tarot arcana – Dreamyoga

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 …

Here is last night’s dream. I managed to sleep until 5 AM without interruption which is unusual these days. We watched the film “Old Guard” last night.

The dream starts in the South-Eastern corner of America. It is in the recent past. It is sweltering hot, humid and sweaty. We are under siege. We can hear gunfire from the nearby town which is surrounded. There is smoke in the air and cordite on the wind. From time to time the night sky lights up with an orange light from afar due to a large munition. They are being pounded. We too are besieged but by a much smaller force. It is quiet where we are but we know that they are out there on our property in numbers.

In the dream I am very surprised to be in America. Though it does make sense.

I am sat at a large table in the kitchen or scullery. There are candles burning and several finished bottles of wine. I have a glass on the go. We are speaking Cajun or creole French. There are a few of us white and a few servants or slaves black. We have all hastily eaten something quick. Others are keeping watch. We are in some wooded “mansion” type house on a plantation of sorts. The windows are boarded up from the inside.

On the table is a tarot deck de Marseilles. On the wall there are pictures of soldiers in a kind of uniform of dull grey colour. My minds thinks Confederate but it could have been earlier. It could be militia but is definitely not redcoat. There is an air of civil war or revolution and of tearing apart. On the table I can see the cards 0,1 and 10. The cards are le mat, le bateleur and la roue de fortune. I focus on the latter. It seems apt. Also on the table someone has been sketching a contemporary “confederate” set of cards and having them cut out. The table is like that of le bateleur in front of us. The tarot arcana have been given a modern twist. La roue de fortune is comprised two pistols intertwined head to tail to make a kind of pistol ying-yang circle. Other figures are made contemporary with white wigs sat on judicial “thrones”. One of the company is whiling away the time drawing. We all know what is coming in the morning. One of the black women in a dark blue dress clears the plates from the table. One man in the corner is drinking brandy to forget. There is a sense of impending.

The scene changes to morning. We are outside in daylight. I am wearing black riding boots, black pants and a dirty white blouson shirt with a lace up closure in the front. It is partially undone. I have blood spatters on it. It needs a wash as do I. My long dark brown hair is held at the back in a pony tail. I am partially dishevelled and have been roughed up. My hands are tied behind my back and I am being held by them. I am being brought before. I can sense a pistol very close to my right temple. I can sense an arm and a hand holding it. They are going to execute me. I see a flash of smoke as the pistol mechanism fires. I hear a loud bang.

In the dream I know that it does not kill me because I can see myself back in Europe as an older man with a white-grey ponytail and clean shirt sat at my desk. This shooting is early in my previous life.

The dream ends.

Tag: tarot arcana

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