My Lent Book Again

Coming back to report on my progress of reading my Lent book this year, which as I said in my last post is Grant Morrison's The Invisibles.

All acts of magic have the magician as their primary target, and reading a book so notoriously magical can only be described as transformative. Morrison described how he put a spell in it to turn the reader into an Invisible and without publishing details of things that are overly personal, it's hitting some serious stuff and pressing buttons.

In terms of stuff which is sayable in public, this post was prompted by the idea of a Hand of Glory (in folklore the hand of a hanged man used by burglars as a sort of candle to put the household to sleep so that they could burgle it undisturbed) which makes obscene gestures is so very me. I also particularly love a scene where Jack Frost makes a magic circle from fag ends taken from the Tesco bag Tom O'Bedlam gave him.

My only sorrow is that at least in appearance I seem to be passing from King Mob to Tom O'Bedlam!

My Lent Book

Annually, I post here about the practice I have stolen from the Christians of taking a book to read for Lent, and since Lent starts on Wednesday it's that time of year. 

The only thing the books I choose have in common is that they're completely unsuitable and not likely to be picked by the Archbishop of Canterbury as his Lent book. Of course since the archbishop has crashed and burned there isn't one to pick a book this year so they can all pick the witch's Lent book.

This year I have managed to lay my hands on a pirated electronic copy of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles graphic novels so that's my choice. I have read this hugely far-ranging chaos magic apocalypse at various times, but never in order and the omnibus edition is very expensive to buy in any form so it feels like it's dropped into my lap.

I'm absolutely howling at the Wikipedia page for the series, which is terrifically vanilla for a series which is, even by my standards, absolutely WILD. Of course I'm most interested in the magic and I remember being impressed with the way the Invisibles invoke John Lennon as a god. I keep threatening to channel Derek Acorah but have somehow resisted the temptation. Perhaps the cover which illustrates this post are the best explanation.

I'll see how I get on with it because I've also started another read through of the bible (not the New Testament, the Hebrew bible is a longstanding passion and I think I can truthfully say I'm the only dog to come top in Hebrew) and hope I haven't bitten off more than I can choose. I heard Jewish scholar Robert Alter say on a podcast that he originally translated a line from 'The Lord is my shepherd' as 'You pleasure my head with oil,' until his wife, shocked, protested that he couldn't possibly publish that, and I immediately knew I'd found my guide for another read through. So I'm using the notes in Alter's translation, but actually reading the updated New Revised Standard Version in approximate order it was written. This gives a completely different impression from starting from the beginning, because you literally just have a few bits of poetry and then straight into the prophets.

Oh, there's something we have to do before I bury myself in my books. *Some* people are always welcome in the United Kingdom.

Urban Grimoire: A Spell to Reverse the Current Upended State of the World

Obviously, I'm all for a bit of chaos to shake things up but the sheer speed at which the world situation is upending at the moment may itself require some shaking out so that it can be put back in an order where the several world Hitlers aren't getting what they want.

To do this: put yourself in a calm or sacred place and frame of mind and see the world being a calm and peaceful place in your mind. See Putin and Trump out of power, Ukraine and Palestine restored to sovereignty, and so on. Even a Green government in UK because why limit yourself. And say these words:

When Magritte died

The stones fell to the ground

The birds divorced their leaves

The night and day agreed to differ

The breasts became blind

The cunt was struck dumb

The tubas extnguished their flames

The pipe remembered its role

The words looked up what they meant in the dictionary

The clouds turned acstract

The ham closed its eye for ever

When Magritte died.

When Magritte died

The toes hid modestly in their shoes

The mountains no longer envied their eagles

The apple shrunk to the size of an apple

Or did the room grow to the size of a room?

The bowler hat lost its ability to astonish

The old healer

Returned from a dip in the sea

Put on his trousers

his boots

his cloak

his hat

Picked up his stick

his sack

his cage of doves (clanging its door to)

And set off on his banal journey

When Magritte died.

(George Kelly: Homage to Magritte)

So mote it be!

Meisner Technique and Tarot 1

Some time ago I wrote a post in which I expressed my interest in applying Sanford Meisner's acting technique to the tarot divinatory system to see what would happen. This is the first post in hopefully a series, doing just that. I am hoping that the fact I have put a numeral 1 in the title of this post doesn't mean it remains the only one - in fact I've had the book I'm reading on Meisner on the go for some time now and it keeps drawing me back so I'm hopeful that I'll keep on at it even if sporadically. 

