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 Chariot and The Knight of Swords

July 21, 2015: The Chariot by Mary Allen

My card this month was the Chariot.  I got the Chariot during my reading too, in the waxing moon position, so I figured the Chariot might have something to tell me – I still think it probably does, though I haven’t quite figured out what yet.

All the readings I found on this card were pretty vague; mostly what I got out of them is that the Chariot has something to do with change and also determination, confidence, and directed controlled energy.  I’ve always read this card as meaning the pause before – i.e., the moment before -- some big change is going to come, but I couldn’t find that anywhere in any of the online sources I consulted so I don’t know where I got it.  The closest I could come to it was in the Angeles Arrien book, where she says the Thoth “Chariot depicts a figure in contemplation or quietude sitting within a chariot readied for activity.”

Someone gave me a Motherpeace deck a couple of months ago and there the card shows a small woman riding in a conveyance drawn by two goats with wings; the woman is holding a thick brown branch with a ball on the end of it.  Most of the Motherpeace cards—which are round and were designed in the 1970s and which I’ve always thought were too dated while at the same time too untraditional to be interesting, but which, it turns out now, I kind of like—show small women doing something; most of them are naked, but the woman on the Chariot is wearing a dress.  She’s an Amazon from northern Africa and the goddess just gave her an apple for a job well done, according to the guide that came with the cards. 

I love that idea and I’m very happy in general that my card of the month was the Chariot—it’s saying something good, is pretty much all I’ve managed to take from it in my thinking so far.  Which is often the main thing I look for when I pull a card—is it a good card, or is it a bad card or a boring doesn’t-say-much-of-anything-good-or-bad card?  I love thinking that my life this past month involved a job well done, that my behavior last month involved change with directed controlled energy, but I’m going to have to stretch to actually connect that with something in real life— my real life—last month.

The only thing I can think of is this talk I gave in the middle of the month.  The talk was on a Wednesday morning at eleven a.m. and I got a terrible night’s sleep the night before, I had one of those night’s where you can’t go to sleep and then somehow you can’t stay asleep.  When I finally got up in the morning I couldn’t imagine how I was possibly going to be able to marshal the energy to go down and talk for an hour – my subject was how to edit like a zen master – in front of an auditorium full of people.  It was not going to be easy, to say the least.  (The victory of the Chariot may involve triumph over some struggle.)  But, as the Chariot predicted, I was somehow able to rise to the challenge. I reread my notes, marshaled my psychic energy, and went down and gave that talk, and everybody loved it. 

Against all the odds, and even a little miraculously, I felt good, happy, confident standing there in front of my audience – most of them writers who’d come to Iowa City to attend the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival, a program I taught in a few weeks earlier, and which my talk was a part of.  I looked out at their faces and saw that they were truly interested in what I was saying, and I felt interested in what I was saying too.  I was present in the room instead of nervous and they were present too.  Three or four people left during the talk – I could see them gathering up their bags and exiting through the back door – but my Chariot confidence remained unshaken.  There were more questions than I could answer at the end and people came up front and talked to me and everybody seemed excited about what I had said.  I was excited about it too. 

I could practically feel myself being pulled along in my Chariot – on to who knows what future triumphs and speeches and publications.   As the afternoon wore on I started to feel my tiredness, and I didn’t quite know what to do with myself while my slightly inflated ego sank back down to regular size.  But the feeling that something had gone well never left me, and I’m grateful for my time in the Chariot, and sometimes I can even remember that I’m still in the Chariot, being carried forward by life.

July 21, 2015: The Knight of Swords by Tania Pryputniewicz

My card this month was the Knight of Swords. In the Thoth deck, horse and rider skim through a blue sky high above cloud-like rivulets of water. I love the tawny caramel of horse outlined in darker brown, the elfin gold-green armor and matching pixie helmet of the knight. Three swallows fly below the horse bearing his colors in winged mimicry. Both backs of horse and rider share a body line, just as horse’s rear leg and rider’s leg fold at the same angle, seamless in their commitment to forward motion.

They’re setting off diagonally; even the birds agree. We don’t see the rider’s eyes, but the horse’s are blue, wide open. His muzzle and profile line meld into front hoove line. Four propellers, transparent as dragonfly wings, spin on top of the knight’s helmet and are labeled North, South, East, and West. Where is this duo headed with such purposeful haste? Angeles Arrien reminds us that the card, “Combining the elements of water and air, metaphorically, is a symbol for passionate thinking.”

