Conflicted about Peace

Source

Today I passed a Quaker meeting house which was displaying the poster which illustrates this post. As usual this small thing set the Hound thinking - perhaps because of the witchly concept of Will in the poster - and it has left me deeply conflicted. In fact I find myself in almost complete disagreement with everything in the poster!
I have a real problem with the concept of peace anyway, if it is the absence of conflict. Readers of this blog will be almost certain to remember the X-Files episode in which a man discovers a genie. She grants Mulder three wishes and the silly man first wishes for world peace. There is a dead silence, and of course he is the only person in the world. To me this sounds like a dream, but of course some people still wouldn't experience peace, even alone. In those circumstances peace would be contingent on the person having really good self esteem and no hidden psychological nasties. Ultimately Mulder realises you can't force people to be good and his final wish is for the genie to be free.
I have been forced to conclude that the absence of conflict is unnatural, and thus the kind of thing people who aren't witches hold up as an ideal. In nature there is a continual ebb and flow of everything, maintaining homeostasis. There is also a process of selection, deciding what will survive. I have a feeling the people who look after number one and stab others in the back are the ones who are more likely to survive! And do very well for themselves.
And yet... I don't want them to. I am always on about some turd or other here, and the reality is that we live in a violent world. I would like there to be peace but I really don't think peace is what I've incarnated for this time.
Here I am actually at the heart of the witch figure as I understand it. We are like mirrors. We give people opportunities to correct their own stuff (history, actions, karma, debt, perceive it as you will). They see themselves reflected in us and don't like it, which is why witches tend to get burned. I see this also as part of the action of homeostasis, and it doesn't really have a long-term goal as it is happening.
I suppose the longer-term goal could be called peace, but unfortunately the world is full of people who lack things like living skills, emotional competence or even consciences. They won't pay attention to a poster about peace, and unfortunately it's them the witch has to move towards peace. It's a hard life being a witch.

Tarot: the Shading on Pam's Deck

One of my favourite thing ever is the comic-book shading of the early editions of the RWS tarot, seen here on the figure in The Star.
Of course my grasshopper mind makes a connection with something else. I was going to say that the comic book image makes a connection between the cards and the individual squares of cartoons, only with the cards you can rearrange them and change the story. Or be rearranged by them. As you will.

The Star is a card I find it difficult to connect with. I think it's the breasts. But this comic-book connection has also made me think of the Tintin adventure, L'Étoile Mystérieuse, about the search for a meteorite which has fallen to earth. It has the exact same surreal feeling of the tarot card, and the sensation that virtually anything can happen. Even a gift falling out of the sky.
The other thing in the Tintin book is the heat. Since I aim to be entertaining on this blog as well as educational I attach a fun game in which Tintin seems to have lost all his clothes. You can dress him again if you wish 😏

Guest Post: a Fictional Tarot Reading

I usually have a guest post when viewing figures for the blog round some significant number. Obviously 107,000 is significant and signifies that 105,000 and 100,000 passed without me noticing. The guest post this time is by Nancy Spain who was a trouser-wearing character if ever there was one, and comes from her novel Cinderella Goes to the Morgue (Thriller Book Club, London, pp. 189-91). Spain's characters Miriam Birdseye and Nathasha duVivien have got mixed up in a pantomime and in a murder investigation involving clothing coupons under wartime rationing. I like this as an illustration of the way describing the cards brings out their meaning. Spain had obviously come across a Rider-Waite-Smith deck.

