brief note on attributions

so what i get when i look deeper into the hebrew letter attributions from the qabala is that mathers and crowley and case probably got it wrong.

certainly their systems are arbitrary. the fool cannot be twenty-one therefore it is zero, but the hebrew letter is alef, which numerically is one. and then all the following cards are offset by one, until you get to the tens and hundreds, when the whole thing breaks down anyway.

and the planetary attributions are all out of sequence. and so on.

and what are the arabic numbers even for? back in the fourteenth century or whenever, the trumps were not numbered at all.

excellent discussion of all this on psyche.com explicating the work of carlo suares. if you want to go deep. and suares' explanation of the cube of space makes infinitely more sense to me than that given by case.

bottom line for me is to adopt the suares attributions and leave the majors unnumbered.

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.

a diversion

for a number of years, i have been laying out a particular form of solitaire called "calculation," at least three or four and sometimes ten or more times a day, pretty much every day. i completely wore out one deck of cards with this game, and i am working on another.

as with any solitaire, what you are doing is sorting a randomized deck, subject to rules that limit your decisions in sorting in ways the cards can defeat. in this case the limiting card is the king.

you are building sequences in four stacks, by ones, by twos, by threes, and by fours. you are counting in mod 13, with turning points at the queen, jack, and ten. so for example, after ten the twos would be queen, ace, three, etc. and after jack the king, an end. the threes after nine would be queen, two, five, etc., and the fours after eight would be queen, three, seven, etc. each sequence ending in a king. suits are disregarded.

and over here, while you are waiting for the next card in one or another of these sequences, you are storing cards in one of only four piles, as you select. burying cards you think you can afford to bury, leaving paths to get to them when you need them.

in effect, you need to get at least one king to the bottom of one of these storage stacks, or you lose.

you put a seven and then a four onto a ten, you have an ending sequence for the threes. you are offered an ace. do you put it on the ten seven four, or just start the ones and maybe offload the four to start the fours, or do you start a new storage stack. and then you are offered a jack.

and so on, through fifty-two cards. the kings are trying to lock you into commitments you cannot sustain. you are down to the last card, and the king of clubs has caught the ten of hearts and the seven of spades. and you think, why did i tell that lie, and should i try to sustain it. or, what did she intend by saying that, and should i pretend to accept it.

or hey, something else involving something you care about and some ambiguous narrative surrounding it. you tell me.

the cards are speaking to you. listen.

and then the next hand is completely random, you get a bunch of trash and then the kings come pouring out. noise. but maybe the noise itself is a message. back off, i will come to you.

five clubs. bring it on. six spades, set it aside. five diamonds on the six. let's get serious.

nine diamonds, a root or a cover the five. take cover. two hearts, park it on the five six. ten diamonds a root. ten swords, damnit.

and the game goes downhill from there or you are somehow able to rescue it through very careful play and a couple of lucky breaks on key cards. you draw a second six early, forcing the choice on the threes, and so on, through fifty-two cards. or until it miseraby ends.

it takes seven shuffles to randomize a deck of cards, the math papers are published online. i usually do eight or nine, because it feels that way to me. and eight has significance for me from tarot. strength, or is it justice. and when justice is gone, there's always force. laurie anderson.

sometimes it is just static for even as many as two or three hands straight, but not often. more frequently than i used to, as i learn more and more nuance, i will get a beautiful game i had to fight hard, but the last card allows me to take twenty or more out of storage before hitting the last king.

you learn to minimize your commitment to any particular course, but try to leave several open. you seize some but by no means all opportunities to unload your storage. but you might leave a seven or a jack behind because you need to be able to duck an untimely two down the road.

and who was it released the last king but the ten and seven again. but which king was it, and were they the same ones, the hearts ten and the spade seven. oh, i didn't notice. the seven, yes, but i am not sure about the ten. the king was i think a heart.

and you start looking for these two cards in the next hand.

queen wands reversed

this card has turned up twice in recent days as the "shadow" to a three card spread.

the first set was three swords rx flanked by six pentacles rx and ten cups rx. sometimes when i get all cards reversed i imagine the cards are to be read by someone else, sitting across the table.

the six, earth, undermining the three, air. the ten, water, neutral.

the second set, this morning, was seven swords flanked by three swords and six cups. the three supporting the seven, the six neutral.

i accept "sorrow" as a basic meaning for three swords, which turned up in both spreads, though "melancholy" might be closer. a sort of permanent mindset. six pentacles has to do with "material success," yes, but also something about issues of equity and inequity. to have and have not. ten cups not so much "satiety" as the illusion of satiety.

the queen wands often turns up as my ex-wife, i regret to say. ten years out, i should be able to get past some of this.

but i should maybe mention that just before this reading the six of spades came up twice in my solitaire, suggesting that i might examine something from a different perspective.

and then this morning the three swords again, but here opposite six cups, nostalgia, flanking seven swords, verbal manipulation.

these latter meanings are personal to me, incidentally, and do not all that closely resemble the standard issue. crowley, mathers, et al. would call the six cups "pleasure" while acknowledging a suggestion of rotting, and they would call the seven swords "futility," arising from a lack of commitment to the effort.

pips here totaling sixteen, suggesting (16) tower, the catastrophe.

and here i will acknowledge that a large part of "what went wrong" in the marriage was my lack of commitment to the idea of material success on her terms and also the fact that i was a liar.

but there were two players.

audience

to whom am i addressing myself. who is the intended audience.

i say "the skeptic," but what exactly does this mean. obviously i cannot expect to reach the dogmatic scientific empiricist, the logical positivist, whatever they are calling themselves these days.

a skeptic, as i am using the word here, accepts that any conclusion rests on assumptions, and that any assumption must inevitably be provisional. the "academic" skeptic, in other words.

what anyone thinks she "knows" about the nature of the universe is an amalgam of mostly received ideas, ultimately limited by the range of data available through our senses. "working" knowledge, if you will. amplified by various technologies, yes, but even with these we only ever look for what we think we might expect to find. again with the pattern making.

a skeptic, then, is at least vaguely aware that existing social and cultural norms are constructs, that is, they do not exist outside people's heads. the various narratives we accept as "history" are constructs. property and money are constructs. the identification of the "self" with an individual personality is a construct.

and what the empiricists call "verifiability" is itself a construct, which assumes causality and the "forward" motion of "time."

i am not asking the skeptic to accept any of the mystical premises of qabala, numerology, astrology, whatever. i haven't, much. but i am inviting her to suspend some of the premises that have framed her experience.

allow for the possibility that other patterns might be built from the same raw, chaotic material.