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 Star Card, The Queen of Wands, and The Six of Wands

July 31, 2017: The Star Card by Tania Pryputniewicz July 31, 2017

I love the graceful curves of the embodied Star in the Thoth Deck, her arms, legs and hair radiant with celestial blue lavender. The tiny white star embedded in the pale maroon planet behind Star Woman’s body mirrors a tiny blue star spilling out of the top cup of two she holds in her hands. The path of the light trails coming off the star points escape in concentric angular rings. The Wild Wood Tarot calls this card The Pole Star, that star by which the first human travelers navigated; they write that the star fields “wheel around it in fixed position.” Angles Arrien writes that the card reminds us that each of us “is an opening for light or a gateway through with the Absolute can manifest.”

I piled the kids in the car this month and promised them we’d stop at Moonlight Beach in Encinitas where they could play along the shore break if they first agreed to come with me on a garden/incense run. Not to the formal Meditation Garden where they’d have to observe the rule of silence (according to the floating officer of the Peace on duty) but to a different Peace Garden just up the street. In this second garden, created by an ordinary woman, you are invited to select a palm-sized white rock or two and choose a couple of colored pens from a ribbon suspended on a tree branch.

The kids knew what to do. They dropped down and began to draw, the garden at their feet full of messages left by others, the most recent still readable, the older stones fading under the southern California sun. Since my earlier visit with a friend, a laminated photo of Gandhi had been added with the quote “be the change you want to see” as well as a sign reminding dog walkers to refrain from allowing their dogs to relieve themselves on the art.  We added our rocks, snapped photos in front of the hanging wooden hearts and rainbow pinwheels, and then dashed into the Self Realization Fellowship gift shop for sandalwood incense. I also picked up a tiny free blue book, Cosmic Chants.

After just one night of chanting at dusk along the beach the Star card feeling comes on strong. One of the lines from that night’s chant, “Opal Flame,” opens with, Shining, opening in hall of matter, O Star, I peep through thee into the land of astral light that kindles life in everything.  I walked along watching the few rays of light make it through the cloud cover to shine far out on the sea. All the while, at my feet, was this lovely miniature mirror realm of clouds reflected in the sheen of retreating waves. This shifting landscape washed free every time a new wave broke. I felt as if I could fall through the clouds at my feet.

That night I had a dream that I was walking by the sea. The sun was a deep orange-red and hanging low in the sky. Every time I took a step I floated up off the ground. I was overjoyed at my newfound skill.

I love the way and heaven and earth exist so nested: the incense, the little free blue book from the gift shop, Moonlight Beach, the peace garden, and the chant reminding me I need only put my hand on my heart and I am home again, close, but far, starbound and earthbound at the same time.

July 31, 2017: The Queen of Wands and Six of Wands by Mary Allen

I picked two cards last month: The Queen of Wands and the six of Wands.  Both happy auspicious cards but also cards that feel a little generic to me. The queen, according to Angeles Arrien, represents self-mastery or self-reclamation:  She’s got her hand on the head of a leopard sitting beside her, which is supposed to mean she’s come through many dark places and chooses to remember them; hence, a gold leopard with black spots. The six is the card for victory. In the Rider Waite deck the six shows a prince riding in on a horse with followers beside him; he’s wearing a garland on his head and there’s another one on the wand he holds in his hand.  A great card to have for your card of the month, even if you did pick it as an afterthought after you picked the queen.

The symbol that speaks the most loudly to me right now as I look at these cards is the symbol at the ends of the two upper wands in the Thoth deck six of wands.   As far as I can tell, this symbol is the Winged Eye of Horus, with roots in ancient Egypt, but the colors and imagery look like Pueblo Indian things to me.  It’s turquoise, with red markings and red circles, and has snakes at the base like you find in the desert, all of which reminds me of Taos, New Mexico.

 

I went to Taos when this was my card of the month (one of them).  I was down there for a week working with a client on her manuscript, and when we weren’t working we went for walks in the clear bright air.  One afternoon we walked to an abandoned monastery and stood beside a tall white cross at the end of a sandy path in the middle of an endless field of scrub brush.  We placed stones at the base of the cross and then stood there looking out at the wide blue sky and the towering blue-tinged clouds, surrounded by the quiet and the wind and the sunlight. 

