Marseilles Seekers Thread (Second Exercise)

So you speak of the sacred space, the builders of the cathedrals.

edit inserted here(so now I'm wondering about what poets and image makers share, what do the poets share with cathedral builders, who are making us sacred space. Who is actually making us the sacred space...we remake ourselves every time we earn a new understanding of an image, a card, a sequence.)

The Builders created the house or form that the sacred space takes.
We as readers hold sacred space, really ground the sacred space for the person who has the question, and the Tarot is the Church, if I take your meaning correctly.

Now you say each poem, which is each sequence of cards is wanting/waiting to be turned into metaphor and the question gives us the context.

You know how children play that finger play game-

Here is the church
Here is the steeple
Open the doors
And see all the people....

and each line is a different movement of the fingers, creating each thing.

Well I suddenly thought, Where is the prayer?

If you were to break a reading down, in keeping with your ideas about cathedrals (and not every church is a cathedral, but every cathedral is a church. I have no idea if that really means anything here.) I think it means not every reader is creating truly sacred space? I hate to say that, but really we don't come to the table as equals. When I play in your sandbox it looks like a cathedral, I'm not sure what my sandbox looks like....it is still under construction!

I don't know what I am asking.

But I thought, can each piece of the map be about the aspects of the cathedral AND what happens in the cathedral. The prayer, the mass, the communion, the incense....and so forth. (I'm not catholic, I was raised Lutheran.)

Because then, in the context of the reading, we are asking for something to happen...we ask a question, but what if in the space of the reading, when we close a loop, and see what a court or trump is looking at outside the three cards we place, if that is the answer to the prayer? Which then makes the different kinds of sequences carry a different energy or tone or perhaps this is the music, a different quality?

In that sense, do we make the leap now and become somehow...god like ourselves? I don't want to scandalize anyone, but we seem to be co-creating with God...we seek to not just ask or request, but at some point we move into a creative and more fecund position, we actually begin to imagine solutions and we give advice.

In this context, the prayer is somehow answered...we have helped the one who comes to us with a problem...and sometimes we help them to reveal the solution they can live with. Like a priest? Or perhaps something more?

Very Cool Satori. I just printed myself out a copy!

Hooked

Yes, thank you...I printed it out too.
Great shifting you did there.

Thanks peeps!

I've been thinking about doing this ever since we started...post after post had such revelations. I am very attracted to this system, but really it is when EE talks about how he sees the rhymes that I get the most out of it all. So today I sat down and started to go through the thread...post by post...and pulled out stuff and put it all into a document. And then I edited it and voila!

It is a beautiful system. Suddenly with the expansion/contraction idea the pips make sense in a whole new way. I really have a very strong connection to this method. I love it. I am a writer, a poet, and I have been a huge fan of architecture, so to see what Enrique is doing here, is very original and creative. And appealing to me. It all feels very familiar...which is weird. I don't have deja vu, but it is as if I know this material....that I learned it before. Even though it is all new to me.

Satori said:

I don't have deja vu, but it is as if I know this material....that I learned it before. Even though it is all new to me.

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Thank you very, very much - thanks to all of you here .
I´m reading along these exercises right from the start and do them on my own as well...
As you described it, Satori, it echos to me. Reading the cards this way feels like "coming home"...


Now I´ll disappear again and read your great insights, glad you share them with us -

Phine

Cheers Satori! Thank you for that list - I've printed it too.

Bee

I've printed it out, too.

Printed a few thing from here - thank you!

Thanks, Satori. I've printed it out, too. I'm not doing the exercises here, but I'm doing them on my blog, and saving and printing out practically everything EE says. I feel like I've "come home" in a way, too, with this reading method. I first got into tarot when I was looking for storytelling inspiration, and tarot readings may be the closest I'll ever come to writing stories or poems, but there's something about it that fulfills a need!

~Mosaica

Thanks!

Satori,

Thanks you very much for all that!

I have come to understand that I have a non-Western approach to teaching. I see all what is there to be known about something as a circle. We stand at the center of the circle. Western education would stretch the circle into a straight horizontal line, so we can go from the beginning to the end. I prefer to keep the circle as a circle. We are all standing at the center, and each one of you will pull toward one section of the circle, or another one. That’s the section we will talk about. That way we go around, uncovering the whole circle, based on your inclinations, interest, and feedback. But here is the thing: I am hoping that by uncovering one section of the circle here, and another one over there, you will find sections of it that I am not aware of. This way, we will realize that the circle of what is there to be known about the tarot was, perhaps, bigger than what I had envisioned or anticipated.That way we all discover something.

In terms of guidelines, I would like to simplify further:

- Understand the tarot pack as a human-powered symbolic machine. As Kiefer said “symbols flow in all directions”. It exists in a constant state of randomness. All the cards are equally important for us, and all the cards are there to be seen in the same way.

- Look for messages, not for meanings.

- Place cards in simple/single rows.

- Look for the whole rhythm. It can be either rising, falling, of constant. This will give you the tendency about the situation. This way you will get immediately the feeling of things improving, deteriorating, or remaining as they are.

- Look at the whole sequence and try to define if it is expanding or contracting. This is specially useful when looking at the pips, and it will tell you how are things improving, deteriorating, or remaining constant. It will qualify the rhythm you saw.

- Look for eye rhymes and resonances. Eye rhymes are repetitions of similar shapes. Resonances are a dialog between images that can be conceptually related (death scythe and the Devils chains, for example). This will give you an idea of the details of what is happening, and also, of what the person could, or should, do.


In terms of the act of looking at the cards I would say that is basically it. It is very simple. I have tried to provide a conceptual context for this that has been nicely summarized by Satori in the previous posts. I am very thankful for that. I don’t think the idea of looking at the cards is mine, nor I think that anybody can claim ownership of that. The cards are there to be seen. What I have done is to borrow the model of poetry so we can understand the tarot. Since divinations plays such a little role in the Western world we need to borrow models from other activities so people can understand better what we do. I prefer the model of poetry because the other model commonly used is the model of therapy, and it doesn’t satisfies me, in that therapy is devoid of magic and the experience of the tarot isn’t. The only thing I would like to add, not as pointers nor guidelines, but as a personal comment about why I feel the need of working with the cards in this way, is this:

I know many cold readers. I study their techniques because you can't understand perception without understanding deception. It is a fact that they can be as successful at doing readings as any serious reader. Truth is, you won't know the difference. I will go even further and say that many readers who think of themselves as the real deal are doing cold reading without being aware of it! Understanding this has been a very sobering thought for me. In the right context, whatever you say to a person will be meaningful. Those who think that they get profound readings because they follow to the letter an ancient tradition are deceiving themselves. The depth of your tradition is not the source of success in a reading, but your client's willingness to go along with the process and make use, and sense, of your words. This is why I find divination so interesting. I see it as a celebration of our capacity to find meaning in everything, not because everything is meaningful, but because we are meaning-full. This also makes me very skeptical of any 'truth' no matter how classical it may be. Human beings are awe-inspiring and awe inspired. Myths are truthful as long as they are taken as myths, models to grasp the unthinkable. But as soon as we insist on taking myths as literal fact they become a lie.

Early on in my studies I became aware of something: I can't cheat. Even worse, I can't even play along. I can't keep quiet, and if I happen to spot the man behind the curtain, I have to tell everybody. But what I love about this is that, just as happens in the story of The Wizard of Oz, it is when we call the wizard's bluff that we finally find true magic. You have probably already noticed that The Wizard of Oz is a manual of how magic really works. If you have no heart but I give you a clock to wear on your chest you will be able to hear a pulse, and if you can hear a pulse, your unconscious will respond to its beat as if it comes from your actual heart. It makes no difference if you are consciously aware of the clock being an external machine. As soon as you accept the clock as symbol, you have a heart.

Since I can't cheat, I can't be cold reader. I can't just pretend that I am reading the cards while noticing that my client's fingernails are dirty and concluding that, since his hand are also calloused and he brought a bag from a supermarket with him in the middle of the afternoon, he must be a self-employed mechanic who wants to hear about winning some money at the races to get out of a debt. If he came asking me to look at the cards I feel the honest thing to do is actually look at the cards. Here I have another problem. I can't wait for an angel with a wireless connection to whisper some words of wisdom to me because I have never projected such angel in the world. I have no imaginary friends. Even worse still, I can't draw some colorful mythology from astrology, Neoplatonism or the Cabala to give him some taste of sacred wisdom. I cannot trust that the truth will come from an ancient system envisioned by men who thought they found the connection about all the things in the universe, because I know that connexions only exist where we find them, and we find them whenever we want to find them. We actually get high from finding them!

So, I have only one option: I have to tell him what I see in the cards in that moment, because divination is about the moment. The moment we both sit together to enact a ritual whose purpose is to find insight about some issue, vital or seemingly trivial, that my client is concerned about. Within the context of the ritual everything I say is meaningful because my client will give my words his full attention, and his mind will tailor them to a reality only he knows, this is, his mind will make my words useful. So, at that point, I will be equally useful if I gave him a stock script that will fit every person in the planet, by following the Golden Dawn meanings of the cards, or by reciting some of Marylin Manson's lyrics. But that is not what my client is asking me to do. He is asking me to look at the tarot. Therefore I can only look at the cards searching for patterns, without ever deceiving myself and thinking that someone left these patterns there 500 years ago for me to find. No. These patterns are the product of chance, but since I detected them in the moment of divination, they are meaningful for my client. More important, since I am not making anything up, but truly looking at the cards, I will be able to point to my client what I am seeing, and he will be able to see it for himself. My client will look at the cards, and although his conscious mind will know that he is looking at some pieces of cardboard, his unconscious will take the images to be as true as the images of a dream, a premonition, or a memory. Magic will happen even if I have my sleeves rolled-up, because we are magical creatures, powerful enough to turn a clock into a heart.


I understand if some of you find this ideas problematic, and I don’t think you need to agree with them to find the eye rhymes useful. I was thinking this days that, for some of our family and friends, telling them “I want to be a tarot reader” may be almost as shocking as saying “I want to be a professional stripper”. I have nothing against strippers, but I think you get what I am saying. The public image of the tarot has been so heavily damaged by centuries of ignorance and conmanship, that it has become imperative to share the beauty of tarot with others, and the best way to do this is by experiencing that beauty ourselves within a set of coordinates that can actually be shared.



Now I have to go. My kids have a karate test to attend. I will be posting more, later.

Thanks again Satori, and all the best to you all!

EE

EnriqueEnriquez said:

Connexions only exist where we find them, and we find them whenever we want to find them. We actually get high from finding them!

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"High" is a good way to describe the way I feel about the Marseille and eye rhymes, all these exercises, and this whole post that you just wrote, EE. Thanks!

Mosaica