In the past months I’ve developed a daily practice with Tarot to survive the itinerancy of moving across the country. I usually only read for other people, but reading Tarot for yourself daily is a great indulgent practice. Like Narcissus, you get to self-reflect ad nauseam, but you’re also active like a monk, a disciple of self-awareness. And while I began this practice with the Tarot as a mode of self-therapy, it’s become central to my writing practice. When I set myself to my poems, these journal entries provide me with a set of hilariously larger-than-life symbolism to cast the motions of my language against. Because these cards show you your demons, and like Wes Craven’s
Swamp Thing, the Tarot tells you “the only way out is through.” If you see that your poetics is becoming increasingly decentralized, occupied by too many voices, then the answer is not to restrict your voices but to adopt more of them, to inhabit them all, work them all up until you don’t
need them any more. The Tarot tells you to genuinely encounter and then work through the cards you pull, and it’s teaching me that a lot of a poet’s work is akin to the spiritual work you do with the cards. Just as The Devil sometimes shows up in readings three days in a row, sometimes a thing thrusts itself into your work, and you have to embrace it with no shame.
So for those who dig it, I’ll give you a crash course in the basic system I use to read the cards, I’ll talk about the spiritual place of the Tarot, and then I’ll give you some excerpts of the journal I keep from my daily practice.
*****
The Tarot is an old card game. Its origins are debated but basically its gestation site was 14
th century Europe, when the French pope Clement VII and the Italian pope Urban VI were feuding (aka
the Great Schism) and Muslim mercenaries were hanging out, thanks to the Crusades. So the Tarot, though it uses plenty of Christian iconography, is heretical as fuck (and some kings, counts, etc. tried to ban it). For example, the last card of the
Higher Arcana, number XXI, The World, is meant to represent the most sacred completion a human can achieve. It depicts a vision that comes directly from Ezekiel’s “vision of God”: there is a circle with a figure at each of the four cardinal corners –the Angel, the Lion, the Ox, and the Eagle– but instead of representing a Godhead, there is a naked, dancing woman in the center of the circle.
The author of one of my Marseille Tarot decks tells us: “The most classic example of Marseilles Tarots unites intuitive simplicity and esoteric profoundness.” So my goal in a reading is to use both my knowledge of the Tarot’s system and my deepest intuition in order uncover the meaning of each symbol as it’s presented in harmony with all the other symbols in the card, and the spread. I then present the meaning of the cards to the querent so that they can identify with these cards as they will. The cards don’t tell your future, they tell you something more like “this is how the deck is responding to your current energetic state” so that the power of these cards becomes how we respond to them. A card shows you something at a given moment, and like picking up a $20 bill on the street, you choose to trust it. Found meaning. The purpose of putting your mind to a card is that it will give you material to work with in your daily, creative, emotional life.
The Tarot has a Minor and Major Arcana. There are 56 Minor Arcana Cards, divided into 4 suits: the Wands, the Cups, the Swords, the Coins. Each suit has 10 numbered cards and then 4 court cards: Page, Knight, Queen, and King. Then there is the Higher Arcana, which has 22 cards. Each Higher Arcana depicts an animate figure whose significance is on a more “cosmic” scale, because the figure in each card figures a stage in a progressing narrative that represents the unfolding and actualization of the universe. You start with the Magician at 1 and end up with the World at 21. You also have the Fool, who most truly represents the cyclical nature of this actualizing process. He is number 0 and number 22, beginning the journey at 0 before the Magician, or continuing the journey as 0 when he bravely leaves the state of completion he reached in the World’s 21.
Below is an introduction to the system of symbology that we work with in the Tarot. It is useful whether or not you’re reading Tarot because it represents a soft architecture of the soul. Because it grew up in Europe it embeds itself in largely Western interpretations, borrowing primarily from Gnostic, Jewish mystical, and Christian imagery. However, the Tarot makes no gestures towards the pseudo-science of, say,
Humorism. The Tarot is its own tradition with a human horizon; it is purely creative and therapeutic because it allows you to check in with yourself. It asks the querent: how balanced is your architecture? what colors, numbers, elements could you meditate on more to achieve the balance?
-
We read the elemental characteristics of a card’s Suit.
The Minor Arcana is divided into four suits:
The Wands are fire–your creative, impulsive, sexual energy, anything that rises up within you like a flame and pushes you forward into future.
The Cups are water–your experience of emotion or spirit, anything in you that is fluid and flows freely through the channels of communication that you open up between yourself and things surrounding you, be they human, animal, plant, or picture.
The Swords are air–the aeriness of your intellect, the part of your mind that is lean, flexible, and cutting. If the Cups are the emotional aspect of your immaterial self, the Swords are the active part. They make decisions, they represent your agency to change your feelings and perspective, your capacity to gain knowledge to change your own system and world-systems. The Swords help you uncover the origin of your consciousness.
The Coins are earth–they are your experience in the material world, your material intelligence. They are linked with alchemy: how you spiritualize matter and materialize spirit.
-We read the numerological placement of the card within the deck:
Odd numbers are active
Even numbers are receptive
The number One is pure potential
The number Ten is perfect completion of a cycle
The numbers One through Five represent the worldly realm of experience
The numbers Six through Ten represent the heavenly realm of experience.
Each number has a very nuanced significance, for example the
Five is an active bridge from the worldly realm to the heavenly realm. The
Eight is a perfectly stable and receptive number that wants to sit where it is and bask in its spiritual peace.
-We read the symbolism of colors
Light blue is spiritual receptivity.
Dark blue is earthly receptivity, you use it to contact your basic intuition.
White is pure divine ecstasy, union with nothingness.
Yellow is divine receptivity, spiritual intelligence.
Flesh color is the consciousness of human life.
Violet is androgynous union of spirituality and human action.
Orange is pure creative life-receptivity.
Red is activity, creative push.
Light green is celestial nature,
deep green is earthly nature.
Black is creative flow, a magma of the depths you can use to contact all the fathoms of your impulses.
*****
“And out of spit my children grow churning in my mouth” – Jenny Hval and Susanna,
Mirror in My Mouth
(I think of this as anathema to the birth of Athena, warrior goddess born of the severity of Logos, of mental activity)
In my practice with the Tarot, I’ve been thinking a lot about
Jenny Hval’s watery imagery and shape-shifting lyrics. in
Mirror in My Mouth she sings: “And out of spit my children grow churning in my mouth." I think of children getting born out of Jenny hval's spit as anathema to the birth of Athena, warrior goddess born of the severity of Logos, of mental activity. I get on board with this because I’ve always been very watery (emotional Pisces empath, a kinda hellishly cool love) but I pull a lot of swords. Mental agility, activity, severity! But I value the fluidity of water, of Cups. I like to pull a card, the Hermit, the Sun, the Star, the Hanged Man, and really identify with the card, fill its container like water. It gives you a lot of power to pull the Hanged Man all the time and adopt shoulder stands as your power stance. Shoulder stands errday. I become the water that fills the cups of any form I really want to fill. Contrast with the Page of Swords who’s a good actor. Byzantine in his fanciness. He adopts forms that he makes up, or that he sees and imitates. He risks insanity, total loss of his identity. Emptying the mind to make a form, he gets locked into the form. I have been thinking, let’s be more fluid, organic like water, like Spirit. Let’s really become the Hanged Man, vuln, let our blood become the sea that feeds our young. Etel Adnan writes in
Sea and Fog: “Sea’s passion. Ophelia no longer woman, Medea submerged in blood. Luminous beams shed light on the humiliation. The sea has no arms to uplift the sky. Planets are forbidden islands, still forbidden.” Because this is how we become ecstatic bodies. Really ek-static, like outside ourselves, no longer women, no longer men, androgynous like psychopomp imperfect Angels (shout-out to Mariah). The sanctity of the humiliated body, let the Sun make incandescent the body you left behind, and also the body that you become. The most heroic Outsider, outside-yourself. It’s a way to find freedom. Manipulate your body, tattoo it, pierce it, fuck yourself and other fluid bodies. Do it with love, compassion, love every body. But accept the challenge of keeping up the energy to keep up the manipulation. You can’t stop, you keep growing.