I got stuck in the Denver airport overnight on my way down there, and before that I taught for a week and a weekend, gave an hour-long speech, and did many other things that made me feel like I was caught up in a tornado, whipped around from one thing to the next.  That was more or less what my whole month was like from beginning to end, with only that one moment of peace and stillness among the scrub brush at the base of a cross.  But I came through it, I wasn’t thrown off the horse of myself at any point, including when I was lying on the hard floor of the airport, hungry and exhausted and feeling flung to the ground by a tornado in the form of the lightning storm that hit the airport during the time my flight was scheduled.  I came through it all and was spit out the other end, I learned something from it all, I managed to be myself, reclaim myself, through it all.  And I suppose that is a kind of victory.

Related Links:

A Poem for Lisa: Encinitas Meditation Garden

The Moon and The Devil

June 27, 2015: The Moon Card by Tania Pryputniewicz

Last Card of the Month writing with Mary was on May 1, so I’ve lived with The Moon now for two months. Mary was battling resistance to her selection, The Devil, so she chose a few more cards. I love that she second-guesses the pull, knows better than to force a negative. No being punished or nailed down; we view the Tarot as a spontaneous mirror and never judge our spontaneous hands reaching out for another image.

“What did you get?” Mary asked. When she heard I pulled the Moon, she suggested that I go inward in order to find peace around the heightened survivor’s panic I’ve been unable to quell as my three kids (especially my daughter) careen toward puberty. “Use the Moon to go see what is inside you, for you,” Mary said, like there was just a trapdoor to open and stairs to descend, and all I needed to do was go. She’s right; she’s journeyed the card intimately: see her post about how the Moon card prevailed through the grief of losing her sister. 

Mary reminded me that the tall jackal figures on either side of the valley of two hills in the Thoth deck are sentries protecting us so we are safe to review our hidden selves without fear of exposure or danger from the outside world. Arrien says, “The guardians of the gate are the Ra Kings from ancient Egypt, the Sun gods, who protect our life force and energy as we change and reclaim our authentic selves.”

I love this idea that our life force is sun driven.

I looked at the card closely and right away recognized a bathtub view of the female body lying supine. The pale red and blue hills below the earth’s horizon line form breasts and the scarab (Khepi, Egyptian God of Transformations according to Arrien) encircles an underground sun with its two foremost feelers. Scarab and sun are haloed by two pale yellow circles that feel uteral to me. Especially the ring that forms a tip at the loins of the two large blue legs, ending in the hills of knees, nesting the two sun gods, one per thigh.

I think of Frida Kahlo’s bathtub portrait (What I Saw in the Water, also known by the title, What the Water Gave Me) painted from inside pain’s hyper alert state of slowed time. We could say it is Frida’s Moon map, memories bobbing on the surface of the water, stilled for her to see. And for us to witness, looking over her shoulder, blessing vicariously her story and our own buried sorrow wicked to the surface in resonant sympathy.

All month long, finding five minutes here and there in which to rest while burning sandalwood incense, I felt that quiet, protected, moony place again inside, even as my son interrupted, flinging open bedroom door to bring me his latest smoothie variations of fresh pineapple, almonds, vanilla, kale, raspberries, and yogurt over ice.

During Tarot class, I came across Eden Gray’s mention of the stream between the two cups of the Temperance Angel as transferring “the Life force from the imagination (Moon) into activity of the conscious (Sun) [in such a way that] the will is developed and imagination purified” so that nothing is ever lost. Eileen Connolly, speaking of the Star Card, reminds us “we can’t know the question nor the answer” when approaching the Superconscious or God force itself.

I spend so much time white-knuckling life, putting up shields in fear this or that might happen to my daughter or my sons; but now I see the shield keeps out the good God force too. It is a blessing to return to meditation where body and mind can replenish. I’m thinking of sci-fi movies in which cyborg assassins shut off to rejuvenate, blue and gold light sparking beneath metal frame. When those cyborg eyes click open again, the whole robot is fully restored and ready to overcome any obstacle or threat.

In the Thoth Moon depiction, between the blue hills or knees of the supine self, another world crowns with swirling red and blue path lines. It looks like a blown glass marble, pale yellow but mostly blue like the Earth from space. Maybe during incarnation our path is lined with blood. Pain forces our attention, darkens the hem of the skirt, anchors us.

Reading Alejandro Jodorowsky on the negative aspect of the Star card, I came across this line, which at first made me defensive. He writes: if we want to view the Star card negatively, we could say, “she is squandering her energy on the past, haunted by the unresolved neuroses of the inner child.”

