death

When Death Means Death

Don’t we talk in spiritual terms in this community? We talk of death as if it is a beautiful experience. Some also play down the Tower while it’s been nothing short of devastating in my life.

We tend to do this with the Death card too – “Death doesn’t mean death, it means transition, or the end of something.” And so it goes on. But sometimes Death does mean death and more importantly, it is a part of life we cannot escape from. Like the Tower, when it comes crashing down around your ears. If you’re not already on your Chariot ready to drive through the devastation like a phoenix rising from the ashes, you will find yourself in the rubble, scratching your head and wondering what on earth just happened and where do I go from here?

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Meditation on Death

Buddhism encourages new followers to go slowly and adopt the practices gradually. This is sound advice. Buddhism isn’t just another religion or philosophy to learn about, it’s also culturally different from anything we’re familiar with in the West, and is presented in many Eastern languages. Gradual suits me just fine.
On the Buddhist path, compassion is pretty much a prerequisite and one I very much agree with. Only it can be really, really hard to feel any sense of compassion when we hear and read such disturbing news across the media. It can be really difficult to feel compassion for our fellow man when they can be so annoying, egotistical, spiteful, hurtful, inconsiderate…

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Soul Journey Tarot Spread

The Soul Journey Tarot Reading, from the legendary Rachel Pollack, seeks to help you understand, through the Major Arcana, what journey your soul has been undertaking during your dreams, and other trance-like states. It’s a little different to regular dream interpretation as it doesn’t seek to find what your dreams are about, rather it seeks to find out where your soul travels to and what it’s doing while there. As Rachel explains:

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Journey Through The Major Arcana – Part 2

The 3 X 7 Theory: Part 2

In my Part One of Journey Through the Major Arcana, I talked about Rachel Pollack’s presentation ( in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom) of the Major Arcana Trumps as a sequence, or progression, of an individual’s journey to individuation and enlightenment. The Trumps (minus the Fool, who represents the individual taking the journey) are divided into three lines:  cards I-VII are seen as consciousness (the outer concerns of life in society), cards VIII-XIV are seen as subconscious (our inward search to find who we really are), and cards XV-XXI are seen as superconscious (development of a spiritual awareness and a release of archetypal energy).

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Deck Review: the Illuminated Tarot

Illuminated Tarot
Review by Valerie Sylvester
The first deck most beginning tarot readers encounter when starting out on their tarot journey is the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, (which I’ll refer to as “RWS” after this initial mention). It’s often the “default deck”, the one that people learn the basic meanings of the cards from. It also serves to illustrate many tarot books and websites, and most experienced tarot readers have some familiarity with it, even if they don’t use the deck regularly. Many new Tarot decks are published each year; quite of few of these decks are based in some way upon the RWS deck.

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The Gaian Tarot – An Interview With Joanna Powell Colbert

Gaian Tarot Oracle
I recently began writing a review of the wonderful Gaian Tarot, created by Joanna Powell Colbert. Communication with Joanna regarding permission to use the artwork on my Tarot blog quickly became chatty and as luck would have it, she kindly agreed to a short interview based on the Gaian Tarot. This post is that interview, the review will follow in a couple of days. Enjoy.

Where did the Gaian Tarot begin for you?
I had the desire to create a deck of my own back in the mid-80’s when I was deep into Goddess and Tarot studies, especially of the Motherpeace and RWS decks. But the thought of painting 78 cards was daunting. (Little did I know . . .) Later on, in the late 90’s, I went through a period of time where I let go of all my esoteric interests like tarot, astrology and ritual. I moved to a small, rural island, built a straw bale house with my husband and started a wilderness awareness course of studies — learning about the native plants and animals, going deep into the Spirit of Place.

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Scorpio Music

A guest post by Mick Frankel…

…Introduction by Catherine
Working his way through the genres in search of music that is true to Scorpion depth and emotion, he finds this in 1960’s gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. Mick does a grand job in showing the link between Mahalia’s music, her style, her personality and her Scorpio birth chart.

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