Because we are not Platonic, Plato who said “People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.” What a class-homogenous geometrically-(like, static ideals)-inclined asshole. Plato also told his students not to study the actual motion of actual planetary bodies, but to study mathematics and the idealized laws of heavenly i.e.
unreal bodies. Fuck you. Let’s be here to study the real motions of real bodies. If planets are forbidden to us, it’s because Plato stuck so many laws between us and them. It’s like the mutated half-ideal half-for real nature studies of 17
th century scientists, who couldn’t decide if they wanted to draw Platonically ideal images or the things they really saw (should this
Nymphaea flower I’m drawing look clean and mythological like a nymph, or luscious and messy like I see it?). Let’s not have pseudo-science but real observation. Let’s really see. Let’s look at things and think about the way they actually grow, the way other bodies are different from your body, about how your body can be more mutable. How you can become not afraid of your cells decomposing and your spirit going elsewhere or also decomposing. Cycles, cycles, elemental sound and fury - swim in it like water. Have a radical relationship with the world like you can have with the Tarot. See a Hanged Man and invert your perspective, stand on your head. See a witch in the woods and go out there to find your own new intelligence.
*****
Below I've included two readings around my Pisces birthday, best time of year for self-scrutiny. Forgive their angst:
*thursday*march 5*2015*morning*
Ominous reading. It is up and down, and only through careful balance am I going to survive it whether I come out happy or otherwise.
The Subject Card is the Three of Cups. This is me idealizing love, threes being a bursting forth into youthful action, and cups love to love. I’m glad to see this card having pulled so many twos in the past days, which symbolize all my energy-gathering, the infinity loop that needs to grow up and face the zillions of other, larger infinity loops. The Conflict Card that represents my difficulty moving forward with this Three of Cups, is the Seven of Wands. Ugh. Big capacity for that to be
really, fucking difficult. The seven’s most negative aspect is domination, proselytizing, dictatorship. It knows how to act in the world with all its fiery energy behind it. And unfortunately I know how to do that. I know how to dominate myself and my too-often idealized experience of affection. Be still my heart you baby Pisces, you are swimming in it this season. But the Seven of Wands’ most positive aspect is great: active and strong, the goodness of my pan-sexuality, my pan-benevolence towards fiery creative energies, in bodies, in poems. Whatever it is here, it definitely WILL BE A CONFLICT to channel the energy this 7 since it crosses my naïve loveriness. So careful. The Base Card, the ground I’m working through is the Sun, number Nineteen, and this bodes well, but, shit, big. Constant self-renewal that gives energy but that knows it does what it does because it craves Other, all the shit that’s gravitationally attracted to it, and in turn the larger system it is gravitationally attracted to. The key here is to be benevolent. Don’t burn your ppl up, don’t burn up your 3 of Cups. The fiery 7 of Wands and this Sun are a little intimidating for your Subject Card. So be it. The Goal Card, the positive aspect to carry into the future, is the Four of Wands, which is nice. Stability in sexual impulses and a capacity to use your fire in warm, stable friendship-building. Fuzzy. This comes from the Past Card, here the self-love of the Six of Cups (which bodes well for making the best of that Sun), and I move forward into a Future Card of the Ten of Cups. I should be careful that the sweet completion of this Ten doesn’t become a block, a sealed utopia of emotions, but I should be sure to benefit from the closing of this cycle in emotional growth, and let it function in a calm civilized way. So my Self Card is the Nine of Coins, a materially accomplished card (I wrote that poem in one go last night), but feeling the crisis of striving for its own Ten. The Nine of Coins tells me I have the energetic capacity to invest in something materially today, an interesting thought. What, plant a cactus in the kitchen? We’ll see what comes up. So my House Card is the Ace of Cups, which I’m glad to see–bodes well in relation to the acknowledgement of my deep fucking well of love for people, which this card says has yet to get too deeply fucked up. I still have all the potential of the One (Ace) to love all the cool kids in this city. Maybe get a cat. Anyway, I was always a resilient kid, if moody, and I think I can preserve the Sanctity of this Ace if I really try. So my Hopes/Fears card is the Eight of Swords, which is meditation, emptying the mind and weighing the reality of Logos, what I think about things, what is useful to me and what isn’t. My end card is the Two of Cups, very positive love and exchange that is ultimately projection and incestuous. Awkward, but if I can love myself then shit, I can love everyone. This card is a respite. So aspects of this card include: the Five of Swords, which pushes forward to KNOW more about the Other (don’t be completely navel-gazy with this Two of Cups); the Hermit, number 9 in the Higher Arcana and so wise as fuck but cast out of womb-like stability, traveling until he reaches his own 10; and the Three of Coins, which is sweet optimistic house- and community-building. These back up that End Card well. If I love myself so much today, at least my crisis-self is intact, I’m receptive to growing knowledge, and I’m community-oriented. Just don’t burn yourself up. Go read a book.”
