u/SrJenkin

Is it just my impression or has tarot become a widespread fashion lately?

The more I work with it, and the more I see other people working with it on the internet, the more it becomes evident how "unraveling" tarot can be (beyond health and energy depletion). It's not always about an interpretation mistake on the reader, something I don't see discussed much that I've seen again and again is the oracle itself outputting misleading, inaccurate or outright destructive information.

I was reflecting about this, how tricky tarot can be if you do not step carefully. That made me think about the older serpent symbolism/power, connected to oracular power and wisdom, but also destructive to the wielder if he's imbalanced. I thought about the Hermit's staff and the serpent power in it, then I had an insight... the lantern is the key, its light balances out the darker/cthonic aspects of the serpent/staff.

I'm not claiming tarot literally works through serpent power, I honestly don't know. But it serves as a good guiding analogy to work safely with divination, treat it like a serpent, either you make it stand upright or it coils around you. And the key is your own light, self-knowledge is the antidote to self-deception.

Part of my intent with these posts is to hopefully temper the blind trust folks seem to invest in tarot, taking for granted that it always speaks the truth and serves only to illuminate you. I'm not saying it has malicious intent in any way, it's just that by the way of its (fluid) nature mixed up with human stupidity it tends to output unreliable answers, and should be taken with a pinch of salt.

In another post I talked about how my deck seems to have its own agenda, but it doesn't feel like parasitical or malicious agenda, it's just wild and slightly chaotic, it tests good judgment and forces discipline: a more thoughtful approach and deliberate word constrictions. In this way, I'm inching further to make it stand upright.

My last post was about tarot's intrusive thoughts hijacking readings. That was inspired on recent occurrences where I was getting Tower and Death repeatedly in different contexts... I thought that was about my aged and sickly dog whom I am tending to, he's sure gonna die, but not this year.

I got a "twang" to look up the chart of my city and it caught my attention that the full Moon would fall exactly on the city's scorpio Moon... "Oh dear", I thought. I live in a coastal amphibious city, half land and half water, very sensitive to Moon cycles both physically and magically. The city is Piscean (Sun, Mercury, Mars, Pallas and IC), and is suffering from a Neptune + Pluto return. For the last 7 months at least I've been getting dreams related to water, like massive waves and raging rivers.

A particularly important one happened in June of the last year, on the same day I got a new statue into my home, that dream was magical and very terrifying. In the midst of a mundane dream there was a cerulean painting that stood out and looked like a window, so I stepped through it and got out on top of a sky high wall of rock in the ocean, while terrifying, colossal waves crashed against it. That was also the day of an exact Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Aries, except I wasn't aware of this yet. I've had an "intuition" about this conjunction an year earlier, while contemplating the waves by the beach, I got into a deep mulling state and wrote in my smartphone something like "they will try to build walls, but the walls won't contain the sea" .

But the synchronicities don't stop there. More recently I pinned down the exact moment the city was "born" (the moment a document was signed) through divination, I laid the cards in a sequence for each section (and the degrees within the section) of the sign the Moon was in (Scorpio), and the Moon card showed up to indicate where exactly it was when the document was signed, which told me the birth hour. I looked up the sabian symbol for that degree of Scorpio and it says "a massive rocky shoreline"... bingo. The city is named after its long wall of coral reefs that absorb the Atlantic's power and tempers the local weather. That is all to say, this native Moon is a very sensitive point, with the full Moon's return lining up with other key astrological conditions, something was definitely going to happen.

I woke up this morning while barely noticing the traces of the storm that raged all night, there was just a gentle rain going outside, gentle but unceasing... I addressed the statue and tried to utter the mantra of tuning I do each morning, but something was off, my voice kept failing, and the sound didn't "switch on". I proceeded with meditation, but my mind was stuck in a loop of a song while my imagination was hyperactive, so I let it flow, and it quite literally flowed, I became a river sweeping across everything and communicating with everything. That was brief vision and then the noise came back, I put out the flame, covered the statue with her veil, bowed, and went about my day.

