Today’s #3card community reading was for the following cards:

That’s the 4 of Swords, 5 of Swords, and Knight of Wands.

When I see these three cards, I see a situation like an intervention (you know, where you gang up on someone for their own good?). The four of swords implies some sort of temporary ease in conflict, and I take the Jupiter influence as a sign of benevolence. This is the part where you get the subject into a safe place, surrounded by loved ones. Then we get the five of swords, where the subject is basically overwhelmed by arguments from the group. The last card is a bit ambiguous… it’s clear that the knight of wands (the subject) will strike out strongly, but the question is whether this refers to new life choices or simply storming out of the room. Were this my reading, I’d pull more cards. But, since it’s not, I’ll take Jupiter as the ruler of Sagittarius (Knight sits on the Sag cusp) to mean that the well-meaning crowd has a positive influence on the subject’s philosophy.

Since this is an open-ended reading without a question, you could extrapolate general advice from this reading, horoscope-style, as follows: “try to make use of unpleasant confrontations to change your perspective and move in a more positive direction. Also your lucky numbers today are 4, 5, and 14.”

Sorry, my stock market businesses have been keeping me very busy this week, so this entry will probably be shorter than most. That said, here we go!

Spiritual == Poor?

Chapter 1 is a concise (what a surprise!) overview of Crowley’s life. His life—and others like his—makes me wonder… is the life of an adept necessarily at odds with making a good living? You know, walking in metaphysical circles, I’m often disappointed in “practitioners” trying to sell me magic prosperity bowls when they are clearly living on the edge of poverty themselves. More on that in another post. But, this is Aleister Crowley we’re talking about. Someone with the skill and discipline to do advanced yoga and mountain climbing, not to mention synthesizing and cataloging aspects of numerous world spiritual systems, and yet he started out wealthy and died a beggar.

I guess people on a spiritual mission get so one-pointed with their focus that they don’t attend to their day-to-day lives very well. I’d say that’s a failure and a dangerous trap for all spiritual people to avoid.

Book of the Law: Holy?

Probably the most important event in his life happened right around this time of year… April 8th, 1904, Crowley started receiving the Book of the Law. This would be the foundation for Thelema and just about everything he did afterward. There is still quite a bit of confusion and skepticism about the authorship of Liber AL… was it truly channelled, and, if so, who exactly is Aiwass? Or, did it just float up from Crowley’s (or Rose’s) subconscious? And regardless of the answer, is it supernaturally ‘perfect’?

Strangely enough, I’ve come to the conclusion that the answers to these questions don’t actually matter much. Regardless of where it came from, or its status as holy book or gibberish, Crowley spent years trying to extract meaning from that text. My theory is this: you put a smart, extremely well-educated spiritual person in front of a bunch of random numbers, and through study and meditation they will eventually become enlightened. You see? Just as the zen koans enlighten you by having you contemplate nonsense, I can see how Crowley could arrive at great truths by believing they are in Liber AL and then looking very hard for them. I think he could have done similar with tea leaves or by concatenating every third letter from the sunday paper. But, instead he arrived at the Book of the Law and came to convince himself that it was holy. A lot of great work (indeed, Great Work as they say in esoteric circles) came out of it.

If you want to participate in our twitter book club, just pick up a copy of The Weiser Concise Guide to Aleister Crowley and start talking about it. Use hash tag #WBC2 so we’ll see what you’re saying!

FORMING

I nurture your truth with love, and
Being your total I see you, for
Together we are God

I swallow your love with passion, an
Order to dance as I break you, for
Together we are Bliss

I vibrate your passion with fury, a
Roar that destroys says: “I know you!” for
Together we are Strong

And we need to be

Because Together,
Perfection is (a) Matter
Of waking up twice

I get together with some friends a couple times a month for tarot practice, and to have fun in general. As you know, lately I’ve been making a real push to keep my readings specific. I want to really answer the question, and avoid the typical eggshell dance that so many readers perform.

The Operation

For example, one of my friends asked if she should put off a non-emergency medical procedure for a month, or keep to the current schedule.

