Natalia Lee

A nest of sorts

The Suits In Their Element

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Animating the Tarot Pips

When I see the pips, the elements do not come first, instead, as I mentioned in the opening of this series, their phenomenological virtues (qualities) comes first. By this I mean their tangible physical life applications and the processes arising out of their applications and uses, and what is mirrored in the cards at play.

In other words, a cup does not stand in for the abstract element water initially. A cup is a cup, and how we ascribe elemental meaning to the cup arises out of our own experiences of cup, chalice, drinking vessel.

Instead of diving into what each suit is not elementally. Let me dip into what they are once more, swerving into their elemental connotations. Let’s first define element as per Merriam-Webster dictionary:

1. any of the four substances air, water, fire, and earth formerly believed to compose the physical universe; the state or sphere natural or suited to a person or thing.
2. a constituent part; a distinct group within a larger group or community

Going back to cups, a cup is a vessel, concave with a deep center so as to allow for the holding of liquid. A cup holds and contains. It is held close and just as it contains it shares, as from its deep center where the swirling liquid rests, when tipped over it falls in-to an open mouth (in most cases). The actions that accompany cup give it a quality in relation to and in service with liquids, with liquid as sustenance, something that nourishes, replenishes, satiates. The cup itself is the medium through which we experience the liquid inside. In this sense it is receptive, open, and enjoining, in that it joins together, the more cups sharing and drinking, the merrier.

A sword is a sharp blade that pierces, cuts, and divides, it is cold, hard, metal. It wounds and causes blood to flow. It is held far from the body, pointing at others in combat, or for protection. In other words, it keeps others away from our body and that which we protect. Swords denote separation and death. As a sign of war, it underlines analysis and calculation through the framework of best plan of attack to conquer. Victory through strategy and might.

A baton is a wooden stick, some are polished others are more rustic. The more rustic ones are stacked to build things, whether home or furniture to facilitate living. Other batons are polished, and waved as a sign of authority and power. On occasions, batons are used to bruise in defense against an other. Batons are also held far from the body, they are heavy and blunt. Denoting raw strength. And, I can’t help but repeating, sometimes many batons together are a forest.

A coin is round, shiny, and held very close, in the pocket, in a purse, our a pouch. Exchanged for goods and put into circulation for gain. Coins are shiny and round like our eyes which often get entangled with lust for a thing sighted. Greed and avarice are a possibility just around the corner. One is good but many is best. They are a metal made warm by our touch, and because we keep them near to our bodies, and not just our bodies but our thoughts. Our thinking is often preoccupied with how to make more coins and keep more on our side.

So what about their elements? The suits in their element are articulated through the lens of how we experience and use them. Elemental connotations are filtered through the alembic of the body. If element is defined as the “sphere natural to a thing, which itself is a part of a greater whole, then one can assert that each of the suits have particular characteristics described through their use, and composition. Yet as part of a whole, the suits themselves interact with the greater part of the rest, intermingling amongst themselves in their descriptive and perceptual potential. When reading the pips from this stance, the categories are kept loose and rely on how the body reacts to and uses the tool(s) itself(themselves) while always in relation to the question. Hard categories can be restrictive, and calcifies the suit in question in relation to the others and to the reader. Creating strict boundaries that categorically separates the object as tool from the abstract symbol.

Meaning arises through play.

Swords are not stand-ins for mental gymnastics and thought-processes. Swords are a weapon first, and our own experience of sword takes us to its meaning at the moment of reading. All the tools presented in the pips, such as swords, cups, batons, and coins, involve thinking. Different ways of thinking. How we think with defenses, war, and protection; thinking with value, money and wealth; thinking with joy, the heart, and those near; thinking with authority and order.

Nonetheless, let us swerve for, a moment, into the elements. This is the common arrangement of the elements in the minors, albeit not in this exact order:

Swords= Air

Batons= Fire

Cups= Water

Coins= Earth

GENERAL FIGURE OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE TAROT, SHOWING ALL THE AFFINITIES, Tarot of the Bohemians by Papus, translated by A.P. Morton, 1892, from Sacred Texts Archive: https://www.sacred-texts.com/tarot/tob/tob09.htm

When seen from this angle, of the classical elements, roughly put, air is the intellect, fire the passion or will, water the emotional and sacred, and earth the material and objective. When seen from this range, a symbolic, neoplatonic, symbol set is superimposed upon the the 56 minors. All of which map conveniently, although with varied alterations or interpretations depending on who is doing the descriptive coding, to cabalistic and astrological frameworks. These frameworks are fit into the kircher tree, and the tetragrammaton: Yod He Vau He. Through this superimposition the minors and majors acquire an overarching esoteric quest and narrative through which the tarot reader then inserts the question at hand. From this perspective the suit of swords becomes air and describes intellectual, mental, gymnastics. Batons describe the pursuit of passions, power, glory, and enterprises. Cups the realm of emotions, the heart, and sacred psychical explorations. Coins, in turn, the material realm, money, resources, and possessions. This of course is reduced in scope for brevity’s sake. † What this achieves is a hard or rigid categorization of the minors to a specific narrative.

