What are Talismans?

I haven't been present much: for a fortnight or so, the software at the site wouldn't let me post (other bloggers managed, so what was going on I don't know!) and I've been incredibly busy ever since just before service seems to have been resumed.

I take part in a number of internet communities pertinent to my interests, and one of my interests - by no means the only one - is Tarot. In the last few days, I was interested to read a dialogue between Liz Hazel, creator of the charming little Whispering Tarot, and Benjamin Assisi along these lines:-

That talismanic magic is by its nature astrological magic. That magic is the art of changing reality in accordince with Will. And astrological talismans are the oldest form of magic.

Let's look at those ideas.

1) Talismanic magic is astrological magic. I don't necessarily agree. Sure, I'm a pig's snout of an astrologer and it's been decades since I did any in-depth astrological-based magical work, but I do fairly regularly do talismanic work. A talisman is any fairly portable object that has been charged with magic to a particular purpose. A shaman's touchstone is a talisman. A Wiccan's Athame is a talisman. A faether I pick up, charge, and place in the Air quarter of my Circle is a talisman. A piece of jewellery charged with intent is a talisman - none more so than a gift of jewellery intended to win the heart of someone who isn't sure of you.

Even the tattoo I recently had of one of my power animals - Wombat - is a talisman, once that I can never put down and lose, one that will never be stolen from me except in the case of an upper-arm amputation, in which case I'd probably demand that they return that patch of skin to me and allow me to cure it!

None of these things have to be astrological in nature or use.

2) Magic is the art of changing reality in accordance with Will. A working-definition of magic that I have been using for decades is that Magic is the art and science of changing the way coincidence happens such that it goes your way so frequently that it is statistically impossible. Weather that should have happened yesterday that is now happening today, I'm looking squarely at you! (Okay, so I've never been good at timing).

and 3) Astrological talismans are the oldest form of Magic. I think talismans and talismanic magic are far older than astrology. I think they go back to the dawn of animal consciousness. When you foster an orphaned macropod, perhaps a wallaby, and but it into a warm knitted bag, the wallaby knows perfectly well that the bag is not its mother's pouch, but it it a talisman of the safety and nurturing that the macropod would have found in nature in its mother's pouch - and some foster-carers deliberately charge it magically to be so. When you see a pet, perhaps a cat, taking a liking to a particular corner or soft toy, that is primitive talismanic magic. When they then lose interest in it and fixate on something else, it has served its magical purpose for them, whether that is a purpose of reassurance, healing or something else, and they are now looking for a different energy and a different magical outcome in another place or object, another talisman.

Wedding-rings are the ultimate and most widespread of human talismans, although the majority of people who give them don't know how to charge them properly and the majority of people who receive and wear tham don't realise it.

Talismans are everywhere, and only a minority of them are at all astrological in nature.

Sanitising Your Tarot Deck

Someone recently asked if it was a good idea to sanitise the Tarot deck before use, to remove "negative" cards. The following represents my thoughts on the subject:

Nope. Not for the very young, not for the very old.

As to "sanitising" the deck to make all the readings happy-happy-joy-joy, well, you might as well buy a Doreen Virtue deck and have it done for you before purchase, if that's all you want from a reading.

I've had a number of traumatised clients (and seen a number of internet discussions from people who had been throught the mill), who uniformly said they didn't like happy-happy decks that didn't reflect reality.

Every time I read for somebody, I set about discovering people's problems and bringing them to their notice - then set about finding potential solutions so that they can repair their lives. With a deck that has had cards like Death, the Devil and the Tower removed, I simply couldn't function to help people. I'd have to talk meaningless puff, as some other readers I know do.

This means that, in the absence of being able to truly identify people's problems, I can also truly identify no cures, no courses of action that they can take to change things for the better.

I did a reading just today for someone in late middle-age who had very severe problems. If the only cards my deck had to offer were all happy-happy-joy-joy cards, I wouldn't have been able to detect what was really happening for them in their life, nor the emotional impact that was having on their inner world. Without that information, I would have been able to make no constructive suggestions, specially as so many of these so-called "negative" cards hold within themselves hints to their own solutions.

Do people really want readings that change nothing and don't help them? I don't think so. At the end of the reading, this person left, giving me a hug and promising to come back and let me know how things play out after they put into action some of the suggestions that the reading brought out. I simply couldn't have said anything important or helpful today if my deck had had its teeth pulled.

13th May, 2011

This video aired on 13th May, 2011, on ABC-1, an Australian TV station. It was a part of their regular programme, "The Collectors". We had enormous fun filming it - the whole story from the very beginning can be found here.