Now, my first impulse is to put out some cards for each possibility and describe what I see for each to the querent. But, if I’m really honest with myself, I must admit: I’d do that to avoid committing to an answer. Instead, the querent will take whatever I intuit about the scenarios and naturally lean one way or the other. Even if I select the option that looks “better,” I’ll have put out enough good points for both dates that I can’t be completely (god-forbid!) wrong!

So, yesterday, I stayed aware of these tendencies, and tried to always get right to the heart of the question. I was using a simple poker deck, and used a pseudo-astrological method where I lay out a card for a planet, and a card for a sign (you’ll see a worked-out example below). I did this for both options, and saw that the delayed procedure was a much stronger combination. My reading was:

“You should delay the operation.”

No wiggle-room there!

Now, were this for the public there would have also been a disclaimer about how I am not a licensed physician and do not, under any circumstances, give medical advice for money. In litigious America, it pays to be careful!

The New Career

Another friend asked about a new career opportunity that fell in her lap. Should she pursue it further, given that she has other start-up businesses in play? She seemed interested in how much money there was in it. I used the same astrological method as above, only I drew positions for:

1. Her
2. The Job Activities
3. The Money

Here’s what I got:

I used the chaldean planetary attributions from a typical Tree of Life for the upper row (3 = Saturn through 9 = Moon), and the decans of the zodiac for the lower row.

So, she is 3/Saturn in 6P/Taurus. No real dignity either way. The job is 7/Venus in 5W/Leo. Again, no real essential dignity whatsoever. The money is 5/Mars in 2P/Capricorn, where Mars is exalted. So, based on dignities alone, the money is the strongest factor by far.

I also noted that if you judge the aspects in a crude way (just based on signs), then she and the money are trine (both in earth signs), which to me connects her to the money (she’s going to do the job), and tells me that she’s going to like the financial aspect of it. On the other hand, she is in square aspect with the job (Taurus vs Leo). This tells me that she will not necessarily enjoy the job much… the fact that she is represented by Saturn tells me she would do the job to be practical, and not for love of it.

My reading was basically a summary of the above. Again, I tried to be to the point, unambiguous, and without slippery, noncommittal “weasel words”:

“The new job will pay well, and you’re going to like the income. You’ll like the income more than the job, though, which you probably won’t find to be much fun.”

She confirmed that when she had done this type of job in years past, that it was okay but not much fun. I guess I’ll find out in months to come if I was right about the money part!

Conclusion

I think it pays off for all readers to periodically evaluate their readings. See where your strengths and weaknesses are. In particular, ask yourself:

• Did I answer their question, or just talk about their question?
• Did they go away from the reading with something they could actually do (or at least think) about their situation?
• Did I see the answer in the cards, but add a bunch of slippery language for fear of being wrong?

I recently realized that I had fallen into the habit of talking a whole bunch about the questions, without giving a definitive prediction. There are times when the querent wants to explore an idea, so those types of readings have their place. Often, though, the querent wants to know where in the heck they lost their laptop, or if they will get the promotion they want. Straight questions deserve straight answers.

You don’t have to get it right all the time. The weatherman said it was going to rain the other day, and it didn’t… I’ll still listen to his prediction tomorrow.

FYI The Weiser Book Club’s book for April will be The Weiser Concise Guide to Aleister Crowley.

How do you participate? Just read the book and talk about it on twitter! Use the hash tag #WBC2. You’ll probably also want to follow @WeiserBooks to find out about the book club, or participate in our #1card and #nightcard group tarot readings, and more.

I’ve had enough! For too long I’ve shunned questions of location in my tarot readings.

The other day at the Dallas Divination meeting, they pulled three cards to answer the question: “where are the missing earrings?” I was curious about what people in the group would say. How would they use cards to find an object? Here’s what they pulled:

Well, instead of them saying anything, they asked me what I thought it meant. Damn! So, I said something like:

“You’re looking in the wrong place, and the harder you look, the more unhappy you’re going to be about it. Stop looking for it and eventually you’ll find it by a happy accident.”