saturday*march 7*2015*morning
“Happy birthday. I’ve gone through hell this year! I have faith in calmer seas in the next round. Ha, God.
Subject Card is the Queen of Coins. As Lizzy texted me last night, “were guna treat ourselves like queens.” Ha, fuck yea. Careful not to overdo it and keep an eye on the sacredness of your flesh and pleasure, all the work you’ve done to alchemize your shit. Get drunk but do yoga. So this Queen is surrounded and crossed by a sea of nines! I am such a crisis. Well, just 3 nines, not too many. So the Conflict Card is the Hermit, number Nine in the Higher Arcana. Makes sense and I’m glad to see this reminder that my self as disciple of solitary pleasures, that the lantern I carry is still self-awareness for now, even as Lizzy’s on her way. Because the Hermit is no son of the Queen of Coins (tho I am gonna safeguard the fuck out of my pleasure). He folds out of the womb of Justice, number (Eight in the Higher Arcana) so is heritage is Justice’s affinity with cosmic reality, is Justice’s Third Eye and her severity in keeping with what she knows is going on out there. Still, the Hermit has to determine his own esoteric logic to move forward. So anyway maintain the fact of ritual while Lizzy’s here. Light candles, read Tarot, listen to Judy Sill, laugh at yourself. And give Lizzy some readings. Oh fuck, and exercise. Yoga, shoulder stands, show that shit to Lizzy she’ll love it. So my immediate past is the Ten of Swords. Damn strait. Unity of mind, an organic enmeshment of all my voices, coming home last night and crying like a baby. Like a baby because it was natural, not out of panic or control, and then I could sleep, soundly, for 7 whole hours. Didn’t even dream. So my Base Card here is the Nine of Cups, so I should make sure I push through gestation and birth a fucking glorious emotionality. I bet Lizzy would get into midwifery. And I’m so happy that on the day of my BIRTH the moon shows up as the positive Goal to carry forward. That deep creepy following of my crustacean intuition, my dogs who howl to the moon etc., and she’s receptive (an Eight at number 18), she’s perfect and orange like Erykah Badu, bitches. Glad also to see her not so central because I get into her creepier sides, but instead I’m seeing her in a place that means I’m in full capacity to wield her best qualities today. Cherish your sweet creepy underbelly. I got the hermit-y wisdom to do this in good measure, though it might be hard. My Future Card is another Nine, of course, the Nine of Coins, so I’m gonna end up still trying to birth stuff, get up to the ten (happy bday), but here I need to make sure I’m sweet to my material self. Shoutout to my Queen of Coins, my good drunk lady with a regal bearing. Keep an eye out for new places to value material and worldly wisdom today, and push yourself delicately towards the perfect alchemized Ten, keep good form, try to be a lotus, root yrself in the grime and reach in a pretty way up to the sky, be a jewel, be a doll for yrself and don’t forget to keep yr weirdest shit in tow. Can’t wait for Lizzzzzzy to get here.”
-MALI SCOTT
Mali Scott is a poet who recently relocated to Oakland from Brooklyn, NY. Her work has appeared in Elderly Magazine, Poems By Sunday, Wendy's IS, and in the show "I Swallowed a Moon Made of Iron; for, I promise to Burn Brightly" at the Peninsula Art Space in New York City. She spends her spare time searching for microclimates, which abound in the Bay Area.
In the past months I’ve developed a daily practice with Tarot to survive the itinerancy of moving across the country. I usually only read for other people, but reading Tarot for yourself daily is a great indulgent practice. Like Narcissus, you get to self-reflect ad nauseam, but you’re also active like a monk, a disciple of self-awareness. And while I began this practice with the Tarot as a mode of self-therapy, it’s become central to my writing practice. When I set myself to my poems, these journal entries provide me with a set of hilariously larger-than-life symbolism to cast the motions of my language against. Because these cards show you your demons, and like Wes Craven’s Swamp Thing, the Tarot tells you “the only way out is through.” If you see that your poetics is becoming increasingly decentralized, occupied by too many voices, then the answer is not to restrict your voices but to adopt more of them, to inhabit them all, work them all up until you don’t need them any more. The Tarot tells you to genuinely encounter and then work through the cards you pull, and it’s teaching me that a lot of a poet’s work is akin to the spiritual work you do with the cards. Just as The Devil sometimes shows up in readings three days in a row, sometimes a thing thrusts itself into your work, and you have to embrace it with no shame.
So for those who dig it, I’ll give you a crash course in the basic system I use to read the cards, I’ll talk about the spiritual place of the Tarot, and then I’ll give you some excerpts of the journal I keep from my daily practice.
*****
The Tarot is an old card game. Its origins are debated but basically its gestation site was 14th century Europe, when the French pope Clement VII and the Italian pope Urban VI were feuding (aka the Great Schism) and Muslim mercenaries were hanging out, thanks to the Crusades. So the Tarot, though it uses plenty of Christian iconography, is heretical as fuck (and some kings, counts, etc. tried to ban it). For example, the last card of the Higher Arcana, number XXI, The World, is meant to represent the most sacred completion a human can achieve. It depicts a vision that comes directly from Ezekiel’s “vision of God”: there is a circle with a figure at each of the four cardinal corners –the Angel, the Lion, the Ox, and the Eagle– but instead of representing a Godhead, there is a naked, dancing woman in the center of the circle.
The author of one of my Marseille Tarot decks tells us: “The most classic example of Marseilles Tarots unites intuitive simplicity and esoteric profoundness.” So my goal in a reading is to use both my knowledge of the Tarot’s system and my deepest intuition in order uncover the meaning of each symbol as it’s presented in harmony with all the other symbols in the card, and the spread. I then present the meaning of the cards to the querent so that they can identify with these cards as they will. The cards don’t tell your future, they tell you something more like “this is how the deck is responding to your current energetic state” so that the power of these cards becomes how we respond to them. A card shows you something at a given moment, and like picking up a $20 bill on the street, you choose to trust it. Found meaning. The purpose of putting your mind to a card is that it will give you material to work with in your daily, creative, emotional life.
The Tarot has a Minor and Major Arcana. There are 56 Minor Arcana Cards, divided into 4 suits: the Wands, the Cups, the Swords, the Coins. Each suit has 10 numbered cards and then 4 court cards: Page, Knight, Queen, and King. Then there is the Higher Arcana, which has 22 cards. Each Higher Arcana depicts an animate figure whose significance is on a more “cosmic” scale, because the figure in each card figures a stage in a progressing narrative that represents the unfolding and actualization of the universe. You start with the Magician at 1 and end up with the World at 21. You also have the Fool, who most truly represents the cyclical nature of this actualizing process. He is number 0 and number 22, beginning the journey at 0 before the Magician, or continuing the journey as 0 when he bravely leaves the state of completion he reached in the World’s 21.
Below is an introduction to the system of symbology that we work with in the Tarot. It is useful whether or not you’re reading Tarot because it represents a soft architecture of the soul. Because it grew up in Europe it embeds itself in largely Western interpretations, borrowing primarily from Gnostic, Jewish mystical, and Christian imagery. However, the Tarot makes no gestures towards the pseudo-science of, say, Humorism. The Tarot is its own tradition with a human horizon; it is purely creative and therapeutic because it allows you to check in with yourself. It asks the querent: how balanced is your architecture? what colors, numbers, elements could you meditate on more to achieve the balance?
-We read the elemental characteristics of a card’s Suit.
The Minor Arcana is divided into four suits:
The Wands are fire–your creative, impulsive, sexual energy, anything that rises up within you like a flame and pushes you forward into future.
The Cups are water–your experience of emotion or spirit, anything in you that is fluid and flows freely through the channels of communication that you open up between yourself and things surrounding you, be they human, animal, plant, or picture.
The Swords are air–the aeriness of your intellect, the part of your mind that is lean, flexible, and cutting. If the Cups are the emotional aspect of your immaterial self, the Swords are the active part. They make decisions, they represent your agency to change your feelings and perspective, your capacity to gain knowledge to change your own system and world-systems. The Swords help you uncover the origin of your consciousness.
The Coins are earth–they are your experience in the material world, your material intelligence. They are linked with alchemy: how you spiritualize matter and materialize spirit.
-We read the numerological placement of the card within the deck:
Odd numbers are active
Even numbers are receptive
The number One is pure potential
The number Ten is perfect completion of a cycle
The numbers One through Five represent the worldly realm of experience
The numbers Six through Ten represent the heavenly realm of experience.
Each number has a very nuanced significance, for example the Five is an active bridge from the worldly realm to the heavenly realm. The Eight is a perfectly stable and receptive number that wants to sit where it is and bask in its spiritual peace.
-We read the symbolism of colors
Light blue is spiritual receptivity. Dark blue is earthly receptivity, you use it to contact your basic intuition. White is pure divine ecstasy, union with nothingness. Yellow is divine receptivity, spiritual intelligence. Flesh color is the consciousness of human life. Violet is androgynous union of spirituality and human action. Orange is pure creative life-receptivity. Red is activity, creative push. Light green is celestial nature, deep green is earthly nature. Black is creative flow, a magma of the depths you can use to contact all the fathoms of your impulses.
*****
“And out of spit my children grow churning in my mouth” – Jenny Hval and Susanna, Mirror in My Mouth
(I think of this as anathema to the birth of Athena, warrior goddess born of the severity of Logos, of mental activity)
In my practice with the Tarot, I’ve been thinking a lot about Jenny Hval’s watery imagery and shape-shifting lyrics. in Mirror in My Mouth she sings: “And out of spit my children grow churning in my mouth." I think of children getting born out of Jenny hval's spit as anathema to the birth of Athena, warrior goddess born of the severity of Logos, of mental activity. I get on board with this because I’ve always been very watery (emotional Pisces empath, a kinda hellishly cool love) but I pull a lot of swords. Mental agility, activity, severity! But I value the fluidity of water, of Cups. I like to pull a card, the Hermit, the Sun, the Star, the Hanged Man, and really identify with the card, fill its container like water. It gives you a lot of power to pull the Hanged Man all the time and adopt shoulder stands as your power stance. Shoulder stands errday. I become the water that fills the cups of any form I really want to fill. Contrast with the Page of Swords who’s a good actor. Byzantine in his fanciness. He adopts forms that he makes up, or that he sees and imitates. He risks insanity, total loss of his identity. Emptying the mind to make a form, he gets locked into the form. I have been thinking, let’s be more fluid, organic like water, like Spirit. Let’s really become the Hanged Man, vuln, let our blood become the sea that feeds our young. Etel Adnan writes in Sea and Fog: “Sea’s passion. Ophelia no longer woman, Medea submerged in blood. Luminous beams shed light on the humiliation. The sea has no arms to uplift the sky. Planets are forbidden islands, still forbidden.” Because this is how we become ecstatic bodies. Really ek-static, like outside ourselves, no longer women, no longer men, androgynous like psychopomp imperfect Angels (shout-out to Mariah). The sanctity of the humiliated body, let the Sun make incandescent the body you left behind, and also the body that you become. The most heroic Outsider, outside-yourself. It’s a way to find freedom. Manipulate your body, tattoo it, pierce it, fuck yourself and other fluid bodies. Do it with love, compassion, love every body. But accept the challenge of keeping up the energy to keep up the manipulation. You can’t stop, you keep growing.
