Madam Lichtenstein's Cosmic World

The Sun. One of My Favorite Tarot Cards

When I get my cards read (because I cannot read my own cards...) there are a couple of cards that I love to see pop up. One is The Sun. The Sun is your big wish. That which drives us to happiness and success. Depending on where the Sun pops up in your reading spread and whether it is upright or reversed indicates where we can achieve our big dream.In Astrology, our Sun sign is our basic personality. It also represents our mission in life. So the Sun card inthe Tarot deck also indicates where we feel most like our true selves and where we strive for happiness and fulfillment.

Here are some of the glorious versions of the sun tarot card - 8 from me today because 8 is the number of luck and prosperity. Use this post as a lucky talisman for all of your hopes and dreams today.

 

Tarot readers tend to have various meaning for the same tarot card which is why readings can vary from reader to reader - based on different card interpretations.

The Aeclectic Tarot website has meanings for all the cards, some of which I agree with and some that I have different interpretations. But check out their site and see what you think.

Learning to Play The Cards She is Dealt

Here is a very moving account of a woman who consults a tarot reader to help her plan her future. I am excerpting the full article here but the full article can be found on the NYT site.

 

After the demise of her long-term relationship, my friend had enlisted a psychic in a search for answers. Never having felt close to her ex’s parents, she was hoping to avoid a repeat with whoever came next.

“No one has a normal family,” the psychic said. “Normal is not a word.”

When Andrea asked me if I would come along to take notes at her tarot card reading, I agreed despite my skepticism. I figured this was something to help her get over the loss. A spiritual paint-and-spackle job of sorts.

When we arrived, the psychic escorted us to a wooden table draped with purple cloth. He sat down across from Andrea, flanked by twin candles burning in translucent jars. A crystal ball in an iron stand rested on the table beside him, alongside a tube of Clarins hand cream, which I assumed was free of mystical associations.

He shuffled the deck and told Andrea to think about what she wanted to ask. The cards are meant to work like mirrors, he explained, providing a CT scan of the psyche.

It was the third time she had visited this psychic in 12 years. Now she wanted to know: Will I ever meet someone? Will I have a baby? Three years ago, the psychic had done a reading for her sister and predicted she would fall in love with a man named Paul and have a baby. Which she proceeded to do — at 41.

This is the status of most of my friends: well past 30, ionized by free-floating anxiety about children, when to have them, whether it will work. They trade careworn stories of Teflon uteruses and invincible sperm, that wife of someone’s cousin who got pregnant at age 47 without so much as a cup of fertility tea.

I still remember that eerie feeling the night I met my future husband. We had walked the streets together for hours instead of going straight home after being introduced at the house of a mutual friend. We were both 17.

“I love you!” I yelled after him when we finally parted at the end of my block. It was meant as a funny thing to say to someone you had just met. But when he yelled back, “I love you, too,” it didn’t sound funny at all.

And if someone had told me right then that this boy (who rode a unicycle to school and whose unruly mullet had earned him the nickname Jesus) would be the guy I married, I wouldn’t have said it was crazy. I would have said, “Yeah, I know.”

When I left our 1-year-old daughter with the sitter, I mentioned I was on my way to Chelsea to serve as a psychic scribe. “Not that I believe in psychics,” I added.

“I’ve never visited a psychic,” my baby sitter replied. “But it’s true that if you receive a towel as a gift, someone in your family will die. It happened to me twice within the past year and a half.”

On the F train to Manhattan with Andrea, I shared the baby sitter anecdote, and she reiterated her conviction that tonight’s session was no mere parlor trick. A two-hour reading costs as much as a fancy dinner for four, with wine. We weren’t going to see some sideshow act but a reputable professional with a long list of corporate clients.

“But do you really think he’ll tell you the truth?” I asked. “Even if he thinks you’ll never get married and have kids?” The psychic also sees her sister, and I pointed out that maybe he already knew about her situation and was just going to tell her what she wanted to hear.

Andrea assured me he knew nothing about her breakup; she hadn’t even told her sister. When she walked in, she was careful to betray no hint of duress, doling out smiles and hugs. A few minutes after we sat down, the psychic flipped up the first pile of cards and tapped a trio of bayonets piercing a bloody heart: the Three of Swords.

“You’ve recently gone through a separation,” he announced.

Andrea shot me a knowing look. I avoided her eyes and reapplied myself to the challenge of maintaining readable penmanship.

He predicted she would end up with a dark-haired stranger, someone tall and athletic with a soccer player’s build. The psychic described the man’s ethnicity as “whitish,” which I was tempted to jot down as beige or maybe taupe.

“I don’t see you settling down with someone until the spring of 2013, around Aries time,” he told her. “And you shouldn’t move in with him for at least a year.”

She groaned. “What? My baby clock ...”

Regardless, the psychic’s voice was clear and free of doubt.