Now, I don’t think this was a bad reading of the cards, really. It makes use of the essential meanings of the cards in question. But, if you think about it, I didn’t say much that was useful. The question was “where is it?” If you strip away the color, my reply was: “where you haven’t been looking.” So, by my standards, this reading was at least a partial failure.

You’re Supposed to Learn Something

Never forget that the the point of a divination is to learn something. I once had a third-rate tarot teacher that would say that tarot can be good for confirming what you already know. I say that’s not very useful. If you already know the answer, then ask the cards how to deal with it, or something. You should come away from a divination with something actionable; something you can do that will help you.

That’s why I’m somewhat embarrassed that, even now, the questions I’m least comfortable tackling are some of the most direct: “When will I see him?” “Where did I lose it?” “What grade will I get?”

Part of my issue with these types of questions is that the most straightforward way to attack them would be with card correspondences. Looking around the net, though, it seems that there are a ton of inconsistent attributions floating around out there. There are people that say it doesn’t really matter what system you use, as long as you pick a system and stick with it. That may be true, but it strikes me as lazy “insta-expert” thinking. I mean, being consistent with a poor system may just mean that your answers are consistently incorrect!

This is where my recent interest in traditional astrology may just come to the rescue! The ancient horary astrologers had attributions to planets, houses, and signs that helped them answer all manner of direct questions. This is great, because I know they were once in widespread use, used successfully in divination, and directly relatable to tarot cards. Much better than using the attributions that some random Aeclectic user said “felt right”!

Directions

So, with all that exposition out of the way, let’s tackle attributions to the cardinal directions (north, south, east, west). In Christian Astrology, William Lilly gives correspondences that I sum up this way:

• Fire Signs: east
• Water Signs: north
• Air Signs: west
• Earth Signs: south

… which further breaks down into:

• Aries: east
• Leo: east by north
• Sagittarius: east by south
• Cancer: north
• Scorpio: north by east
• Pisces: north by west
• Libra: west
• Aquarius: west by north
• Gemini: west by south
• Capricorn: south
• Taurus: south by east
• Virgo: south by west

What does this scheme have going for it? Well, if you squint your eyes and tilt your head just right, the rough assignments correspond to the Thoth deck’s attributions of princesses to quadrants of the earth. In other words, you start by considering China to be the east, and America to be the west. That shouldn’t be too hard. Then, you just have to mentally project the map so that europe and africa are between them to the south, while the pacific ocean is between them to the north. So that’s nice synergy between the approaches, anyway.

What I don’t like, right away, is that you don’t get a straightforward progression around the zodiac. In other words, you go from Aries (east) to Taurus (south by east) to Gemini (west by south) to Cancer (north), etc.. No coherency there. However, if you stick to just the cardinal directions, then at least they map cleanly to the zodiacal order.

This is only my second horary reading, ever. I’m still trying to get comfortable with the methods, but it’s quite fun! So, today’s question was: “Will I get everything done?” Today I need to get some work done for some clients, and also clean up my house, before 9pm. I pulled a chart for the moment I had the question formulated in my mind… it looked like this:

So, who are the players? The ascendant is in Cancer, which makes me the Moon (the ruler of Cancer). The tenth house for my career is in Aries, ruled by Mars. The fourth house of my home is in Libra, ruled by Venus. I’m not positive that the fourth house is the best way to represent my housework, but it’s certainly different than my career “work.” I think it’s ok.

I think things look ok (but not great…) for getting my client work done, but the house work may suffer. Let’s see why:

We’ll start with the strengths of the players. I’m in Capricorn, in my detriment. This is accurate because I feel somewhat sluggish, and am not looking forward to doing either types of chore today. So, whatever happens, I don’t feel like I’ll take a very active role in it. Today is a procrastination day!

As for the two kinds of work, well: Mars doesn’t have much going on, except it’s own triplicity… so it’s feeling pretty genial towards itself, I suppose. Hopefully this means that the work will go fairly smoothly whenever I get to it. Sadly, Venus is in retrograde, and also in its detriment in Aries. Not only that, but it receives Mars here (the ruler of Aries). This would indicate to me that housework will take a back-seat to career work, when push comes to shove.

As for other receptions… Well, I’m in Capricorn, which exalts in Mars. So, I may not love my work, but I might just enjoy it today. Or at least, get fixated on it. That’s another sign that the career work will take priority today.

I also note that I’m coming into square aspect with my house work here… yet more tension working against us. And since we’re both in our detriment, I’d say I don’t have the energy to overcome any obstacles in this area. Meanwhile, I was trine with my career work not long ago, but have moved out of it. This makes me think of the fact that my career work for today is mostly a continuation of stuff I’ve already done for this client, another way to see how easy-going this work today ought to be.

That’s my prediction… we’ll see what happens…. I guess my advice to myself would be to sort of lower my house-cleaning standards and cut (appropriate) corners to give myself more room to rest. No since fighting the tide.

If any horary experts are reading, I’d love whatever help you can give me, as I come up to speed on traditional astrological techniques. I find it fascinating!

We’re just now finishing the second section of Kissing the Limitless in the Weiser Book Club (search for #WBC1 on twitter to see the discussions so far). This post is about Chapter Eight.

Name Your Demons

I thought Chapter Eight, “Unlocking Emotions and Intellect” was great food for thought all around. I’m slowly realizing that in a lot of the older traditions, people externalized parts of themselves as part of their work. The Egyptians had their pantheon of “gods,” for example. Some magicians develop their “magickal personality.” A good bit of this chapter talks about getting to know your angels and your demons.

I guess I can see the advantage of going this route… it can help you interact with aspects of yourself if you give them names. Still, I’ve always shied away from this idea. Maybe as a Gemini I have enough inner personalities already, without naming more! Really though, as far as I have taken it in my practice has been to try to maintain a separation between my self and my egoic mind, along more-or-less Buddhist lines.

Writing this now, though, I guess the only difference is in the level of granularity: instead of the forever-deluded ego, I might have named entities for Fear and Greed and Anxiety. Is this further breakdown of my facets helpful or necessary? I don’t know, but I’d be willing to try.

To me, the most important thing is not to buy into the separation too much, because at the end of the day, they are all still a part of you. This is why I love that the first section of the book dealt so thoroughly with engendering a healthy conversation between your various aspects and drives. You respect and honor them all, but not necessarily give in to all of them, all the time. In chapter eight, Coyle says:

“This is not exorcism but embrace. There is no need to cast out our demons; rather, our embrace and understanding of them brings them back into balance and health. We see that they are not really demons at all but adversaries that help us to struggle.”

Especially doing Buddhist-flavored thought-work and meditation, it’s easy to make the egoic mind into a kind of unwanted stepchild that you keep in the corner. I think I had started leaning that way, and Kissing the Limitless has reminded me to appreciate how important and necessary the lower parts of my mind really are. It’s not wrong to be out-of-the-moment if you are taking time to plan your evening, for instance. The important thing is to choose to take that time consciously.

On Language

I especially appreciated the section on language. Words are powerful things, and so it is very unfortunate than in English we say “I am sad” instead of “I feel sadness right now.” Not long ago, I had a conversation about this very topic with my girlfriend. I was suggesting that in a healthier language, there would be no blanket “I” term available to throw about lazily. Instead, we’d always have to distinguish between “my body,” “my soul,” “my mind,” etc. So, it was great to see this in the book.

I have been trying to train my inner voice to make these distinctions. It’s not easy!

I get asked from time to time how to get into the Crowley deck. No wonder why… it’s one of the best there is.

Unlike a lot of decks that the industry churns out these days, the Thoth has some real substance… you can think of it as the culmination and summary of Crowley’s whole career. As such, it’s absolutely saturated with cross-disciplinary references. This makes learning the deck a difficult, but very worthwhile undertaking.

Here is what I’d suggest to people that don’t know where to start:

1. Get the deck itself (for study/meditation, you can’t beat the big deck… for doing spreads I usually use the normal-sized deck). If you are already familiar with a RWS-style tarot, then you should be able to basically use it right away… make notes of images or symbols that you find confusing, because once you learn the answers you’ll probably find it helps you understand your other decks as well!
2. Learn some astrology basics. If you have a basic grasp of what the 4 elements, the 7 classical planets, and 12 signs are about, then you should be okay to start. Just knowing a few keywords for each should be enough to get started. The great thing about tarot study is: working with the cards will deepen your peripheral knowledge practically for free along the way. So, as you learn how fire plays a role in all of the wands cards, you will come away knowing quite a bit about “fiery-ness” in general
3. Learn some Qabalah basics. Get familiar enough to know the names and basic keywords for each sephira on the tree of life. Like with astrology, to get started you really just need to know enough so that your eyes won’t glaze over if you see references to Hod or Geburah. Knowing them on a keyword basis will be good enough to start.
4. Ok, now for the main course(s)… read through The Book of Thoth. This is actually pretty approachable. The discussion of the majors may leave your head spinning with all the mythological and esoteric references, but on the first reading just absorb what you can and keep going. The sections on the court cards and minor cards are pretty straightforward, I think.
5. At this point, I find it really helps if you read The Law Is For All, which has The Book of the Law along with Crowley’s more accessible comments about it. This book was the foundation of much of Crowley’s work, including his tarot deck. Once you are familiar with this, you will begin to see links to it all over the Thoth tarot. You will understand much more clearly what it means that the woman in The Star card is Nuit, and you will see Hadit in the axle of the wheel in the Fortune card, for just two examples.

From there on, I think just using the deck and occasionally re-reading The Book of Thoth is the main way to get deeper into the cards. The second time through it, I spent time meditating on each major card, and looking up the references I didn’t know on places like wikipedia. This was time consuming, but helped a lot. I plan to go through the cards again soon to get even deeper with them.

Here are some more references that you might want to branch out into:

• The Thoth Companion, which is the Snuffin book. Points out a lot of the symbolic references on the cards that Crowley doesn’t mention specifically in his book. Wondering what that hexagram-inside-a-cube-wand is supposed to represent? Pull out the Snuffin book.
• If you want to know more about sephiroth of the Qabalah, I really like Dion Fortune’s Mystical Qabalah
• Want even more correspondences for the tree of life? 777 And Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley is the book for you!
• You can read the complete old and new commentaries on the Book of the Law over at hermetic.com.
• Aeclectic’s Thoth Forum has lots of knowledgeable people who can help you with questions. See especially the study group.
• Want to know what the rose cross on the back of the cards is all about? I thought DuQuette’s description of it in Understanding Aliester Crowley’s Thoth Tarot was excellent. In fact, it’s about time I read that again… I would probably absorb more of it now. You know you have a powerful deck when you can study the image on the back in multiple passes!

I did a reading today for a friend with my Ancient Egyptian Tarot. To make the post read easier without revealing the friend’s name, I’ll write the rest of this post as if the reading were for me.

The question was “what should I do about my work situation?” I don’t have scans of these cards, but here is a pic I took (click to enlarge):

The cards were 4 of Disks, 2 of Cups, and 4 of Swords.

So to me, these cards say “carve out time for yourself and get ready for the next round of headaches.” The central card, 2 of Cups, is Venus in Cancer… in this case Cancer yells for going home and being insulated. Focus on the things or people that you love. Why is this good work advice? Well, because of the supporting cards. We have two fours… which are all about building up (as opposed to the fives, which are about knocking down). The 4 disks are about building up reserves of material things.. the picture in this deck shows coffers of grains being filled. The 4 swords is about getting a little distance to rest and plan. That’s not about a problem solved, but more like room to breathe. The picture here shows people outside the city, crouching down and possibly planning an attack.

So, I should remember to stay in contact with loved ones for support, build up my strength (physical rest, and also buying proper supplies perhaps), and get ready to go back to work with guns blazing if needed.

Sometimes easier said than done, but hey… I’m just the card reader. I’ve done my part!