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!

Tarot by the Background

Perhaps I had better say that this post is by way of thinking aloud, what I'm going to say is purely a personal thought and if anyone wants to say I'm talking rubbish I won't disagree.

I have thought of a possible way to divide up the tarot cards (based on the Rider-Waite-Smith deck). It is somewhat arbitrary since it came out of thinking about the background colours.

In the RWS deck there are only a few background colours used, and I wanted to attribute a meaning to them. It's possible that I will think more about the backgrounds because sometimes they are something slightly hidden which might be revealed, or provide an environment for the action of the card, or sometimes are literally like a stage backdrop.

By far the most have a blue background, but I am starting with the ones with a yellow background. I am taking my cue from the Fool for this with its predominantly yellow background (although the sun itself is white) and I've decided to attribute a theme or enlightenment or illumination to the cards with a yellow background.

The Fool also has a line in the background of the two other predominant background colours: blue of various shades, and a sort of greyish white.

I have arbitrarily taken the 7 of Cups as my hint here and am attributing a theme of instability or things changing to these cards with blue backgrounds.

Conversely I am attributing a theme of things being stable or solid to the cards with a greyish white background. This may seem strange when Death, the ultimate change, has this background. However I am taking it that death refers to an expected, inevitable change, which is therefore actually stable and unchangeable.

Once again I will stress that this is just a thought and so shouldn't be treated as gospel: you won't find these attributions anywhere in the literature.

The few cards with a black background presented me with a few difficulties, although since they all depict difficult moments of decision and power (I'm taking 3 of Pentacles to refer to a situation where you have to get on with it and make the situation what you will, with the dark background through the doorway representing a future that still has to be created), I have taken them to refer to traumas, initiations and negotiations of power.

This leaves only two which don't fit in. I am taking the reddy-orange of the Emperor to mean authority and the snow of the 5 of Pentacles to mean being outside in the cold so you're not seeing the real background at all. 

I will play with this idea and see how I get on with it. Once again I'm struck how tarot strikes one differently at different times.

Oh, there's something we have to do still:

Ritualising It Out

The phrase of ritualising something out of your system is a direct quote from Anton LaVey but then I'm nothing if not ecumenical.

All the textbooks of practical magic, without exception, say that when working magic you must attain a point where the desire has left you. The 'itch' you are working on has to leave you completely, in other words, to manifest on the material plane, where you want it. The theory is that if you keep thinking about the matter, or chewing it over in any way, the spell comes back to you and won't manifest.

I have always found this incredibly difficult, because I tend to chew things over and find it very difficult just to leave things. For this reason I have always tended towards magics where you can keep coming back and scratching the itch until it does actually leave you. I would not dispute the need for the desire to leave you, just need to make sure it actually does go. 

Personally I think I just sometimes need to keep working on things until it goes. You know when it's left you because it just doesn't bother you any more (bearing in mind that the chief target of magic is always the magician himself, really). If you will pardon my unsubtle way of putting it, it can feel like a cat does when they've used the litter tray and run round the house because they feel much lighter.

These thoughts are occasioned by a matter leaving me today, although it's been evident that things have been moving for some time. Things have seemed to come to a head the past couple of weeks and after events today I am sitting here surprised that I really don't care about it any more. This is how I know that what I want is going to happen.

Of course since someone with an actual legal responsibility for this situation has asked me to let them posted on what is happening on the day I have ceased to care about it, I'm still going to have to do that. But I think that's more along the lines of acting in accord with the spell. The person, who is the hopeless building manager of the building I live in, should have been more interesting in this situation all along, and the fact he has now taken an interest is what shows me something will happen.

I'm sure he wouldn't like me to happen to him!