I could take this to mean I’ve squandered my time on projects that were twenty obsessive years in the making, such as November Butterfly in which I wrote about women across time and our inherited relationship to victim stance, charisma, danger and power. But just the act of taking that time to write about my trauma and that of others has allowed the “neuroses of the inner child” to speak, and freed her clutching grip on large portions of my psyche. As a result, there’s room in my inner house now for the kind of joy I’m experiencing in meditation, actively practicing Connolly’s concept of immersing without resistance to the ever present God force.

I’m reminded of a particular type of flying dream I have now and again, bordering on horrific, in which my body disintegrates as a fractional core self hurtles forward in forced acquiescence. The terror is always balanced by an intense joy—as if my cells are singing in celebration of God/life force.  I tried to paint the sensation years ago when I lived in Iowa City, titling the blue and dark orange melting figure, The Fear/Joy.

How do we take the lesson of trusting life again “off the cushion” and into the day? ("Off the cushion" is a line from a beautiful meditation astrologer Bonnie Orgren shared with me, The accomplishment of Kwan Yin, by Donna Mitchell-Moniak). I practiced earlier this week while walking my Siberian Husky, letting the black loop of her leash rest lightly in my palm and borders of my body blend out to meet the black-eyed Susans swirling on their pale lime stalks, extending the blending of boundaries down to sand and beyond to the wan blue bay water receding towards the Blue Bridge…

…which worked until my Husky spotted a tiny wild rabbit, and we were off in reckless pursuit of a bobbing white tail vanishing through sage bush until my weight countered the dog enough to drag us to a panting halt beneath the high noon sun. I’ll try again when I’m not attached to the other end of a leash.

June 27, 2015: The Devil Card by Mary Allen

My card of the month was the Devil.  Oh no, the Devil! I thought when I pulled it, and I pulled another card to see if I could get something that would tell me something different.  That time I got the 7 of Wands (Valor) which I thought might be telling me the same thing as the Devil so I picked another card (2 of Swords, Peace) and at that point I just gave up.

The Devil in the Thoth deck has a picture of a goat stuck to a big brown wooden something that can only be described as a dick and at the bottom of that are two oval balls.  The balls have small ghostly contorted figures of men inside them; the goat himself has long twisty horns, a third eye in the middle of his forehead and a rakish crown of blue flowers sitting askew on his head.  As depictions of the Devil goes this one is pretty benign even if it’s a little embarrassing. 

The Devil in the Rider-Waite deck has harpy feet, bat wings, and a reversed pentagram on his forehead, and the Devil in the Tarot of Marseille (this was the first tarot deck I ever had, bought on a whim when I saw it at a bookstore, the images turned out to be way too abstract for me to even begin to make heads or tails of) – that Devil has boobs, a face on the belly, eyes on the knees, male genitalia, and its own set of bat wings.  What could all these images possibly be telling me during the last month?

I’ve decided to go with the interpretation in the Angeles Arrien book, which, like the Thoth Devil it describes, is the most benign one I can find.  She says the Devil represents (or reinforces, or comments on or whatever) maintaining stability and humor in all aspects of life. (I guess being strapped to a big dick equals stability, the humor needs no explanation.)  She also says, and here’s the part that speaks to me about the spiritual pathway I’ve been traveling since I picked this card (a good month and a half ago now):  The Devil represents the need to face whatever we might consider our bedevilments or problems.  

I think I can honestly say I did that during the last month or so.  Prompted by some inner necessity, and without even thinking about this card, I typed out a list of the main thought patterns that still bedevil me in my life – things like not being able to get and hold onto any clear adult sense of myself; the idea that it’s somehow not safe to feel like everything is safe and good, etc.  (There were six of them, like the six wand-wielding men battling the one man who’s standing on higher plane above them, in the Rider-Waite seven of wands, my second card of the month.) 

I also typed out a prayer listing six alternative thoughts I’d rather think:  Thank you for helping me know deep inside that it’s safe and good to feel safe and good, etc.  And every day since then I’ve been reading that prayer a couple of times a day.  And every time, after I do that, I feel something light and airy opening up inside myself; I’m filled with happiness and optimism and peace – peace like the meaning of the two of swords, my third card of the month. 

Maybe the next time I pull the Devil or something like him as my card of the month I won’t be so scared, though I doubt it.  I’ll just pull another card and maybe another one after that, and try to listen to whatever Life has to say to me and remember that life is safe and good and that it is safe and good to feel safe and good.