And then I saw the news... The city was in absolute chaos. All of our rivers decided to flood at once, nearly everywhere but the high places were covered in water, traffic was stuck, terrain came down, people died, lost their houses, properties, etc... Death and Tower cranked all the way up. Basically the same scenario of when I made one of my first posts in this sub, "destructive tides in brazil".

I am lucky both to live in one of these high places and that I didn't have to work today. But in some way I always get swept along this weather thing. And this tide will keep hitting worse and worse. In the last "warning" dream I had, I climbed out of a river just before its tide sped up very quickly, and then it brought along all sorts of vehicles, a person who was with me couldn't escape in time and got crushed. I interpreted the river as both literal and also a metaphor for the traffic, which is getting more violent and chaotic lately (a significant increase in the rate of accidents). There's also something about electricity, I've been dreaming of things going really wrong with chaotic wiring, and one of the outer confirmations I had these days was a powerful lightning strike that shook up windows everywhere and blacked out the whole district for a day, and there was a remarkable astrological signature in the moment of the strike (involving Uranus, Jupiter, Mars and Sun).

It's almost like a narrative. The patroness of the city is a warrior apparition of "Mary", titled "generalissima of the army" (she appeared in the battlefield leading soldiers to victory, in a historical battle which become the foundation of the brazilian army), she is connected to sweet water and wells, which are getting invaded by the salty water of the ever pushing sea. I've seen this quarrel before in mythology...

This Neptune return in the chart of a piscean city is being truly fascinating but also really sad to watch. There's the lightning storms, the river floods, but also a less dramatic and more insidious problem, the salty water pushing underground is slowly eroding the foundation of buildings and also contaminating important aquifers....

May the gods help us!

What a long post... this should probably go to my journal and not reddit, but I feel this is sort of a continuation of the experience I shared in my other post about destructive tides, and I feel like sharing this all. I hope this experience might be interesting for you, and I hope you guys have a nice weekend.

This gets increasingly evident over time. I thought my questions weren't tight enough or focusing on the wrong layer, and thus yielding irrelevant answers. But it seems that I and the deck disagree on what "relevant" means, and the deck always pulls the reading to the most urgent subject. I try to interpret within the constraints of the question, but the answer looks nonsensical within the context, only when I give up and go about my life that the true subject comes to light and I realize my deck wasn't "broken".

This kinda makes sense, isn't divination supposed to bring to light things that we cannot see? Usually, we can't see something because we don't expect it, don't think about it, it's outside our limited view. We don't know what we actually need to know until it unexpectedly pops our bubble of thinking, so how could we aim questions that are truly relevant?

The method I'm currently leaning on is quite the opposite of what Josephine advises (tight control yield precision), I'm getting more positive and precise feedback when I make open ended questions and let the deck, along with my intuition, speak freely.

Have you guys had similar experiences?

Sometimes I feel that my mind is just incompatible with visionary work and I should stop struggling. Whenever I attempt a visionary script, I cannot stop my imagination from slipping into "generative mode" instead of "seer mode". My mind tends to expand everything it holds, wildly and non-linearly, the visionary script just kind of adds fuel to that instead of making a linear experience. I don't think it's an issue with focus, the images that come up are less of a distraction and more like coherent parts of a system that is self-generating, but it's something that is coming forth from within instead of "receiving from the outside". In visionary work, the imagination is supposed to be receptive like an elastic fabric for spirits to project shapes onto, but MY imagination is kind of a bully, it pushes things away as it expands outwards. I hope this doesn't sound too abstract, it's the best I can manage to explain it.

In the description of the resources (tarot) layout, if I remember well, Josephine mentions something about a tension between creativity and visionary work. I wonder if it's truly one or the other, and what's the experience of other creative people with visionary work.