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.

The Four of Cups and The Eight of Cups

April 22, 2015: The Four of Cups by Mary Allen

My card this month was the four of cups.  The four of cups in the Thoth deck depicts four cups with water pouring out of a lotus fixture at the top, and is, according to Angeles Arrien, supposed to represent emotional luxury and fulfillment -- both internal and external fulfillment. 

At first I couldn’t figure out what in my month had anything to say about me having both internal and external emotional fulfillment.  Maybe the card was just wrong this time? 

Then I remembered that I did have a big moment sometime during the month when I felt a deep sense of satisfaction in the life I’ve made for myself.  I was at a twelve-step meeting with someone who was talking about moving to another part of the country to take a new job and I realized how absolutely unappealing that was to me. 

And in that moment it came to me how truly happy and satisfied I am with the life I’ve got, the life I’ve built for myself with the help of Life over the years – a life that is truly both internally and externally satisfying.  A life with writing -- which is a deeply internally emotionally fulfilling thing -- squarely in the middle of it, a life in which I write faithfully at least two days a week every single week, and in which I get to help others write, and even get paid for doing that.  A life in which I get to live inside my own house and my own self-made life, feeling both internally and externally fulfilled. 

I felt incredibly grateful when I thought of that and the feeling stayed with me for days.  And now writing about this card has reminded me of it and brought that gratitude back.

April 22, 2015: Eight of Cups by Tania Pryputniewicz

… get it right girls! After all we went through, the least you can do is thrive! …

I initially disliked this month’s card, the Thoth Eight of Cups, balking at the one word caption, Indolence, with its hues of purposeful laziness, petulance and excessive wealth, fearing it meant I was doomed to squander my month stewing in unhealthy emotion.

In the Thoth image we see even rows of storm clouds bordered by moody mossy Neptunian hems of green that gradually subside to a lighter blue, with one brief lemon ray to indicate sky before the plunge into a green you could mistake for the sea or a desert out of which sprout peach cups.

A cluster of five cups seem to float in tiny pools sprung up in the desert, but when you look closer, you see a wan peach lily-like plant supporting two down bent blossoms dripping water into the middle row of cups. The very center cup, perhaps the severed root of the flower itself, is empty as are three cups in the sky floating on lily pad leaves.

Angeles Arrien says the card depicts a state of feeling depleted, which feels accurate for me. I’ve been in an exhausting rut, reacting to my 14 year old daughter’s life, fearing the power struggles might go on forever. I keep forgetting that I have a choice about how stressed out I become. Wanting some relief, I turned to the Rider Waite Eight of Cups, called by some “Success Abandoned.” Here, a figure in red cape turns away from eight full cups to go after an elusive new goal.

In synchronicity, working with my Tarot writing students this month, I come across the Poet Tarot Deck’s Wheel of Fortune card featuring Edna St. Vincent Millay. When I look for example poems by Millay, I discover a selection on google books discussing her natal chart and birth placement as a Pisces Eight, which connects her to the Eight of Cups. The Poet Tarot handbook assigns Millay to the Wheel of Fortune Arcanum due to the ups and downs she experienced during periods of wildly vacillating public support. Still, she wrote. Regardless. Maybe the Eight of Cups “elusive new goal” is simply to write that next poem….

But just as I question Indolence, I’m wondering about Success Abandoned. I prefer the Rider Waite’s red cape to signify the figure’s vitality and warmth, an inner confidence. And prefer to think the figure is drawn to new pools, stopping to look into each new mirror, as writers are apt to do, much like the children in C.S. Lewis’s "The Magician’s Nephew," remember them? Polly and Digory?  The two kids steal a couple of magic rings, which have the power to transport them (yellow: go, green: return) to a strange forest pocked with pools that are portals to other worlds.  They end up on the run from a powerful witch named Jadis, a tall and terrible stone queen they wake from enchantment who manages to trail them back into our world.

Last year when I was reading the Chronicles of Narnia to my own children and writing daily Haiku, I wrote three for my husband based on The Magician’s Nephew:

Sleep: our yellow ring.

Dawn: our green. True magician:

Love’s concentric rings.

The woods between: you’re

Digory, I’m Polly, with vague

Shared past, still willing.

Not for thrill of new

or fear of witch. But that you

came to retrieve me.

On the run, hiding in the garage from the kids, leaning up against the washing machine, my husband listens to me, calms me, when things get too intense. Though I’m grateful he’s so present, can take over here and there, I am most of the time the first body absorbing the emotions circling our home at any given moment. Only after reaching out to my friends to say how down I felt do I realize how much I’ve gotten used to a perpetual state of Eight of Cups exhaustion.

Dance! One friend says… Shake out the anger! Walk away!

Read "Gift from the Sea," another says, and it pulls me up short, puts my struggles in perspective, to discover the grief of Anne Morrow Lindbergh (she lost an infant to a kidnapper). And yet, Lindbergh writes. Seashell by seashell (her chapters named after shells), Lindbergh considers her family of five, displays for us her ledger of joys and challenges with equanimity.

Read Sharon Olds! Another says. And I do…and I see everywhere around me women not giving in to their exhaustion but finding a way to make a path, word by word, to wholeness.

This month and last, then, I’ve had two of the Eights that correspond to the Major VIII, Strength. These minor Eights—chosen blindness (Eight of  Swords), and chosen exhaustion (Eight of Cups) are meant to remind me to call on the best of Arcanum VIII, Strength, to heal. When I look at the Rider Waite Strength card, girl bending gently at waist to restrain lion’s jaw, I’m initially angry to see such a harmonious rendering of what I perceive as a far bloodier internal battle to gain equilibrium.

In this case, I prefer the Thoth Strength card: a naked woman astride the many-headed lion, cauldron of her uteral blood raised to sky and worms either coming to feed or scattering away from her chalice of self. This woman is thoroughly underground—only her blood breaks the horizon line—blood she discards monthly, blood of childbirth, blood that goes into the bloodline of her future children.

The kind of wrangling to right a teenage daughter and oneself means wrangling with one’s own matrilineal lines of power and pain. It means respecting the trials of my ancestors—my two grandmothers—one withstanding the shock frequencies of EST passing through her brain, the other waiting up all night for her husband to come home from the bar, and further back to distant Polish and Italian and Irish foremothers walking barefoot in their gardens or the gardens of others they tended.

Perhaps the storm clouds in this month’s Eight of Cups are ancestral, a backdrop of the crush of emotions that pour in to the charged, lemon bright air of the now between my daughter and I, a sort of mixed blessing and challenge: get it right girls! After all we went through, the least you can do is thrive!

What I can do for now is give thanks for the strength of my grandmothers, for the lens of the Tarot, for Mary’s friendship, and for this lifelong affliction/blessing of writing that allows me to breathe and try again tomorrow.

Related link:

Tania's next Tarot Writing class, Wheel of Archetypal Selves: Stasis to Radiance, Hanged One to Star is forming online. To read a course description and to sign up visit her website.

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.