The Nine of Wands, the Hierophant, and the Star

February 15, 2019: The Nine of Wands and The Hierophant by Tania Pryputniewicz

Mary and I haven’t blogged at Tarot for Two since April of 2018—and I see why—both of us immobilized (emotionally and physically, respectively). I lost my mother in January and Mary fell and broke her shoulder on the ice in February. We still threw cards over the course of the year. I’ve missed tethering lived actions to the symbols and colors in the cards but I also trust the in-breath and out-breath in our tarot practice, or “taroting” as Mary calls it. And it just adds to my gratitude for this hour together today. 

I’m looking at the Nine of Wands I pulled in common with Mary the month before last and this month’s Hierophant card. The Rider Waite’s Nine of Wands shows a wounded warrior looking out with bandaged head, scanning the horizon for trouble. It reminds me of my own habitual way of reacting that I’m trying to change—old habits from family of origin poverties and periods of instability, the ups and down I experienced as the oldest daughter in a family coping with depression and bipolar in our family orbit, something I’m just starting to explore in my writing about an Illinois commune. As the oldest child, I often chose to stand psychologically at the helm in a bit of a hypervigiliant way, worried about my parents and all of us, a habit I needed to shed as I grew.

Lady Frieda Harris paints the Thoth Nine of Wands as the Sun in Sagittarius. My father is a Sagittarius. With love he pointed the arrows of my dreams towards the sun. I grew up in his infectious aura of passion and play and limitless promise that inspired my love for words and poetry and music, the fire of love coming out in his hands on the keyboards of the pianos of my childhood. The Thoth image shows four staves on the top of four staves, ends tipped by moons fattening through the phases. There’s a downside of limitlessness when it is attached to mania that involves sorting through various phases and realities, inherited and actual, that I came late to understanding as a dreamer myself.

This month perceiving the world as it actually is began in a yoga studio three minutes from my house where I could begin to return to my body, the body my mother once housed, the body I have felt distant from after losing her last January. I’m waking up again as I stand and feel my feet on the yoga mat while I stretch my arms to the sky. I’m revisiting the spiritual teachings I walked through before I had children—the astrology, the tarot, the reiki—which I experienced as a young student intellectually and mystically inspired as my father’s daughter, in love with omen hunting and symbol seeking to make sense of life, something I learned from him, something that makes the tarot a natural fit for me.  Now I’m looking out at the world, through eyes and a body increasingly grounded again to the earth as it is today, shedding the past.

In the Thoth Hierophant card I see as an orange robed man: universal father, teacher, spiritual guide. I resonate with the woman robed in blue deep in the interior field of the teacher, holding the sword of the mind, as if to say, “Here is where thought takes form on the Earth.” Learning to listen, discerning, as a witness, has been an incredible spiritual gift, probably the very challenge at the threshold that has filled me with enough empathy to withstand finally seeing the effects mental illness in a family can have on children, including my child self, and there I see her, standing guard like that Nine of Wands warrior with bandage headed, looking for what might next take down the house. 

Bringing the body to yoga means eyes closed on the mat, aware how far off the ground my knees are, how tense and untrusting my body has been. But eyes closed letting go, without judgment, I feel my muscles being to let go into the field of gravity that holds me here. Growing up, I watched my father defy gravity—beautiful, miraculous to follow the imagination down associative paths in imaginary gardens. But then we all had to come back to present time and the particulars of building a life on earth. 

I too defy gravity in lucid dreams, in poems, in my art, in my tarot play, but I am a mother with children to raise and have fought to stay present like everyone else on the planet despite fear, despite challenges imagined, perceived, or real. The spiritual teacher in the Hierophant suggests a way forward, with love, eyes open, crescent moon in hand, a respect for the cycles of sun and moon, and the sword of clarity aimed at this incarnation, the feet of the one body I inhabit today, here, now.

