tarot's take on some nerdiness

So recently, some friends have drawn me into the nerdy cliche that is the world of Dungeons and Dragons. Very unsurprisingly, I quite like it. Due to difficulty (different cities, conflicting schedules) of playing in person, I've recently joined a game online. Character building, story telling, writing, lots of fun and silly dice...whats not to love?

The idea of using tarot to help flesh out a fictional character is one that's been floating around my head for a while, and this seems to be a perfect opportunity to do so, using the one I've made for this roleplay game, so.

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Shedding some light on Iara Carnagos, Tiefling Wizard (Mage)

I. Crux of the character's strengths:

Restriction, restraint, interference: the woman in this image is tied up and held still, both by her physical bindings and by constraints of her mind - the self-doubt, or fear, or hopeless resignation.

One does not necessarily think of this card as a source of strength, but if can be. Restraint, restraint. So many things that you could do if you were willing to pick up one of those swords... In the D&D universe, in this edition at least, Tieflings are of a demonic heritage, their ancestors having made some kind of pact with demons. They can make things burns, have tails and variously shaped horns. Many are known for being all kinds of destructive and evil.

This character of mine...she had a twin brother once, who chose to go down that path. She did not, and ended up killing him in what was mostly self-defense...a pivotal moment for her. She is chaotic, random, capricious, but she is not evil - there is a line she will not let herself cross, though she could; there are actions she simply will not take, even when refusing puts her in a quite difficult situation. She will even, on the rare occasion, actively refuse to let someone else do so.

In the everyday too...she puts up the facade of being impatient and impulsive, and do some degree that may be true, but...anything of real importance, she does consider, weigh, wait if she must. Restraint, restriction, a much bigger part of how she interacts with the world than most would realize, than she would like anyone to know and...a vital part of what could be called her better nature.

II. Crux of the character's weaknesses:

The juggler hops around, foot to foot, two coins to balance, two boats on two waves to choose between - always moving, juggling, flitting about.

The character too. Class-wise, she is a mage that focuses on both pyromancy and illusion, both blasting attacks and controlling/debuffing powers. A focus on purely one of the other could potentially be more powerful, but how could she commit herself like that?

Otherwise too - she flits from group to group, short relationship to one even shorter, job to job, town to town. Tries this and that, grows bored, moves onto something else. Worked mercenary jobs involving use of knives even though that does nothing to advance her primary abilities. Studied under several wizards even though these kinds of arrangements are not ideal - some wizards only acquiescing to idea of temporary apprentice for cold hard cash.

This lack of commitment, lack of focus and attention, in so many aspects of her life...certainly it is limiting, in many ways.

III. The character's fears:

The queen sits comfortably in her domain, with her wand, her flower, her cat. She is self-possessed and confident in her place. What could one fear here?

Iara does not have or want any of these things. She has not stayed in one place for any significant amount of time since she was sixteen. She does not keep pets, or gardens, does not care for fancy robes and does not hold onto many possessions at all - in fact, one could almost call her an ascetic in the latter regard. Keep few things you do not need, be willing to let those go and start anew too, if you must.

Her friendships and flings do not last more than a few months or weeks, nor do her working partnerships and teams. And why is that?

Fear of that kind of domestication, of a place where you feel safe and things that comfort you and people you trust and feel close to. The more you have the more of a shock it is when the world starts to spin and shake and everything starts falling apart around you. The more you have, the more there is that you cannot control. If you have nothing, just your physical body, your skills, your knowledge and magic...there is so much less that can be taken from you, so much less of a chance to feel helpless.

IV. The character's hopes:

The Hanged Man rest upside down, in some ways resembling a butterfly in its cocoon, waiting in stasis as it develops and transforms. In other ways he can be seen as a mirror of Odin, hanging in sacrifice, losing something to gain more. Perhaps a useless sacrifice, needless waiting around when movement is needed.

This character certainly hopes that all of her work will be a worthwhile sacrifice, that all the hours studying and reading dusty tomes, and all the times and gold she spent with her various masters will pay off.

She hates reading, only went to school as long as she did because her twin hated it even more and quit it - she wanted to show that she had more self-control, or something. She never reads but for the magic books, for what other way is there of learning, always learning and it is just a task sometimes, flipping through so many pages as her mind wonders, another job or adventure tempts... there were other paths to magic, ones that would have been easier for someone of her temperament but she chose this one and yes, she hopes it will be worthwhile, utterly so.

IV. Crux of the character, a snapshot:

The man in the eight works, creates, engraves and molds with care for his work, though it may not be easy at times, is his craft, and his love, and his calling.

Perhaps a compulsive wanderer, perhaps not the biggest fan of the book learning to which she is obliged, perhaps a lot of things but what it comes down to: love of this lifestyle. Love of uncertainty and risk, love of seeing new places to explore, new people to work with or fuck or taunt, without the 'burden' of knowing you might know them long enough to get attached. Love of adventure and jobs and quests.

Most of all, though, the love of magic. Wonder - she can still remember the day as I child, when she first saw magic being done. Her and her brother both, a rare moment of utter unison. Pure, sheer, stunned wonder because what could be more beautiful, more awesome, than magic? She knew from her first glimpse at it that magic is what she wanted to do, her calling as it were, and though attention to it may have wavered, that certainty never did. For all that may change and all the tedious work learning might involve, nothing can touch the feeling of pure inner joy she gets when she summons a fireball, makes something change color, uses a trick to get someone to say yes where otherwise the answer would certainly be a no.

2013 Year Card

2012 was a Justice year for me, and overall I found the year card exercise at the start of the year useful. Not so much predictive, per se, as guiding. The idea of seeking equilibrium throughout the year stuck with me, and helped me figure out some things. 2012 was definitely more about balance than any possible legalistic interpretations of the card, as I had thought right off - fortunately I do not currently have any legal issues to deal with.

That said, I thought I would do this again. For 2013, my year card is the Hanged Man.

I admit that the prospect of the Hanged Man as a year card does not immediately fill me with excitement: a year of hanging, suspension, feeling stuck in place? That does not exactly sound like what I am seeking to achieve. But of course, that is only one of many takes on the hanged man. This is a card associated with the water element, as the de la Rea here shows. Water is flexible, associated with dreams and emotions, depths, the obscure, neither fully solid nor gaseous.

The Hanged Man is associated in many tarot texts with the Norse god Odin, the AllFather, who hung himself from a tree for nine days in order to obtain runes, the key to all knowledge. He sacrificed his body, his power in exchange for that wisdom. He did not fight that sacrifice, did not try to cheat or find some kind of alternative. No, like this major shows in almost all decks: he hung with serenity, with acceptance of the situation as is.

Acceptance and even hanging do not have to mean stasis, doing nothing, giving up. Again, the reminder that all things have a cost - currently I am sitting on a bus driving back to DC. I am intensely motion sick and I am watching a very beautiful sunset while going over a bridge that enchants me from an aesthetic architectural perspective. Most things are like this, pros and cons. I could sleep and feel good and lose time and miss out on many lovely sights. Costs, decisions. Sometimes we reach a crossroads, a certain point where yes, there is stasis, repetition, doing the same thing again and again long after we have grown tired of it. What then?

A willingness to let go is called for - of the familiar, of the comfortable, and of control and distrust, at least to some degree. The hanged man in the Corte dei Tarocchi is particularly interesting to me in that he is not hanging from a branch or tree but rather from a rope of leaves held in the beak of two birds. How absurd! How could he believe that they would hold him up? He does though - he is willing to place himself in that position, and calmly.

The figure here is upside down, and at first glance it's easy to think that maybe we have drawn this card reversed. That is the spirit of this card too - the energy to turn things on their head, to look outside the box, the established way of doing things. You hang between realms and between phases of life. You let go and you find, grasp. The key is the serenity, the acceptance. This is not sacrifice for its own sake - there is a reason for this, something for which to strive.

In a way this image is not unlike a butterfly or moth still cocooned, waiting beneath the waves with held in breath. I used to do that too, as a kid. I liked to dive into parts of pools that were twice as deep as I was tall even though I couldn't really swim and I liked to hold my breath under the water for as long as I could, until my lungs burned. Why? It felt freeing. There is freedom in the way that you can move underwater even though, of course, all swims and baths must come to an end.

And so, a year under the Hanged Man's influence. A year for development and growth, sacrifice and letting go and finding the new, the better, the wiser and more fulfilling. A year for thinking differently, for stepping away from some of those careful caveats and limits of what you will do, for acting within a frame of acceptance - of self and of situation, of how things are and how things could be and what must be done to bridge the two. Of not only weighing out those costs but taking them on in self-awareness. Strength within constraint.

the art of hanging

A man hangs, stuck between above and below. He is tied up, crossed into triangles, shapes and forms said to have some kind of meaning. Do they really? Is this truly a sacrifice, and if so, what is it for? What could he gain that would be worth this hanging stasis for so long, what wisdom? Look at the landscape of this card, how far separated he is from reality as others experience it.

In the Thoth this card is not associated with a planetary or zodiac astrological sign, but rather with the pure element of water. Water, which is associated with emotion, with dreams and intuition. Will those be improved, strengthened by his time tied up and submerged? Water is also associated in Crowley's system with the ancient Aeon, a time long passed, behind. The new Aeon is made of fire, of impetus, action, movement forward. In this sense the hanged man is stuck in the past, nostalgia-heavy, dwelling with and bound by things no longer relevant.

The answer is to move forward then, yes? Put behind this idea of self-sacrifice, sticking with what you know because you know it. But what if it isn't that simple, if the hanging situation isn't altogether in your power to change. What if you have done everything you could think of to help yourself to no avail, and when you try to reach out for more professional assistance you are met with a litany of unreturned phone calls, ignored messages, outright don't have time in my schedule rejections? In that case perhaps you must continue in the hanging place a while longer. Might as well try to extract that wisdom after all, those Odin-style nuggets of epiphany. Clouds and rain, water. Perhaps the hanged man goes on hanging because he has found a certain kind of serenity with his lot, rather than dealing with constant cycles of frustration.

Serenity: the art of hanging on.

moving forward, walking away

So some more experimenting - this time, an attempt to do a reading combining tarot and lenormand. Basically, draw one tarot card and have that serve as the overarching 'theme' of the reading, and then a string of three lenormand cards as the message for/response to/clarification of the tarot card. Basically the tarot still gets read as tarot and the lenormand cards still get read together, as lenormand cards ought to be.

In terms of over-arching theme, we have the eight of cups. A man stands in a body of water, his back turned towards the future, the sky. Above the water he is attractively-built, strong; below it, a kind of tentacled creature, bizarre, flexible and yet so...intangible, difficult to describe. The contrast between how others perceive us and how we perceive ourselves, in our heads? Ever since I was a small child I have always had this odd feeling that my body wasn't really...me; not the way my mind was, my thoughts.

Anyway, he faces away from the cups, the things he has, the place he has been, the past. Instead he looks up, towards the sky, the stars, hopes and dreams and the intangible - all the things you must work for, grasp at if you ever want a real chance at having. Turning away from the status quo to pursue more, the new. Letting go, being willing to reach. Knowing when to walk away, and what to walk away from.

Then, to take a look at the lenormand cards and see what they have to say about that...We have the crossroads, which is about making choices, and decisions, being forced to figure out which road you will take, what sacrifices to make doubts; and the coffin which speaks of difficult things, depression and illness and death, of endings; and the stars, of hope and creativity and imagination, of renewal, inspiration.