Review: The 7th World Tarot Deck

Title: The 7th World Tarot Deck
Illustrations by Terry Whidborne
Booklet written by Debra-Mary MacInnes
Website: http://www.the7thworld.com/

After the episode of "The Collectors" featuring my Tarot collection was aired on ABC-1 a short while ago, I was contacted by the creator of this deck, who was happy to give me a copy to keep in my collection. Self-published in a print-run of just 100 copies, it has not found distribution outlets or a mainstream publisher yet, and I think it richly deserves to find an outlet, plus mass-publication.

The deck as it is in this first print-run, is presented in a simple white box with no artwork, sealed with stickers on which the title of the deck, contact details and a simple logo of a bug with outstretched wings are printed very simply and plainly.

 On opening the deck, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Minor Arcana are the first cards you see, with the Major Arcana at the rear of the deck. For some reason which I haven't really analysed yet, this pleased me greatly; it's as if the deck doesn't need to show off its more glamorous side to attract one in the first place.

And overall, it is an attractive deck. The cardstock is sturdy and gently laminated, and its new-deck-smell is different to the variety of chemical smells that most laminated decks gas-off, instead smelling refreshing and somewhat citrusy. The backs are a simple design in red-ochre, yellow-ochre and black featuring that same bug, in the manner of a woven mat, and are warm and appealing.

Throughout the deck, Majors and Minors all have a broad, elaborate border in ochres, yellows and browns, with a scorched and slightly fantastical edging, placing the image at one remove from the observer and set deep within their own world.

The Minor Arcana cards are unillustrated but subtlely decorated, allowing one's intuition more free rein than illustrated pictures do in my opinion, as the observer is not locked into the artist's idea of what the card is about. Wands feature freehand-drawn rods with a burst of ripening grain at the end, simple and more appealing than if the artist had used a ruler to make them perfectly straight. Swords feature a simple, double-sided blade with a basic hilt and a spiral handle forged from the same piece of metal, again drawn freehand. But attractive as these suits are, Pentacles and Cups are where the Minors come into their own. Cups feature cafe-style coffee-cups. I don't know why that surprised and pleased me so much, but it really did. It's as if this deck is more down to earth than decks with showier goblets. And Pentacles are a brown circle, infilled with yellow-ochre, centred with a four-petalled purple flower with a red centre. The floral nature of these Pentacles again veers away from the showy, ceremonious nature of many other Pentacles, towards an earth-based, fertility-based idea, bedded deep in the colours of the country the deck was designed in.

The Court Cards are reversible, busts of individuals usually seen in profile around the symbol of their suit, rather like the court cards in playing decks. Unlike playing cards, though, there is plenty to go on in the expressions and postures of these people to give you divinatory clues. What I like is the cohesiveness of the Court Card characters: cards like the Queen Pentacles and the Knave Pentacles (this deck has Knaves instead of Pages) could be members of almost any race on earth, cards like the King Wands could be anything from Asian to Native American, while the King Pentacles is unashamedly Aboriginal - yet all of the faces, different though they are, seem to come from the same reality the same culture, even the same race - Human.

Along with the reversible, mirror-image Courts, there is something else marrying this deck to commonplace playing cards - the two Jokers. Yes, we have an eighty-card deck here, with no title cards but instead two Jokers. They are identical - I am not even going to begin to describe this card to you - it looks different every time I see it. Needless to say, in my copy and my use of it I'm treating it as a twenty-third Major Arcana card, and leaving both of them in the deck. I've often thought that the Fool card as we experience it in most other decks should really be two separate cards: one indicating the beginning of human consciousness, ignorance, the start of the learning process, and another indicating a state of being experienced but being untouched and uncorrupted by the world. In my own deck which I haven't found an artist for yet, I call the former "The Barbarian" and the latter "The Jester". In this deck, they are The Fool and the Joker, and the cards work well on that level.

In the Major Arcana the range of humans we see in the Court Cards gives way to the non-human, undeniably removing us from the day-to-day and dumping us slap-bang in the middle of the archetypal. Throughout, the "human" roles in the Major Arcana are filled by skinny, long-limbed, floppy-eared, cherry-nosed Tolkienesque earthern-folk who are really very appealing.

Cards I am particularly drawn to? Justice is naked and evidently male, blindfolded and balancing a Sword on his forehead, pieces of a broken yin-yang symbol spinning on strings from its hilt. The Hanged Man is a marionette, hung from strings attached to his elbows, knees and pointy hat. Death is a fantastical crysalis with teeth (and an overbite), with a fat, juicy, delicious moth hovering in the background. The Tower is an unstable stone structure balanced on a wagon and a fork, tipping and crumbling. The Star is an Edward Lear-like bird on a bicycle with a Star on a stick. The Hierophant is old and eccentric, standing on a book and wearing a Papal mitre. The Lovers are Zaphod-Beeblebrox-like: one body, two heads. The Fool is prancing and playing his stick like a flute with his long fingers. The Hermit reverts back to the original concept of Father Time for this card, standing on a clockface and carrying a scythe from which, yes, a lantern dangles, but a double-ended two-candled lantern recalling the shape of hourglasses.

Cards I dislike? It would be hard to name one. Perhaps I am not so fond of the fairly conventional, cutsie dinosaur used in The Chariot, but even that card is attractive in its own way. This is a deck that has a great deal of charm.

I have only had my copy a very short time so far, but I am finding that each of the images gets deeper and more meaningful every time I look at it, which is what you want from a divinatory tool. This is a worthy deck, and I am proud of the fact that it was developed in my country, Australia, and while not labouring its Australianness, has a feel of red earth throughout.

I hope that in the very near future, Terry is able to find a conventional publisher for this deck, as it is a deck that will appeal to many, many people from all over the world and deserves very wide distribution.

Too New to Read Tarot?

Recently I was asked by someone who was just starting to learn to read Tarot if they were too inexperienced to read for themselves. I didn't think so. That's the best way to learn - reading for others when you haven't built up your skills base yet is a recipe for disaster if they take your reading with the same seriousness as a reading from a more experienced person who isn't just feeling their way into it.

But be a bit careful - don't read on the same subject too often, especially if you've already had a reading from someone else on it. Do the work that issue requires in your life first, before you do more readings. A reading simply shows you the next step to take in any area of your life, the things you need to do or stop doing. Until you've done that, another reading will be pointless and perhaps harmful (your even asking the question implies that the difference in cards pulled has already harmed your confidence in your cards and your ability to read them).

After all, what happens when you keep pestering people about something? They get annoyed and less responsive. I believe so do Tarot decks, too, with over-use on the one subject. Think of other things to read about, even if it's the old standard: "what do you want to tell me now?"

In the particular instance where the person has recounted first drawing the Ten Cups iin a reading, then later drawn the Ten Swords and was puzzled by the difference, I'd pull back a bit, and ask what meaning the number ten might have for you personally. Have you lived in a house numbered 10? Do you work on a team of ten people? Is it numerologically "your" number? Is it a significant number or a number surrounding someone you know?

While you're still learning and unsure, why not pull a card every morning? Look at it, think about it, write it down. Then at bedtime that night, look at it again, and see if it relates to anything (or anyone) in your day that day. This will help you get familiar with how you personally read the cards (everyone is different).

You might also want to play Tarot Solitaire as well. It is played like windows solitaire, but with Tarot cards. Lay out an extra two columns, instead of alternating "reds" and "blacks" keep each suit to itself, and run the Majors starting only with Card Zero and Card Eleven (the way the suits start with Kings), in strict numerical order.

This game takes time. Like regular solitaire, it will sometimes work out and sometimes not. It's interesting to speculate on which suits you can't get to work out, and how they are currently important in your life. But mostly, it keeps in the images of your deck in front of your eyes, and you learn by absorbtion and familiarity.

Good luck, and enjoy your Tarot deck.

"But you Already HAVE a Tarot Deck!"

Some time ago, a friend of my teenager stayed with us for a week, and during that week her mother, a friend of mine, took me out and bought me a carload of groceries - her way of saying thank you, I suppose.

While we were at the shopping centre I went to the post office there, because I was expecting a parcel crammed full of Tarot delights from these people. Actually, I wasn't - most of the delivery had already happened, but one deck had been omitted and sent on later, and that was what I was waiting for.

So my friend M. and I went to the post office, she waited outside and the smiling guy there handed over my parcel to me. As I walked out of the post office to met up with her again, I was jumping up and down, saying "My parcel's arrived! My parcel's arrived!" And before I was even two or three metres (yards) from the door of the post office, I was chewing through the tape at the corner of the package - it was very, very well taped up indeed - trying to get into it.

My friend laughed at me. "Calm down," she said, "you'll soon know what's in it."

"Oh, I already know what's in it," I told her, "it's a Tarot deck."

She looked at me, completely confused. "But you already have a Tarot deck, don't you?" she asked. She simply couldn't wrap her mind around my wanting another one.

I was floored. Didn't she understand? As a Portuguese Tarot collector and friend of mine said, and I quote: "Ive already got a book in my house, but - oddly - keep buying more too. Insane isn't it? Ive also already got a CD and keep buying more of those too. Just can't control myself."

M. is a literate, educated woman, and has plenty of books. She also has more than one outfit that she wears - I've seen her in several, over the years, and I'm willing to wager she owns more shoes than I do: I have one pair of sandals, one pair of runners and one pair of black shoes "for good". She probably has several pairs of earrings, too, or necklaces, although I've never really noticed jewellery on her - I know I have a lot more jewellery than I ever actually wear. She probably even has more than one saucepan, or more than one knife, fork and spoon.

So why should one Tarot deck be enough?

Another person I know in the same discussion, said that her husband used to ask her why she needed more than one Tarot deck - right up until she asked him why he needed more than one camera. Apparently he shut up completely, and hasn't bothered her since.

Different Tarot decks have different artistic styles, and let's face it, the more diverse the collection of art you feast your eyes on, the more content and developed your inner self is. They also have vastly different feels, and put both you and the client in different moods.

A Tarot deck is like a book: every time you pick it up, it tells you a story, a story of greater or lesser complexity. A collection of Tarot decks is like a library: a book for every mood or stage in your life, each one another step on the path of your enjoyment in life and your quest for self-education. And they are things of beauty: a Tarot collector can be both a serious reader and a butterfly, flitting from one glorious flower to another of a different colour, size and shape, and with a different perfume.

But it's not just people who are not involved in Tarot themselves, M's attitude can also be found in people who are involved in Tarot. I have a local friend whom I occasionally swap readings with, not because I really need her to give me readings, but because she needs the practice adn doesn't get as much opportunity as I do, and I'm very happy to give her the chance as well as giving her a reading. She reads with quite a well-known deck, the Mythic deck, which was the deck that was used in the Tarot course she took many years ago.

The teacher of that course taught her a number of things that are hard to un-teach: that Tarot is dangerous and you need "protection" from it in the form of Christian prayers (Tarot is just cardboard and ink - any "danger" is from your own mind and in your own mind), and that no other decks work, the Mythic is the only one that works, and if you use other decks your bond with it will weaken and you won't be able to read with it any more.

This is completely untrue, and almost as laughable as the "dangerous" thingie. Like everyone, I bought one deck first, and learnt on it, But I found that every time I bought a new deck and familiarised myself with the new images and the new ways of thinking and feeling that those images triggered, my knowledge of general Tarot got deeper and more complex. I have around a hundred decks now, and I know and love all of them - and can tell you at a glance what deck any randomly card came from - and each of them have added to me, to my knowledge and abilities.

The last couple of times this friend and I did a swap, she commented on how deep and incisive my readings for her are, while she seems only to skate on the surface of my life when she reads for me. And how do I manage it, seeing as I (deliberately) use a different deck for her every time? It's because a wide range of decks has given me a greater opportunithy to develop and grow as a reader.

And aside from all of this, there's another strong reason in favour of collecting decks. Imagine you were vsiual, and you liked to look at lovely and/or interesting art, art that engages. How many pictures could you fit on the walls of your house? Five? Ten? Thirty-five? Maybe fifty if you're in a biggish place and they're smallish pictures?

A single Tarot deck contains (usually) seventy-eight images, and in many decks they are high art, complex art, satisfying art. I routinely carry two decks in my handbag, and often a third or even a fourth. I keep another half-doxen or so in my Tarot Readers Kit Bag. Which means that at least eighty sit in a large wicker basket on a small shelf. I go through the basket regularly, pulling out decks and revisiting their images with pleasure and delight.

If every deck had exactly seventy-eight images (they don't - some have one or more extras) and I had exactly a hundred decks (I don't - I have either ninety-eight or ninety-nine), then that is seven thousand, eight hundred individual works of art that I manage to fit into a very small house. Many significant public collections of art don't contain as many works of art, and most don't display all of their possessions, keeping much of their collections in storage and rotating it pretty well as I do.

So for those of us who are not billionaires and don't have houses as long as shopping centres to hang paintings in, Tarot collecting is an economical and space-efficient way of collecting art, collecting satisfying visual treats that will give you joy for the rest of your life.

The Question of Beauty

Recently, some other collectors and I were discussing "beautiful" and "ugly" Tarot decks. I was immediately uncomfortable with the discussion, and withdrew fairly soon. Why? Because humans are creatures of pattern. What they do one day, they'll do another day, What they do in one part of their life, they'll do in another part of their life.

Beauty in Tarot decks is often judged to be a matter of colour, precision of line, proportion, balance. Beauty in people is often similar: we are genetically programmed to look for symmetrical features and bodies because some genetic weaknesses produce a decided lopsidedness, and in addition to that, we have different cultural/racial standards of beauty in the shapes of features and bodies, and the proportions between them.

Yet I've lost count of the conventionally attractive people - men and women both - who are rotten to the core, who ride others and use others because they have a blythe confidence that if one relationship or friendship ends they can pick up another based on their looks and their smiles. I've also lost count of the scarred, the disfigured, the deformed and yes, the smelly also, who have big, warm hearts and would do anything for anybody.

Of course people are people, and good-hearted people and bad-hearted people alike can be found in all degrees of physical attractiveness, which leads me to believe that we shouldn't judge people on their appearances at all, but more on their behavour and on what they say and how they say it.

Getting back to Tarot, I don't like to judge decks to be "ugly" or otherwise. If you judge decks to be ugly and therefore somehow lesser in worth, perhaps you will one day judge people to be ugly and therefore somehow lesser in worth. And let's face it, no matter what we look like on the surface, no matter what cards genetics - or disfiguring accidents - have dealt us, we all have the same feelings and the same inner value.

Even as a very young child I was enormously uncomfortable with the tradition of fairy tales to describe heroines as "beautiful" and rescuing heroes as "handsome" - I felt beautiful on the inside, but every time I came across a mirror, I got a shock. Likewise, I hated and still am uncomfortable with Dickens, whose goodies are unblemished, and whose baddies are always scarred and limping from the rough hand life has dealt them - not in my opinion a qualification for evil, although Dickens obviously thought so.

By criticising and dismissing ugliness in inanimate things, we unconsciously make it easier to criticise and dismiss ugliness in people. I judge Tarot decks on appearances when I am reading for strangers - it really helps to have a variety of "attractive" decks on the table as well as some good old workhorses and one or two historical decks - but there are some pretty decks I just don't use - I own them in my collection and I have used them, but no matter how easy on the eyes they are, they have little depth and subtlety and give inferior readings.

And in my own collection and for my own use, I have some ugly ducklings. They read surprisingly well, and many of them are bizarrely appealing because of their ugliness, because they are interesting and intriguing. Should I judge them to be inferior to an airbrushed, glossy, colourful confection that skids along the surface of Tarot and life?

I think not. Nor are all my friends - or even the person I currently have a crush on - all page three model material. Magazines full of beautiful people don't interest me - vital, alive, intelligent, compassionate, real people do. Tarot decks that are pretty don't interest me - Tarot decks that are interesting and work well do.

It's about time we grew up and stopped programming our children from the earliest of ages via fairy stories, cartoons and the like, to value some ideal of physical beauty, and think about beauty of the soul.

My collection

A little bit of local press coverage can be found here. And some pics can be found here as well. Have fun, people.

It's funny how things change: you talk to a journalist, the years you've been reading get changed (I would have said around thirty) and there's just a slight twist in tone. Still, c'est la vie, c'est la guerre, c'est la pommes de terre.

Collectors Program - ABC1

On Friday the 6th May at 8.00pm. ABC1's Collectors programme will be featuring me and my Tarot collection, a good ten months after filming! The crew ended up with over four hours of good, useable footage which will have to be cut back greatly to fit the segment, so it will be interesting to see what made the cut - even I'm not allowed to see the spisode until it airs.

Next Monday I will also be interviewed by the local newspaper, as an editorial to be run locally before the episode airs. That will be exciting, too!

The paper in question runs an internet version - I'll post the URL for the interview here, when I know what it is.

Technical Difficulties

Okay, folks, I'm suffering what I hope are temporary technical difficulties with the net, so access is going to be through libraries and possibly internet cafes, and thus confined to business hours.

I am still capable of providing readings by email: I will need your name, an assessment of your issue or issues so that I don't waste my time and your money reading Tarot to uncover them, and your express permission to read for you. Use the button below to pay for your reading, and contact me at the same time with these details, and I will do your reading within three working-days. This is NOT an hourly rate: full readings may take me up to several hours to complete, analyse and type up into an email. Overview readings will focus on just the one issue and will be less in-depth, but previous clients have found they give enough detail for them to make the best possible decisions in their situations.

As of the end of March, I will no longer be donating everything earnt this way to the Disaster Relief Fund, but I will be donating a percentage of every reading depending on my overall earnings.

Reading Options

Full Tarot Reading $50.00 Overview Reading (less detail) $20.00

For residents and visitors to the Central Coast of NSW, I will still be providing my Quit Smoking for life program in the privacy of your own homes (or hotel rooms) and at your own convenience. Email me for my business phone number, and I will get back to you when I next check into a library or internet cafe to check my emails.

The sooner I get busy, the sooner I can help you manage the situations you find yourselves in.