February 15, 2019: The Star and the Nine of Wands by Mary Allen

We haven’t written about our cards of the month for a long time for various reasons, a broken shoulder, a dying mother, many other large and not-so-large developments in both of our lives.  We’ve continued taroting for two through some of it, though (I love using the word tarot as a verb) and we’re back on track with the writing now.  I didn’t write about the last card I pulled as my card of the month, the nine of wands, on 12/29/18, or the card I pulled before that, on 12/4/18, The Star was a beautiful card to have sitting on my mantelpiece for weeks on end, and it’s been talking to me all this time. 

The Star depicts a woman channeling divine energy, bringing it down to earth from above.  In the Thoth deck it shows a slightly abstract woman holding one cup in a hand raised above her head, another cup in a hand at her knee, beautiful geometrical pink energy pouring down from the raised cup through the woman and out the cup at the bottom.  A pile of clear crystals is at her feet and there’s a large pink moon, like a crystal marble, in the background, a navy-blue sky full of swirly white lines that originate in a seven-pointed star in the upper left-hand corner of the card.

I’ve started writing a novel that takes place in the afterlife, and whenever I think of it I feel something light and airy around this project.  It’s almost as if the book itself—the 65 pages I’ve got so far—sits in my computer generating a kind of airy brightness, like a visitor from the afterlife itself.  I have all the feelings of fear before, during, and about the act of writing it that I usually have, more actually, because this is fiction and I usually write memoir where you know the story; here I’m having to make the story up and I don’t even know what it is till it gets on the page—every time I add to it I struggle with the same old questions:  Can I do this?  Is this good enough? Will anyone ever read this?  Still, there it is, brought through into the world bit by bit by me, in fear and not-so-easy-ness, sitting in my computer with its own strange light-filled beingness, as if waiting for the next piece to be added to all the other pieces. 

The Star card has been showing up for me a lot lately in readings, and I can’t help thinking that if it’s talking about anything in my life, it’s talking about this novel.  Not the novel itself but the writing of it, the way I seem to be bringing it down and through, perhaps from above, in spite of myself.  And maybe the nine of wands, strength in the Thoth deck, or, in the Rider Waite deck, even more appropriately, a bandaged soldier leaning against a staff, having come through the wars, battered but still standing—that could be a good symbol for the writing itself, the strength it takes to keep showing up for that small scary daily birthing, the work and the risk of it, and all the writing I’ve done over the years that have gotten me ready to do it now.        

The Three of Cups and The Hierophant

January 20, 2017: Inauguration Day, or Three of Cups by Tania Pryputniewicz

It’s raining here in San Diego, fitting for the blues I woke with today and assuaged by writing my own inauguration poems with my students in the Election Blues: The Gift of Agency in Poetry class I teach and consider my act of rebellion. We sat writing our poems even as we all as a nation were heading for a poetless inauguration ceremony for the swearing in of the 45th President of the United States and people were either getting on trains or not getting on trains to attend or not attend the inauguration, or enroute or not enroute to attend the following day’s Women’s March on Washington in Washington D. C. and in sister cities in the United States and globally from Mexico City to Sydney to New Delhi, to London  and Paradise Bay, Antarctica, and hundreds more.

Earlier this week on the radio, I heard someone speaking about how it is never good to boycott an inauguration ceremony because in a democracy the peaceful transition of power is a big part of what we stand for--but what comes to mind is the President Elect stating his own reservations about honoring the peaceful transition of power should Hillary Clinton win during the Presidential debates leading up to the election.

In another snippet of radio interview this week, I overheard a woman designer speaking about a male designer helping with inauguration decoration; the phrase they used, that it would be characterized by “soft sensuality,” triggered speculation that the inauguration would suffer from Trump’s brand of beauty pageantry, girls on stage or in the wings. Other comments followed, speculating that “soft sensuality” might be used here to pull in television viewers either curious to see what was meant by the phrase or those attracted to the lifestyle Trump formerly lived as when he was taped making lewd comments and accused by former pageant contestants of entering their dressing areas because he owned it all. These kinds of banterings, more often than not, consume the air-waves, and I, more often than not, have children in the car on the way to or from school listening, always, and I more often than not turn off the radio in favor of silence when my children are with me.

How does this relate to my card of the month, The Three of Cups? In the Thoth deck, golden light overflows from down bent lotuses into rich red pomegranate chalices. How can this image relate to this month and the intensely charged political climate of fear, anxiety, and opposition?

In Pamela Waite Smith’s version of The Three of Cups, three women raise their cups to the sky; one wears a white robe, one wears gold, the third, red. One dons blue boots, one yellow boots, and the third, feet shrouded by the robes of her companions, perhaps goes barefoot. Flowers garland the heads of the trio; a cluster of grapes trails the down bent palm of the wearer of the golden gown.

Maybe this card is a tiny symbol of the joyful, celebratory, strength created by groups of women such as those gathering to march as an antidote to the myriad collective upsets, knitting and wearing pink hats in an attempt to reclaim a word so disparagingly used by the incoming President. Or on behalf of the seeming failure of checks and balances as the incoming administration’s candidate confirmations barrel along unopposed despite so many concerns raised about qualifications in the hearings. Maybe this card is a pictorial version of joining hearts through bridgework, as one might do, during this kind of strife, helping communities galvanize to take practical and ethical action on behalf of the greater good for all.

Angeles Arrien says the cups in this card symbolize the “abundant communicating heart.” At night, I have been raising my own heart to the sky, to the stars, praying, listening for the next right action to take towards harmony. So that harvest be possible, oranges ripen on trees, pumpkins on the vine, like those at the feet of the Three of Cups women.

I also see in this Three of Cups an image of the women in the Obama family celebrating their hours under the White House roof: the hundreds of dancers, performers, writers, and children of all nationalities Michelle Obama invited to perform and visit, the thousands of young African American girls now believing they have a chance to be President--indeed cause for donning of gowns and the braiding of flowers in our hair. No matter who sits in the White House, there are children to raise, hungry to feed, people to love right in front of us in our own country and across the seas globally. Thank you Michelle, Satia, and Malia for the hours of your life you gave to us. I raise my pomegranate chalice to yours, draw strength and courage, from the example you set.

January 20, 2017: The Hierophant by Mary Allen

My card of the month this time was The Hierophant, the fifth Major Arcana card in the deck.  The Hierophant is also my life card.  (You can figure out your life card by adding together the numbers of your birthday, including the year, if you come up with a double-digit number higher than 22 you add the two digits together.)  I’ve always been sort of dismayed by having the Hierophant as my life card, thinking, probably rightly, that it predicted a lifetime full of painful lessons and opportunities for growth for me.  The minor arcana fives aren’t much fun either, depicting, as they do, strife, poverty, defeat and disappointment, mostly all in the mind, as the minor arcana usually are.

I’ve read that the Hierophant was originally meant to represent the pope or some other powerful figure in organized religion, maybe the power of organized religion itself, a concept that doesn’t mean much to me when I pull this card.  Much more meaningful to me, and closer to how I look at it, is Angeles Arrien’s interpretation that the Hierophant has to do with learning and teaching experienced through life challenges. These days when I look at the Hierophant—big bearded orange-outfitted male figure with a smaller, blue-dress-wearing female figure standing in front of him, a tiny baby penciled into a star in the male figure’s heart—I think of higher powers, my higher power, which, as someone who has belonged to a twelve-step program for almost twenty-five years, I’ve cultivated a relationship with, tried to turn my will and my life over to daily, for so long I can hardly remember not doing it. I’ve grown into the habit of at least trying to live in concert with my higher power, of wondering what my higher power could be trying to teach me or tell me with all the major and many of the minor events of my life.  So when this card came up for me as my last card of the month, I wondered what the universe, Life, my higher power was going to be teaching me or telling me in the weeks to come.

I did have an interesting December.  And for once the lessons I seemed to be called upon to learn weren’t painful ones.  For at least thirty years I’ve had a recurring dream that I had to fly to Hawaii and I was scared to and I couldn’t bring myself to get on the plane, and last month, on the 15^th of December, I was called on, in the form of a text from my ex-partner’s oldest daughter, to actually get on a plane and fly to Hawaii.  Plane ticket, lodging, other expenses all provided.  I couldn’t help but look at it as a higher power thing, as my higher power calling me to give up that old fear, whatever it was, not exactly fear of flying but more like fear of moving forward in life, fear of getting off the ground. 

Flying to Hawaii in real life was nothing like flying there or actually not flying there in the dream and I had a lovely trip, full of warmth and sunshine, the ocean, palm trees, coconuts, walks on the beach, time with my ex-partner’s family which, it turns out, is still one of my families even though he and I haven’t been a couple and have hardly spoken to each other for at least five years.  He was there too and it was nice to spend time with him, but whatever lessons I was supposed to learn from him in this lifetime have already been learned, so it was painless, easy, simple, and not particularly significant to be around him for six days.  So maybe here the Hierophant message could be about lessons learned, big lumps of old spiritual food having been finally swallowed and digested.

Donald Trump was inaugurated as our 45^th president a week or so ago, when I had this card as my card of the month.  And as I look at the Hierophant now I’m thinking that maybe, in the larger spiritual sense which the tarot cards talk to us about through symbols, our current political circumstances could be happening for a reason, that we’re getting Donald Trump for our 45^th president so we can learn something, maybe many things.  Lessons about how to have faith and accept others and affect change, about how destructive and bad form blaming, mocking, and name-calling are, ditto the objectification of women, homophobia, racism, and who knows what.  In any case, it seems we are all being called on to stay close to our best selves and higher powers, to stand in the shadow of them and be protected by them so we can learn what there is to learn.

             

The Hierophant and Art, or Temperance

April 2016: The Hierophant by Tania Pryputniewicz

In the Aquarian deck, the Hierophant’s gloved hands remind me of falconry and I step right into the world of Robert Duncan’s poem “My Mother Would be a Falconress.” When I first read the poem in the heartland, I recognized that form of psychic connection bordering on bondage that Duncan captures, though it is a fertile way of relating I associate more with my father than my mother.

In the Hierophant’s red scepter I see the telephone poles and redwing blackbirds of my Illinois childhood. Two keys sit in the left hand corner of the card. Which door does the Hierophant guard or welcome me to unlock? His pale pink and pewter complexion makes him appear invincible. Intellectually I know he often represents formal religion, as in the Pope and other more rigid traditions of spirituality as defined by large groups that appoint a leader to embody their teachings.

As I write new poems about the Illinois commune I lived on as a child, I’m thinking about borrowed religions and ideas.  Raised as they were by Christian and Catholic parents and struggling under the duress of a breakdown my father suffered, my parents opted to start over on the commune after reading The Ultimate Frontier (a book written by our leader detailing his spiritual journey and the lessons of many prior civilizations). We moved from upstate New York to Illinois to join the Stelle community.

Our leader, we were taught, incarnated as King David and further back in time, as the Pharaoh Akhenaton. We drew on diverse traditions to shape our daily ways—out of yarn we made Eyes of God; on Easter we walked a spiral bordered by lit candles. The literature of those commune days still fills my imagination from The Education of Oversoul Seven by Jane Roberts to The Sun Rises (a book written by Dr. Stelle about cavemen Rhu and Hut and the White Brotherhood our leader claimed carved an insignia on his hip).

Knowing there were multiple incarnations made this one seem optional, mundane. Traipsing around on our various field trips, I wondered: Why learn about fertilizer for seed crops or butchering methods at the slaughterhouse or chemical mixtures for sewage? Why would we, the chosen children, need to know these things, if we were once Lemurians or Atlanteans? Why did we fall from grace? How was it possible to skin a knee? To lose a cat to a car on a hot tar road in summer? And how am I to know which past incarnation’s work I need to complete in this incarnation?

I’m using poetry to call a Truce against the pressure of the commune’s unconscious, absorbed, and borrowed beliefs. I begin to make peace with my parents’ pilgrimage in the corn when I look through not only their eyes, but those of the other adults operating at that time in my circumference: the practical, simple, daily “teachers” acting as collective counterbalance to the Hierophant, our leader, at the helm.

