Tarot time: Pandemic Edition
Apocalypse trumpet go brrrrrrrr
I've been trying to write since this whole fiasco started but all I can seem to commit to the server is frustration and anger and I'm actively trying to let go of that part of me. So I'm taking a cue from fellow Illuminist and Lodge Brother, Father Tony Silvia, and doing some divination to practice. It's been a while since I've pulled cards with any meaningful result and I recently reconnected with an old friend that has been reading cards for a fraction of the time I have but has a much stronger connection to them than I do, so it's time to practice.
I busted out my decks to see what comes back and the results have been mixed. I used my spooky, drippy Book of Azathoth deck and still can't really connect with it. Thematically, it's on point for me. The art is real wild and inspired by HP Lovecraft, but there's a real gross vibe to it that makes it feel like a novelty and nothing else. The Night Sun deck is total garbage. I love the art but the imagery is fucking nonsense. There's some rumor that the deck is a ripoff of some alchemical lodge's deck that Llewelyn brazenly stole and had another artist tweak to make it their own. That kind of karma is going to taint a deck, ya know? My Nightvale deck had some nice results, which makes me think that I really need to work it out a bit more and get my mojo into it. Then my cat threw up on a spread I put down to represent the Otz Chiim, using my trusty Thoth deck, and made me feel like that may have pissed the cards off. I cleaned them up and kept using them since the damage was really quite minor. It's just... you know... cat vomit.
I keep my Rider Waite in a box and only use it in ritual but decided to break that one out since I need a real clear message from on high to give me a little direction. I don't like to read for myself since I tend to project a lot on the results and see only what I want to but I also still sorely lack in confidence to read for other people and because of this, I've slipped out of practice. I wish I could get over the feeling that I'm going to come off like a fraud in front of someone while looking at their cards, or freeze up and not be able to give them a meaningful reading without having to meditate on the cards for several hours first. I don't know. It's just me being a baby I guess. I need to get over myself.
Tony is testing out an oracle deck, which is a thing that I could never really get to work. I have some friends that use them and my wife has a couple as well and seems to connect to them better than tarot, but I just can't, for some reason. A friend at the local occult shop talked me into The Daemon Tarot, which I took to mean it was an actual tarot deck, but it's not. It's just another oracle deck and like the rest, I have yet to draw a meaningful card from it. So for some practice, I decided to take Tony's question and spread an apply it to his question. The outcome was solid and reassuring.
Like a lot of folks in America, I lost my job a month ago. Huge bummer but not terribly unexpected since, like, 5% of the country found itself in the same spot all within a two week span. I've been out here trying to scrape together freelance hours to pay the bills at the same time as I was handed a weird opportunity to start a new business with two dudes, a product designer and a dude that used to run a marketing agency out here. Tony asked:
What should I be doing that is most important during the Coronavirus pandemic?
I pulled the following spread:
On the surface, it's fairly obvious what's going on here. I'm surrounded by distractions. I suddenly have a lot of free time and I'm having a hard time focusing on any one thing in spite of my ADD medication. I play a lot of video games, I'm reading a lot and trying not to get distracted by references to other books in the book that I'm reading. Like, I'm reading through the Voudon Gnostic Workbook but the second that it mentioned Kenneth Grant's Cults of the Shadow, I broke off to read that to get some context.
(spoiler: Grant devotes a lot of that book to the magical properties of drinking urine and rubbing the ashes of burned poo on yourself -- you know, MAGIC STUFF!)
Then from there I realized that I don't know much about the Gnostic Archons so I read some of Nag Hamadi stuff and then cracked a book about gnostic fundamentals and then decided to read The Exegesis of Philip K Dick, which is like, 1500 pages of his religious theory, which led me to cracking The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch before I even got to the Exegesis's introduction. I'm a fucking mess, man.
The 7 of Cups is pretty obvious, though. I have a lot of strong feelings about getting this business rolling. It means independence. It means freedom from the feeling of doom that inevitably clouds my life when I take a full time job with someone and realize that it's just a matter of time before the sword of Damocles falls on me. But it also represents a lot of mysteries that I can't predict right now. It's the shining Grail that I need to reach for but bear in mind that I can't see what's inside quite yet.
I don't read inversions but the 7 of Pentacles dropped in reverse so I'm reading its shadow in the context of the rest of the cards. I'm working towards this thing. Cultivating a new enterprise but I do have a lot of reservations. These two dudes I'm working with? I don't really know them very well. We came together quite by accident and I worry that even though we get along quite well, that our visions for this thing we're working on aren't quite in line. Little things about our meetings throw up red flags. One guy absolutely resists using modern tech. He's an old school print designer. I think we're about the same age but at some point, he seemed to tune out and cling to that old mode of design that he was comfortable with. I worked with a dude like that a couple years back who handed all of his web design files in an old print design file format and I couldn't get him to switch to new shit. The other guy literally prints out all the articles and emails I send him and reads them on paper. Maybe he has a good reason for it, but it strikes me as a real Boomer thing to do and it leaves me wondering if these guys are going to jump into the modern Agency death match situation and struggle to stay afloat because their sensibilities are 15 years old.
The 3 of Pentacles tells me that I may need to take the lead on the execution of this business. They have the plans and the experience that I don't and that's a key element that's going to make it all work but the execution is going to have to be all me. We can work together. Our vision is united in the sense that this is a thing that we all want to make it work for the same reason and that each of us is going to bring something to the table that ends up working in concert toward our ultimate goal. But these dudes are going to have to get with the program and embrace new business technology or they're going to look like assholes the first time they receive a Google Doc and don't know what to do with it, or receive a design file either in Adobe XD or Sketch/Invision and suddenly have no idea what anyone is doing. If I can set up a business infrastructure that forces them to modernize everything will be great.
...which is The World, and I honestly didn't expect to pull this card because, quite frankly, I never do. I need to trust my instincts, recognize that my concerns about the other dudes are valid and that I may need to exert a bit of authority in the execution department to keep everything modern and understand why that dude prints all his shit out. Do that, and this enterprise is going to be every bit as wonderful as all the other readings I've had about this business.
Notes about the numerology of these spread: There's a missing piece in the business equation and I'm really not sure what it is yet. Here's why. I drew the 7 of Cups and Pentacles and then the 3 of pentacles. I think the missing piece may lie in the 7 of Swords or Wands because the outcome is The World, 21. It makes me think that without the 7 of X element, this is all going to work since 7 * 3 is 21 but with the full revelation of the 3rd 7 card, this all goes into perfection territory. Right now I have 2 out of 3 7 cards to make that 21 but the 3 of Pentacles is telling me that I need a third 7 to really pull it all together for The World. Does this make sense? I don't know. Numerology is weird, man.