There was no music in 148a Leazes Gardens. Marilyn let herself in and groped,ccursing, for the electric light switch. The dark hall sprang into relief about her as she went ahead, past various dank waterproofs and hats that made strange shapes in the shadows. She came to the kitchen door and stood outlined against it. Here everything was sweetness and light.
The parrot cage was shrouded in green baize. Tony Gresham and Mrs Furbinger sat on either side of the kitchen table, which this evening wore its red frieze cloth. They were laying out the Major and Minor Arcana with a set of very old German tarot cards. Cups, swords, pentacles and wands were littered in terrifying profusion about the table. As Marylyn and Sergeant Robinson stood at the top of the steps and looked down on their bent heads, one neat and grey and grasped in curls, the other fair and vulnerable, Mrs Furbinger picked up the nine of swords with a little cry of horror. It showed a woman in bed weeping. Nine drawn swords dominated the darkness behind her.
"There," she said, "Tony. Not that I think it has anything to do with your legacy from Mister Banjo. But I knew I done wrong sewing up them clothing coupons for your poor dear mother in that old costoom. I shan't have a moment's peace till I tell the Sergeant all about it."
There was a very faint smell of kippers. It was easy to guess what Tony had had for supper.
"But look, Mrs Furbinger," he was saying earnestly. "Here is the hierophant in the great Arcana."
"That signifies the Pope," said Mrs Furbinger. "That denotes that all will be accomplished as be wished for the querent for the greatest good."
"What is this frightfully upsetting gentleman standing in this box with all that armour?"
The old-fashioned stove twinkled with black-lead. The curtains were drawn closely, excluding the rest of the world.
"That is the chariot of victories with urim and thumim like, on both shoulders and all the earth under him. But look at this three of swords..."
She gave a long sigh, compounded of bronchitis and apprehension. The kettle on the hob also puffed and wheezed and blew out its little plume of steam.
"I think all the swords are terrifying," said Tony and covered his eyes with his hand. I don't know which frightens me most. That one with the man face down, I think, transfixed with swords on the seashore..."
The cards made sinister shapes on the warm red cloth in the friendly room. They represented a future that was fearful and menacing. It was dangerous, like madness. In this kitchen everything was safe.
"You'll get over it in time," said Mrs Furbinger comfortably. "I was just like you over the tarot cards at the start. Particularly the three of pentacles with them beggars in the snow and that stained glass window. Fair gave me the creeps, I can tell you. But I'm altogether over it now..."
And she dealt them out in three packs face downwards, muttering, "To your house, to your heart, what's bound to be."

The tarot reading is never concluded.

Justice

I am finally writing about something which is a bit of a personal problem with me: I have a real issue with the concept of justice.
I think the reason for this is that as it is often understood, justice is seen as coming from outside oneself. Justice is seen to be decided by official arbiters and is closely related to another personal bugbear, which is the idea of rights.
I am not into these concepts for the simple reason that they appeal to external authorities. I believe myself to be a more than adequate agent to decide how I should behave towards others and what is right and wrong. You may say that laws are needed because some people aren't bothered how they behave. Well, they're not going to be bothered by breaking a law either, are they? I don't have an answer to this problem I've created, it's basically to make the point that those who know how to behave don't need laws, in my humble opinion.
There is another problem with justice, which is the blindness of justice, the idea also represented by scales or feathers. The idea that justice takes a full account and metes out what we deserve. There is the problem with this that as we act in various situations we can never truly see everything involved and so can only act on our understanding.
The idea of deserving is also tricky. There is a human tendency to think that we should be treated as we deserve, rather than arbitrarily, which is perceived as being unjust.
Don't get me wrong, if, say, my employers set up policies then ignore them to my disadvantage, I will hold them to them, because that is the contract. But on the whole I don't see things being done with justice in nature. Disasters just...happen, and it is only religious nuts who claim they are caused by gays (we,re powerful, see).
The problem of blame and entitlement is also found in the modern discourse of traditionally disadvantaged groups, which if repeated enough becomes so fixed they remain oppressed. We become what we think.
The idea of justice is also bound up in self image. Some people will always be genuinely happy in their skin. Some people are unhappy and blame themselves, so either end up in a well of misery or change what they do.
Some other people are unhappy and are convinced it's someone else's fault. They either get a chip on their shoulder and become resentful of their perceived oppressor, or they try to level it out by bringing the oppressor down to get a bit of what they've got.
Some other people (and they're really scary) think every human emotion and action is fake and behave accordingly.
I know this may seem to be far from justice, but the purpose of my post is really to express my own dissatisfaction and not to describe a whole alternative social system. The illustration of the Justice card has a purpose, to point out that there is a tradition that the rope around the neck of Justice is the same rope suspending the Hanged Man. Justice is a dangerous thing...