The point I’d like to spotlight is that one can also arrive at a rich tapestry of forms, movements, and meanings with another type of displacement, and that is a phenomenological one. Wherein we engage the suits through our bodies, through our own experience with what we see on the cards. In contrast to having a narrative already categorically complex encoded in the cards, the narrative created with the cards is one we engage with spontaneously and in the moment of asking the question and laying down the cards. Gauging how uncomfortable, or vulnerable swords make us feel in relation to the cards and the question. How weighed down or even ambitious the batons move us toward a vision. The cups, how indulgent, and the coins how frivolous or calculating in our goals. Cups and coins can be seen through desire dynamics that are sometimes opposing, and at other times complementing. Although truthfully, desire weaves itself throughout the whole pack as it also weaves itself through all our living. The adjectives can expand outward from here. How much of one thing weighs on the surrounding cards, or how little? What is moving, what is staying put? What is being cut, pushed, bought, invested in? What is being sensorially, and heart-fully explored? Through all these mirroring and perceptual dynamics we explore the poetics of the body through form and movement.

In other words, the suits in their element is found in the poetry of the body engaged in doing, being, living.

~~~

† Tarot of the Bohemians by Papus.

Animating The Tarot Pips by Natalia L Forty is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at mistandether.wordpress.com.
Of shadows and corners

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Enchantments

It’s day number I’m not sure when everything closed down, I’ve always worked from home but now it’s with my partner and child present, which makes for interesting work times. While home, and separated from regular weekend adventures with others and at the beach, we’ve been taking mostly daily walks around our neighborhood. Which has become its own sort of medicine for the things that circulate around me, us, my thoughts, and everything that’s currently happening on the “world stage.”

During these walks, I’ve run some in empty parking lots with my son, climbed over tree roots and sat down by their shade to watch the clouds moving and the birds flying about and chattering away. I’ve made petitions to hidden spirits by certain spots, admired the Cathedral that sits just outside my front door, saddened by its closed doors in a way that can’t be put into words. Maybe it’s more melancholy at the quietude of it all. Everything stands still, and people drive by covered in their masks and wearing their gloves, apart.

I’ve lived and breathed and done all right during this time, with my morning rituals of prayer, keeping the candle lit, regularly fumigating the house with fragrant vapors, shuffling and reading the cards, playing with my son, talking and touching my partner, cooking, meditating, stretching and standing before the sun to let its rays prepare me for the day ahead. During all this living I’ve been reconnecting with that persistent notion of mine that magic/enchantment (whatever you want to call it, awakening to the animate world around us) begins with the self immersed in land, in the landscape, with locality and relation, with perception and awareness. I can brazenly admit that all this “isolation” time has brought all these notions home. I live them, have lived them, and continue to do so.

I was recently inspired by Gordon White’s podcast where he interviewed Darragh Mason Field, professional photographer and author. I felt moved to more purposefully engage with the beauty of the everyday, the elegance of the quotidian. A form of this everyday engaging turned into spontaneous photographs. The excellent interview can be enjoyed here: Talking Place, Travel, and Photography with Darragh Mason Field.

Because of this inspiration, I’m sharing some of the spontaneous shots taken during my daily walks, as well as in my house. Keep in mind I’m no photographer, just a person that enjoys looking and appreciates beauty. These are all local, some edited but most are raw. These images form a part of my thinking, those notions circling around me and our home at the moment. There are shadowed corners, green leaves, blue skies, crossed lines, winding ways, the juxtaposition of empty and full.

This experience has shown me that there is always beauty, there is continuance and endurance wherever I look. I am beginning to understand that hope and joy is a thing we bring into our life, a choice, we embrace and play with daily, in our habitual doings and seeings.

On another note, it would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there are a few sore spots in all this, one is that my face to face divination readings have been reduced to null, and my house gatherings, misas and veladas have ceased to happen. My spiritual house has gone on pause while we all learn to fall into the rhythm of what this moment demands of our bodies.

With the walking and thinking I’ve been participating in, I’ve arrived at the resolution that I want to re-open my virtual tarot shop. I’ve done just that about a week or so ago. Much has remained the same, I offer the same reading spreads, the perennial Magic Square or 3×3, and the handful of cards option. The first is more involved, and the latter is straight to the point no nonsense. I’ve added my take on Crossed Cartomancy, or Cyprianic Cartomancy, which is a cross spread read with playing playing cards in a specific way. It’s a lot of fun and the good Saint approves. On the pricing front, I’ve lowered the prices from what I normally charge, thinking that I’d rather have the readings be accessible when a person comes searching. I’ve also added a video reading option which is quite new around here. I’ve even gone so far as to make an introductory video, which, I must admit, could be better but it’s a good staring point. I invite you to take a look.

With all these words shared, I do hope you’ve been keeping your self, your home, and your loved ones, safe, sane, loved, and nurtured. And remember, this moment is also good for awareness and enchantment in the quietude.

