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September 18 through September 24, 2023

The highlight of this week will be the Sun's entry into Libra on Saturday, which will mark the start of a new season and a time of astrological "harvest!" Libra is famous for creating loving relationships, restoring balance and expanding our perception to see beyond the obvious to the hidden aspects of any situation. Monday and Tuesday we'll move under a Scorpio Moon, which will either have us exploring the mystical and metaphysical, or throwing all our focus into an intense project. Either way, we will be intent on finding out about and mastering something new. The Sagittarius Moon will cast a light-hearted energy around on Wednesday and Thursday, so we may be more inclined to goof off or daydream than get any actual work done. We'll close the week out under a Capricorn Moon, choosing to focus on our physical worlds and activities that improve our health or security. Capricorn also has its fun-loving side, so don't forget to put aside a few hours for some socializing or relaxing.

The Spirit of Tarot, by Kristoffer Hughes

(Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal.)

Materially and superficially, the Tarot appear as a set of images printed with ink onto slightly stiffened paper or card; to all sense and purposes, they appear as simple pieces of art. However, the Tarot is significantly more than just pretty pictures; they are a treasure house of images that express a profound connection to a mystery school that was centuries in the making. Elements hid within the Tarot reflect a truth that was old when the world was new. The school of Tarot emerged from an Occulture that was intent on creating a tool that would transform the lives and spiritual wellbeing of its users. They succeeded.

As a fledgling Tarot reader, I often felt out of my depth, isolated from my teachers or those who inspired me. Cut off from the guide books and the information therein that, my fallible memory failed to recall clearly and succinctly. With the eyes of the Querent upon me, I cannot begin to tell you how often my breath would catch in my chest, as pearls of sweat broke out on my forehead to glisten and betray my lack of confidence. Thankfully, most querents were patient and willing to allow a young person to simply have a go, and I am grateful to them for their tenacity and encouragement during my studies. And yet, I often felt so alone in my quest to understand and move into deep relationship with the cards.

That is, until one fateful day when I was to meet the most influential person in my magical life. Her name was Myfanwy Davies, and she hailed from the green valleys of South Wales. For decades she had resided in the North Wales coastal town of Rhyl. She was profoundly crippled by consequence of a road traffic accident; she wore glasses as thick as milk bottle bottles, and I would jest that she could still see Haley's Comet through them things. Short in stature yet huge in heart and magic, she told of me something inherent within the Tarot that I had yet to consider or contemplate—the Spirit within the Tarot.

Aleister Crowley explored this spiritual principle hid within the Tarot in his seminal work The Book of Thoth. In it he discusses the animistic principle held within the cards and stated that the cards themselves are living beings. They appear on the surface of to the untrained eye as inert and stationary and yet they crackle with a life-force and a vitality that is accessible to any student or adept of the Tarot. It was of this that my teacher Myfanwy referred to and then encouraged me to expand on that thought and explore the nature of the Tarot as a landscape of living, spiritual entities. My relationship with the cards were never to be the same again.

It is easy for us to consider that the nature of consciousness only applies to that which we consider as kin or near-kin, fellow humans, our pets, other animals, trees and rocks. We can identify the consciousness in others because we may share a similarity of awareness. We may not immediately consider this when we look at a deck of cards, and yet we would be foolhardy—as students of the occult sciences—to dismiss that the cards themselves reflect a consciousness. As I learnt that day, all of those years ago, as the western winds brought hailstones to beat at Myfanwy's windows: the Tarot are pictorial representations of the natural forces of the universe, and they contain within them the very principle of existence and all of its glorious expressions.

Tarot functions through the occult hypothesis that consciousness is not local, and it is not confined to specific points in space, or places like our brains. But in turn, our brains coalesce that consciousness, like a receiver, into a moment in time, and like the opening of a book and the turning of its pages, consciousness reveals itself in the here and now. This is precisely what the Tarot does: it opens the book of consciousness and coalesces material and information relevant to a precise moment in time (the reading), and reveals it.

It is able to do this because of the immense psychic energy that went into its creation.

In truth, each time you take to your decks, you are accessing a storehouse of wisdom that is more than the sum totality of its creators. For instance, if your deck is one inspired by the Rider-Waite-Smith system, a plethora of energies and influences went into the making of that tradition. From the Kabbala to the complexities and magical endeavours of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, to the profoundly powerful images of Pamela Colman-Smith, to every student and reader of that particular system. All have fed and nurtured a mystery school that is complete in 78 branches of wisdom. This magical heritage gave breath and life to the thought-forms that would eventually rise as living beings in their own right, as the spirit within the Tarot.

If your deck is inspired by the Rider-Waite-Smith system but has another overlay, take for instance my own Celtic Tarot. I have retained the primary symbology and system of the Rider-Waite-Smith but overlaid it with the magic of Celtic mythology. This adds another spiritual dimension to the cards; it does not detract from what is already present in the symbols themselves. By proxy of this, using a modern deck connects you to its creator and artist and the spiritual work that was necessary for them to perform to bring their decks into being.

Tarot is revealed to both reader and querent simultaneously, as each card is turned the spirit within that card sings of its heritage and the connection it has to all that has gone before it. The reader interprets the meaning of the card based on its position or value within a spread, and reveals this vocally to the querent. The most effective of readers are those who can sense and work with the spirits that inhabit their decks.

With this in mind, when one takes to a deck, one is in actuality never alone, for the spiritual beings that inhabit the Tarot are your constant guides to their revelation and inspiration. I sit here now, on a night not dissimilar to that which I enjoyed decades ago, the winds blow and hailstones stammer at my window demanding attention. But in my office, I am not alone, I have a number of decks, too many to admit to, and I sense their companionship. For within these decks are the wonders of the universe and of all life and living, of things seen and unseen and things betwixt and between sense and sensibility. In them are the efforts of occultists and artists and magicians long since dead, the mighty ones of the Tarot. It is the company of Tarot that I share this space with, and the comfort and stability that they offer my adventures into the magical world of Tarot.

Next time I will share some of my techniques for accessing the spirit within the Tarot.

Until then, fare thee well, and keep reading.

Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal. Copyright Llewellyn Worldwide, 2021. All rights reserved.

I'm both a psychic and a yoga teacher, and am wondering what you think about the connection between physical fitness and psychic ability. It seems to me that being healthy and fit would enhance our psychic abilities, just as it enhances every other area of our lives, yet I see many psychics who are riddled with health problems and terribly out of shape. What do you two think?

- Andrea

Astrea:

The strange ancient ritual of the Sin-Eater may help me explain what's happening here. In ancient times, people would place a feast on the body of the departed, for it was thought that the Sin-Eater would come and eat the feast and thus take the sins of the departed soul away.

This guaranteed the departed would go right into Heaven with all his sins forgiven. Though this is a really creepy idea, I think it will help me explain why many psychics are in awful physical and/or mental shape.

Just as modern vampires suck energy from others instead of blood, today's psychics take on the problems and ailments of all the people we read - unless we take proper precautions so that doesn't happen. Most of us do, but some of us don't know how.

The psychics you encounter who suffer from various health conditions are the ones who weren't taught to protect themselves against taking on the problems and issues of their clients.

For most of us psychics alive and working today, no one in the family was familiar with protection rituals because psychic ability was frowned upon by most organized religions and banned completely from others. Those of us who came into our abilities in the sixties had to discover our own protections, and some of us did better with this than others.

Every psychic has to find a personal way to connect, read and help clients and yet keep their problems and illnesses at bay, and this can be harder in some situations than in others.

Sometimes the client comes to us in such a weakened, unhappy state that our hearts reach out before we can take time to protect ourselves. At those times we're vulnerable, and many psychics will choose to take that heavy energy on instead of sending it back to the person suffering. We all do this occasionally whether it's intentional or not.

Even those of us who know better sometimes forget to protect ourselves; everyone gets sick once in a while. Part of being human involves taking on illness to strengthen our immune system. Now that there are vaccines for measles, mumps and chicken pox, people don't get all those childhood diseases. Similarly, we're not as accustomed to fighting off psychic germs as we used to be.

That is changing, however. More and more awareness is coming through now, so I predict that the next generation of psychics will pay as much attention to their physical well-being as they do their psychic abilities.