This card fell during some intense weeks of reckoning with mortality due to my aging parents. I’m poured through childhood memories, as if on a Ferris wheel, up, up for birds’ eye view, then plummeted back to the ground level of the now where my children live. The psychic umbilical cord doubles; I stand midlife, one half of the cord trammeling back to my parents and the other surging towards my children.

There’s never much more to offer than physical presence so I prepare to visit. Even as I pack my green suitcase, I get a phone call from the lifeguard stand: my daughter hyperextended her arm doing a cartwheel in the surf.  I reign in my fears about dying, what’s left to say or do in my life, my parents’ lives, have they done what they came here to do--have any of us?—and I tend to my daughter, anchored to her need. But by dusk the entourage of doubts and memories return with what I recognize now as the “fear-of-death/loss migraine” in tow.

Alejandro Jodoroswsky writes in relation to the Knight of Swords, “I guide [my horse] in a large leap that projects me from realm of intellect into the mystery of the emotional.” The realm I enter does not feel guidable; I’m definitely out of my head and in the heart’s underworld of projected grief, as if out of time with my loved ones already. My husband makes dinner for the kids and by instinct they all steer clear of my door, coming only to kiss me, nudging aside the stack of pillows over my head, calling Mom, Mom, good night.

By sunrise, I know, like the knight, it is best not to look up or stop  for now, better to dwell in the green spring of the possibility that my parents, and all of us, will have more seasons together. I’ve no other task than to allow that supple strong-legged horse carry me to and away from my parents as often as I can escape while I care for my children and write my way true.

The Eight of Swords and The Prince of Wands

March 24, 2015: The Eight of Swords: The Blood Fold by Tania Pryputniewicz

“Good luck,” Mary says each time before we hang up the phone to write to our cards of the month. This bit of warmth makes it possible for me to pick up the pen, for writing is hard work. We’d been joking, laughing, Do we want to write? No. Will we write? Yes. Mary’s love, like a neck scarf, trails me into the tunnel of alone, the part of our shared Tarot writing journey we do separately, bright promise of her voice on the other side of our twenty-five minutes when we will read our reflections back to one another.

It is not one of my favorite cards--this March’s Eight of Swords, Interference in the Thoth deck--with its purple background and jangle of red lines and triangles, six scimitars and sickle-curved, jagged swords overlaid by two long, straight swords as if set just so on top to bring order to the unruly six.

In my mind’s eye, I see the Rider Waite image for the Eight of Swords: a blindfolded woman standing in front of a row of blades anchored in the ground. A typical Tarot response is that the woman could step left or right in order to cut herself free. Victimhood stars in this interpretation, since she could end her bondage if she chose. What is she gaining by stasis, though, might be a kinder question.

Alejandro Jodorowsy, in The Way of The Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, has an even kinder take: “the mind has ceased to identify with its concepts. It is a powerful orientation, a trance state or deep meditation in which the duality of opposites dissolves in celebration of the present. The solution to problems becomes obvious, beyond the powers of reasoning.”

I want this calm interpretation to be the one I lived. But instead it was a month of withstanding interference and overcoming obstacles to book doctor’s appointments and meetings with the school, counselors and more for my teen-aged daughter in crisis. And trying to understand why—given the myriad good measures we’ve taken to help her--we are still standing in the kitchen at 1 a.m. arguing.

I’m raising my voice, But I am on your side. She persists, No, you’re not. You don’t understand.

My husband emerges woolly with sleep to intervene, can we keep it down, he’s getting up at 5 a.m. to supervise tomorrow’s dive. Our sons at the opposite end of the house begin their fidget awake which means soon they’ll take refuge in our bed. The raw ire now encompasses my husband; we’ve done it again: the family swords are out in the air spinning and glittering for the taking.

I long for the day before when we walked, Husky leaping between us over the kelp washed seashore, where I find a blue plastic sea-horse sand toy and the littlest, a green Miami dolphin baseball cap in wearable condition. My husband finds a canister go-pro, the kind you wear on the side of your head. He’s already turned it on and records a pan of the four of us on the side of the sand dunes comparing treasures.

So destructive, this interference of the mind, the pain families cause one another with the things we say. You don’t understand. I’m on your side. I negate my daughter's words: I do understand. She negates mine: You’re not on my side.

The argument started earlier in her bedroom. Frankly, I am in the wrong--her room is hers. I should know better: When I come in to say goodnight, say goodnight. Resist the urge to restore order: leave the wet towel, the empty mug. You are the only person in this house with your own room, I still can’t help blurting. It isn’t helpful. My daughter remains anchored and I muster the strength to go, abandoning us both to our separate truths. My husband retreats to our bedroom, boys blinking sleepily behind him.

