Water in the occult sense represents emotions, emotional energy, and the movement of energies in general. A watery card will typically represent something that “hits home,” so to speak. It could be something simple like a call from a friend after a time or that claustrophobic feeling when you have to take that call in a room full of people. When things are going well the water of life is flowing well and unhindered there are no blockages.
Unlike falling or running water which takes the past of least resistance and moves on, the water of life embraces everything in it’s path leaving nothing behind. Like an ocean that greets each obstacle before it’s embrace. The water of life is undaunted by the mountains of our fears and the chasms of our worry. Often it will carry us to places we had never been to…and would rather not be
….and so that is how I found myself here on the internet making a blog. So ill prepared i am like a lumberjack doing his business with a steak knife. So please forgive the mess as I try to get this blog to flow like water. I will be working on different ways to organize and link to the pages I am writing. Things may look really wonky at times, things you like may disappear and never return. Things you don’t like may appear and never leave.
For the moment I have the Faces article organized by each court card. Each court card being the zodiacal parent to it’s three faces. Sort of a stop gap measure for the time being. This leaves their order in their chronological order as they would be seen around the sky. The two and three of Hearts are the latest editions. All the Kings, the first emanation zodiacs, are done now. In the next few days I will be cleaning up the Queens, the second emanation signs.
As I re read piles of research I’ve done on all the decanates, I can’t help but observe the fact that all of these minor cards are literally happening to us all the time. As a card reader one has to trust their intuition to bring the proper cards to the top of the deck.
The latest page I made, for the Ace of Hearts, would often indicate a message from a loved one. For many people this happens many times a day. For some this may happen once in a great while. And we just have to trust our intuition to bring this card to the top of the deck when one of these interactions is going to affect us.
Once the meaning of these cards becomes etched into you. Intuition plays no part in reading the card any longer. Suddenly intuition is driving your very self to bring these cards up in the right order to be read.
“Life” happened to me for the last five months. The end of a progressed Mars conjunction with my ascending and Uranus. Three solid years of immense obstacles that culminated in the death of my father last month.
Life won’t be “normal” again for a bit, my progressed Uranus and Mars are still in conjunction. But this will be a faint echo of the past few years. More like aching feelings than actual chaos. A couple astrologers I studied under warned me about Mars coming in conjunction with my ASC. and Uranus….I laughed them off. Sorry, you were totally right.
So much has passed, that “normal,” will be another time we remember. And in passing the normal will soon be what it is now.
I have been urged, in the mean time, to get back to it. By closest friends, family, people I can’t remember talking to, and a couple I never met, even it seemed like the universe was sending refreshing things at me to wake me up.
I took the last test to the Brotherhood of Light courses. Being a full fledged Herrmetician now, for whatever that is worth at the moment, it seemed like the next thing to do was poke my head in here make some excuses, hold up my Hermetician’s Certificate, and make like I got a lot done in my absense.
I wrote a short piece on how to select the proper crystals, stones, and minerals for yourself… Or to at least know if someone’s doing a good job for you.
I started a Discord server called the-ether-world. If anyone has questions, suggestions, or corrections feel free to drop in and leave me a message. Or we can just chat if there’s something you want to talk about.
Keep your eyes peeled for new pages and posts. I have notebooks that go back over twenty or so years that I will be transferring to theEther. There will be pages for the beginner all the way up to wherever it is that I have made it so far.
What is your birthstone after all? Can you really add up all of the numbers on your credit cards or drivers licence to find it? Does the day of the week, the month or the year have any bearing on the stone you need? Does that birthstone app in the app store really work? A bunch of people born on the same day together, and it would be fairly obvious to even the most untrained observer we would want to pair them each up with different things.
The idea of birth stones was originally a part of heraldry. The stone represented the house or tribe one was born in. Over the millennia the habit and some of it’s structure has stayed in place. Birthstones make that awesome gift that reminds the significant other that you ARE after all capable of remembering their birthday. But we want to use crystals and so forth for healing and meditation. It is most likely the system of heraldry is not going to suffice for the subtle selection of crystals, minerals, and other things to improve our health and well being. So lets take a peak into the theEther and find out about birthstones and what not in;
So what was your reason for wanting to learn tarot? Was it because some of your biggest heroes swear by it? A creeping suspicion there’s something more to life, and that gypsy at the carnival may have had it right? I personally wanted to be a powerful wizard that gets to hide in a room full of books and do wizardly things….more like Gandalf less like Saruman.
My guess is most people would probably say they picked up the tarot for divination. Does he love me? Does she hate me? Am I going to get the job? Are they going to fire me?
Any discussion about divination will require some discussion about intuition. Lets forego for the moment the theory that,”the cards have some mind of their own and they are actually telling us what they want to tell us.” We must infer then that it is our intuition that is putting the cards in the right order as we shuffle them or it is merely chance.
If intuition was easy to master there would be no looking for love or searching for just the right tarot deck for that matter. One would just know where to find it and know it when they found it. There is probably a hidden “law of irony” involved here with how many people buy tarot cards to look inside of themselves and find out why nobody asks them out, while at the same time it’s quite apparent there’s just as many people buying tarot cards to find out if they should ask them out…if only they were at the bookstore on the same day buying the same deck of cards…
As far as intuitive reading of tarot cards goes, this is not a shortcut. Either way one will have to memorize all the cards. Either they learn the meanings to the cards they have from studying. Or they spend a good deal of time staring at the cards creating associations with each card through which they can make their divination.
