What is on the Cards – Tarot – V&A

September 7, 2025September 7, 2025 ~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

I first started looking into Tarot around 2001. At the time I was an academic in Physical Chemistry at Imperial College London. I was very busy and a part of my job involved considering the second order non linear susceptibility of surfaces and probing these with femtosecond laser pulses.

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It probably wasn’t on the cards that I would share these two interests. Needless to say I did not soap box about tarot to my colleagues, lead ballons and all that.

Last night YouTube suggested a short video from the V&A about tarot and the history thereof. I watched it and found out about Minchiate and subsequently Sicilian tarot. I also found out that you can request to examine and handle some of the collection. The video was well made and interesting.

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« Le minchiate est un jeu de cartes du début du XVIe siècle, originaire de Florence, en Italie, qui n’est quasiment plus joué depuis le XXe siècle. Très proche du tarot, mais plus complexe, il se caractérise par le nombre important d’atouts qu’il utilise : 40, là où le tarot n’en comprend généralement que 21, pour un total de 97 cartes. »

The V&A has a nice web page on the history of Tarot, click here.

In the past I was more often found across the road in the science museum where I, on occasion, explained various exhibits to a little person. Often I would attract a small crowd who pretended not to listen in to what I was saying. The science museum seemed more natural, home turf.

The idea of emailing the V&A collection room to ask to inspect tarot cards from my old Imperial address tickled my fancy. Would they note it and find it odd?

Anyway I have a PowerPoint slide pack course in which I relate tarot to the Kabbalah tree of life and the various paths thereupon, to the Toltec Jewels of Awareness and to the evolution of inherent and evolving awareness. If I remember correctly Théun used to say that it was the Toltecs who invented tarot as a means of communication under things like the catholic inquisition. Anyone who threatened the supremacy of the church was subject to torture and death. The church had a stake in keeping control and power and it burned others on stakes. Tarot being arcane could be hidden under a cover story from prying eyes.

I’ll wager that more people use tarot than second order non-linear hyperpolarizability tensors. Hyperpolarizability is more arcane than tarot.

Back then I looked in detail at much so-called occult literature with the skill set of someone who can read matrices, and spot patterns. I found a lot of the published work shoddy and inconsistent.

I have a weak notion, that I am probably uniquely placed to relate so-called occultism, Toltec, Tarot and Buddhism with the critical thinking of a once pukka scientist.

In the 1990s I never knew that tarot was on the cards for me, though I had started to use I Ching for divination and shamanic journeying to request guidance from the universe. The shaman’s drum and the optical parametric oscillator do not see natural bedfellows. Seemed pretty darned normal to me.

The history of things like tarot will always be largely the overt and exoteric because the esoteric and hidden, is not in the public domain.

I personally cannot get on with the more modern tarot decks, using the tarot de Marseilles almost all of the time. I don’t do cartomancy but allow the major arcana to add pictorial clues to whichever Jewel of Awareness is in play or needs to be used.

I do dream tarot cards from time to time. This may not be common.

Let me be clear occult as I use it means difficult to see, partially hidden from view and not the bleeding obvious. It has nothing to do with Satan nor any dark ritual magic.

There are enough evil people in the world who are successful in the ordinary socio-political and pecuniary sense. They don’t need upside down pentagrams and goat heads. They are just nasty evil selfish people.

I still don’t know what is on the cards for the rest of this year / life …

Some Bizarre Unlikely Sci-fi Espionage Film Plot – Dream Follow UP

July 12, 2025July 12, 2025 ~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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Shamanism is a spiritual practice that involves a practitioner (shaman) interacting with the spirit world through altered states of consciousness, such as trance. The goal of this is usually to direct spirits or spiritual energies into the physical world for the purpose of healing, divination, or to aid human beings in some other way.

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Beliefs and practices categorized as shamanic have attracted the interest of scholars from a variety of disciplines, including anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, religious studies scholars, philosophers, and psychologists. Hundreds of books and academic papers on the subject have been produced, with a peer-reviewed academic journal being devoted to the study of shamanism.

From Wikipedia

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I’ll postulate that you can’t make this shit up….

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Following on from this morning’s dream I do indeed have a shaman’s drum, a bodhrán, it is on the floor to my right between the paper shredder and the filing which contains vast amounts of medical paperwork and the stack of papers and patents which I used to file a quantum optics patent at the IPO in the UK. I did indeed “pass” a foundation course in Shamanics and have practiced self-same art from time to time.

One could argue that this is a strange quantum superposition state, someone with a passable knowledge of quantum as applied to molecules, non-linear optics and light, entangled with someone who does shamanic journeys, drumming and uses sage smudge sticks to clear spaces.

I suspect that this may qualify as a form of eccentricity.

As a basis for a film plot it already at tad unfeasible.

To add to this I was {in real life} a co-founder of a high power laser start-up company spun out of a top UK technology university. I “invented” a working extreme ultraviolet light source (EUV) prototype. I wrote the patent application. EUV lithography is the driver for the production of the top, most recent, semiconductor technologies and is (perhaps) behind the four trillion dollar valuation of AI leviathans. An EUV lithography kit from ASML is probably THE most complex commercial instrumentation currently planetarily on sale. It has a hefty price tag. Humanity is facing the AI – robotics – human computer interface transition. Maybe by surgery we will all be cyborgs. I am on my way, it seems, to being bionic.

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I kicked around at various top-end UK universities for a while and did my Ph.D. at the ultra-niche Royal Institution of Great Britain. From time to time I get surveillance dreams from people at the river house and Langley.

I identify as a retired gardener who lives in a very rural setting. We were kept awake by early harvest. The ivory towers and dreaming spires are a long way away. I look most like a hefty pikey prepper who, because of hip arthritis, walks like a duck. Why I would be under surveillance is a bit of a mystery.

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The dream suggests that they are using the very latest technology. Something I am unaware of.

Developing the plot all the spook agencies in “developed” countries will have some kind of a Quantum section and some kind of an AI interest. They will also be very interested in drones and robotics given what has been unfolding in Ukraine. There is always money in arms and defence. There may be blue-skies on the edge interest in the weird and the wonderful such as quantum telepathy. The interest in cryptography goes way back. I have been to Bletchley Park. Chronologically I could be a reincarnation of Alan Turing. If this were a film, he might be coming back to clear his name / seek revenge only to find himself immortalised on a bank note!! I am not he.

In the film the spooks would have cyber-psi-quant specialist units under top secret development. It would be quite advanced. There would be a psi-ops force perhaps monitoring me in the dream state. There may be psi-ops protection for senior eyes-only spooks in all agencies.

The dream suggests a very English quasi Fawlty Towers thrombie or thromby going on. I am the outsider kept at arm’s length and a kind of dirty secret.

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I am on a gardening leave far from the metropolis and its is power struggles and schemes.

For some reason I am being talked about in the hallowed corridors of academe. But at who’s behest?

In a film script someone might be sent to talk with me and the plot might evolve in bizarre and imaginative ways. There could even be a race between different agencies.

Somehow, I would be entangled back in to the outer world of techno. The trouble is I am, in reality, pretty much past anything like that. They would be a tad disappointed…

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This morning we were discussing preparing a list of things to do before I get operated on. The most obvious thing is clearing the drain down to the septic tank before the operation. This clogs every six months or so and we need it fixed late October. There is no way that I can lift the inspection cover and use plumber’s rods post-op. We need to get a wood delivery and I need to do some wood sizing with the axe and chain saw. I need to cut several months kindling

In all likelihood I will not hear much about my sleep apnoea test until I see the lung doctor next March. It does not seem urgent to me. There is plenty on my dance card. Unless she deems otherwise nothing will happen on that front until next year. I was thinking this morning that given how well I feel generally, apart form the hips, all this medical stuff seems like a massive overkill.

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I have no logical explanation for the dream this morning unless something truly bizarre and highly unlikely is actually transpiring across the channel….

Apnoea – British Academics – Full Moon Dream Snippets – 12-07-2025

July 12, 2025 ~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Last night I was wearing the apparatus to measure the sleep-state with a view to investigating sleep apnoea. The wrist based device was held in place with some medical elastic gauze as was a pulse oximeter on my left index finger. I had a nasal cannula and two microphones stuck to my chest. It was a warm night. I consciously avoided doing any meditative practice whilst wearing the gizmo. I sometimes do this meditation if I wake up during the night and am a tad bored.

On and off during the night and whilst asleep I was consciously aware of the gizmo attached to my body, in particular the spring on the oximeter was clamping down on my finger. I had the vision of ET with his illuminated finger from time to time. The thought form, “ ’phone home, ‘phone home” amusingly popped into mind. A bit like a Rick Astley song.

I started to get strong visual images of various members of British Science Academia with whom I have had past interactions. None of these physical plane interactions were more recent than a decade. There were “chemists” from Imperial College London, Oxford University and Durham University. Some of the Oxford people were from way-way back pertaining to the molecular spectroscopy community I once interacted with in the last century. There were some from the van der Waals crowd.

Next, I was at some kind of camp in the woods with undergraduate students in wooden chalets. One of whom was very concerned about a patent she had in Germany. I gathered the students around all of whom had invested in her. I said we will call the European Patent Office in Munich the next morning. In the meantime I would take them out for a fire-pit and shamanic drumming in the woods. I picked up my shaman’s drum and we set off.

The scene returns to British Academia. There are now very senior figures only a few of whom I have ever met. I know of them vaguely. There are those in power, VCs and the like. Some are in the quantum area of expertise and there are some from the generation preceding me who must me in their 80s or thereabouts.

There is a sense of much toing and froing, of discussions behind the scene with some handwringing and indecisiveness. There is a sense of gossip and debate about what if anything to do.

The pace of the dream snippets and their interchange is hectic and breathless. It is far from rest full. I am aware during this sequence of the gizmo in my nose, on my finger and stuck to my chest.

I wake up around 6 AM for a loo break.

Back now in the dream and with the students. They are in the chalets with me and warning me that the academy does not like me doing drumming on courses for students and that my motives are very misinterpreted. My helping of the young woman with the patent is mis-construed as a sexual relationship because we appear too close, friendly and not distant enough. The students say that I am being judged. We gather together and start to call the patent office with the land line phone on speaker. I know that the call and the dream is being monitored by technical experts at MI6. They are highly technical and have methods of surveillance of which I am unaware.

In the dream I wonder how this whole shebang is going to be recorded on the medical device.

I wake up and the dream ends. I am keen to remove the micropore tape holding the gizmo as quicky as possible.