Because we are not Platonic, Plato who said “People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.” What a class-homogenous geometrically-(like, static ideals)-inclined asshole. Plato also told his students not to study the actual motion of actual planetary bodies, but to study mathematics and the idealized laws of heavenly i.e. unreal bodies. Fuck you. Let’s be here to study the real motions of real bodies. If planets are forbidden to us, it’s because Plato stuck so many laws between us and them. It’s like the mutated half-ideal half-for real nature studies of 17th century scientists, who couldn’t decide if they wanted to draw Platonically ideal images or the things they really saw (should this Nymphaea flower I’m drawing look clean and mythological like a nymph, or luscious and messy like I see it?). Let’s not have pseudo-science but real observation. Let’s really see. Let’s look at things and think about the way they actually grow, the way other bodies are different from your body, about how your body can be more mutable. How you can become not afraid of your cells decomposing and your spirit going elsewhere or also decomposing. Cycles, cycles, elemental sound and fury - swim in it like water. Have a radical relationship with the world like you can have with the Tarot. See a Hanged Man and invert your perspective, stand on your head. See a witch in the woods and go out there to find your own new intelligence.
*****
Below I've included two readings around my Pisces birthday, best time of year for self-scrutiny. Forgive their angst:
*thursday*march 5*2015*morning*
Ominous reading. It is up and down, and only through careful balance am I going to survive it whether I come out happy or otherwise.
The Subject Card is the Three of Cups. This is me idealizing love, threes being a bursting forth into youthful action, and cups love to love. I’m glad to see this card having pulled so many twos in the past days, which symbolize all my energy-gathering, the infinity loop that needs to grow up and face the zillions of other, larger infinity loops. The Conflict Card that represents my difficulty moving forward with this Three of Cups, is the Seven of Wands. Ugh. Big capacity for that to be really, fucking difficult. The seven’s most negative aspect is domination, proselytizing, dictatorship. It knows how to act in the world with all its fiery energy behind it. And unfortunately I know how to do that. I know how to dominate myself and my too-often idealized experience of affection. Be still my heart you baby Pisces, you are swimming in it this season. But the Seven of Wands’ most positive aspect is great: active and strong, the goodness of my pan-sexuality, my pan-benevolence towards fiery creative energies, in bodies, in poems. Whatever it is here, it definitely WILL BE A CONFLICT to channel the energy this 7 since it crosses my naïve loveriness. So careful. The Base Card, the ground I’m working through is the Sun, number Nineteen, and this bodes well, but, shit, big. Constant self-renewal that gives energy but that knows it does what it does because it craves Other, all the shit that’s gravitationally attracted to it, and in turn the larger system it is gravitationally attracted to. The key here is to be benevolent. Don’t burn your ppl up, don’t burn up your 3 of Cups. The fiery 7 of Wands and this Sun are a little intimidating for your Subject Card. So be it. The Goal Card, the positive aspect to carry into the future, is the Four of Wands, which is nice. Stability in sexual impulses and a capacity to use your fire in warm, stable friendship-building. Fuzzy. This comes from the Past Card, here the self-love of the Six of Cups (which bodes well for making the best of that Sun), and I move forward into a Future Card of the Ten of Cups. I should be careful that the sweet completion of this Ten doesn’t become a block, a sealed utopia of emotions, but I should be sure to benefit from the closing of this cycle in emotional growth, and let it function in a calm civilized way. So my Self Card is the Nine of Coins, a materially accomplished card (I wrote that poem in one go last night), but feeling the crisis of striving for its own Ten. The Nine of Coins tells me I have the energetic capacity to invest in something materially today, an interesting thought. What, plant a cactus in the kitchen? We’ll see what comes up. So my House Card is the Ace of Cups, which I’m glad to see–bodes well in relation to the acknowledgement of my deep fucking well of love for people, which this card says has yet to get too deeply fucked up. I still have all the potential of the One (Ace) to love all the cool kids in this city. Maybe get a cat. Anyway, I was always a resilient kid, if moody, and I think I can preserve the Sanctity of this Ace if I really try. So my Hopes/Fears card is the Eight of Swords, which is meditation, emptying the mind and weighing the reality of Logos, what I think about things, what is useful to me and what isn’t. My end card is the Two of Cups, very positive love and exchange that is ultimately projection and incestuous. Awkward, but if I can love myself then shit, I can love everyone. This card is a respite. So aspects of this card include: the Five of Swords, which pushes forward to KNOW more about the Other (don’t be completely navel-gazy with this Two of Cups); the Hermit, number 9 in the Higher Arcana and so wise as fuck but cast out of womb-like stability, traveling until he reaches his own 10; and the Three of Coins, which is sweet optimistic house- and community-building. These back up that End Card well. If I love myself so much today, at least my crisis-self is intact, I’m receptive to growing knowledge, and I’m community-oriented. Just don’t burn yourself up. Go read a book.”
