Ironwing Tarot: The Magician

[Mi-Shell]

The Magician:
To me, this card is the most evocative one in the deck.
For a long time I pondered if I should dare and write a little as to why.
Let me try:
Most of you know, that I was raised and have always lived within a shamanistic worldview and that not only my artwork reflects that but that I work as a shaman in my community.... (read more about that in the Teaching tent...)
Now this card:
I KNOW, what it is like, feeeeels like to be that being depicted here.
I was exactly that in more than one occasion and will be so again- iffff I am not so right now- to a certain extend......
(sitting - right now at the keyboard, bringing these words to “paper” is the part that alienates - feels “different” from the archetype on the card.....
Can’t explain it better....)
The little long haired girl in the bottom of the card = me: little, ordinary, where I came from... AND the 4 elements that shaped me into what I am now:
Earth = my connection to Mother Earth and all my relations = animals, plants, rocks and the sacred interconectedness of it all
Fire: the torture and pain that forged me, burst my mind/ soul open to perceive visions
Water: The water of tears, of love and healing I received from my teachers, when I started to study the shamanic path as well as the waters of emotion flowing freely from me towards my clients as Born of Water opens the gates, lets the sacred flow cleanse and heal - -once me, now them.........
Air: Sacred breath, sacred void through which to fall, to rise, to tumble to fly as my Miahanit arrives to guide me towards yet another vision.

: The right side of the person on the card. = The “Woman in the Mirror”
The tonal = mundane everyday ordinary me, that sits here, writing this...
The one the others see, when they look at me on everyday occasions, and also during ceremonies, during sacred ritual --> what they see: A calm and collected woman in an exotic outfit holding a shell with smudge ( bedded in sacred Garnet sands ) - or a drum or whatever the ritual requires, invoking the directions, praying, chanting doing healing work or......?
The other half; the left side = the Nagual the ecstatic trance that swept me away while doing the above........
What I feeeeel like while doing the ritual, the praying the chanting, trying to hold on to my tonal parameters, to “stay here“, lock knees in, so not to stumble and fall or while the floor beneath me opens up or the breeze sweeps me up into the trees. To continue the ritual in spite of being in full theta trance.....
... I seeeee who is sick, where the cancer cells are stuck to the backbone of that lady in yellow... that N.’s leg hurts from an old injury, feel the pain of loss of a loved one in a person behind me. .....
But the prayer goes on and the reporter takes a nice picture of it all......
The observer seeing the woman in the mirror.....
In the card the little person above the shaman’s split open head is the voice of experience: The one that knows where the parameters are, that anchor me in the middle of both.... .....trance and ritual --what comes acros as a performance to the observer,
The voice of experience knows all of this and that I will be just fine --- as long as nobody comes over and touches me.....
Then the shaking would start and scare the living daylight out of EVERYONE!
It also is the one that is aware, that whatever happens, P., my DH, is there and will prevent anyone from touching me until it is save, until the trance subsides........

 

[Mi-Shell]

The Trance of the Water Dancer:

I got the Ironwing deck as a Winter Solstice present in 2006.
As mentioned, the Magician immediately felt like me!
When I loooked at the other cards I could not believe my eyes!
I was taken back to a day 10 month prior.....
I had to put them away- to catch my breath!


Here is why:
Please lay out the Magician, then next the Ore of Coils, then the 8 of Coils, then the Gatemaker of Coils, then the Shaman of Coils, then the Tower.
Read the vision following the images.......


The Trance of the Water Dancer:

It was in February 2005 in Orillia on a gathering called “For the Love of Water” a gathering to pray for clean drinking water for the town, the lakes that surround it and the nearby reservation and also to introduce the Water Crystal teachings from Masaru Emoto.
I was asked to do the opening ritual and prayers, lead a drum circle and do the closing ritual....
So there I was, first doing Invocation Prayers to the 6 directions (stream of consciousness) holding and drumming on the Water Drum from the medicine Bundle I am the keeper of...
The I grabed my large abaloney shell and smudged ; first the 6 directions and then standing in the middle of the room the participants come up one by one to either get smudged of do it themselves.....
It is a very sacred, quiet reverent time.....


