Greenwood Tarot - The Seer

From Chesca Potter's notes:


The Seer

Minor arcane: Nines. Position on wheel: guardian and centre.
Outside of time. Colour: all.

The Seer stands beside the roots of the Greenwood Tree. Behind are the trees that mark the boundary of the inner sanctuary of the Greenwood (Respect, nine of wands). Ancient moss covered stones form another barrier, It is essential that the Seer stands still at the centre of the wheel, having knowledge of all aspects of the previous 65 cards, and of the four elements. She holds the staff (fire), stands by the spring (water) where an arrowhead lies (air). She is firmly on the earth.
Her staff is encircled by the double headed serpent of the land in balance; her medicine pouch of sacred objects and her antler whistle for calling the spirits are tied upon it. Glowing on top of the staff is a sphere of energy, necessary for second sight. She stands still at twilight-that magical time of the gloaming, when the veils between the worlds is thin. She is wrapped around by a barn owl, that flies silently at dawn and dusk, its soft plumage red brown and white, black and gold, with its beautiful heart-shaped face and piercing eyes, making it a fitting totem of the vision of the heart of the land.

Upon her green cloak are prehistoric painted animals, aurochs, horse, reindeer, mammoth, lion, owl and plants. The Seer is keeper of ancestral memory (nine of stones, Tradition), and its myths, able to see into the past, and understand its connection and interaction with the present. She is sensitive to her environment, to the nature around her. She is knowledgeable, not only intuitively, but she also has a keen intelligence and alert awareness, and can protect her land, and her clan from desecration of its natural inheritance.

She stays still but misses nothing-she is completely at one with the heartbeat of the land, which allows her to traverse all worlds. The Seer acts upon her visions, she is not a passive day dreamer. She can be prophetic, aware of much that others miss. The mediator between The Seer and the community is The Shaman.

Incidentally, I do not see this as a gendered quality; I know of skilled male seers (William Blake) and powerful female shamans.

This card is the most evocative to me.
This card is an Owl.
It calls awake EVERYTHING that is Owl to me and in me.
It commands my attention like no other because of that.
This Owl is alive and I know her:
In a trance journey into the realm of the Greenwood I met this Owl in the barn of the homestead next to the Stone circle. She gave me important advice and direction. For me, this Owl is the Seer. not the human being whose profile and hands I see on the card To me the Owl is also the only Being on the card that is in sharp focus and clearly defined. the woman behind the Owl is just a shadow, her body not clear defined, the tool of the Owl, not like Chesca says the woman wearing an Owl cloak. It is unclear to me, where the cloak ends and the surrounding green landscape begins.
It is however very clear where the Owl begins and ends.


Below the Owl I see a number of other helping spirits, all of them featured again and again on other cards. That tells me, that they were/ are very important to Chesca Potter, maybe they are the main Guardians of this deck, as they were the Guardians of Pre Celtic Britain. (or just how was this region called way back then???) The face of the Teddy Bear somehow throws me a little. As iffff he does not belong among all the rupestrian art. But then again: Is not a Teddy Bear the VERY first “munieca /toy, play-guardian we give to a newborn child! And isn’t it our deepest inert animal memory, that leads us to do that? The Re-membering of the ancient She Bear, that was our Goddess and guide through life and growth and child birth, and later deeep into the cave for initiations and later still unto death....
A little Bear was the very first one that was laid into my cradle. I was 3 days old.. My father brought it. Its name was Petzi, for Meißter Pets the fable name for the Bear Spirit of Central Europe. Only much later I learned about the mighty Russian Medved and our own VERY SACRED Ee’ren Adik and his Powers.
By then I had many Bears and my Rabbit and a Cat and I knew all the Spirits they represented and that I should know their Medicine names but never speak them.....
Now I could list and write about all the Animal spirits on this card and where the Cave drawing is found and all that....
But first - what is that white line going down behind Owl’s second primary? Chesca was an accomplished artist, why did she not show the dept perceptions in this card? where the so called cloak (that i do not even see) ends and where the surrounding forest begins.
to me this is the line - or bette the very veil between the worlds with the spirit world on one side and the tangible everyday world on the other, beginning just behind the walking staff. the aid of motion. My father had such a mighty staff to shamanise with. Complete with snake skins, Medicine bag and his bells, 7 of them affixed on the top, just below the large quartz crystal with the Owl and Magpie feathers. With this staff he thumped out his trance rhythms. He did not use a drum like me.
I wonder, what happened to his staff. after I got out of the orphanage to live with my mother in a supposedly ordinary and righteous christian way I never saw it again and it was not in his home when he died. Knowing him, he saw to it that it was returned to Nature, probably put somewhere near the poplars at N.’s farm....
Owl was important to him too. It was not his main Miahanit, that was Lynx and Magpie, but he would not drive a car, if it did not have an Owl figure/ symbol in it.

On the other side of the veil there is yet another none ordinary world with the Tree and a rather strange well/ pool and its horned guardian, next to whom I recognize a drum, much like my Moropa drum.
This pool reminds me of one just like it that I art times visit and consult in the Upper World of my shamanic realm . It is a vision Pool. I go there and looooook and what I need to see will well up. And ifff i do not watch out I will get sucked into whatever that is and visceral and emotionally experience that. sometimes i dive into it at will, to find out about the well of feelings of my client to better understand their dilemmas and serve their needs. At the well sometimes I meet Upper realm Guides - even guides of the client.... It is a deeply magical and Sacred place ....
On this card however I again miss the depts. and dimensions in the artwork. all is on one plane. Is that intentional, to show the one dimensionality of stage 2 trance images or is this a very early painting from Chesca????
To enter deeper into this image I enlarged it to fill the whole screen. It is Green in green. All is one. All is one dimension? All is on one level!
The face of the woman: Her eye is as green as the surroundings She sees this, iffff indeed she is a human or an anthropomorphic Spirit and not just a mask; if indeed it is an eye I am looking at, and not the hollow face mask of a human. Being hollow , a hollow bone however is the only way to be a Seer. I know that from experience. Only if I become empty, a Shell, a hollow
bone/ conduit for the Energy to flow through unhindered, only then can I “See”
Then however the Owl, my Guide is riding me and directing my vision to where it needs to go....

This is one of my favourite cards. It came up as a daily draw today and I started looking more closely. The Owl is the key, overwhelming image in this card, she stares out at me with a keen, piercing gaze which can see deep within me and through me yet she is benign and welcoming at the same time.

She wraps herself around the 'seer', bringing her influence to bear and becoming the sight of the one who looses herself in the green wood.

The owl links to all the other spirits on the cloak, connecting with them through and for the person wearing the cloak. Together they form the bridge but only when deep in the silence of the green wood which correlates to the silent, inner realm which we need to access in order to 'see' that which is usually hidden.

The other prominent part of the image for me is the light on the top of the staff. If a staff is a symbol of authority, wisdom, support etc then the light atop of this seems to suggest the clarity of vision which comes from experience and inner seeking. The light can be used as a focus to counter distractions but again, it is the wisdom from the experience of doing (suggested by the staff) which often allows us to drop into that focus at will.

The whole card has a stillness and authority to it which is both earned through experience and gained through collaboration with the spirits. Both seem necessary as well as the fortitude to leave the worldly distractions behind.