If you have selected the correct deck teaching yourself the meaning of the cards from scratch is just reinventing the wheel. And that is a waste of energy and time.
There are only 78 cards to memorize, it’s not that big of a mountain to scale. The I-Ching, or Book of Changes, has 64 hexagrams each composed of six lines, each line having a different meaning, on top of that each hexagram having its own meaning. For a whopping total of 448 different things to memorize! And that’s just the beginning if you want to really dig into The Book of Changes. Memorizing the tarot cards doesn’t seem so frightening now does it?
Since I planned on being a wizard of the non-Oz variety, I knew I would have to learn astrology. The school I chose to learn astrology at teaches the modern style of astrology. This is the more common astrology in the west and it takes into account the three outermost planets. So I chose a deck of cards that includes those planets.
This means everything I have learned about tarot is something I learned towards astrology, and anything I learn about astrology is another thing I learned about the tarot. The tarot cards then become a tool for learning, describing, and explaining astrology with others for teaching and learning and even for doing readings.
By approaching tarot in this manner the adept avoids the use of intuition to guess the meaning of the card. Each card represents a very specific complex of thoughts or ideas that the intuition can you use to communicate with the adept, the things that the adept would like to know.
Building up the skill in this way forces the intuition to manipulate the shuffle. Since there is no guessing or hunches involved with the meaning of the card the intuition can focus on bringing the proper symbols to the top of the deck for the spread that has been chosen.
People have been studying The Arts and Crafts for a long time. Since time immemorial people have been writing books on the mystical and occult to tell the next generation of people what they discovered. And so it goes without saying some of the best mystical occult books have already been written, and at that quite a long time ago.
Actually so long ago that the copyright has run out on most… which is to our advantage.
And there just happens to be an archive of many of these books on the internet. Whether you’re studying tarot, astrology, Kabbalah, Thelema, Wicca, actually almost anything that is interesting that has expired copyrights can be found at sacred-text .
The world would surely be a different place today if the likes of Aleister Crowley and Arthur Waite had Sacred Texts online to study…. Of course they would be reading their own books….
Choosing the right tarot deck is a wonderful adventure…You know the scene. A week or more wondering which deck of cards to get. Finally cards in hand overwhelmed with excitement you shuffle, lay the cards out and now you’re wondering what they mean. An insence stick later you’re searching the internet only to find three different people saying three different things… After a bit of this, “Wonder,” isn’t really the right word to describe what you’re going through anymore. If by some chance you were just getting started with studying one of the occult sciences such as astrology, Kabbalah, alchemy, etc. You may be more confused than the person that’s just left with a bunch of wonder.
It’s important to keep in mind that a deck of tarot cards is a tool. Regardless of what the person who owns them purchased them to do they were created with a specific task in mind. Things are going to go a lot easier for you if you have purchased the right tool for the task at hand.
Some decks were created for playing games and slowly turned in to being used for divination, others were created for performing magic rituals, some for just studying the occult arts and attaining a level of enlightenment, there are decks for just studying astrology, alchemy, Kabbalah, various combinations, and more. But for the most part the large majority of decks of tarot cards are clones of the three most prominent “classic tarot” decks.
“When the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.” Chinese proverb
The tarot is the means to an end. so it’s pretty important to make sure you’re the right person for that deck. Or else your tarot deck will be full of ambiguity and skewed results when you use it. Which would be a shame since tarot cards exist, in great part, to remove the ambiguity involved with purely intuitive divination.
Having become tired of hiding in books and being a complete hermit, I have chosen to begin a blog and share a little something back with the world that has heaped so much upon me.
I have been studying the Arts for as long as I can remember. For the last ten years or so I have been steeping in Astrology and Tarot. I have created piles of art on the way as study tools. The latest perfectTrine being a poker deck to help learn to read tarot with poker cards.
why theEther?
There was a time when the concept of the ether was a cornerstone of science. It was given many attributes, usually attributes to help prove or disprove this theory or that. Which of course led to varied descriptions of what it was. the ether was a mess so to speak, and a couple young scientists killed the ether over a hundred years ago.
Over one hundred years later we are still faced with the ether though. Science is still grappling with it and what it is, all the while being very very careful to not say, “ether.” At it’s most basic level the ether is the space within which everything exists…one could also argue that a hole does not exist only the things making up the edge of the hole can exist, while the hole itself is nothingness.
The debate over the ether was a heated debate that changed all of science and civilization by the time the dust settled. In the end quantum mechanics would be ushered in and the next technological revolution. In the battle of theories for eminence the Ether was sacrificed. It was an easy sacrifice technology itself was used to disprove it.
Astrology has taken a beating much like the theory of the ether has. It is sublime and difficult to measure. I believe once again though technology is catching up with our beliefs. Soon we will build data sets large enough to prove or disprove astrology and alchemy once and for all…but regardless of how the cards fall for Astrology in this battle, the planets will still be there. Gliding by counting off the years and millennia, still exerting their subtle pull upon all that surrounds them.
Thank you for joining me in theEther.
So lets have fun learning and teaching from each other!