TWO hours later, the table was covered in cards, I had taken 12 pages of notes, and my hand ached. We had moved on from Andrea’s love life to the astral status of a friend who had died two years ago and whose spirit, alas, remained unsettled.

The psychic wrapped the cards in a gold cloth and placed them in a marble-lined box. He gave us each a hug and handed me his card. Andrea immediately volunteered to be my scribe should I ever need one.

Going back to the subway, she was in high spirits. “I think it went great,” she said.

“Did it help you make up your mind?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I was really thinking about going at it alone, but now I think I’ll wait until I meet someone and let things unfold naturally.”

“So you trust him?”

Andrea nodded.

The night sky was cloudless, and I hoped that somewhere above our heads stars were aligning. But perhaps my voice still betrayed some quaver of doubt, because then Andrea smiled and said, “Besides, it’s also the easier thing to do.”

And that, we could agree, was definitely true.

Great Tarot and New Age Inspired Gifts from Esty

Gosh I just love these!

 

The Future Foretold

Tarot Cards

Et tu Brute?

When the Tarot Trumps All

This is from the New York Times. I applaud any article on Tarot. Notably, I prefer the Marseilles Deck and also like to use the Spanish Deck and the Swiss Deck.

IF you were to peruse all the decks of tarot cards listed on the Aeclectic Tarot Web site, you might want, in poker parlance, to fold then and there.

There are nearly 1,300, starting from decks rooted in the late-Gothic and Renaissance eras, when the playing cards arrived on the scene with special cards, like the Lovers, for trumps. There are modern-day mystic-occult decks to suit every spiritual bent imaginable (Buddhist, Wiccan, Toltec, Cat People). There are decks with a less devotional approach: Stick Figure Tarot? Hello Kitty? Star Trek?

Then again, why stop at 1,300? Why no Contemporary Art deck, with Maurizio Cattelan as the Fool and Urs Fischer as Death? Why no Fashion tarot, with Anna Wintour as the Empress and Martin Margiela as the Hermit? Why no 21st-century tarot, in which the more irrelevant cards — Temperance, the Hierophant, the Chariot — could be updated to familiar faces like Bikram Yoga, the Psycho Ex and the iPad 3?

According to the art-film director Alejandro Jodorowsky, though, all deviations from the Tarot de Marseille are nothing but inglorious bastards.

“I’m a purist,” Mr. Jodorowsky said this month, standing at a display of tarot decks in a Greenwich Village bookstore, dismissing them one and all. He was in New York to be honored by the Museum of Modern Art, which was screening a retrospective of his films, including “El Topo” (1970) and “The Holy Mountain” (1973). But he was equally thrilled to talk about his abiding passion and hobby, the world of tarotica.

Mr. Jodorowsky, 82, certainly devotes as much time to it as he does to film these days. In Paris, where he has lived for the last 20 years, he lectures on the tarot and does readings for strangers once a week. And he vividly remembers how, at 20, he first saw an old (and, he said, naked) woman in his native Chile give a tarot reading, and was instantly intrigued. He soon moved to Paris, where he joined the mime company of Marcel Marceau and began traveling with him. It was in Tokyo, Mr. Jodorowsky said, that he first bought a tarot deck. This became a habit. Every place they went, he would figure out where and how to buy a new deck; before long, he had a vast collection.

A decade or so later, in the 1960s, when he was visiting an early hero, the Surrealist writer André Breton, he took along an obscure tarot deck as a gift, having heard that he was a fellow fan. But Breton had a trump card of his own.

“He told me that the only good tarot was the Tarot de Marseille,” Mr. Jodorowsky said.

And so, he started all over. He got rid of his collection and began obsessively studying the Tarot de Marseille, a historic tarot family with roots dating from the 16th century. Over time, he became something of a black belt, to mix dark-art metaphors. But he was always frustrated, he said, at not being able to find the perfect Tarot de Marseille deck.

Then, in the mid-1990s, he contacted the last descendant of the Camoin family, who had printed the Tarot de Marseille since the 19th century. Together, they worked for the greater part of a decade to piece together the ideal 78-card deck, filled with a wealth of arcane detail and with 11-color printing.

He never goes anywhere without it in his chest pocket. At least not without the so-called major arcana: the 22 cards most often identified with tarot, like the Lovers or Death. (The other 56 are, in essence, a deck of playing cards, with four face cards instead of three.) “The whole deck is a little much to travel with,” Mr. Jodorowsky said.

To him, the tarot is such a constant companion that it has become all-purpose: a point of reference, of reflection, of divination. He has put it into his films, he uses it to communicate in a nonliteral way, and it is a simple pastime to boot.

“The tarot is sacred,” he said, adding, “It’s all a game.”

In short, Mr. Jodorowsky’s philosophy of the tarot (about which he has written a book, “The Way of Tarot”) is flexible and even slippery. But it does appear that tarot can be everything and anything you want it to be. Maybe the tarot doesn’t need to learn from the iPhone. The iPhone needs to learn from the tarot.

 

Interesting Tarot Reading

My friend just had a very interesting tarot reading that she has agreed to share with me and the blog community. The spread is the Celtic Cross - a favorite among readers and clients alike.

 Tarot cards are fascinating and I encourage you to learn to read tarot cards not only as a meditative technique but also to help others and also as a way to understand your inner thoughts and needs.

 

Reading:

As well as setting down the cards, I also used your order and terminology for the places in the spread.

• Crossing:  Magician x Death reversed
• Basis:   Page of Wands
• Phasing Out:  Page of Cups
• Possible Outcome:  4 of Pentacles
• Phasing in:  Hierophant reversed
• Self:  4 of Wands reversed
• Environment:  Ace of Swords reversed
• Hopes/Fears:  Queen of Pentacles
• Outcome:  7 of Cups

First of all, the Magician, card 1, in the first position (something I learned, that a card whose number matches the spot in the spread has extra power), is a powerful statement for the ability to transform your situation, to take charge.  It's also a fresh beginning. 

Having Death reversed along with the Magician is a great statement about a medical situation and  good results from medication.  There's a link between the Magician and the medical profession, through the idea of the shaman, but also the divine figure of Hermes, whose symbol, the caduceus, has become the modern symbol of doctors.  At the same time, I think it's you having creative opportunities, not just in healing, but your life in general.

The Basis is the Page of Wands.  That speaks again to the idea of a fresh start in life, but also to your idealism, and eagerness. If the Page of Cups is phasing out, then there's a kind of return to your basic nature.  This seems to me not a bad idea, since the Page of Cups can be passive, good for looking but not so much for acting. The Page of Wands is idealistic, takes a strong position.  To me, this is all about your disturbance with the corruption of your bosses.  Because your basis is firm, and idealistic, you've been unhappy watching this without doing anything.  As we will see, however, the 7 of Cups as likely outcome suggests the time may not be ready for firm action.

The possible outcome is  4 of Pentacles.  This can refer to your creating a stable situation, or to the need to hold onto your job, and be cautious.  It also might be the importance of your boss, and his self-interest and corruption.  I suspect all three of these things are connected.  But while this is possible the actual likely outcome goes in a different direction, one much looser.

Phasing in is the Hierophant, a card of authority.  But it's reversed.  This can show a weakening of authority, or rigid ideas.  Partly it refers to the more experimental approach of the trial medication, which is having a Magical effect, and partly it suggests your boss's grip not being as powerful as he might like.  In that sense, it would seem that the possible outcome may not be that likely (if we see the 4 of Pentacles as him). The 7 of Cups at the end definitely seems to open up the tight structure of the 4P.

The self is another 4, 4 of Wands reversed.  The 4 Wands is probably the happiest, and most communal of the 4s, but the fact that it's reversed may indicate a feeling of isolation, probably at work, where others might not be as idealistic. The reversed card can also indicate caution, and the concern with staying in a safe environment, even if your Page of Wands nature would like to move out into the open, and find allies.  The Ace of Swords reversed seems to me to represent your boss, and the misuse of power.  This is something to be careful of.  Another meaning, very literal, would be not having surgery or any other extreme medical procedure (the Ace of Swords can signify a scalpel).  Since it's in the environment it would not be that you have to be careful of such approaches, but just that they are not likely to be called for.

In your message originally you suggested the Queen of Pentacles might be about a female authority at work.  But I think that since Capricorn is an Earth sign, and the card is the Queen of Earth (even though Queens in general are Water), I think it's more likely you. She seems to me to indicate a positive desire to have a life that's grounded and happy, in good health and appreciating the simplicity of things (compared to the wealth concerns of the King--or 4-- of Pentacles).  This seems very positive to me.  Considering the two situations you might easily have had a card that emphasized fear, but the Queen of Pentacles strikes me here as very positive.  As with some others (the Page of Wands,the Magician, the Hierophant reversed) there is a sense that your hopes are about doing things your way, not getting too sucked in to outside structures.

The 7 of Cups seems to say that no action is called for right now, that it's a time for looking at possibilites, letting your imagination open up to what life might hold, what actions you might take.  The difference between this card and the phasing out Page of Cups is that there was just one thing, the fish, emerging from the one cup.  Here there is much more a sense of possibilities.  I feel like this is saying that you've been in a tight situation but your options and choices are opening up.  The positive Page of Wands and Queen of Pentacles in you, along with the surge of Magician energy, will make life seem more open than the overly cautious King of Pentacles might have wanted.

 

The reader offers insights into how she arrived at her conclusions. It is a good lesson for those who are seeking more knowledge on tarot and techniques: