the knave of hearts

i had seen him there before, several times.

in his late fifties, i would have guessed, though quite fit. faded, soiled, torn jeans and often a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, on which he had written some slogan or other with a fabric pen. "what is self-awareness for" i remember was one.

and i had become familiar with his routine.

he would lock his ancient steel road bike to a signpost a few doors down, next to the distro box from which he bought the local paper. on his way into the cafe, he would sling a beat up canvas messenger bag onto a small table at the window. and by the time he got to the counter and said good morning to the barista, she had already begun grinding the beans for his espresso.

"morning, zach, bagel today." she would say, tamping the grounds. "morning, paige. yes, thanks, poppy seed if you got." or sometimes not.

he would read through the front section of the paper, local political gossip and bits and pieces of the national press feed, and then turn to the sudoku. as the week wore on and the puzzle got more difficult, this might occupy ten or fifteen minutes.

then, with a second espresso at his elbow, he would start in on the cards, some very severe form of solitaire. i once heard him call it "calculation." exactly three games.

the cards were very worn, the images nearly effaced, many with edges taped. sometimes he would stop after turning up a particular card and write for several minutes in a battered notebook.

today was not a bagel day. no paper either, for some reason. but the cards yes.

about halfway through the third game, a small, bearded man who had been watching from a nearby table said something to him in what i would guess was a russian accent, something about reading his future.

zach looked up i would have said surprised, but expressionless is actually more to the point. he turned up the four of spades and looked at it for a moment. then he looked directly at me.

"okay," he said finally, "let me finish this out." and the rest of the cards all fell into place.

zach invited the russian to sit across from him. he placed a small copper disc on the table. the russian picked it up and handed it back to him. zach shuffled seven times and handed the cards to the russian, telling him to mix them until he felt comfortable.

the russian pulled seven cards without being asked. zach took those, mixed them once, and started laying them face up on the table.

five of spades. "this is about looking out for yourself," zach said, "something in your head." seven of diamonds. "a decision you are putting off." and so on. i don't remember all of the cards.

the upshot was the russian needed to let go of some perceived injustice and embrace an unrecognized opportunity, or something like that. i was trying not to eavesdrop.

the russian sat silent for awhile, his finger tracing invisible lines from one card to another. abruptly he stood up, took zach's left hand in both of his, and quietly thanked him.

the russian left, and zach retrieved his empty cup to take it to the bus tray. i approached him.

"hey, can i ask what just happened here? it looked like you were reading cards to this guy."

zach gave me the same expressionless gaze he had given the russian. "have we met," he said. apologetic, i gave my name. "zach," he said, not extending a hand. across the room someone dropped a spoon.

"yes," he said, "i was reading."

"but i mean, how does that work. i was thinking maybe something like rorschach, but --"

"that is not an entirely inapt analogy," he said, "though it is very incomplete."

"-- but it was you offering interpretations to him, not him looking into inkblots."

zach gestured to an empty table. i offered to buy him another espresso, but he declined. we sat.

"the reading will inevitably be filtered through my individual personality, yes," he began, "but i try to minimize that. the interpretations i offered were very general. it was for him to fill in the details."

"but still this seems to suppose that the cards are coming up in some meaningful sequence."

"it is useful to allow that possibility," he said, "and engaging the querent in selecting the cards helps support the idea. but meaning could be read into any combination of cards."

"so i'm sorry, are you saying the reading you just gave was completely arbitrary?"

"no, actually i am not saying that. what he needed to hear would have turned up in whatever cards he drew."

"this is not making sense to me."

"you mean as a rational materialist."

"okay, yes," i acknowledged. "you shuffled the cards, he shuffled the cards, he pulled some number of cards. how can this be anything but random?"

"have you never attributed meaning to random events?"

that set me back a notch. "probably. but i try to dismiss that kind of thinking."

"why?"

"i want as much as possible to be able to think of myself as a rational being."

zach paused. finally he said, "let me ask you this. what exactly do you think were your motives in initiating this conversation just now?"

i found myself struggling with the answer. finally i had to concede that at some level i had felt threatened by what i had seen, and i had wanted to reassert my grasp of mundane reality.

"you want to paper over something you don't understand with rational explanations."

"okay, yes."