Then, slowly, I saw the smudging shell “wafer” like liquid in the heat and the smoke emerging from it turned red like blood, the Life Blood of the Earth boiling and bubbling and then leaking over the rim of the shell and down onto the floor, flooding it, touching EVERYONE present, flooding the room, higher and higher and finally bursting out of its confinement and flooding out across the frozen lake, staining the snow red and on, into infinity.....
Now = loooook at the ace od coils!
THAT'S what it looooed like!
Whatever was left of my consciousness stared into the shell with a mixture of amazement and horrror. The shell felt fluid, like a slippery jellyfish- and proceeded to transform into one, engulfing my mortal body and dragging me out into the blood-red sea, there changing into an enormous Manta Ray, like the one I had seen years ago on the beach in Tulum, Mexico.
Finally we surfaced somewhere: There were cypress trees and frogs and mangroves, large fish and all kinds of birds everywhere. I remember franticly looooking for an Owl but only seeing a flock of Snowy Egrets that made up the vanguard of a mysterious being that now floated towards me in the light of a setting sun then turned the scenery from green and verdant to yellowish red.
“You ask for water!?” transmitted the being none verbally, spewing bubbles... “do you realize what you ask for??”
The being changed colour and shape constantly, becoming more and more like a huge skull.
"Water will come, water will clean the land, water will drive you through fire and pain!"
Huuuuge eyes were now loooking at me and inside them I saw huuuuge waves crashing onto the shore, sweeping everything away, flooding the land and the people’s houses, changing them to underwater dwellings overgrown with huge seaweed. Out of that rose huuuuge towering tree trunks that changed to columns of fire, igniting me and dragging me with them upward, cooling down into rocky domes surrounded by fire that changed ito large glass houses standing in the middle of the bloody snow on the lake , that then turned back to sheer white and I was back in the room still holding up the smudging shell while the participants of the ceremony walked by one after the other to smudge themselves........

I was shaking, realizing fully, that we are calling for clean water, but the Waters of Mother Earth, once being called upon, also have the Power to cleanse us from this earth; Global warming will bring rising water levels , cities will submerge, there will be more hurricanes and floods....

 

[Milfoil]

I can see why this card's image so embodies what you saw, not only as your own unique spiritual journey but also with regards to the 'clean water' vision.

The card to me, speaks of balance, the sort of balancing act that the magician does keeping all the elements in harmony. When we ask for more of one thing, are we not also needing to balance something and ask for less of something else?

I'm just musing here but this card suggests a capacity, a capability coming from that power which glows within the very centre of our being..

 

[Wendywu]

The Magician (The Ironwing)

This card clearly shows two contrasting sides to the Magician. There is the calm, controlled aspect of her nature and then there is the wild, fierce persona. Dancing in between the two is her Inner Self – her True Self. For me this shows that it’s OK to have different aspects of oneself, as long as I can “dance” between them as I please. I do not want to be at their whim.

I find the things she is holding fascinating. She has an iron bowl (beautifully forged) filled with water. It holds so much water that it slops out of the bowl. In this deck we are told that water is the life-renewer and a giver of life. Water ties up with love and emotion, so this Magician is overflowing with love which she is happy to share.

Her other hand holds a forged iron magical staff (or small fire basket depending on your point of view) and spreads magic (or light) around her.
Air in this card is a symbolised by the pod knife at the Magician’s waist – and therefore hers to take up and put down as she chooses.
Earth in this card is symbolised by the garnet crystals that spill from the pomegranate bell. Garnets come in many forms (see attached image for one that resembles the seeds of the pomegranate), and has many attributes amongst which are its ability to bring courage and hope, and to turn crisis into challenge. It also calms emotional distress and helps in the controlled rise of kundalini energy. I see this as a more than suitable crystal for a Magician – it calms, it soothes, it inspires and yet it brings wild energy.

The pomegranate bell that the crystals falls from is also interesting. Extracted from the fruit the arils (little seeds in jelly) look exactly like garnets – see image. These arils are prepared and used in a wide variety of cooking styles including sweet, sour and hot.

In Ayurvedic medicine pomegranate has been used for remedies for thousands of years and is being increasingly investigated by Western medical researchers. It also has great and historic symbolism in many cultures.
Researching the pomegranate I was overwhelmed with uses, symbology and occurrences in a great many cultures for widely differing purposes. I have been caused to think of pomegranates very differently than I did previously. I now see that a pomegranate bell forged out of iron, with garnets spilling from it is hugely apt worldwide and is a deep set of symbols used to represent elemental Earth in the card.

For fire and water I look principally to the image of the figure standing on a hill top. She has climbed steadily along the path to reach this position (and here it is good to compare her with the figure seen in The Lodestone (Fool), which can be seen in my avatar). On one side of her is fire and on the other rain. She is going to have to find a way to control or reconcile those differing forces so that neither is lost. If she let the two sides mingle uncontrolled, all she’d get is a pressure cooker that would (a) put the fire out, (b) turn the water to steam and (c) blow the top off the chamber…. Since this has not happened it is obvious that she has learned to master and control these forces – this figure is also the true Magician – another aspect of the inner heart of the main figure.

The dancer at the top of the card takes the Magician between this world and the shamanic Otherworld. This is a mental Journey. Yes, the heart and spirit are involved but the Journey is accomplished by dropping into theta trance and following the resulting visions, and this is essentially a mental thing.

The magic pouring from the small lantern (staff) interests me – as a result of her Journeying the Magician can effect magical change. Magic is the deliberate change in circumstances caused by an act of Will. So – Journeying, and using the control required to Journey, enhances the Magician’s ability to focus and thereby she is able to alter circumstances.

To Journey the Magician must control her “outer” nature so that she can reach her Other Self. To do this she needs focus, self control and discipline, and she needs to be able to communicate what her Other Self brings back. If she Journeys for someone she must be able to pass on what she learns in the Otherworld or the change in that person cannot begin to be effected. In some ways the Magician must manipulate her clients (and although this is a word with some bad connotations it is apt here) so that they, as far as possible, see what she saw and learn what her vision means for them. Whilst Journeying, and in trance, the shamanic Magician is a focus for her own imagination, her own contact with Spirit and however she reaches the Otherworld (through dance, drum or both) she must make contact with its inhabitants (whatever form they might take) or her Journey fails in its purpose.

And it is these two personas that the shamanic Magician in this deck carries within her, must reconcile and must learn to control to some extent.

It is a fascinating “take” on the Magician in general – her control/harnessing of the powers of the elements, her ability to communicate, translate and illuminate. At the same time we are talking about someone who is necessarily less than open. A part of the Magician always remains hidden.

Sometimes, in some readings, the hidden aspects of this figure of power could cause this to be a dark card to read but in any reading either of the personas could be at the forefront. A manipulator, a quick talker, hidden personality – explosive on the inside – with all the elements and elemental power at her fingertips – this could indeed be a difficult yet powerful card. At other times it would be Magical and indicative of all that is truly wonderful in the shamanic world.

Part of its appeal is in how very many ways it can be read – if reading for the non shamanic a moment’s reflection on the two personas shown in the card reveals many possibilities available to the reader.

I left it a few days before continuing so that, as far as possible, the study I had done would fade from the forefront of my mind.

And what strikes me, just looking at her is that she looks so incredibly Victorian – high collar, long sleeves, neat hair, long skirt …. And then you look closer. And you realise that whatever she looks like, her heart is wild and free. And I don’t mean free to screw around, get pissed and gradually lose her way and heart. Instead she is free to go where Spirit leads, to hear what is taught and laugh with true joy and the things that sometimes, only she can see or hear.

Ignoring the specifics of what I see, this card is as comforting as Grandma’s lap and as unsettling as fingernails on a chalkboard. So much fire, fire and water, and so much magic being shared.

She is the walker between worlds. She is every shaman who ever lived or ever will live. And she is me, taking my babysteps on the shamanic path and learning more of what’s worthwhile with these steps than in long years of formal education.

I know there is so much more to this card than I have found but that’s OK – I’m in no hurry and the Ironwing and I are happy together.

 

[fairybugg]

Magician

This child (at the bottom) must past through a tunnel that looks an awful lot like a birth canal. In her experince she is burned and rained on and the wind whips her around. She is at the mercy of the elements. But if she can make it through the tunnel she will become the Magician. The one who can create fire and control water.
I feel drawn to this card-like a moth to a flame.
I feel like the small child in this card. Ragged and tired. Arms open, approching the teacher with questions. I feel like a perpetual beginner. I have been tempered by rain and fire but there is still so much to learn. I am a willing student, just afraid of the price for learning.