In the logjam of our bed, I think about our house up north where I had a writing cabin with a desk, pastel sketches, sculpture of a man’s torso bearing a poem, sculpture of a woman poked with serpentine holes so the light inside of her rayed out in faint spokes, a painting of a Midwest barn glowing with the surreal blues of winter snow, and a futon where my daughter and her best friend loved to sleep. With a wooden tray of tea and chocolate, I’d cross the chilled deck in the dark and over the gravel drive to knock on the door, the outside bulb wreathed in moths and every other gangly, amber winged creature seeking light.

But now I wonder about that merging of psychic fields. Should I have kept that cabin separate? Maybe. But letting my daughter use my studio for sleepovers during the ups and downs of salvaging my marriage was often what I had left to offer. Under the roof of the healed marriage, it is my turn to respect her room, be-hair-banded, be-shoed, be-littered as it may be from empty plates to her clothes-pinned water colors draped above the desk, all hers to keep or clear. Maybe that awareness of the dance of merging and separation is the celebration of the present of which Jodorowsky speaks.

Or maybe the card shows how our daughters see us as we grapple with how to deal with them. Come on Mom, take off the blindfold. Come on Mom, don’t be so stupid, free yourself. But give me what I want, at all costs.

I know that craving well. To be mirrored. Loved. What she doesn’t know is that my blindfold is a blood-fold, a living web I see through before I make decisions regarding her, weighing needs vs. wishes across years of living she doesn’t understand littered with compromise, marriage, childbirth, and persisting with my passion to write.

Or, to step one more time into the figure on the card, maybe I am the blindfolded daughter standing in front of the Eight of swords linked inextricably to the Major Arcanum VIII, Mother Justice card. She sits on her throne with eyes open, unafraid, sword of truth in one hand. Scales in the other. Impenetrably aware of the next right thing to do, without personal attachment--something I struggle to relearn in the presence of those I love when they crave something from me. I’m learning Mother, still learning, how to withstand my own unmet cravings. Help me to teach my daughter to withstand hers.

March 24, 2015: The Prince of Wands by Mary Allen

My card this month was the Prince of Wands:  male figure in a chariot drawn by a lion, everything in shades of red and gold, the boy/man (he doesn’t really look like a boy or a man), the lion, the wheels of the chariot, the corona of flames coming out of the boy/man’s head, the flames all around him, the spears of flame coming up from the bottom of the picture – everything is red and gold.  The prince is holding a set of reins loosely in one hand, a staff with a bird’s head in the other, and there’s a kind of fountain of watery flames leaping out of the front of his chariot, like something you might see on a pedestrian mall except there would be no fire involved.

This was the perfect card for me this month.  I went to Tucson with my friend JoAnn; we stayed in a rented house in the desert and wrote and hiked on trails in the Saguaro National Park.  The colors of this card are the colors of the desert and the sunburst around the prince’s head looks vaguely Southwestern.  He’s moving, being drawn along across an abstract tan landscape like the desert floor – the way we were constantly moving throughout the trip, zooming through the sky in separate airplanes to get there, walking every day along tan sandy hiking trails, burning through the ten-day vacation, our time in that magical red and gold place getting shorter with every passing day -- and around the figure on the card, I see, in the spaces between the flames surrounding his head and the flames surrounding his body are little black things that look like bees. 

There are bees in the Arizona desert, it turns out, Africanized ones; you read about them at the visitor’s center before you go up on the trail – if you have an encounter with them run, it says on a laminated poster, and I did encounter them at one point, in the form of a loud, loud, getting louder and louder helicopter-like buzzing coming from the left and passing over and behind me and then heading off to the right as I started running up the path toward my friend, who was at least a half mile up ahead of me on the trail.  Those bees gave me pause, to say the least.  But in the end they didn’t stop me from going back out on the trail the next day.

Angeles Arrien says the Prince of Wands is a card for “mastery of unlimited creative expression that is totally inspired from deeply within” – that the fact that the prince holds the reins loosely in his hand, while the lion charges ahead pulling him in the chariot, means he’s allowing creativity to take him where it wants to go without restricting it or restraining it, and I would say that that’s an apt metaphor for my month too, my ten days in Arizona.  

JoAnn and I wrote every day, sitting across from each other in a sunny room, the door cracked despite the threat of flies and errant bees wandering in, to admit the warm Arizona air, trying to let go and let the language come out of us, to let the writing pull us along to the images and the meaning.  That kind of writing does feel a little like sitting in a chariot being pulled forward by a lion, a fountain of flames leaping in front of you, something growing inside a circle in your heart like there is in the boy/man’s chest, and maybe some scary bees flying along beside you.