Poet's Corner Knowledge Cards

[darwinia]

In my continuing search for fruitful tie-ins to tarot and oracle cards, I bought this deck in Chapters today.
http://shop.store.yahoo.com/pomegranate/k107.html

How fitting that the example on this page features Poe. <g>

Very plain cards but I thought, why not draw one of these with something else to augment a reading?

So let's say I drew a card with a quote from Walt Whitman's poem "O Captain! My Captain!" which according to the background information on the back of the card, was wriiten in homage to Abraham Lincoln in the year he was assassinated.

"Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead."

Could be a 10 of Swords card or an Emperor even. It might tie in nicely with (I pick at random from Froud's Faeries' Oracle) #61 G. Hobyah.

And he tells me that fears are imaginary and not part of the real world. Gee, tell that to Lincoln G.H. Oh, but then he goes on to compare imaginary fears to things we actually need to be cautious about (like assassin's bullets I presume.)

One thing though, when someone dies we DO actually become fearful. Fearful of being alone, or what lies ahead without our leader, so maybe that is the tie-in here? Or perhaps the letting go of old patterns much like the transformation of Death or the 10 of Swords?

You can see perhaps that it skews your imagination enough to render an odd kind of clarity to a reading.

I can hardly wait to get those illusions in Art cards.

[Tarot Sparrow]

Very interesting cards! Thanks for the link. I love Poe

[darwinia]

This innocent little deck, after randomly formulating a tie-in with Whitman and the Faeries' Oracle, has now caused me to change my signature on the forum and add a whopping 1040 page book called The Poetry of Pablo Neruda to my wish list.

If I ever get The Poetry of Petrarch, I'll have to examine what the faeries' think about his love poetry. Tied in of course with one of the Illusions in Art cards. I can examine a piece of art by Rene Magritte; Paul Simon's song Rene and Georgette Magritte and Their Dog After the War; and Gloominous Doom's outlook on surrealism and love.)

It never stops.

[darwinia]

I thought this was pretty good as a tarot archetype.

My Poet's Corner Knowledge Card for today is a fragment of writing by Sappho. Sappho was the aristocratic head of a renowned poetry school on the island of Lesbos, and rivaled Homer as a poet, earning her a nickname from Plato, no less, as "The Tenth Muse."

Many of her poems were meant to be sung in the Mixolydian mode she invented, but they only survive as fragments. (see end notes!)

"If I meet
You suddenly, I can't
speak--my tongue is broken;
a thin flame runs under
my skin; seeing nothing,
hearing only my ears
drumming, I drip with sweat;
trembling shakes my body
and I turn paler than
dry grass. . ."

Mmmmm, when you're good, you're good. I thought this was pricelessly evocative.

I first thought of the Lovers card with this, but because of the mention of the Muses and singing, I switched to The Mantegna Tarot and decided this poem was embodied by.....I am torn between Poetry, Music, Venus, and Mercury playing his Pied Piper flute.

The definition for poetry is "Purification. Reveal emotions in private." How apt for this body shaking blush and sweat. And yet Venus is for "Sensuality. Use sex without being a slave to it." Music is "Harmony. Attract friends; disorient enemies." And Mercury is just darn sexy and would make the hardest soul break into a sweat as they stare at his boots and hear that flute weaving its spell.

In the end I pick Poesia though, because she is playing a flute, and hidden in her clothes is her flaming skin. She pores water, that liquid of sensuality and emotion, while a globe of stars and hills rests at her feet. She sits on dry, pale grass by a fountain, her ears drumming the rhythm that her trembling hand feels through her reedy flute. Her eyes unseeing, her mouth speechless, she only feels, her legs spread wide.

Whew, well enough of that. Medieval study was not all Church and philosophy, and celestial spheres. Sappho indeed.

********

And for those of us who have no idea what Mixolydian Mode is, it seems to embody both scale and rhythm, used today for guitar, banjo, mandolin, blues, classical, but based on ancient modes. I don't know music, it is a door of mystery to me, but see what I learn with these odd decks of cards? http://www.pleasanthill.k12.or.us/Sc...ine_robin.html

[darwinia]

I refer to reclusiveness as "pulling a Pynchon" after author Thomas Pynchon's renowned reclusiveness. He is the Ultra Hermit.

Interestingly, my Poet's Corner card features a man I've never heard of named Robinson Jeffers. A social hermit if not a total one. Perhaps I shouldn't differentiate? The quote is from the poem "Boats in a Fog":

Sports and gallantries, the stage,
the arts, the antics of dancers,

The exuberant voices of music,

Have charm for children but lack
nobility; it is bitter earnestness

That makes beauty; the mind

Knows, grown adult.


I am convinced that people who foster their children in a climate of personal criticism and tyrannical suppression or discipline, contribute to the child's withdrawal from the real world and do them a major disservice. I was a child similar to that, we Hermits have a shadow side. Someone like Beatrix Potter, while not disciplined severely, was certainly suppressed in the fashion of Victorian times, to the point of inventing a fantasy world and language. That she found fame does not negate the crippling aspect of it. When I was eleven years-old I adopted a compulsive need to count the steps in my house; always nine and then again. Nine for The Hermit, a cosmic joke on me.

The Knowledge Cards editors say "By his life's end, Jeffers came to prefer the rocks and hawks to any human interaction." One of those who sense decline and the failure of the dream, who lose their faith in Man. He built his houses, much like my favourite illustrator Rockwell Kent. Like William Blake, he was before his time and is now beginning to be known better and praised. He found a personal mysticism or belief much like these other two men I so admire.

Is there not a subtle strangulation that takes place in the shadow side of The Hermit? I never considered that there was a shadow side to this until I viewed the Hermit card in Carolyn Myss's Archetype Cards. She says under shadow attributes: "Withdraws from society out of fear or negative judgments of others. Refusing to help those in need."

My favourite Hermit card and one that embodies my usual view of the spirit of this card, is the one from the Golden Tarot by Kat Black. It shows Saint Francis of Assisi in the forest with a deer, a quail, and a cat. "Take care not to become too detached from the world around you." Introversion, solitude, and an insidious withdrawal to shadows if you aren't aware.

Robinson Jeffers studied forestry. <g>

What is that Zen expression....."Wherever you go, there you are."