Back to Basics

These last few weeks, I have been cutting more than adding to my arsenal of divination tools and techniques. New decks, new sources of information do not always bring much, sometimes they are just a source of distraction. I needed some period of peace and reflection on how I use my tools.

We were taught from a young age that knowledge is power, but sometimes, too much knowledge runs counter intuitive to what we are trying to achieve. It’s so easy these days to go on the internet and find information about any subject, lots of information. Concerning divination, there are so many different approaches, oftentimes contradictory to each other. If we follow too many of them, we end up with a mix of ideas difficult to reconcile against each other. And that, my friend, brings a lot of confusion to the mind.

Times and times again, I see people who want to learn Tarot or Lenormand, and all they do is accumulate lists of meanings found here and there, without any consistency or system behind them. While I agree that it’s very nice to confront different ideas, for a young mind in any domain, it is very difficult to distinguish what is useful in all the noise, and what is not.

Internet does nothing to help this situation, it tends to make it worse by giving too much exposure. For all the people starting to learn a divination tool, I would highly advice to keep working with a single book, or a single source, for a while, for the time necessary to ingest the material presented. And while it’s hard to stay aways from facebook groups and distractions, it is probably the best way to progress. A well made mind is not a full mind, it’s a mind with a clear purpose.

With this in mind, I asked my Jean Noblet, “What should I do with Tarot? How should my study of Tarot evolve?”

We have Tempérance, La Mort, LA Maison-Dieu. Temperance, Death, The Tower.

The first thought that went through my mind was no compromise, I should bring down the house.

Visually, we have a central structure on the 3 cards, an angel that becomes a skeleton that becomes a tower. Also, 2 vases that become 2 heads, which become 2 falling people.

A first observation is that the skeleton of La Mort advances towards Temperance and threatens to cut the flow between the two vases. A priori one could think that to do two disciplines (as I do mostly Lenormand and Tarot) would be bad, and not respecting the warning of La Mort can only lead to the collapse and the destruction that one sees in the tower.

But that’s not really the question, my question was specifically about Tarot. And in that optic, I find La Maison-Dieu interesting. If we really look, it is only the top that is destroyed, not the whole tower, the part close to the ground remains intact. For my evolution, I see this sign as meaning that the basics i have must remain. What must be eliminated is all the little things that we put above, the mind has to empty itself sometimes to make room for something else.

So what do the two vases in Temperance mean, what things are mixed together that Death asks me to cut out? The two vases are replaced by two heads on the ground, then by two characters at ground level. The angel, spiritual being becomes progressively a tower. The compromise here is to mix too much spiritual and concrete together. As the question is for my personal practice, I take this as the fact that I have always privileged the image and the observation over the symbolism. So, what should I do with the tarot? Return to what constitutes my solid foundation, and do not build too much above it, stay in the image and its description above all. That is to say privilege function of the cards over symbolism.

Deck: Jean Noblet, restored by JC Flornoy.