"do you remember what you actually felt in the moment you decided to talk to me, any physical sensation?"

and again i found myself struggling. suddenly i realized that, yes, there had been a distinct physical sensation. it was as though i were waking up, or as though i were stepping back into the cafe from a closet. as though the entire scene with the russian and the reading had been a film.

zach looked at me for a moment, as if deciding something. finally he said, "the four of spades was for you."

the "a" word

when i started on this project, i thought, how deep do i want to go into astrology. of which i then knew practically nothing, and of which i have since learned not much more.

i decided early on i would place the attributions on the cards, so that anyone who wanted to go that direction would have a ready reference. but it is not just the seven planets and the zodiac. there is this whole business with planetary dignities -- rulerships, exaltations, triplicities, terms, detriments, falls. how much of that did i want to include.

to which of course the answer would have to be, only as much as turned out to be meaningful to me.

one of the first things i noticed is that the zodiacal signs are arranged in four groups of three, the four groups corresponding to the four elements and then each element presented in its "cardinal," "fixed," and "mutable" forms, which one might think of as corresponding roughly to thesis, antithesis, synthesis, or maybe as commencement, opposition, and equilibrium.

or maybe in terms of the three gunas, essence, activity, and inertia, though possibly not in this sequence.

duquette does an excellent job of explaining how, at least in the thoth system, the thirty-six "small" cards are assigned to "decantes," or ten-day intervals, throughout the zodiac. twos, threes, and fours to the "cardinal" signs, fives, sixes, and sevens to the "fixed" signs, and eights, nines, and tens to the "mutable" signs."

the system starts with aries, which is the sign of the spring equinox. the cardinal fire sign. the two, three, and four of wands. then four months later leo, the fixed fire sign, the five, six, and seven, and four months later saggitarius, the mutable fire sign, the eight, nine, and ten.

then there are planetary attributions, which appear to correspond with the ptolemaic "face" dignities, the lowest form of "essential" dignity. these start at zero degrees leo and run through a repeated cycle of seven, the outer planets, then the sun, then the inner planets, and finally the moon.

these seem arbitrary, but they apparently do have something to do with the meanings the qabalists attributed to the small cards. again see duquette.

so for example the seven of swords, one of my favorites, would be assigned the third decante of aquarius, fixed air, mid-february, and the moon, which has no dignity in aquarius other than "face." seven on the qabalistic tree is netzach, corresponding to venus, but with an elemental attribution of fire. the third chakra.

crowley calls this combination "futility," and mathers calls it "unstable effort." in my own readings the seven of swords has come up as verbal manipulation, sometimes lying.  the waning part of the oppositional phase.

anyway, i may put all of those attributions on the small cards. and in fact i may decide not to go with illustrations on at least the pips themselves. maybe rename some or all of the cards to reflect my own thinking, but then let the attributions and correspondences speak for themselves.

and even though i myself have not gone very far down this path, i think because most of the major arcana are assigned planetary or zodiacal correspondences i will indicate these as well. but i am not sure how deep i want to go with the so-called planetary "dignities."

the dignities begin with "rulership," with the sun in leo at midsummer and the moon in cancer, and the five planets known to the ancients distributed on each side in sequence outward, so that each rules one house by day and another by night. each of the so-called "masculine" planets "prefers' his day house, while the "feminine" venus and the "androgynous" mercury each "prefers" the night house.

a planet is in "detriment" in the sign opposite its rulership.

"exaltation" and "fall" are a bit trickier. the sun is "exalted" in the nineteenth degree of aries, which is about three weeks after the spring equinox. i dunno why. mercury is "exalted" in the fifteenth degree of virgo, because that is where it first escapes the "rulership" of the sun in leo. or something. and so on.

a planet is in "fall" in the house opposite its "exaltation."

if these distinctions begin to make sense to me, i may include them.  for now, i think "rulership" and "exaltation" ought to be enough. what i am trying to do here is to identify patterns of correspondence, not construct a horoscope.

divination or

so i guess one thing i want to get out of the way early on is that i am not talking about using the cards to predict the future.

case is emphatic on this point. what he calls "divination" is something other. a reading of the energies present at a given moment in a given situation. to paraphrase not all that closely. and to not get into this whole business about "inimical astral entities."

the cards have been, for me, a tool for what I call "structured rumination." you bring yourself in your present situation to the table, you lay out some cards in a spread, with position assignments indicating what a card in that position will refer to, and then sit and consider.

the eight of cups, disentanglement, or what crowley and his crowd called "indolence," turns up in position nine on a celtic cross, as something you may have overlooked. and as it happens, yeah, i had not thought of that. what would it be like to just walk away from this.

and the eight is maybe well or ill dignified by cards in the surrounding positions, and over here is the page of cups, and down here is another eight.

and suddenly the whole thing falls into place as a sort of mandala, with several cards seeming to lie in this cluster in the foreground and others in that, farther back, and with almost visible lines of connection running through these cards here and those over there.

and then it shifts and resolves into a different set of connections. and you can almost see how the two fit together.

and after twenty minutes or half an hour of quiet reflection, you come away with a somewhat different perspective on whatever it is the cards seemed to be talking about.