An Affirmation

For years my energy and thus magic have tended to revolve around, if not dating fuccboys, 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:

Tarot Drama

The modern esoteric tarot is intimately connected to the stage.

For example, Pamela Colman Smith, who designed the Rider Waite tarot, worked as a theatre set designer. This is manifest in her deck in the somewhat unreal world she creates; additionally, there is a whole series of cards sometimes called the Stage Cards. These are marked by a straight line near the back of the scene (pictured) that makes it look exactly as if the character is standing on a stage. If you accept the existence of these cards, they could be interpreted as meaning that there's something not quite real about the scene or situation. 

Additionally, Pam's own favoured method of interpretation was straight out of an acting manual rather than an occult manual. She advocated getting into the position of the character depicted and seeing how it feels. This is a method which doesn't get mentioned that much these days but is really useful.

Convinced of the theatrical element in the modern tarot's makeup I have been casting round to find an acting method that would click with the tarot as a means of interpretation.

Possibly Pam's reading technique is closest to Michael Chekhov's psycho-physical approach (think Jack Nicholson swoon), which aims to create a conscious awareness of the senses through a focus on mind and body.

I have of course dipped my toe into Stanislavsky, although I have had to back out as what I read made me more confused than anything else.

Currently I have a manual on Meisner on the go by the loo and hope to see how his organic authenticity can illuminate the tarot. I love his focus on motivation, because I feel a focus on motivation explains so much human behaviour.

Sources:

https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/acting-techniques-stars-swear-11321/

https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/meisner-much-repetition-1456/

https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/the-definitive-guide-to-the-meisner-technique-67712/

Life Lesson from Donald Trump 4

I have been listening to Alison Gill's reading of the lovely Jack Smith's revised filing in the light of the Supreme Court's ruling that the president of the USA is legally immune for official acts, on the Jack podcast. I have been howling with laughter every time she does her impression of the orange freak but nonetheless it's provided me with yet another life lesson from him.

This is that if you are going to pretend that you're concerned about, say, election interference you should act as if you are and not just go looking for it where it would affect you personally. Smith's case would be a lot weaker if he couldn't keep pointing out that Trump wasn't looking for actual electoral problems because he only looked for it where Republicans lost.

Besides, every time Smith calls tRump 'the defendant' I want to hump his leg even more.

Obviously you shouldn't take legal advice from someone pretending to be a dog on the internet, but I believe this reflects a legal principle whose name I can't remember, that you should at least behave in accordance with the position you are claiming. Until recently an example of this in UK law was in adverse possession, where if you squatted a property for long enough and the owner made no effort to get you out, after a certain length of time the property belonged to you. Whereas if you'd done that and in court the owner proved they'd been making endless efforts to get you out, you wouldn't be granted adverse possession.

Essentially in one case the owner is acting like he doesn't mind you having the property and in the other the owner is acting like he doesn't want you to have it. To translate this in Trump terms, he's saying the election wasn't secure but is acting as if he's just looking to win regardless of what he has to do.

This also reflects a magical principle often called 'acting in accord': you put your intent out there and it behoves you to act as if that's what is happening. If you act in a way different to the intent you have put out you're messing it up and it won't happen.

Luckily Donald tRump is obviously not a magician otherwise his hair and skin would look different. 😱

Spirit of Place: Highbury Hall

Last week was Heritage Week and one of the things I did was go on a tour of Joseph Chamberlain's house, Highbury Hall.

It has a resonance for all sorts of people because like so many other things, the Cluedo/Clue game was invented in Birmingham and Highbury was the inspiration for the floorplan on the board. In fact walking in to the house it does feel like the game board!

It's a fuck off massive house with hundreds of rooms cunningly designed to look much smaller and Chamberlain used all sorts of tricks to persuade visitors that it was an ancestral manor in the country, including taking them on confusing routes to the house, while the servants got there first because they went directly from New Street.

In other words there is a high degree of artifice and pretence about it.

Given that it's pretend it will come as no surprise that Chamberlain was both a prominent politician in Birmingham and also in the House of Commons. Frankly the effect has largely been to put me off Joseph Chamberlain and I'm particularly not impressed with the way he had a single home-grown chrysanthemum brought from Birmingham by train to London every day when he was an MP. He managed to create chaos both in the old Liberal party and in the Tory party, and despite supposedly being a competent man left no provision to run the HUGE house he built so it was sold straight after his death. It was a hospital in World War 1 and was ultimately given to the council who used it as a care home and is currently being looked after by a trust. When I say it's huge I'm not exaggerating and on the tour they showed us how when one services installation is outdated they just leave it there and pick another empty room to be the next plant room.

If it embodies the spirit of place it's the spirit of self-serving ambition with no thought for the consequences and that of making out everything is fine when really you've bollocksed it up. A spirit maintained by Birmingham City Council.

Absolutely Not Gardening

I have managed to get involved with 'graveyard gardening' in the city's two listed cemeteries at Warstone Lane and Key Hill. This probably sounds uncharacteristic but it's not really gardening, and in fact filling in a sunken grave with crud taken out of a gully feels much more fundamental and witchy.

This week I've been cutting ivy off overgrown graves, some of which have never been catalogued because they have always been overgrown, and the rest of this post will just be pictures of this satisfying activity. I do have family in Key Hill and keep picturing an arm reaching out of the ground and grabbing me by the ankle.

Incidentally this is yet another confirmation for me that volunteering is much better than an actual job: it was the capitalism that was the problem all along!