Category: Tarot

The Chapel for the Vigil

Posted on by Jeff Lilly

Meditation on the Four of Swords

The chapel for the vigil is in
A wild forest, a wild stony river, bugs and birds.
Heat, but the breezes are cool.
The sound of water everywhere.
The chapel is a stone hut by the river, right where it turns;
Its window has a view of the lands downstream, very hazy now.
He blesses me and leaves me here to meditate.
Inside it is somewhat damp and dusty.
I lie down, take a brief nap, and when I wake the sun is setting;
everything is red and hazy gold.
I feel the birds in the air and the fish in the stream.
They speak languages I have not heard before.
I feel called to go outside the hut and plant seeds in a circle around it.
When the sun sets I listen to the water and the crickets.
A wind picks up and tosses the trees.
The night is quite dark — no stars.
Silence comes and goes, following the night’s hunters on their rounds.
This is wilderness, but it is full of voices.

Using Meditation and the Tarot to Parent Consciously

Posted on by Jeff Lilly

Today I’m delighted to welcome a guest author: Kara-Leah Grant, yoga publisher, editor, writer, speaker, teacher, and creator of The Yoga Lunchbox. Enjoy!

New Year’s Eve packed a powerful punch for me this year – I broke up with my partner of three and half years two days earlier.

It was two weeks before our son’s first birthday.

So it’s a brand new challenge for me, this single-mothering gig.

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Steve Pavlina Book Review III: the Tarot for Smart People

Posted on by Jeff Lilly

In the previous two posts in this series, I reviewed Steve Pavlina‘s new book Personal Development for Smart People, and suggested a way in which his seven principles (Truth, Love, Power, Courage, Authority, Oneness, and Intelligence) could be mapped to the seven visible planets in astrology (the Sun, the Moon, Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Venus, and Mercury, respectively).  In this post I’ll carry it further, and tackle the correspondence of these principles with the Tarot.

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The Narnian Tarot

Posted on by Jeff Lilly

My nine-year-old daughter absolutely adores the Chronicles of Narnia. Nothing unusual about that, really — lots of kids do — but why?

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After all, isn’t Narnia Christian allegory? It’s blatantly obvious to anyone who gives it a moment’s thought. But I’ve argued elsewhere that children are natural born pagans. So what’s the attraction? Does Christianity touch something in children, after all? Or is Narnia not wholly Christian?

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The Tolkien Tarot Spread III: Fiction and Divination

Posted on by Jeff Lilly

What does fiction have to do with divination?

The common thread is the story structure, the plot. A work of fiction is an illustration of prototypical event structures, plotlines that are moving or meaningful. A divination system also provides plotlines, as well as general elements to flesh out the events of the story. A divination system shows you a possible plot line for your own personal story; it allows you to construct a tale to make sense of your life.

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A Tarot spread can be thought of as a narrative structure upon which you can hang the life events surrounding the theme of your reading. The classic three-card reading — past, present, future — is just about as basic a narrative structure as one can imagine. The Celtic Cross is an elaboration of that basic narrative, showing obstacles, influences from ‘above’ and ‘below’, etc. Diane Sylvan has a marvelous spread (the Storyteller) that echoes Campbell’s journey of the hero. The Tetractys spread, which I learned of while researching this article, is a fascinating one that I’d love to try sometime, and seems to combine four plot patterns into one.

The Tolkien spread uses Tolkien’s favorite six-part plot pattern, which I explain in detail in the previous post; it underlies most of the action of The Lord of the Rings, as well as the overall arc of the novel itself. It illustrates Tolkien’s primary theme, eucatastrophe — the sudden twist, unexpected and yet intimately bound up with the framework of the tale, that brings the story to a positive conclusion.

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The Tolkien Tarot Spread II: Patterns of Action

Posted on by Jeff Lilly

Click here for the previous post in this series: The Function of Fiction.

Patterns of Plot, Patterns of Life

All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost. The old that is strong does not wither; Deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring; Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again shall be king. –Tolkien

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One way in which fiction influences our subconscious thinking is in its very structure, its plot. Different authors and different works have different plot styles and devices, sometimes woven carefully and consciously (The Quincunx), other times written on the fly with almost no forethought (Louis L’Amour). These patterns of plot can influence the way we, as readers, try to organize our own experiences — the way we make sense of our own stories. We come to expect our lives to unfold in the same way that our favorite fiction does.

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The Tolkien Tarot Spread I: the Function of Fiction

Posted on by Jeff Lilly

There is no question that Tolkien has had an amazing effect on my life, perhaps more than any other single person, including my parents. I am a linguist today because of The Hobbit. The runes absolutely fascinated me. And then — The Lord of the Rings! Can you imagine the thrill that shot through me when I read the inscription on the One Ring:

Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatuluk, agh burzum ishi krimpatul. One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness, bind them.

…and I realized that ash must mean “one”, and nazg must mean “ring” — and suddenly the name Nazgul — “ring ghoul” — Ringwraith — made perfect sense! There was no turning back after that.

Profound Lies

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And then of course there’s this whole druidism thing. Of course, there are no druids per se in Tolkien’s mythology, but the atmosphere, the moral values (e.g. the reverence for trees), and the character of magic throughout the works are unmistakable. I didn’t realize I was a druid until twenty-odd years after I read the books, but they set me on the path.

I think it’s pretty common for works of fiction to have profound effects on peoples’ lives. Think of all the libertarians spawned by Ayn Rand, for example. But if you take a step back and think about it, it’s a strange thing. After all, fiction is just a pack of lies, right? And not just lies — lies that everyone knows are false. Tolkien wasn’t fooling anybody, or trying to. Objectively speaking, how could known falsehoods have any kind of influence on someone’s life?

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Drawing Cards II: Storyboard Results

Posted on by Jeff Lilly

This past week my wife and I decided to try the Tarot reading technique Slade described in his guest piece here, Drawing Cards: Storyboarding the Tarot. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, we’re going through some interesting times financially, and we felt like we needed some additional guidance on next steps. The storyboarding technique looked like it would be a lot of fun, and would allow my wife in particular access to her intuition, since she’s unfamiliar with the cards.

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Drawing Cards – Storyboarding the Tarot

Posted on by Jeff Lilly

Guest Author: Eric Slade Roberson of Shift Your Spirits

A few months ago, Slade was kind enough to invite me onto his site as a guest author, where I took the opportunity to summarize the How to Choose a Religion series. (That summary has things in it that I still haven’t gotten around to here on my own blog!) I jumped at the chance to have Slade write something for the Druid Journal in return.

Slade is an author of tremendous energy and creativity, and an experienced medium and Reader as well. In Drawing Cards he describes a new way of using the Tarot, one that draws directly from the images in the cards — in my opinion, the greatest strength of the Tarot.

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The Eight-Circuit Tarot Deck II: Medium and Message

Posted on by Jeff Lilly

The other day, I said to my anima, “Look — I need to talk to the guy who wants me to make this Tarot deck.”

She nodded. “All right,” she said. “Sit down, and let’s get started.”

interviewfrankmaceowenI’ve been able to talk directly to my anima during meditations for about a month now — ever since I realized what she was. She is always very helpful to talk to, not least because she is a medium. It’s rather odd that my anima is a medium, and I am not; but there you go. It may be that she is only communicating with other aspects of my subconscious — but even if so, that’s pretty handy.

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