The basis of the Meisner system is to stop actors merely performing an attitude, but to make their psychological and physical responses real, so that they are actually really in the role. Modern tarot bears a similarity to this programme, in that readers and querents often ask themselves who they are in a card, what they are doing, how the characters relate to each other, what they would say, and so on. This is exactly the personal involvement and motivation which can be lacking in an actor playing a role: so the only difference would be that an actor is finding the motivation and involvement, and the tarot reader is getting to discover their own motivation and involvement. 

Meisner Technique is perhaps best known for its repetition technique, in which two actors sit opposite each other and repeat statements to each other, however the author of the book I have taken as my guide (Nick Moseley: Meisner in Practice. Nick Hern Books, London, 2012) before his students get to repetition gets them to sit opposite each other in pairs and just look at each other for several minutes. Predictably, he says (p.12) that the effect of doing this has results such as laughter, staring competitions, establishment of status as in one observer and the other observed, and boredom. One of the reasons this approach interests me as it could be applied to tarot is that these sort of dynamics and *exactly* the sort of not-necessarily-conscious behaviours, psychological mechanisms and defences, which should be brought out in a tarot reading.

I think this is even more easily adapted to tarot than the repetition exercises, and perhaps is therefore a good start to the approach. I've picked the 6 of Cups for this post because there's quite a lot going on in it for the viewer to see. I would suggest that simply looking at the card and taking a note of the thoughts and feelings which arise is a useful (and fairly standard) exercise. 

For example, someone who is unacquainted with the strange world of tarot cards may wonder why two deformed children and in the grounds of a castle surrounded by massive chalices with flowers in, and be simply irritated by the whole thing. If that happens the whole exercise of looking at a tarot card may seem pointless and the reader may be tempted to jack it in.

I would suggest that that is exactly the sort of 'block' that the Meisner technique is intended to overcome, because the viewer is being prevented from learning anything about themselves or what is going on in the card, by their instant reaction here. These blocks are intended to be overcome and replaced by other psychological and physical responses, by subsequent exercises, but at this stage the important thing is having the reaction and being aware of it.

There are of course other possible initial reactions and different people will notice different things and respond differently. They may notice the house, they may notice the children's clothes, they may count the chalice, they may notice the windows, they might wonder who the character in the background walking away is, they might notice the relative colours, they might notice the weather. I personally find the X on the balustrade of the steps draws my attention more than anything else and I have to wrench my attention away from it. The viewer might feel a moment of tenderness, or wonder why the children are alone, and so on. Even if you're very familiar with the card, just looking can allow a different reaction in the viewer.

Yes, I know you will rightly say that I haven't even got on to Sanford Meisner's technique in this post but, hey, you have to react to me too. 

An Affirmation

For years my energy and thus magic have tended to revolve around, if not dating fuckboys, then at least dealing with problematic energies and behaviours. 

In a witchy sense, sometimes the universe sends you things repeatedly because you have failed to deal with that situation in the past. At other times it sends you these situations because you can deal with them, and you've created a sort of vacuum that draws them. I am in no way making this out that this is in any way scientific, but would just point out that while it seems to be contradictory, it exactly reflects the apparently contradictory nature of positive and negative feedback loops in science.

Because I have been the sort of person who dealt with things, they have therefore tended to keep coming my way, and frankly I'm a bit tired of being a magnet for cunts.

One of the problems is that being the sort of happy, self-sufficient and self-assured person I am is an almost automatic magnet for cunts, and it is a sad reflection on our world that simply being happy is enough to drive lots of people mad. Unfortunately they aren't people who want to be happy themselves, they're people who aren't happy and want other people to be unhappy with them.

I'm rather tired of this and so I'm setting out to reset this energetic signature I have. I have written here before about how I think it's useful to return the energies people give out, to the sender, without them having any impact on me.

I'm also making a point of just not engaging with the cunts the universe sends my way. If you want to go around being a little ray of misery, that's fine by me but will leave me completely untouched. Of course this calculated indifference to other people is also guaranteed to wind up these nasty pieces of work, but they'll have to deal with that.

I'm doing some head work by setting myself an affirmation to say to change my head and behaviour. I have had some difficulty doing this, though. My first attempt was:

'Cunts are not attracted to me in any way.'

However every source I have ever read about using affirmations has been most insistent that they should be positive and not include the word 'not'. Obviously I wouldn't feel obliged to follow other people's rules, but probably an affirmation should at least affirm something. So my second attempt was:

'Cunts are repelled from me.'

I avoided the use of the word 'by' because it would suggest that I was repelling them rather than them just not being drawn to me in any way. However on reflection I felt the idea of them being repelled from me still suggested that I was actively involved in this process, rather than them just keeping away from me completely.

Uncharacteristically, I tried to turn this round as it would suggest in all the books, by trying to affirm that I was only attracting what I wanted. So I tried:

'I only attract positivity and good.'

I was even less satisfied with this one because it really didn't sound like me at all, so I felt like it wasn't going to work. And also I really am not in the business of attracting anything at all, but just to keeping nightmare people away. I know that the people who genuinely need me will be drawn to me, but don't want to be surrounded by happy, positive people, because I would want to kill them.

So currently this affirmation stands as:

'Cunts stay away from me so that I am in peace.'

I am certain that by the time I click 'publish' on this blog post I will have changed it to something else, but that's the general idea. 

Regular readers may see this as a major conscious reset of my energies; certainly I do!

A Way of Dividing the Major Arcana

I posted recently about an arbitrary way of dividing up the whole tarot by the background colour of the cards. This is sort-of a guest post because it's just to repost another way of dividing the Major Arcana taken from someone else. As always with blogging, when I post something it's because it either has already entered my inner world or I want to turn it over and let it stew.

This way is taken from a book I read years ago: Anne Lionet: Secrets of Tarot, Dorling-Kindersley, London, 2001, pp. 82 and 83. This is actually one of the books I read fairly early in my tarot reading career, and to be honest, having obtained another copy about twenty years later, I'm horribly aware of how little of it seems familiar to me, so perhaps I didn't pay as much attention as I thought I did!

It gives this way of dividing the 22 Major Arcana cards into themes, which I suppose is a more developed way of the tendency in introductory texts to divide the tarot cards into good/bad or positive/negative. So here are the categories (some cards do fall into more than one category, this isn't a mistake):

1. Enlightenment: The Emperor, The Empress, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Hierophant, The Hermit and The World.

2. Responsibility (to Others): The Empress, The Emperor, Judgement, Temperance, and The Lovers.

3. Everyday Living: The Empress, Justice, and The Devil.

4. Reacting to Fate: Wheel of Fortune, The Hanged Man, Death, The Devil, The Tower, Judgement, The Moon, and The Star.

5. Cards of Light and Dark: Wheel of Fortune, The Hanged Man, Death, The Devil, The Tower, Judgement, The Moon, and The Star.

6. Cards of Reality: The Emperor, The Chariot, Strength, and The Sun.

7. Cards of Dreaming and Doing: Temperance, The Star, and The Chariot.

8. Cards of Moving Forward: The Fool, The Chariot, Wheel of Fortune, The Sun, Judgement, and The World.

As always, when reading someone else's approach to the tarot, I'm struck by the way the cards impact different people in so many ways and have endless resonance. These themes are largely here, as I said, to make me turn them over and see what they make me think, but I just have a couple of first impressions.

The first is that I want to take the category of dreaming and doing further and see what I can do with it. I want to think about whether the whole Major Arcana, or even whole deck, could be dividing up into either dreaming or doing. The reality category also interests me because I would like to see what I can do with the idea of reality and do a similar thing to see if the deck could be divided up into reality/unreality as a whole. I personally don't do reversals because I think each card carries both the upright and reversed energies as a duality all the time, and to try to divide the two is a fruitless exercise: the entire point of paganism/magic/occultism is monism in which everything is one so certainly a card should be able to carry two different meanings at once!

The other impression, which is perhaps a caution about this division method, is that I personally would question whether you can make a category of Major Arcana cards which are *the ones* which carry meanings related to Everyday Living. I take the Minor Arcana as being more inclined towards everyday living, minor decisions, routine events, etc, and the Major Arcana as being about bigger perspectives, tendencies, and so on. Major is climate and Minor is weather, if you like, and therefore I'd be wary of assigning some Major Arcana cards to everyday stuff. Of course I'm immediately going to contradict myself by commenting that of course Major cards can mean ordinary pedestrian stuff, because the meanings are endlessly mutable, but then I did just say above that each card can carry at least two contradictory meanings at once!

I'm looking forward to thinking about these divisions and seeing where I go with them. Of course I'm still chewing over Meisner slowly in the bathroom so that will probably result in some posts at some point!

Some Good News

Native Americans burning Benjamin Netanyahu in effigy:

Oh and sadly one of our national treasures has died recently: