Spirit of Place: The Practice

I am delighted to announce that I have been blessed. I have had a major religious experience and will never be the same again. The nature of the experience is an incredibly local one and may need explaining if you're not acquainted with Birmingham. You see, I have seen the man going into The Practice in Selly Oak.

If I explain that The Practice is a proper local mystery which has been going on for at least 35 years it may become apparent why seeing the man is such an experience.

The Practice is a, well, I'm not sure what to call it...apparently a business in the Selly Oak area of the city. It looks like a business, but has never been known to open, comings and goings are as rare as hen's teeth, and the phone number is long since disconnected. Forget a website, and you will see from the phone number that the sign has been like that for over 30 years. It has looked exactly the same all that time, except for being more decrepit. The front is set up like a very cluttered office and the giant geraniums in the window are real and obviously cared for. I think the tree in the roof looks after itself.

Of course the Internet has taken an interest in The Practice and people have kindly found out a few definite facts about the place.

The building actually belongs to a man called Michael Summerfield, who when he bought it in 1980, was a solicitor in Harborne. I assume that if he was old enough to be a solicitor and buying property in 1980, he could be a candidate for the elderly, smart man with tidy white hair and a stick, who I saw today.

However there have also been sightings of apparently another man going in or coming out, who sounds quite different, long white hair and beard, described as unkempt and sometimes in a white coat.

The next fact I have is that from 2007 until it was voluntarily dissolved in 2023, called Freekquency Worldwide Ltd, which is a magnificent name and not at all straight laced. Sadly nobody has found what this business actually did. The sole director was an Alexander Edmund Summerfield, Michael's son, who was born in 1979 so is too young to be the man I saw, and besides has an address in London on the Companies House paperwork.

Another likely candidate, though, is Freekquency's company secretary, David Cox. In the past people have spotted a photo of UB40 inside The Practice and this provides an interesting chain to a Birmingham David Cox. This one ran a butcher's in Moseley for many years, and a record shop in Stirchley. He had definite contact with the music industry because apart from the record shop, when UB40 were young and struggling, he helped them financially and they used to practice behind the butcher's shop.

So the mystery of The Practice isn't completely solved but I do have two possible candidates for the mystery man or men occasionally seen going in or out of the mystery business. I don't have an explanation for the white coat!

Nonetheless, sightings are so rare that seeing someone go in is like seeing Elvis shopping in Sainsburys and my life will never be the same again.

Oh, this post has a tune to go with it:

A Catch Up

I know I've been rather absent from here, but I'm afraid I've had rather a lot on which has required a lot of psychic energy.

Most recently I have decided I'm going to move. I absolutely love looking at properties for sale and having an excuse to look at the clutter people have hidden away in their kitchen cupboards! In fact it's going unexpectedly easy so far, although since I've asked a solicitor to have a look at my lease because it's an affordable flat, to make sure I'm selling to the right person and to stop sales falling through in the future, there's still potential for drama.

The other major thing is that I'm looking to get a diagnosis for the PTSD I think I probably have. Certainly, the RCPsych page on PTSD pretty much describes me but I want to know. This has also so far been surprisingly stress free, although I am absolutely not going to have therapy with my former employers so am on self help.

This is fine of course. I have always told people that the reason the evidence is that self help is as good as a therapist is you admit things to yourself that you would be embarrassed to say to someone else. The resulting frankness makes it go better. 

Of course I'm also being witchy about it and tarot always comes to the rescue. 

Meanwhile I'm very pleased indeed that our Zack Polanski was elected leader of the Green Party by a landslide and it's always nice to see Labour immediately bitching because they're shitting themselves. Very satisfying. 

The Dodgy Tik-Tok Lawyer

I am so psychic sometimes it even scares me.

Last year we had a local solicitor stand as MP candidate here in Birmingham Ladywood constituency. He didn't win, but served the function of scaring Sir Kid Starver a bit, and screwing up the anti-genocide vote, so we ended up with the same Labour MP. Of course I voted Green and am smugly satisfied that I did the right thing.

I went round telling everyone who would listen that if Ahmed Yakoob was elected MP something would come out about him and we would have the rare experience of signing a recall petition in no time (in the UK under certain circumstances a recall petition is automatically triggered and depending on the number of signatures from constituents the petition automatically triggers a fresh election for the MP. The grounds to trigger the petition include imprisonment or suspension from parliament). In fact this prediction didn't require much psychic ability because he was already under investigation by the Solicitors Regulation Authority for spreading false claims about a teacher. So basically he attracted the anti-genocide vote that didn't care about any other standards, and the anti-genocide vote who care about honesty voted Green.

In fact if he'd been elected it would have been the best chance to get a Green MP here, because without the popular Labour MP and without an independent candidate the vote would naturally have turned Green in a by-election during this disastrous Starmerist government. The only time since 1936 anyone other than Labour has been elected in this constituency was another by-election in the sixties when a Liberal MP was elected, but they consistently come last nowadays.

Instead what's happened is he's got arrested under a wider ranging investigation of corruption by solicitors and accountants and is going to be tried for money laundering in 2027. I've had a look at the sentencing guidelines and I don't know the details of what he's charged with but the sentence can go up to 14 years in prison so if imprisoned he wouldn't likely be in a position to stand in the 2029 election and the cadre of candidates he supported for the local elections next year will hopefully be looked at more doubtfully now. 🤞

Finally, if the picture the BBC used is actually from a court appearance, if your solicitor doesn't tell you not to dress as a Peaky Blinder for a court appearance, get rid of your solicitor.

I feel like I know how his trial is going to end. 😂

This post does not constitute legal advice lol.

A Fokawolf Spell

Combining my themes of magic and spirit of place in this one because this post is about two installations by local hero, artist and national treasure (as well as *major* crush for the Hound), Fokawolf. You can find him all over social media but of course I've had to include his picture so any readers who don't know can see how dishy he is. 🥰 Plus he's been known to do his paste-ups wearing Birmingham City Council hi-vis which absolutely tickles me. 🥵

He's possibly best known for his permission work of the Birmingham Screw Driver Company sign in Digbeth, demonstrating that he definitely knows what a Birmingham screw driver is.

However many of his works also draw on magical themes, whether explicitly and implicitly, in the case of these works, the long magical tradition of using images to effe change in the subject depicted, by sympathetic magic.

In the case of his installation at Glastonbury Festival he's put the images of Netanyahu with a target in the urinal and if I wasn't already in love I would be humping his leg like any dog.

He's done a similar installation in a Digbeth pub, unfortunately closed at the moment but which will be reopening in the Autumn.

Anyone want to cross swords?

Spirit of Place: A Selly Oak Tradition

I have commented about this before and only yesterday was pointing out to someone that the spirit of place of Birmingham will look after you if you approach it right, and spit you out if you don't. Shortly afterwards I found myself walking through the Selly Oak area of the city and was reminded of an annual ritual.

I'm sure it happens in other university cities but they're outside the scope of this blog. What happens is that at the end of the summer term (it usually coincides with the Glastonbury Festival), the students' lets on their houses end and they never take all their clobber with them. So either they or the landlord put the stuff out in the street (in the streets running between the Bristol Road and Raddlebarn Road) and the locals come and help themselves to it. 

Please understand that I'm not exaggerating when I say you can literally kit out a whole house and wardrobe for free. Some friends once got a fish tank complete with living fish and had to drive it home very carefully. Yesterday there were people with supermarket trolleys full of stuff.

I didn't have a spare hand yesterday so went back this afternoon with a mental shopping list of some sort of footwear and a cooking pot, and intended to get tomatoes from Aldi on the way home.

So of course I found some work boots (about £60 in the shops) and a pot immediately before loads of unopened tins of food. So I got all that for free and am going back tomorrow because there were still landlords putting stuff out on the pavement. There's nothing more I have in mind but I'm sure I'll find something I fancy.

See, the spirit of the city does actually look after you if you approach it right.

Urban Grimoire: The Review Spell Revisited

Magic has been described as the art and science of causing change in accordance with will, and all acts have been defined as magical acts. I have posted here before about the remarkable magical strength of leaving reviews on the internet. Whether good or bad, your review does have real power online. Now I'm aware that businesses often manipulate their image by posting fake reviews. However, I'm also of the opinion that the public are far more clued up on identifying fake reviews, false information, and what have you, than we used to be. The problem with filling the internet with false information is that people get wise to it. For example, bot comments on social media are now met with a chorus calling them a bot. 

Actually, I quite like to call commenters bots when they're obviously not. If they've left a particularly cruel, inflammatory, or hate-filled comment, the explosion which follows calling them a bot is bound to be good.

But to the subject of the post. It was about the management company of the leasehold flats I live in. The utterly incompetent directors don't involve the other leaseholders and have, for the ten years I have lived here, used the same individuals to do the day to day management, but they've moved through several companies in that time.

Clearly, there's something wrong there, and if I was hugely rich they would be in the tribunal, but there is no hope of creating a mass action out of the 460 flats and there's legally a limit to the power leaseholders can do.

But under the last management company there was a peak of dissatisfaction among the residents of several buildings they manage and people used the power they had, by leaving bad reviews.

And they were absolutely atrocious. If I say that mine was one of the more restrained ones, it should give an idea of how dozens of people were not holding back. They left comments which really can only be described as libellous if they're not true, such as accusing them of running off with people's money and other crimes. My own contribution was to comment on how to take them to the tribunal.

And I'm delighted to say that my efforts mean the company's Google reviews are now headed up by the picture which illustrates this post. 🐴 As I commented in my last post, laughing and ridicule is a really good way of moving power around, and that is pure witchcraft.

Of course I knew the company was rubbish, but this was confirmed by the way they dealt with this barrage of critical comments. They didn't even know or care, that what you do when your professional reputation is assaulted like that is to be pink and fluffy in public and leave sympathetic replies asking the commenter to contact you (see, I could work in comms), but be hard as nails with threatening solicitors' letters behind the scenes. 

What they actually did was leave obviously fictional comments which were even funnier. One of them described two of the staff as the Mulder and Scully of house hunting. I personally edited my review wondering which of the two was so spooky that nobody would work with them and which has been impregnated by aliens.

Their online presence is ruined, and it's hilarious. They've even stopped posting on their social media because of the comments they're getting.

Last week, to nobody's surprise, the leaseholders got letters to say they've sold the property management part of their business to someone else and that's who will be looking after the building from now on. Job done.

Agony Hound: AITA for Faking a Haunted House To Get My Boyfriend to Move Out Because He Refused To Leave After We Broke Up?

High time I intruded and ruined someone else's life again in my role of agony aunt, and this one's a beauty.

(My source for this was somewhere on Tumblr).

The Hound says:

Hon, this isn't ethically questionable. The default position, unless you're exceptionally good friends and have agreed this in advance, is that the one who doesn't own the place moves out when you break up. If someone is clingy/inadequate enough not to do this, they're breaking a major rule of social engagement and all bets are off.

Also, your method of getting rid of him is worthy of a witch, never mind an Oscar. Well done, I couldn't have done it myself. In chaos magic an essential banishing ritual is to laugh at things and this definitely works with taking the piss as well.

Another interesting aspect is the ferret. Perhaps it's a good idea to ask a prospective partner about their ferret, see what they say and demand to see it if they claim to possess one.

What *is* being an asshole is to fake a haunting for years simply to frighten someone, as Noel Gallagher famously did for years to his brother Liam:

The Mirror​ has reported this morning that Noel Gallagher has tormented his brother for years over his fear of ghosts, essentially… by moving furniture about in his bedroom to shit him up.

In Noel’s words, “If we were ever anywhere remotely spooky, we’d tell Liam that the house was haunted, particularly his bedroom.”

“When he’d get up in the morning and go and have his breakfast, someone would go in and turn the pictures back to front, or fucking move a lamp beside his bed across the other side of the room. He’d arrive pale: ‘Have you been in my fucking room?’ ‘No, why?’ ‘You’ve been in my room, because now the fucking lamp is in the toilet.’ ‘No way, fucking hell. Wow.’”

The report also notes that the brothers, in their rock’n’roll heyday (or, “When they were constantly off their tits”), suspected bizarre conspiracies were surrounding them during the 1996 sessions for Oasis’ third album ​Be Here Now​​, which took place at The Farm in Surrey. Noel explained: “Because it’s on a farm, there’s lots of farm people knocking around, we’d always be suspiciously looking out their window, admittedly high as a fucking kite thinking, ‘Sheep’s got a camera. Don’t like the look of that pig.’” Source

Reading The Invisibles....

In 2025 is a strange, synchronistic, experience...

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:

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!

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: