You may have noticed that on my recent post about drama in the tarot, Inexplicable Device said that he wasn't friendly with the tarot and proceeded nonetheless to give penetrating insight into the cards I had pictured there.
What I took from that was that different people have different magics and our individual magics may differ at different times of our lives. Sometimes people may think they don't click with a magic they may be good at. Conversely we may sometimes bark up the wrong tree and want to work a magic which isn't us.
A man once rang into the Hex Education radio programme and said that he kept doing magic out of books and it never worked. Eventually it transpired that when he drew something it just happened - but was dead set on working magic in someone else's way!
I feel this probably happens most in divination. For example I can never see anything in a crystal ball. On the other hand I'm dead good at tea leaves, and the fact other people tell me I'm making it up just proves I'm a natural.
I also can't read Lenormand or other fortune telling cards. I think there is a reason for this inability - it just isn't for where I am now, and to keep banging my head against that wall would be to refuse my tasks of this time, since a major one is always to listen to the universe's message of what is my place in it.
How do you know if a magical or divination method is for you? Well, just do it and see. Another divination method which I often see people say they would like to use but can't, is the tarot decks devised by the French hairdresser Alliette, who used the nom de plume Etteilla. The cheapest of these is the one called Book of Thoth.
I have pulled mine out of its box again, since I have rationalised my tarot decks as I now find it difficult to handle or shuffle the larger decks. I am left with RWS decks and this one. I am taking this as a message from the universe that these are to be my tools for now. I have read with it before and found it a wild roller coaster of a divination tool. Sure enough it's come straight to life in my hand - you have a relationship with your tools and it sounds almost as if I'm talking about a penis in my hand!
And as the universe's gift it certainly will respond! I don't understand his system but am just reading it the way I think seems right. It's very different from the way I am accustomed to read the RWS. Reversals are an integral thing. There are French keywords on each card - usually the exact opposite of how we would understand them now. I love that it conjures up a different era of divination. And what's not to love about getting the African Despot as your daily draw? In fact the structure is quite different, being based on a creation myth and not a hero myth.
I'm finding there are just a couple of tricks to it. You have to pull a lot of cards and read them in relation to each other. The deck also likes being read from right to left. No point fighting it, when you do it that way whole swathes of meaning appear.
And that is the right way to know if a magic is for you - if it works!
Picture credit: Tarot Museum, Belgium.
Do you see the cobbles on the streets? Everywhere you look, stone & rock. Can you imagine what it feels like to reach down with your bones & feel the living stones? The city is built on itself, all the cities that came before. Can you imagine how it feels to lie down on an ancient flagstone & feel the power of the rock buoying you up against the tug of the world? And that's where witchcraft begins. The stones have life, & I'm part of it. - adapted from Terry Pratchett
Wednesday, June 6, 2018
Differing Magics with Reference to the Book of Thoth Etteilla Tarot
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How peculiar, I was just thinking the other day how some items I made back in the nineties predicted the future. I don't think I am gifted to predictions for individuals, I seem to fair better at general prophecy.
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DeleteYes, prediction works in all sorts of odd ways and one of my first intimations that I would be a weirdo was trouble with deja vu.