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| Meet my Holy Guardian Angel |
Allegory is a genuinely ancient way of telling one story using another. For the sake of this blog post I am using the word to indicate that everything in a tarot card can be something else. The classic example of this is the water which burbles along at the back of so many cards. This is not just a stream, but is often taken to be a stream of consciousness, starting with the High Priestess and carrying on through the journey of the deck.
It is surprisingly simple to use allegory in a reading, you can just ask yourself what something reminds you of. For example the church in the five of Pentacles could represent your significant other's unwelcoming family.
The technique I would suggest would be to use the Tarot School of New York's Voice in the Card technique. You simply let your eye wander over the card and let it settle somewhere, on some detail or some action, person, emotion... You get the idea.
Personally what i would then do to get at an allegorical meaning would be to say to myself 'That isn't (thing), it is....' and let the answer pop into my head.
A very good example of the allegorical understanding of a tarot card is Judgement. On the face of it this card represents the final judgement of the dead, one of the Four Last Things of the Catholic faith.
But it is also a card which is heavily allegorised and I will borrow the interpretation by David Allen Hulse in New Dimensions for the Cube of Space (Red Wheel Weiser, 2000, p. 48). In this interpretation the angel is the Holy Guardian Angel which magically is your highest self and here calls you to awakening and oversees it.
The flow of water in the background is the thoughts of your conscious mind, which are stopped by the iceberg of meditation and other spiritual acts in the background, allowing you a glimpse of your higher self. The coffins represent the restrictions of the body or the physical plane, which are overcome temporarily in this awakening so that the HGA can give you a higher consciousness beyond space and time.
Probably none of this was in the mind of the original designers of the card but that is the point of allegory!
You know my - rather limited - views on tarot*, but this post got me thinking... Did your Guardian Angel start drinking and smoking before or after they met you?
ReplyDelete* i.e. the pictures on the cards are just the jumping off point for the reader to interpret however they see fit, and they shouldn't be beholden to what some designer intended. So, um, the point of this is: I agree with you, of course ;)
Of course you do!
DeleteHe did both but has moved on to crystal meth and is trying to get assigned to the QAnon Shaman.