When the leader was exiled for alleged inappropriate relations with the mothers of Stelle, our family left the group. The door swung open and out we went into the free bright air, traveling in a Maroon 57 Chevy with wooden camper my father built for hand by us. In California where we landed, I spent years mistrusting the Hierophant. Neither traditional nor wildly creative forms of religion seemed real though memories of the past both haunted and inspired.

When I look at the Thoth Hierophant, I see the comforting earth-tone browns of a robed man and in front of him, in his path, a barefoot Egyptian woman in Blue. Who wouldn’t want to be that agile, graceful, poised Egyptian queen, crescent moon in one hand with downbent sword at the ready?  And yet in this image, I see nothing real or of this world I live in at present.

But maybe that is the point, we are to feel outside of the card, eager and wanting the state of grace the Hierophant and female in front of him seem to possess. Trust in me, they seem to say—I know the way. I don’t think we are meant to revere symbols, Hierophants, our parents, or other human beings so much as we are meant to revere the process of searching, looking, and listening to our responses to them.

And maybe the Truce is realizing we can learn just as much, if not more, from a derailed Hierophant as a pure, perfect Hierophant.

April 7, 2016: Art, or Temperance by Mary Allen

My card of the month was Art, or Temperance, as it’s sometimes called.  It’s the fourteenth major arcana card, the one that follows Death.  I love this card and was overjoyed to see it come up when I picked it. In the Thoth deck it shows a woman with what I can only call a two-sided face—one side dark, the other side light—mixing fire and water together over a cauldron. There’s a bluish-white lion standing on one side of the cauldron and an orange eagle on the other side, both of them with their feet in the pointy orange flames that are heating up whatever’s up in the pot.  This is a beautiful card with many strange and arresting images:  a circle in the woman’s chest holding a clutch of celestial blue balls, a large oval of pale yellow light behind the woman, with writing in it (what does that writing mean? I don’t even know what language it’s in), the woman’s green dress decorated with bees.

When this card comes up I think it’s talking, not so much about art as we think about it but about the art of life, the alchemy of mixing things together—a little of this, a little of that, sorrow, happiness, darkness, light, and what you do with all of that—to create a life.  Living a life is the ultimate creative act, I read somewhere, and to me this card is talking about that.  And I guess it’s an apt card for my month that just passed. 

Angeles Arrien says that every symbol on the Art card “represents the union of opposition which creates something new.”  Something really great happened to me last month, and something not so great, or actually a few not-so-great things, happened too.  The nice thing was huge and the not-so-nice things were all kind of small, but on balance, in some metaphorical weighing scale of suffering versus pleasure, the not-great things probably at least equaled the nice ones if they weren’t heavier.  They didn’t cancel them out though; all those things were just mixed together, creating a month.

The wonderful thing was:  I was on vacation in the desert for two weeks, writing and hiking, resting and thinking and laughing and talking with my friend.  The not-so-great involved being sick for two weeks before I left, losing a bunch of sleep and feeling sort of sick again after I got back, and, in the middle of the vacation, like a drop of black ink falling into a glass of clear liquid, a rejection letter that arrived in my inbox, for a memoir I’d spent the last two years rewriting after spending at least fifteen years writing.  Just one little rejection letter, I know—everybody knows you have to get thousands of no’s before you get a yes, and blah blah blah.  But, for various reasons, psychological and otherwise, I found it discouraging, disheartening, dispiriting, faith-in-my-writing-diminishing, and a whole bunch of other things.  Still, later on in the day it came, my friend and I went out and hiked through the desert, baking in the sun, buffeted by the wind, and I started the work of digesting that letter, making sense of it in the context of my story, scrounging up the courage to try again.  By the end of the day I was ready to go back to the cauldron of life, to keep mixing in new ingredients, creating more faith.  

Related Link:

A discussion the formative influences of the Stelle commune on Tania's writing life, poetry, and a bit about the beauty of Tarot writing:

Podcast, This Choice, hosted by poet Ren Powell