KAJAMA.COM NEWSLETTER

May 8 through May 14, 2023

Emotional balance will return this week, as we embrace some personal changes and devote more time to our relationships.  The main astrological event this week will be Mercury turning direct on Sunday, though it may take a week or so to stop messing with our communications and electronics! Monday’s Sagittarius Moon casts a happy-go-lucky air around us, and though we may not get much done, we can make up for lost time on Tuesday and Wednesday when the Moon marches through Capricorn. Watch for change and things to start moving forward again on Thursday and Friday, as an Aquarius Moon sets the stage for progress. The weekend unfolds under an easygoing Pisces Moon, and except for Mercury’s shift to retrograde on Sunday, everything should hum along peacefully.

The Path of the Tarot Priestess, by Leeza Robertson

(Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal.)

Over the years, people have mistakenly thought I was a witch. You see, there are similarities to the practices of the witch and my personal work. But I have always known I am not a witch. Yet untangling practice, craft, and beliefs is not easy when the lineages of two very separate systems have been merged over time. Which is why I felt it so important to write Tarot Priestess and lay out the path of the Priestess.

You see, a priestess can be mistaken for a witch and a witch can be mistaken for a priestess. To the uninitiated, they can appear very similar. But they are not the same and their paths, though at times parallel, are very different. I have always been and will always be a priestess. The moment I walked my first labyrinth, I felt like I came home.

Yet my relationship to the goddess was not always harmonious, which is where the Tarot comes in—for it was through my tarot work that I started to drop my biased walls of belief and open myself up to building my own personal unique relationship with the goddess. It is this path, the lesson I myself learned, that I have filled in the pages of Tarot Priestess.

In many respects, you could say I queered the priestess path. I threw away the gender bias and rules and stripped it down. The path of the Tarot Priestess is inclusive, unique, and a safe space. It is here as a Tarot Priestess that you get to come to the feet of the goddess as you are. No boxes to fill. No lines to toe. No shoes to step into. Who you are is who you get to be.

The path of the Tarot Priestess is a journey of liberation, a way to explore your tarot practice as a form of devotion. This isn't about learning a new way to read tarot; no, this is about going deeper, wider, and further with the archetypal energy that the cards already have. To do this I have placed the priestess framework over the structure that tarot does so beautifully—marrying two processes so that they easily become one seamless path of self expression and personal exploration.

This all starts with the three Priestess Gateways of the Major Arcana. The Gateways are the three levels of initiation that we must go through to honor the goddess.

Gateway One: The Magician to the Chariot: Ritual and Ceremony
Gateway Two: Strength to Temperance: Pilgrimage, Initiation and Rites of Passage
Gateway Three: The Devil to the World: Reclaiming the Wild Shadow and Dancing in the light

The cards of the Major Arcana take us through the deep unfolding layers of what it means to be a spirit having a human experience, to be tethered to the goddess while exploring the gift of physical expression. Each time you draw one of these cards, you can see where along the path you are, which gateway you are in and what lessons the Goddess has in store for you.

Right now, pick up your tarot deck. Shuffle it and flip over cards until you come across a major arcana card. Which gateway does it belong to and which of the lessons jumps out at you?

While writing this article I did this exercise and the Chariot was the first major arcana card I came across. This is at the end of Gateway One; the lesson that jumped out was that of ceremony. More specifically, a ceremony honoring how far I have come ( movement is the chariot, it is a vehicle for travel) in the last year.

This simple exercise can lead me to a deeper understanding of my journey, one that has changed immensely in the last 12 months. For one thing, this time last year I had just finished the book this article is about (Tarot Priestess</em), now it is being sent out into the world.

I can take this card to my journal and ask the following questions;

• How did the path unfold for me over the last year?
• Do I feel my journey is complete? Perhaps not seeing as this card is only in gateway one.
• In what direction am I currently pointed?
• What gift did the goddess bestow upon me here in this gateway?
• What will I need to leave behind in order to move to the next gateway or temple
• If I were to reflect on the past year, what lesson would I say moved me the most?

You can use these questions for all the gateways along with card specific questions. Think about the card you have in front of you. What does its archetype mean to you? How curious can you be about that archetype and the energy it flows into your life? If it helps, write some keywords for your card and use those as starting points for your questions.

Next, you can explore what temple this gateway leads you to. Do this by picking your deck back up, giving it another shuffle, and flipping the cards over until you come across your first Ace. I landed on the Ace of Cups; this is the temple of water and the domain of the Priestesses of Avalon. What ace did you flip over first and what temple is the goddess asking you to explore?

In honor of your selected temple, consider getting flowers and candles in its colors to place on your altar to honor the goddess.
Cups: blue or white
Wands: red or orange
Swords: black or purple
Pentacles: green or yellow

Once you have your items on your altar, write a question you would like the goddess to help you with. Remember, it has to be in the temple you drew the Ace from. So for example, I drew the Ace of Cups. My question might be something like: "Goddess help me to create an overflow of love, happiness, or joy in my life."

For Swords it might be: "Goddess assist me gain clarity or focus around a particular problem or situation." For Wands you may think about inspiration or movement. Lastly Pentacles, which you could ask about health, money, or even growth.

Depending on the size of your candle, you may need to write your query as a short, concise ask (which is advised anyway). Then, light your candle and proclaim your request to the goddess. You might even think about opening up your journal and seeing if the Goddess has a message for you now that you have sent her a request.

Set a timer for two minutes, pick up a pen, and just write whatever floats through your mind. Some of it might make perfect sense, while some of it might seem like nonsense. Who knows, you might even be blessed with an immediate solution or answer to your question! The goddess does work quickly. Once your timer goes off, you can either let your candle burn all the way down if it is safe to do so, or blow it out and repeat your ritual again and again until your candle is burned all the way down or you get the resolution you were seeking.

Each of the temples have a different initiation, healing, lesson, and gift for you. Each temple has its own goddess. Whichever one you landed on you can guarantee the goddess has called you there for a reason. There are no mistakes along the Tarot Priestess path. The cards you draw will always be deliberate, strategic, and beneficial. The points of discovery the Goddess has laid out for you is intentional.

There is no limit to how deep, far, or wide you take your work with the cards, the gateways, or the temples. Tarot Priestess is a devotional framework, a map to assist you along your own Priestess path. May you walk it with your heart wide open and your head held high.

Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal. Copyright Llewellyn Worldwide, 2022. All rights reserved.

During a past life reading, I was told that I was a male in a past life and in that life I killed three people. This is very upsetting for I believe that all life is sacred. How do I atone for this? Usually in past life readings, the person is told that they were the victim of some trauma, but in this case, I'm the perpetrator. What do I do with this information?

Priya

Susyn:

We all come into this life with past karma for which we are responsible, and we all tend to focus on those past life events in which we were wronged more than those in which we did wrong to someone else. I want to reassure you that that your ability to rectify this situation is already built into your life path, so it will not be as difficult to atone for this as you might imagine.

When we take another's life in a previous incarnation, our goal becomes to give them life in some way in the future. There are many ways to do this; giving birth to children is one of many examples. Other instances may involve mentoring young people who have lost their way or giving selflessly to those who are less fortunate than we are.

It is important to remember that all our life experiences - past, present and future - are vital to our destinies. They are finely interwoven in ways we can't even imagine. Life is sacred, but part of the sanctity of life includes the processes of birth and death. We have all taken actions we regret or faced life-changing events that seemed negative at the time. When we change our ways and begin to do things differently in the future, it's because we have learned important life lessons.

If the thought of having killed people in your past lives continues to haunt you, I recommend that you do more investigation to learn who these people were. You could do this through additional readings. Revisiting the psychic who revealed this to you should be a good way to attain more information.

You can also ask Spirit to show you exactly who these people were, what happened to provoke their deaths, and if they are familiar to you in this lifetime. In this way, you will gain a clearer picture of the type of past life karma you are dealing with. One way or another, people with whom we have serious past life karma find their way back to us. If they are not in your life now, you are sure to encounter them in the future, if not in this life then a future life.

Meditating on forgiveness will also be essential to your healing process; it will open the door to making amends with anyone you have harmed or who has harmed you. Carrying guilt for something you did in a past life is pointless. Finding an opportunity to make things right is priceless, but it must happen in its own time.

Now that you have been made aware of your actions in a past life, new doors to higher consciousness will rapidly begin to open. You can trust that you will be given a chance to rectify old transgressions soon; you may even discover that you have already done so.

*****

Oceania:

Just because someone tells you something in a reading doesn't make it so. Readers are imperfect human beings who have bad days, so if what you learned doesn't ring true, you should disregard it. I admire your sense of responsibility, but dwelling on a past life can be a way of avoiding your present one. The same holds true within a given lifetime; while I often advocate looking back to childhood for the purpose of healing and understanding oneself, spending too much time on this can detract from our quality of life today.

Trying to undo or make up for past mistakes can lead to further mistakes because when we're looking back, we're not paying attention to what's in front of us! If a wrong can't be undone or if rectifying it would cause further harm to ourselves or others, our focus should be on our behavior in the present and ensuring a better track record now and in the future.

Let's assume for a moment that what the reader told you was true and that you killed three people. Do you know WHY you killed them? Without knowing the context of the events and your motivation, it's impossible to determine what atonement, if any, would be appropriate.

You called yourself a perpetrator, but you might have been a hero! Perhaps you killed in self-defense or to protect your family. Maybe you killed in the line of duty as a soldier defending his country, or as a law enforcement officer protecting his community. If your motive for killing was honorable, no atonement would be necessary.

In his 2012 book The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes those moral values that tend to show up in all cultures: respect for authority and tradition, sacredness, loyalty, fairness, and caring for others, especially those who are less fortunate. In Western democratic societies, liberty or personal freedom is also highly valued. Each of us has a moral fingerprint based upon how we rank the importance of those five or six values.

Political conservatives tend to value all six dimensions equally. Libertarians favor liberty above all the rest, and political liberals tend to favor caring for others as their primary value. You might fall into the latter group since you're very upset that you violated the value of caring for others, but you should consider that you may have been defending another moral value when you did so.

Past mistakes can inspire us to choose more wisely in the future, so if you killed for a less than honorable reason, you can atone by assessing your present-day values and upholding them with conviction in the future.

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.