About a wicked pack of cards

I received my pack of Nicoletta Ceccoli Tarot months ago, in November, a perfect month for this melancholic deck, but it took me some weeks to connect with it.  One of the factor that  immediately attracted me  was the presence of weird creatures, half animal and half poppets, or endowed of a human face on a serpentine, scaly body.  Yet in a second moment I had the vague impression of hostility and unfriendliness. Though all the human figures in this deck are female, little adolescents, sometimes with their eyes closed as if dreaming or looking for an inner vision of the world outside, we have not to be mislead by this "girlish" atmosphere: these cards are, as many tarots with a genuine faery element, only apparently sweet, nice, childlike. Or better they are dreamy and childlike if you accept that childhood can be cruel, sad, full of an inexplicable longing for a place or a state you have never really known. Mainly based on the classic Raider Waite system, the chosen images have also a life of their own, a symbolism that asks you to read them intuitively, travelling back in memories to find the episode they resemble. Hence the dreamy attribute of the deck is precisely its capacity to change you in one of your former selves - younger, full of desires and capricious. The cards bring you to a land filled of imaginary friends and of comfortable shelters which  may easily turn into traps. What do I mean?

Take for example The World. The sense of wholeness, of attained results and the joy of new beginnings are here transformed in a realm protected by a glass globe: it is enchanted as a snowy winter night, but also closed in itself. To start again and experience different paths you will have to break the transparent glass. So a protection becomes a prison, the homely feeling at the end of a journey a trigger to act again, finding the capacity to destroy, break, forget what you have reached. Is this not the engine of human life? The disquieting emotion at the core of ourselves can never be completely soothed, but brings us to be in need of different, unexpected, patterns to better appreciate what we already have. 

Yet there are also images infused of peace, like the Knave of Wands. This a card about the solemn patience of learning, growing roots through a bush of roses and hair and flowers in the air. It seems to suggest: be quiet and remember that magic is first of all a silent thing. Everything that comes after can be accepted. 

Otherwise The Moon re-elaborates all the ambiguity of the Major Arcana, its untrustworthy though compelling magic, the profound knowledge that in spite of our effort to describe, sing, attract the world of the moon, it remains always a step ahead, on the border between an unsolvable mystery and a delusive truth. Or the symbiotic relation that links both the twins embracing each other in the Two of Cups and the girl and the swan together on a sofa in the Nine of Disks. While the overall meaning of these cards is positive, in the first one love, the meeting of a complementary soul, is suggested by the passage through an invisible mirror to touch the other being so similar to us. In the second one the pet and the girl might change one into the other in a moment, as in a fairy-tale of secrets. 

Creepy, unusual, moving; wicked, wistful, playful: these are some more adjectives I could attribute to the deck, inhabited by animal helpers, animated toys, vegetables and candies, all the voices that echoed in our heads, like familiar nightmares or alluring promises. 

Spellworking

Druidcraft Tarot   

Yesterday I've started an intuitive tarot workshop at my   mother's place: two lessons of three hours for  a maximum of    eight  participants. We ended up being eight women of different ages looking     at  the Major Arcana, describing images and feelings and trying  to write down some notes. Eight women, eight witches, eight  human beings, everyone with her own experience of love,  loss, gratitude, pain, hope, silence, rage, expectation.  Curiously enough, when I asked them to choose   and pick up a  card each in order to create a story, all male triumphs, except  the Hermit, were discarded. 

 And honestly as someone who goes searching in the dark,    bringing a small lantern - a personal light, a thirst for inner  knowledge -, I hardly see the Hermit as primarily male: he is   everyone who consciously walks on a path outside the maps. 

The Merlin Tarot

I bought this deck months ago, on ebay, because it's quite difficult to find it these days. Designed by R.J. Stewart and illustrated by Miranda Gray in 1988, it is based on the life and prophecies of Merlin as narrated by the  medieval historian Geoffrey of Monmouth.

This is a pip deck and hence the presence of numbers and the importance of numerology instead of the suggestive power of images might make it less appealing.

Also it strongly differs from traditional decks.  First of all three cards have been renamed: The Guardian (The Devil); The Innocent (The Hierophant) and the Universe (The World); and the order of the Major Arcana is a completely new one, reflecting the universe as conceptualized by Merlin. The 22 Arcana has been divided in seven groups of three cards - Worlds, Wheels, Enlighteners, Liberators, Redeemers, Givers, Sharers - plus the Universe as One Manifest Reality. 

To make an example, the first group is formed by The Moon, The Sun, The Star as the three worlds of experience and knowledge. 

Tarot readings

Next week I'm going to read for a stranger and it will be the first time after years. I came back to read tarot for others months ago, but they were friends or people I know in some degrees.
When I received the call I felt like I had to advise her: "Tarot is not mainly divination... I'm not going to predict your future... It is more on possibilities, attitudes, other perspectives", but she told me that this is exactly what she is looking for. So, fine - I enjoy reading for other people as much as I do for myself.

Fairy Lights Tarot Review

The Fairy Lights Tarot by Lucia Mattioli, published by Lo Scarabeo is surely one of my favourite decks. I bought it at the end of July and one of the first things I did was going into the woods to sit among the fir trees, and admire its fabolous images.

The fairy lights painted on every card give substance to the shadows and revelations of a true faery realm, where memory and dreams are deeply entwined with either a disquieting or an enchanted atmosphere: the fairy-figures are sometimes diminutive beings, but closer to a world of insects and bees than to one of gentle-looking, harmless Victorian creatures. Male and female characters are equally represented; merfolk, inhabitants of nocturnal streams (as in the Star) and lakes, of rocky lands, prairies and meadows, are mingled with a variety of animals from the white bear in the Strength card, to the pigs under a tree of silver apples in the Five of Swords. Though the deck symbolism is mainly traditional, the artist has clearly developed a very personal and consistent vision that shows some significant differences from the Rider Waite meanings.

Aengus, The Fool

Lucia Mattioli, Fairy Lights Tarot

 What's better than a post about The Fool, to begin my tarot blog?
Tarot is a journey and one that always make me think first of a poem by William Butler Yeats, The Song of Wandering Aengus, published in the book The Wind Among the Reeds (1889).

Here the protagonist, Aengus, is either the Irish god of love or the Fool, starting his travel through the hazelwood of knowledge and self-discovery. What he will find there is a peculiar kind of love: he will meet his heart's desire, his opposite and then he will have to pursue her in order to be a full person - the individual that truly finds and touches his own soul through the search for the loved and long dreamed other. The innocence of the Fool/Aengus is enlightened by the fire of imagination first, then from love, seen as the energy of revelation. The final image showing the apple trees of Sun and Moon, represents the marriage of the opposites, but it also can be read as a hint to the wonderful western garden of the Hesperides of Greek mythology, where the golden apples of immortality grow. Maybe immortality is just this gift: the full experience of one's soul.