|
Dedicated to Zoe Matoff
This month's column contains two parts. Originally I was just going to offer the reading below, but as I was typing it the cards offered something wonderful for the moment, and I wanted to share that with you all. But first…
MAYDAY, MAYDAY
Sex Openly Under Leaves
Longtime readers of this column will know that I like to fashion Tarot spreads on spiritual holidays from various traditions. This month the column appears on May 1, which gives us an interesting opportunity, for May Day, as we often call this date, bears on two traditions. One is the Pagan initiation of Spring. Actually, this day really is May 2, or Beltane, but over time the general celebration (outside actual Pagan circles) has shifted to the first. We can get a sense of the common idea of what this holiday is about from the old bit of doggerel "Hooray, hooray, the first of May, outdoor loving begins today." (Okay, "loving" is not exactly the usual term, but this is a family web site.) The sense of sexual celebration stems partly from the general feeling so many of us get that we come back to life in the Spring. More complexly, however, it takes us back to the ancient sense that we awaken the fertility of the Earth through celebrations of human fertility.
The other most significant tradition for this date involves the international Labor movement. In Europe and other places May 1 sees great demonstrations and celebrations of the battle for workers to better their lives. By extension the day has come to mean a time of affirmation of human rights and other progressive causes.
In the city of Minneapolis every year these two versions of May Day unite in a remarkable parade and day long party. The Heart of the Beast Puppet Theater stages a grand procession every first Sunday in May, attended by tens of thousands of people. Marchers carry giant puppets based on Pagan Gods and Goddesses of the trees and the Earth to a lake in a park. There they perform plays and rituals of the Earth's awakening. But the puppets also honor groups around the world who struggle against oppression of all kinds, and the play by the water usually includes radical political ideas as well as Pagan. The people who march, or join the party by the lake, also combine both ways to celebrate the day, from various groups with banners to people in wild costumes. The year I attended I saw a tall bearded man dressed only in a grass skirt, face paint, and a boa constrictor wound around his upper body.
So, in honor of the Heart of the Beast May Day celebration, I offer the following reading:
1. What sleeps in me?
2. What awakens with the Spring?
3. How do I celebrate it?
4. How do I celebrate with others?
5. How can I honor the Goddes?
6. What cause calls me?
7. How can I serve it?
8. How can I work with others?
9. What can we accomplish?
As with any reading, we can look at this in a literal way, and think of actual rituals as well as actual political causes, or we can adapt it to our own lives and perspectives.
And now, something special:
A Card For The Resurrection
Salvation Of Undying Love
Reader who know my book The Forest of Souls will know that it contains a reading done on Easter Sunday, inspired by the fact that I happened to be typing up an earlier reading, one that concerned the creation of the world. For that reading, I wrote, the cards seemed to undergo a Christian conversion. Any card that might show itself as symbolic of Christ's story appeared in the reading.
Well, as it happened, I was typing up the Mayday reading once again on Easter Sunday (no, I'm not really a workaholic, it's just a nice quiet time to do this sort of work). So this time I decided just to pick a single card, from The Shining Tribe Tarot, designed and drawn by myself. Do you ever know just what card will appear before you see it? Usually, I don't, but every now and then… This time I just knew it would be the World card, and there it was.
This card, the last in the symbolic sequence called the Major Arcana (and the last in the creation reading in the book), shows us the fully risen, fully conscious being, the Gnostic soul awakened to its true light. For many, this is what the Resurrection, and the concept of salvation, truly mean. It comes in the Tarot right after the card called Judgement, which shows the angel blowing the horn for the dead to rise up from their coffins; in The Shining Tribe, this card bears the title Awakening. In the Creation reading the next to last card, just before the World, was Awakening.
Something else links the World card to the day. In Jerusalem the Church of the Holy Sepulcher contains a shrine at the spot where tradition claims Christ rose up to heaven. A picture over the entrance shows the risen savior. Except that it shows a man and not a woman, this picture is exactly the same as the early Tarot of Marseille version of the World.
Both pictures show a naked figure in the sky, one leg crossed behind the other, arms out to the side, with a sash draped around the groin. Why does the World card then show a woman, and not a man? Partly we can call this the restoration of the feminine, for some Kabbalists link this card to the Shekhinah, the female aspect of God. Or, we might describe it as the soul, often portrayed as feminine.
Though I meant to take only one card, I happened to notice that two cards in the deck were reversed, that is, turned so that the figures appear upside down. Usually, I keep them all right side up in my deck, so I really cannot say how this happened. The first was the Devil.
In Christian myth, Christ's resurrection overthrows the Devil's hold on humanity. Esoterically, however, the Devil begins the final group of seven cards that culminates in the World. One way to look at the story of these seven cards is the liberation of the light. In the Devil we see the light of the soul seemingly trapped in darkness. We then get lightning in the Tower, followed by Starlight, Moonlight, and Sunlight, and then the light of the spirit in Judgement/Awakening, and finally the Light of the Self in the World.
 5555555
 5555555
 5555555
So the Devil reversed-with the World card-becomes the mark of Easter, the Devil overthrown, or the Light liberated. But what of the other card? This was the Three of Trees, an image inspired by the Ojibway Salteaux Indian practice of making manitokanac, spirit guardians, out of trees and branches, the way we make scarecrows.
At first I did not see the connection, but then I realized I was thinking thematically, when in fact I really needed to look at the picture.
 5555555
What does this remind you of? Remember the account of Christ on the cross, how two men were crucified along with him, Barrabas and "the Good Thief"? Of all the cards in the Shining Tribe deck nothing shows us the actual Crucifixion more graphically than the Three of Trees. But the card appears upside down, for this is not Good Friday, the day of Death, but Easter, the day of Life. And now take another look at the World card. Notice how the posture resembles the standard image of crucifixion, except that here the body is relaxed, the face ecstatic rather than in pain, the Light liberated and joyous.
Hudson Valley, Easter 2004
|
|