Given the cards around in, the coffin in this layout seems to hold a meaning quite similar to that of the Death card in the tarot. Particularly striking in this image is the ritualized, stylized nature of the thing - it isn't just death, it is death, decay preserved, romanticized, all that energy and cost gone into preserving something gone, over...reminds me of Lenin's tomb for example - quite disturbing and unnecessary, if you think about it. Better off to kill those things for good, let them go, choose to walk down the path of separation that would take you into the future towards far better, healthier, more productive and fulfilling things.The star at assures that it is possible, that you have in in you to heal, to fulfill those dreams, to do so many better things if only you could make that decision to let the negative coffin things really go.

How much energy goes into maintaining that elaborate coffin, dealing with it? What kind of starry things could you accomplish if your focus could be fully turned elsewhere, if like the man you could walk away from those tired old cups?

For me, this message is utterly applicable. Things that have gone on for ten years now... I truly do not know how to even try anymore and yet, the cards remind me, that I must; to not give up when I just feel so tired of the inevitability of it all. You can never get unstuck if all you do is muddle about and dwell on how stuck you are. 

My Favorite Majors: The Hanged Man

So this is most definitely one of the more conceptually complex majors, to me. Its meaning in a reading can really range from kind of positive/promising - the whole, self-sacrifice needed to level up/gain needed knowledge/insight/etc - to quite negative - being stuck in a rut, tied down, unable to move forward... With some majors, when they come up in a reading, I pretty much KNOW what they mean most of the time. With this one, I usually have to...consider it a bit more.

Visually, it's one of the more hit and miss ones. Rarely does a deck have a take on this card that REALLY impresses me, and often, even my favorite decks have a representation that leaves me with a 'meh' feeling... That in mind, it wasn't too hard to figure out which among my decks had ones I liked most. Both of these just...really allow me to get INTO the card, in a way that in many other decks I just...cannot.

XII. Hanged Man

Favorite:
I really like it, here, how the Nusantara at once sticks to and reworks the classic RWS image...the Indonesian art style really works to the benefit of the major, I find. For me at least, it highlights the concept of the major a lot more...clicks in my mind in a way that the image in the ACTUAL RWS deck just...doesn't do, for me. I just love, love the garments on the figures in this clone, and here...for the mystical self-sacrifice aspects of the card, I find it perfect in both style and color palette, and likewise, for the more desperate/stuck meanings...the bareness...it works for me. Love the little details, the rope he is tied up with... The palette of this card as a whole, actually, and the contrasts in color...it really creates the right mood for me.

Runner Up:
Amusingly enough, the color palette in the Magical Forest's Hanged Man is utterly different, and yet also really works for me. The cool blue, and the starkness of the background really create an appropriately somber feeling for the card. The choice of animal for this was wonderfully clever. Hanging indeed! Hanging, bug-eyed staring at you meaningfully...book it paws, is that why it is hanging there, to learn? Or is that why it cannot fly off to better places, because to fly would mean to let go, and until it can let go it is stuck here, between those two trees, in this cold, bare place....that lovely detail of the moon and all that it can symbolize... this is what I mean...this card, which could so easily be taken as frilly, silly deck...it ISN'T really, and it just opens up the meaning so much and...clever, cleverly done.

advice for letting things go

So...something happened very recently, that has been quite a bit on my mind, subsequently. It's kind of funny, I posted about it in my personal journal right afterwards, when I was still a bit shocked about the whole thing, and my friends there seem to be...quite upset on my behalf. Moreso than I myself am. The thing is, the more I think about it, the less I like the idea of dwelling or looking at it from a negative perspective because...well, it's all so open to question and interpretation, and it's life and things happen and if you can just shrug, take it in stride...makes for a better outlook.

It's a deliberate thing, really. I don't want this to become some kind of hanged man situation, something I get stuck on. In fact this card came up reversed, and that's exactly what I want...let go, free myself, move on. In my ethnic conflict class we had to watch a movie called 'The Power of Forgiveness', which kind of talked about how different people have varying tendencies to either let go of or hang onto things, large or small. The arguement of that movie, which was in that case referring specifically to dealing with aftermath of conflicts but which I think is pretty widely applicable is that - to just let go...it's less about the other person or people or whatever and more about what that does for you. If you aren't hanging onto resentment or pain or that kind of victimized how could that happen mindset...well, things sure are mentally nicer for you, aren't they?

But here, in drawing advice for how to best do that...I think the message is that I may be a bit over-eager. OK, I AM TOTALLY COOL WITH WHAT HAPPENED is a process, something you get to, rather something you can just logically decide is the best option and bang, all of your brain is in line. Granted, for me I think it's something I can get to in a few days, but still...I need to give myself that bit of time, moderation in my approach and expectations of myself.

See, for me the process is all about logic and dissecting what happened and my reactions. It's asking why and logically coming to some answers that satisfy me and being like, ok, now I can set that aside. A lot of this is about my own actions - not because I necessarily think it's my 'fault' (I don't really like thinking about it in terms of fault because that's the kind of thinking that makes letting things go harder) but because well...your own actions and approach to things is something you have the power to modify and adjust. Even if what happened was 80% the other person - you have no real power to change what anyone else does. That's why I don't like asking (and really don't like the kind of tarot readings where querents ask) about 'why did X do ___?' Because you'll never really know if your guess/reading is right anyway. Some people aren't even self-aware enough to know their own motivations, so how the hell can you expect to figure that out? And why waste time thinking about what isn't in your power to influence? Whereas focusing on that smaller part, the 'well how did my approach let things get to that point, and how could I have perhaps handled the situation better in the moment?' That can lead to conclusions with useful applications to future events.

I like that this card combines both the Art and Temperance traditions/takes because well...that is exactly what I need to do. Moderation, but also the idea of mixing and synthesis - allow myself to really THINK about everything that happened. Repressing thoughts or telling myself prematurely to get over it will have the exact opposite effect. I should just think about it, dissect and process for a few days, figure out how to apply what I concoct to how I want to go foward, both with the person involved and in general, and yeah.

Avoiding the Hanged Man dynamic is a great thing, but as Art/Temperance here counsels, you have to go about it the right way or your efforts could have the exact opposite effect.

First Post!

So yeah. Another blog o' mine. Because uh, neat compartmentalization of life has its advantages...

Anyway, yeah, I've felt more and more an urge to blog about random tarot related things, and wanted a place to it that doesn't have other/unrelated content so I could fully share this as just tarot stuff, and so here we go.

This is going to be brief, because I am still in a mad desperate jumble of a mess of panic to finish a paper within the next very few hours, and so.

Last night there was much panic and anxiety over not having made much progress at all, not knowing how to start, even, etc etc. My head is in that kind of place.

Working with my Silicon Dawn and Spanish tarot decks currently, both fairly new acquisitions, a nice mix of the historic and the modern and both kind of funky and different and awesome...

So I did a quick draw with the Silicon Dawn. Two cards: what should I do, and what should I avoid.

(the actual cards look nicer, but don't have the time/energy to take a picture so using older version from Egypt's website)r

I thought this was really succinct, really useful advice. Focus on what you CAN do, not on what you feel that you CAN'T. Don't sit there, stuck, obsessing over how stuck you are, how you can't move. Just try. Do it. Create something. Allow something, no matter what you think of its quality, to grow. Just DO it.  Sit down at that keyboard and allow your fingers to type down word and keep typing, and keep typing don't think about how you feel you can't breath you are so anxious, how little progress you are making, just KEEP GOING, channel the energy of growth, GO.

I've been glancing back at those cards all last night, all today as I keep forcing myself to plug along, and...it's something I guess. Progress, if not good progress, but...you take what you can get in life, I guess. At times like these.

Also, I'm still kind of on the fence about how I feel about the whole wands-earth pentacles-fire switch in this deck, but I must say...that Ace makes perfect sense to me :0

Off I go to try to...finish this in time not to fail.
Inshallah :D