~~~

PS. I’ve also “snuck” in a couple beach trips, because I miss the salt water and the waves too much.
To Define Witch?

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Musings

Recently, during a live private interview, I was asked a question that has stayed with me the past couple days. And it is, what is my advice for someone wanting to get into witchcraft? Not the exact words. Basically, what is my advice for beginner witches. Faced with this question I somewhat initially pushed against giving a clear answer since for me witch and witchcraft is a personal thing, more of a subjective embodiment. Moreover in a circuitous way, it lead me to ask what even is witch. So, what is witch?

Witch is first a word of myth, arising out of the dark soil like the undulations of a mysterious song. To define witch is to delimit and box that which moves like smoke. To fall under the narrative song of this word is to fall in to a landscape alive, inseparable from the sweat inducing ecstasy of dance, body, transgression, and unnameable wildness. To fall under this song is to blur lines of significations. For me, there is no categorical being witch, but living witch. It is an immersion in a rhythmic landscape alive, conversant, pulsating with heart. Living witch is to see with sharp eyes, to feel with the body, and to engage this same body and this self in place. It is connection, dialogue, narrative with the human and other than human life-ways. It is also a recognition of the self and the body immersed in the all.

The doing of witch is a push toward the senses, the body in motion and moving, engaged in place, in relation to others as opposed to atomized and individual. It is a push toward the sovereignty that arises out of the body that opens up the senses, perception, awareness, all in relation. An everyday doing of this is a continual dialogue with the spirits of place, with the dead, with the land, and with the landscape.

This all has the thrust of rebellion because to engage in this way is to bridge relationships seeking mysteries, answers, and changes between boundaries. To do witch is to demand and seek.

Given all this, my advice stands as it always does, beginning with the body, opening the body perceptively and learning to extend the self outward into the land and the place, developing discernment and sense-ability. In this way the person begins to take hold of the ship’s wheel of their doing, their enchantment, their involvement, with the aim of charting a personal course for the self. This map, this course, is drawn through weaving thread by thread, step by step, the tapestry, the lay of the land as it unfolds. Consistency and perseverance. Each one, after setting out, should reflect on the question, what do I want this course to taste, smell, sound, and feel like, its form? The bare bones should be visible, even as the map of the journey will change through time.

On a practical level, how does one person want to shape the days, the weeks, and the months? Where will the work of consistency and perseverance show itself? What will the body do on a routine basis that sharpen persistence and awareness?

In tandem with the previously mentioned, the person which does witch is inseparable from spirit companions, whether these be Saints, Ancestors, Mighty Dead, or diverse spirits from a religious/mythological narrative, and also the spirits of place the witching person inhabits. And even more practically, what spirits of place will the person be in relation with?

One’s dead, ancestors, are always a good place to begin as most/many openly want one’s own life flourishing. Therefore they are excellent allies and should always have a place of honour. Without the dead we, you or I, would not be. I am because I have ancestors and I carry within me the lives that have come before me.

Spirits of place are equally important because you and I live and in-habit place, a particular landscape. Hence, it would also be wise to open relationships with the spirits that are also a part of this place we cohabit together. Some of these spirits might be ancestral, green spirits, of plant and tree, of the air, varied tricksters, and the list goes on… It behooves the person who witches to be in good standing with some of these spirits.

And then we come back to the body of the witch, how to awaken this body so often forced and reshaped into dormancy and complacency? Journeying and visionary work, which hones different forms of sight and perception as well as experience. Tarot cards serve as a good tool and a gateway into visionary practice. Not the only tool but a good tool nonetheless. I add movement to visionary work, the body in deliberate movement. The body deliberately doing is a body given purposeful shape, refusing to be subsumed within the culturally conforming body.

From where I stand, the overarching why of witchcraft, the why of witch, should be contained within desire and need. Desire to express the self and to create for this living body a life that is witch, that embodies agency and sovereignty. The whys change and evolve/transform through time for the person but moving with desire and how desires flow and are expressed through the body is the fire that keeps the cauldron hot.

It would be remiss of me to not address the witch as rebellion and as a decolonizing force. For this person/a responds to crisis, to the moment, embodying witch is learning to be hunter, and to be vulture. The witch is the inheritance of the daughters of men cavorting with the fallen angels, unearthing mysteries beyond petrified/constricting hierarchies. The witch is the crossing of boundaries and categories, a trickster itself at the periphery. Fluid and too slippery for categorizations. The witch is the daring, it is the reclaiming, the retaking, and the vivifying in the midst of crisis.

Since I read the cards, I thought I would grab one of my packs and ask, “Show me a portrait of the witch?” This is what the cards revealed.

Tarot of the Holy Light, Christina Payne-Towler & Michael Dowers, Noreah/ Brownfield Press, 2011

Witch is a volatilizing force, guiding and synchronizing from the edges. Quick with the knife, direct, visionary. The searing seer and initiating potency.

I didn’t recommend specific books in the interview, but it doesn’t hurt now to mention some of my inspiration.

The Book of St. Cyprian: The Sorcerer’s Treasure, Jose Leitao.
The Immaterial Book of St. Cyprian, Jose Leitao.
The Brazen Vessel, Scarlet Imprint
Apocalyptic Witchcraft, Peter Grey
The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram
Cunningfolk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic, Emma Wilby

On an ending note, these words and ideas have all cooked under the pressure and fire of my own body, my own experience, and living. I have been inspired by many things and these are merely some thoughts on what I have cohered along the way.
Almost hanging by a thread

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Augury

I stood before my kitchen table, shuffled the cards with April in mind, and laid them down. I confess, looking back now at March’s augury it was propitious that the cards called for temperance and a re-positioning of our chessboard, as all this pandemic and quarantine business loomed on the horizon. And now poised for this month’s augury, I shuffled the cards hoping for inspiring windows and uplifting words. Before diving too deep, let’s show the cards, and get into the augury of April.

Fantarocco di Franco Anichini, published by Modiano, Italy.

This month we continue riding the ongoing fallout with the fluidity and malleability of water coursing through the falling rocks and boulders, keeping a tight grip over our coin. It’s curious the tower pops up here, during my own personal readings regarding the current landscape of things at the moment, in macro, the tower has shown up too frequently. For me, these kinds of recurrences with the cards mean nothing outside the moment and the question, until they actually do mean something. In this case, there is definitely something here. But let’s not get carried away with doomed scenarios, let’s look at the whole picture from the perspective of this hearty knight with his cup, and he has backup cups to boot.

April is the month we situate our selves in the flow of this river, as the castles fall and our plans drastically change in all areas of our lives. We navigate our way through and/or around all of this. The this here includes the falling castles, perilous foundation of our local and global economies, job losses, the arising housing issues and ongoing health crisis. We make a course through all of this, while also being a part of it all. All the while keeping a close watch over our coin, our things/assets/property/valuables. This month we are advised by these grasping insects to moderate our purchasing and spending throughout this unfolding precarious landscape.

Fantarocco di Franco Anichini, published by Modiano, Italy.

Nevertheless, let’s reach out to those around us, those that need a hand, let us be present and aware of our surroundings keeping in mind that despite our isolation we are all trudging through this ordeal together.

In other words, the ordeal continues, so let’s sharpen our discernment with our finances, and keep a close eye on those around us that we can reach out to, to aid, uplift, or comfort in any way. Let’s emulate the knight that buoys the way forward, navigating treacherous waters with a good dose of faith.

~~~

Updates

Amidst all the isolation and reduced physical contact with others, I’ve decided to re-open my virtual shop. I’ve kept the prices low, and I’ve also added a video option for readings. You can find it here: Tarot Readings or head to Book a Reading to see the reading options available.

I’ve completed the overview of the individual suits in my tarot pips series. The master list of the installments can be found here: Animating the Tarot Pips.

I recently reviewed a Lenormand deck, The Friar’s Delight.