Fewer of the new kids are going to be plagued by the old ills because they're being taught how to not take on the physical and mental problems of the people they help.

*****

Susyn:

You address a very important issue. Having personally experienced both sides of these health issues and how they affect our abilities, I can clear some of this up for you.

I struggled with an eating disorder most of my life, and it wasn't until I got a handle on it that my psychic gifts began to emerge.

I had been fascinated with psychic phenomenon from an early age, but I grew up in a time when those sorts of activities were discouraged. I feel there was a direct link between that repression and the appearance of my eating disorder.

I encountered my first psychic experience at the age of seven, and by the age of eight, I was putting on extra weight. By the time I went to high school, I weighed well over 200 pounds.

I have heard this referred to as psychic puffing. In an effort to squelch or protect our gifts, many of us have a tendency to bury or hide them behind walls of extra weight or other bad health practices.

We must keep in mind that many of us had negative experiences as psychics in past lives, and unless healed and released, the memories of our suffering carried over into this lifetime.

If we were psychics, astrologers or witches in past lives, many of us were run out of town, imprisoned, hung or burned at the stake. That would make anyone think twice about recognizing, exercising or revealing their gifts!

You are correct in saying that the healthier we are, the stronger our spiritual gifts become. Most people have the desire to be healthy and in shape, but are working through their own fears and issues in an effort to reach a point where they can make a commitment to better health and maintain that commitment.

In addition to battling those inner issues, of course, we are all dodging the constant bombardment of food ads, endless encouragement to indulge (Super-size me!), and the misinformation everywhere regarding food, diet and health.

One of the gravest problems is how food producers who are driven by hunger for high profits laden most of what we eat with sugar, antibiotics and hormones. Even when we attempt to eat healthy, there are many hidden poisons in our food that keep us addicted to the very stuff that is making us unwell.

So eating healthy and staying fit is a challenge for all of us, not just people who are obviously struggling with their weight.

It's great that you're leading by example. While you may not be able to help all those psychics who are ailing, you can encourage your clients to replace unhealthy habits with exercise and spiritual practices, and remind them that in doing so, they will gain many physical, emotional, mental and spiritual gifts.

Astrea:

Many times in life we hear, "You will always have what you NEED, but not necessarily what you WANT." Your spirit must have needed to experience the feeling of leaving your human body, and the suggestion in the next chapter of Sylvia Brown's book was all it took to get you there.

Even though you hadn't read it yet, your SOUL recognized the title of that chapter as something it had been seeking, and your soul, knowing that you had that reference to read after your experience, got with it and out you went!

While I don't usually recommend her books, Sylvia Brown has a wide reaching and powerful effect on lots of people. A Gemini like you would be able to relate easily to her writing and put it to good use. Synchronicity - you gotta love it!

I like your description of "getting caught." That's exactly what it feels like, isn't it? One minute you're free and hovering above the room, and the next minute, ZAP! back down into your corporeal form you go!

As a little kid, I loved that "feeling of return." With practice, most of the time we can control that event, but sometimes, when our physical ears hear a distracting noise or something else occurs to knock us back into reality, back we go. With practice you will be able to control your return better.

I find it interesting that you were visiting your mother-in-law and not someone in your own genetic family. Evidently, you and your husband got married for reasons that are even deeper than love. His family's interest in "psychic stuff" will nurture your children in such matters and help them to grow into their own abilities.

You'll never have to be concerned that when your daughter visits them, she'll be discouraged from exploring her own psychic life and power. My parents encouraged me to develop my psychic senses in a time when it wasn't nice to even discuss such things in public. Heck, it's STILL not considered a great topic at the dinner table in some families!

Your kids will get to talk about it ALL and ask questions and read and study. This is going to give them such an edge in life! Talk with your husband about how you want to present this to your kiddos, so that you are united in your approach and ready to tell them their experiences are all natural and okay.

A word or two of warning: Geminis often have difficulty staying grounded in REAL LIFE. Don't get so strung out on your ASTRAL life that you neglect what you're doing here on Earth.

You are at the beginning of a long journey to learn where your power really lies. Try to be patient with this process and take your time.