saturday*march 7*2015*morning
“Happy birthday. I’ve gone through hell this year! I have faith in calmer seas in the next round. Ha, God.
Subject Card is the Queen of Coins. As Lizzy texted me last night, “were guna treat ourselves like queens.” Ha, fuck yea. Careful not to overdo it and keep an eye on the sacredness of your flesh and pleasure, all the work you’ve done to alchemize your shit. Get drunk but do yoga. So this Queen is surrounded and crossed by a sea of nines! I am such a crisis. Well, just 3 nines, not too many. So the Conflict Card is the Hermit, number Nine in the Higher Arcana. Makes sense and I’m glad to see this reminder that my self as disciple of solitary pleasures, that the lantern I carry is still self-awareness for now, even as Lizzy’s on her way. Because the Hermit is no son of the Queen of Coins (tho I am gonna safeguard the fuck out of my pleasure). He folds out of the womb of Justice, number (Eight in the Higher Arcana) so is heritage is Justice’s affinity with cosmic reality, is Justice’s Third Eye and her severity in keeping with what she knows is going on out there. Still, the Hermit has to determine his own esoteric logic to move forward. So anyway maintain the fact of ritual while Lizzy’s here. Light candles, read Tarot, listen to Judy Sill, laugh at yourself. And give Lizzy some readings. Oh fuck, and exercise. Yoga, shoulder stands, show that shit to Lizzy she’ll love it. So my immediate past is the Ten of Swords. Damn strait. Unity of mind, an organic enmeshment of all my voices, coming home last night and crying like a baby. Like a baby because it was natural, not out of panic or control, and then I could sleep, soundly, for 7 whole hours. Didn’t even dream. So my Base Card here is the Nine of Cups, so I should make sure I push through gestation and birth a fucking glorious emotionality. I bet Lizzy would get into midwifery. And I’m so happy that on the day of my BIRTH the moon shows up as the positive Goal to carry forward. That deep creepy following of my crustacean intuition, my dogs who howl to the moon etc., and she’s receptive (an Eight at number 18), she’s perfect and orange like Erykah Badu, bitches. Glad also to see her not so central because I get into her creepier sides, but instead I’m seeing her in a place that means I’m in full capacity to wield her best qualities today. Cherish your sweet creepy underbelly. I got the hermit-y wisdom to do this in good measure, though it might be hard. My Future Card is another Nine, of course, the Nine of Coins, so I’m gonna end up still trying to birth stuff, get up to the ten (happy bday), but here I need to make sure I’m sweet to my material self. Shoutout to my Queen of Coins, my good drunk lady with a regal bearing. Keep an eye out for new places to value material and worldly wisdom today, and push yourself delicately towards the perfect alchemized Ten, keep good form, try to be a lotus, root yrself in the grime and reach in a pretty way up to the sky, be a jewel, be a doll for yrself and don’t forget to keep yr weirdest shit in tow. Can’t wait for Lizzzzzzy to get here.”
-MALI SCOTT
Mali Scott is a poet who recently relocated to Oakland from Brooklyn, NY. Her work has appeared in Elderly Magazine, Poems By Sunday, Wendy's IS, and in the show "I Swallowed a Moon Made of Iron; for, I promise to Burn Brightly" at the Peninsula Art Space in New York City. She spends her spare time searching for microclimates, which abound in the Bay Area.