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!