A Tarot Spread in the Woods

I went for a walk into the forest a few days ago. This is a fir wood in the top of the mountains: there is the old, decayed stone-hut and I use to sit on a slab on the ground to think and enjoy the shadowy sunlight after a walk of about one hour to reach the place. My dog often comes with me. We don't live together, but I can say that our bond is special thanks to these wanderings in the woods, when I go to visit him and that part of my family. I had with me the Wildwood Tarot, an appropriate deck to the occasion and I drew three cards for a simple spread that might be read as either PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE or MIND, BODY, SPIRIT. I place the Body in the middle because it is the actual connector between Mind and Spirit. I'm in a moment of strong personal transformation and the deck answered me in a very curious, fitting way. Three "watery" cards came out, representing respectively a large, naturally enclosed water; water in a human container, resembling a liquid mirror; wild, streaming water.

The Kingfisher flies free on the clear pool, his eye pierce the surface and reach everything hidden below - there is no fear of truth, but a thirst for it. The Seer can close her eyes sensing the dark water below and achieving her vision. This is not the universal pool of the Kingfisher, but a very personal water - the revelation of one's own soul with its feelings and projections: something that needs to be recollected in solitude. The next step is letting go. The Otter is a joyful messenger of childhood, the possibility of jumping again inside flowing, powerful waters, falling in love with life. This is not a childish attitude, but the capacity to be faithful to intense and long-nurtured wishes - something that can happen only after having considered and contextualized one's path in the world. Truth, focus, discernment are the necessary premises to the immersion into the next stage of existence. They come subtle, vital, refreshing and also difficult to grab like water itself.
A calm pool, a mysterious water mirror, a fast, singing river that translate into these words - experience, learning, risk; or into these verbs - watch, feel, plunge.

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. 

Enchanted spaces

Last week I spent two days in London for a meeting. I lived in that incredible town several times during my past and it's good going back there sometimes: it's truly homecoming.
Also I especially like this town in Autumn: it seems to me that all the magic rising from the town's literature, landscapes, poetry, occult societies and mysteries I so much love is concentrated in this season:  it has always been Autumn the time of my several settlements in London and Autumn is probably the best time of the year for recollection - storing thoughts, feelings and memories while the world starts to vanish in coloured, withered leaves and crepuscular shadows.

The Green Woman, Wildwood Tarot

 On the 1st of October I went for a walk in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, it was a warm, bright day and I enjoyed staying there till closing time.
I walked by the pond and the Serpentine, meeting the usual hungry and scatterbrain squirrels, a magpie and a heron, geese, swans and coots and all the water birds inhabiting this place, and the many people strolling and talking all around. Hyde Park with the Rose Garden close to the main entrance, its lawns and the large paved pathway where you can find either people riding horses or skaters, is the world of the Empress, the great nurturer who allows things to grow, turning the elements into breathing beings, either animals or plants. It is a world filled of peace and creativity, where there's always space for every kind of personal expression and a lot of care is addressed to small details in order to complete a huge picture. Life is here determined by openness to the others and the ability to establish connections, between our roots and our blossoming heads. But then I had to stop for a moment before proceeding under the bridge where Hyde Park ends and the Kensington Gardens begins: a passage from voices to silence, from the outer to a special inner dimension. I'm now leaving the Empress for the realm of the High Priestess, the Seer, the Sorceress - I'm now leaving the sunny meadows for the enchanted wood.

Arthur Rackham

Arthur Rackham

Of course "my" Kensington Gardens means primarily Peter Pan. Not the harmless child represented by the famous statue, but the other one, the half-and-half, the tragic boy who escaped his human life flying away from the nursery only to discover, once arrived in the gardens, that he was no more a bird. The Peter Pan whose adventures in the Gardens, before reaching Neverland, were illustrated by Arthur Rackham, who captured the secret existence of trees and rushes of wind, lurking goblins and fairies. I'm always expecting to recognize creatures playing and laughing between the coloured leaves or to unmask some old log, some mane of entangled twigs, revealing a grotesque figure who is sitting and murmuring there.

The Seer, Wildwood Tarot

Past the bridge the landscape changes. It becomes wilder, more private, calling for personal insight - the tamed nature of the park turns into a mirror for the soul and there is a lingering impression of some misty border dividing the town from a forest of witchery. The Gardens are the other in myself - child, crone, animal, man, woman, unnamed beast -, the secrets of the High Priestess who keeps in herself the visions from different worlds, the knowledge that true time is a circular movement, where childhood and adulthood, birth and death are clasped together. Every squirrel or bird approaching me for food is now a messenger. Will I ever understand completely the message? Will I be too much afraid or too much confident?

I open the book of the Priestess, a book of fairy-tales with open ends, to find among my ancestors, my magical helpers, the figures of my fantasy gathered in these meadows with their own truths, to remind me once more that experience is made of infinite levels of reality, infinite possibilities for symbols and perspectives. I'll never stop feeling like Wendy, coping with the process of growing up that means becoming more and more able to love, nurture, accept, as the Empress teaches, while drawing the forces to do so from that inner enchanted space where childhood with both its cruelty and its wonder is never forgot.

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. 

Foxes

Fox is one of my favourite animals, often mistreated by common judgement and represented in ancient fables as an anthropomorphized  sly figure.
I thought about its appearances in some of the tarot decks I own, starting from the Druid Animal Oracle, where it stands for cunning and diplomacy, but also for a wildness very close to the human environment - that is: a perfect place for imagination.

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.