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Looks like Gordon noticed the same thing I did, though I came to a different conclusion. Here's my entry for The Magician:

The Magician is usually shown holding a wand in one raised hand. He is often standing next to or behind a table filled with magical symbols, with the sign of infinity above his head.

Imagine what happens when you watch actors on a stage, or when, as a child, you played “make-believe.” Something strange occurs: things that don’t actually exist become real in those moments. It’s as if there’s another realm of meaning we forget about in normal life, but we can enter it — at least for a little while — when we play.

Play is an important idea to keep in mind when you see The Magician. In some of the oldest surviving Tarots, he was named Le Bateleur, which was an acrobat or carnival performer. Through their acting, they showed people wonders and what else might be possible.

Think on the double meaning of the verb, “act.” What do the performers in a play do? Well, they act. But when we do something, we also act.

That’s why this card is associated with communication, agency, imagination, and especially with manifestation. The Magician holds a wand towards the sky, but his other hand points firmly to the ground. An idea is just an idea until we ground it into reality. And the more we create, the more open we become to new ideas and to inspiration.

When you see The Magician, ask what you need to act upon, what you need to make real in the world. Nothing ever happens if we live only in our heads, and even the smallest actions change things. While The Fool seems to leave the future to chance, The Magician knows we have a say, too.

It’s probably time you started something you’ve been putting off, and you need to begin somewhere. Don’t be afraid of your influence or power. Don’t worry that you don’t know or aren’t enough yet — you’re only at the beginning, anyway. Go find out what else life can be, and do it with curiosity, playfulness, and wonder.

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Hey R.G.! Loved this piece. You have a knack for writing about these things.

"Like dowsing for water, or falling in love, the operator is led to a concealed truth by a subtle feeling of rightness."

I'm always looking for the everyday examples, the "commonplaces" in the sense that JMG describes the topoi in old-school rhetorical training (https://www.ecosophia.net/the-truths-we-have-in-common/): the thing you can point to that is an experience familiar to people for whom the framework you're coming from will be unfamiliar or alien.

Like Gustavo Esteva telling me, "If you want to talk about the commons now, especially in Europe, especially in cities, then start with friendship." It took a couple of years of chewing on that to grasp that friendship is one place where we still have a common understanding that the world is not made of resources: if someone I thought of as a friend treats me as a resource, I say "I feel used", and everyone knows what I mean. From here, it's possible to break through into the old distinction between commons and resources, rather than the modern distortion (or approximation, at best) that describes "commons" as a way of managing resources.

So, going back to your "subtle feeling of rightness", I've found myself drawn to Suely Rolnik's description of "the vital compass", which came to me from Vanessa Andreotti. This seems like a promising commonplace: we all have the experience of certain settings or people in whose company we feel ourselves coming alive, and other settings or people around whom we feel something inside us quietly dying. Probably most of us were not taught to attend to these feelings or put much weight on them, but they seem to be still available, an animal awareness of "rightness" or "wrongness" that lives in the guts.

Reading your piece, I saw more clearly the connection between this kind of cultivation of trustworthy subjective awareness, which I'm reflecting on in preparation for the autumn series, and the more explicitly occult intuition which you are offering a frame for.

On a different note – I'm currently reading Carlos Eire's They Flew (because Amitav Ghosh told me to!) and, early on, he writes about the Reformation as the cut-off point where miracles were suddenly treated as something that had been possible in Biblical times but were no longer possible. This took me back to your thread about metaphysical conservatism and my sense that the monotheisms are less monolithic in this respect than they often present themselves as being, that what we're looking at is a historically layered locking down of the metaphysical, and that – like most conservatisms – metaphysical conservatism is a more recent phenomenon and less reliable representation of how things have been in the past than it claims to be.

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yes! i'm glad you enjoyed the essay. i love that image of the 'vital compass,' i'll have to look up the full context. it's always amazing to me how much we've narrowed our perception in the name of rationality... that 'vital compass' obviously relates to the different modes of attention that McGilchrist describes—many of which feel alien to us now—and even the classical descriptions of Aristotelian nous as a category of perception, distinct from reason. i think modern people should make a sincere attempt at divination at least once in their lives, just to brush up against the kind of weird knowing that's commonplace in other cultures. i genuinely had to sit down and re-think my whole life after my first big Tarot hit—not least because i'd never felt that kind of harmonic resonance in my mind before.

that kind of perception is related to metaphysical conservatism too, but our understanding of it has become inverted: we assume that human cognition has stayed constant (if not improved) over the past few millennia, while the metaphysical landscape has eroded, which is why we need to preserve these ancient forms. the reality seems to be that our cognition is degrading, and the potential for numinous encounters is still available to us, if we could just overcome our perceptual handicaps.

and i do agree with the layered locking-down of religion—but as far as Christianity goes, thanks to my hopelessly conspiratorial thinking, i can't help but see the initial conservative push in the successful effort to contain the Christ Phenomenon in the person and body of Jesus, rather than recognizing a universal human capacity for transcendence and miracle-working. in my mind, the political and ideological expediencies of that move within the early Church are too obvious.

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Not really but kind of related to Christianity and a conservative push towards containing the Chris phenomenon...I just finished a biography of Giordano Bruno, and the parallels/perpendiculars between Bruno/Jesus journeys to martyrdom are striking. One of my favorite quotes from the book, from his original accuser to the Inquisition:

"Giovanni Mocenigo, accuser: Once when I was going with Giordano to San Giorgio Maggiore he said that there was no reason to marvel at the miracles of Christ, because he intended to do even greater things, and he added that it was no miracle that Christ predicted his own death, because with all his misdeeds, he would have to be strung up. In the matter of Christ's miracles he said that he knew how Christ had performed his miracles, and using the same art he intended to do as much and more."

Would that we all had such conviction in our own miraculous capacity to understand and manipulate reality.

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Loved this!

First of all, just a RuneSoup shout out. Gordon's podcast was formative for me many years ago and while I've grown away from it, his interviews with Camelia Elias are to this day my favorite references for how-to-tarot.

Secondly, I was really surprised at myself for how many strong opinions I've apparently developed about tarot on my own. I found myself strongly disagreeing with parts of your methodology, which is obviously silly because of the whole subjective/intuitive aspect...it works differently for all of us. But after a long casual relationship with tarot, the last couple years I've used it regularly for personal stuff and developed my own "ways." Reading this really showed me how sticky those ways have become for me, which is kinda cool in a skill dvelopment way. And a good reminder to check my judgments of not-my-ways.

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ha! yes. i should have added that as a disclaimer within the post: when you're first learning to read cards, having somebody else explain their methodology in detail is like water in the desert. then, a couple of years later, when you've been reading on your own for a while, hearing somebody describe a set of associations that's different from yours will feel like a personal insult. it becomes a real risk to a friendship: 'what the hell are you talking about, "wands are an air sign"? you degenerate monster!'

i had to cut this for length in the essay itself, but i remember Aidan Wachter talking about how his TdM deck had a crass sense of humor, and damned if that isn't true... i can always count on my TdM deck to give it to me straight, and then call me an idiot for asking. have some great examples of readings that were equal parts funny and spooky.

which deck do you read with the most?

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The deck that got me reading for myself regularly was actually The Spacious Tarot by Annie Ruygt and Carrie Mallon. It took me about a year of using it to realize I liked it because there were no images of people--it's all nature images. Lately I've been using the classic RWS with the intention of bringing back some of that human aspect, both via the actual images and via bringing my intuitions into contact with the millions of prebaked RWS interpretations out there. Like a weird tempering process, I guess.

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Oct 8Liked by R. G. Miga

This is so good I wonder how it’s possible I just read it for free.

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thank you very much! some things are too important to paywall. a good recommendation is payment enough, please restack and spread the word if you found this useful :)

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