying on with their various goals and projects while I tried to fill the emptiness within me.

But there was hope to be had, because I got a pretty nice Sun Card.

Top/Sun Card

Cha-CHING!

My Sun Card for Week 24 is another 10; 10 of Disks: Wealth.

This is literally the last card in the whole tarot deck. In the progression from Spirit to Matter, this is the absolute “lowest,” most “material” card in the deck, so it deals very much with the solidity of the physical world around us.

In other words, it’s eminently grounding, which I have really needed after so much woo-woo, intensity, and drama as documented over the course of so many months here at Dark Twins.

Aside from the element of Earth, the card is extremely Mercurial (9 of the 10 coins in the image carry symbols related to Mercury, and the astrological aspect for the card is Mercury in Virgo—Virgo itself being a sign ruled by Mercury), so the card isn’t only grounding, but it’s grounding in a very healing way.

On p. 271 of Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, DuQuette tells us that “The Ten of Disks represents the climax of the descent of matter and is the signal for the redintegration by spirit.” Not “reintegration,” but “redintegration", a word I’d never heard of before I learned it from DuQuette, and not only from this book, but at the booksigning where he gave a talk about the tarot. He made it a point to explain that word and how it means “regeneration.” This is the upshot of that spiritual burnout from the 10 of Wands; exactly what I needed to recharge my batteries.

At this lowest point of material manifestation, how is this “redintegration” triggered? I can’t claim to fully understand it, as the esoteric “machinery” involved here is honestly over my head, but in short, it has to do with the one coin in the card that doesn’t carry a sign related to Mercury (although this is balanced out by the fact that, laid out as the coins are in the form of the Tree of Life, the one odd coin does happen to be the one in the position of Hod, the Sephirah ruled by Mercury): That coin instead carries the marking of a hexagram that symbolizes the Sun. However it works, it’s the Sun that “uplifts” this mercurial matter and sets off the process of rejuvenation.

There were some upsides to my time away. For one, I got a bunch of reading done, and since I wasn’t keeping my mental wheels constantly spinning with Dark Twins, I was able to actually process many of my recent experiences and to shed light on them with the knowledge I gained from my continued study. It was nice to be able to focus more, and really think some things through, especially in a quiet new environment. Yes, I have felt isolated a lot of the time here, but the quietude has also been welcome.

I also finished my Self-Initiatory playthrough of Breath of the Wild, and have had enough time to cool off and decide how to smoothly cover what I need to cover about that game in World of Ruin. Not only that, but I also played through Tears of the Kingdom, which held lots of neat surprises for me! I really look forward to writing about them, too.

I finally got a full and solid daily spiritual practice off the ground, one which includes meditation. I hear from both Veronica and her sister that they notice the difference this has made. They say I’m a lot more “chill” now, less stressed out and jumpy, more at peace. I feel it, too; and I feel that I am reclaiming my mind.

Speaking of December 21st from my Shadow Card, and solar regeneration from my Sun Card—I didn’t really plan it this way—but I celebrated 6 months of sobriety on the day of the Solstice, too. And that has definitely helped the state of both my mind and my body.

I am starting to feel like myself again, and it’s all good stuff.

But still, there had been the listlessness, and a feeling that my life was passing me by. A sense of being “stuck” even though things have been quiet and a lot more stable for me here in Texas. I really missed writing, my friends.

Anyway; we got Paramount+ recently, which was kind of cool because I’ve wanted to see all these new Star Trek shows you can only see there. I had begun watching Star Trek: Discovery at the Niles YMCA during my separation from The Priestess, and although I was severely put off by the ridiculous “spore drive” they tried to pawn off on the Star Trek fandom, I did want to see where that show went.

And then, of course, there was Strange New Worlds.

So; in Song of Twilight, the final post I wrote just before shutting down Dark Twins, I included a snippet of my Aries Full Moon forecast, which spoke of a “full circle moment” that would likely revolve around my “community affairs and personal freedom.”

Well.

I got a serious kick out of one episode in particular, called Subspace Rhapsody. Why?

Because the episode had my concept of Song of Hermekate written all over it.

In that post, I discuss how a “Song” is essentially a “Word” that manifests through more than one person; and all of this intense synchronicity I’ve been harping on for months is how it plays out. I got more detailed about this in Song of Twilight just before taking my break, where I described in great detail how the synchronicity flows through different people, and how it seemed to spread itself around from one to another.

In Subspace Rhapsody, the crew of the Enterprise encounters a “fold” in subspace, and for some reason decides to channel music into it…and all of a sudden, crew members start spontaneously breaking out into SONG. The episode is a musical. And not only that, but it hits multiple crew members at first, and both of them find themselves bewildered to notice they are synchronizing their movements and their singing with the people around them; and not only that, but they soon find out that this phenomenon is contagious, spreading itself around to every ship they communicate with.

Whaaaaaaaaat?

Yes!

And I was already sitting there, clapping at how it was all lining up in such a way that it basically illustrated all the points I made in Song of Twilight just before I left here….and then I heard it: The refrain in a song La’an was singing:

“Flying Blind.” The name of my first post here.

……yeah.

When did the episode originally air?

August 3rd; the night before I went to see Nathan Monk.

Full circle moment, baby!

I knew then that this Song concept was totally legit as a component of the Word of Hermekate; and I knew it was time to continue writing Dark Twins. And just as I resolved to do so, I started noticing little things, like a YouTube channel that I’ve been following for over year, which had also gone on hiatus for about the last 4 months, finally released a new episode; pages I had been watching, which had lain dormant, started posting again. So then I really felt encouraged, and I started the work of editing and re-uploading posts on a newly-built Dark Twins Substack.

That Curse of the Magus is a real thing; that sense of Oppression I’d been feeling—that “stuckness?” I knew it was because I had stopped writing, had stopped working to share my Word. And if that were true, then things should let up once I got back to it, right?

The day I started on it, I finally landed a job interview.

Wealth.

I am glad to be back. I have so much to say now and I can’t wait to share it with my readers.

See you soon.