Ruled by Taurus, the Hierophant in tarot is historically depicted as a religious man, who claims to have the gift to decipher the word of God into language for everyday man. The literal translation in its native Greek is ‘he who proclaims what is sacred.’ This may have all been well and good at a time when the majority of the population couldn’t read or write. How else would anyone receive these offerings from the Divine? The problem, as we can clearly see looking into the past, (and we are witnessing now with the current politics centered around my uterus) we don’t know the integrity of that man.
I have to say that I am not a huge fan of the patriarchal imagery of this card, but the teaching it offers us is worthy of a deeper dive. He demonstrates how custom and tradition can control an individual’s life energy. Exhibit A would be the evangelical Christians that feel the need to push their personal values into the rest of the population. The part that they seem to miss is that not everyone has that same value system, nor should they. Things that are revered by me, the tarot and runes for example, aren’t held in the same space of appreciation and solemn devotion for them. Some may even refer to me as a witch. I am okay with that, as I am not for everyone. I’m also not pushing for everyone to follow my practices. They are sacred to me for understanding my path in this life.
While I don’t believe in the ultimate say of the Sky Daddy, I have to believe that the Church, and I’m speaking of the Christian one, was not meant to be malevolent at its onset. I’m sure whoever the first Holy Roman Emperor was didn’t set out to harm people. That I can lay at the feet of mere mortal men, the ones who think themselves above everyone else. It’s been manipulated and abused into some sort of coercive effort to maintain said control and power, but there is still a lesson to be had here. If this so-called God is inside of all of us, than wouldn’t that make us our own gurus?
Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.
Aristotle
Therapy speaks a lot into learning how to reparent ourselves. I have had to do a ton of inner child work, unraveling the knots of old beliefs. Who are you and what do you worship? What and why do you believe what you do? I had to learn how to trust myself again, something I still fuck up on the regular. Here’s the thing: our parents put a lot of their own shit on us, mostly due to the fact that they haven’t realized their own trauma. At some point in our lives we come to understand this, and that’s when we can begin to drop all the lies. We can say yes to ourselves, knowing that we are in fact enough.
The Card of Worry
Starting to question your own internal belief system can be quite the mind-fuck. It has literally turned my thinking upside-down in some instances, a complete change in my mind as to what I find valuable in this world. The Five of Pentacles is our first decan for this season, assisting us through this emotional process from April 20 to April 29. It invites into the understanding that there is a massive amount of “instability in the very foundations of matter,” (Book of Thoth) which is a fancy way of stating that we never really know what the future will bring. Nothing that I have ever done has come out the way I planned it. Ask any artist. The painting or sculpture sometimes takes on a life of its own, and sometimes it tells you what it wants to be.
I am the self-appointed QUEEN of what my therapist likes to call ‘What if? Thinking.’ What if this happens? What if that happens? I am also pretty sure that’s why I have carried such large purses in the past. I’ve got to be ready for every occurrence, anything that could possibly happen throughout the course of the day. I later moved on to a backpack. Control issues much? Yep, that’s me! Fun fact: Anxiety is essentially living in the future, and depression is living in the past. I was so concentrated on preparing myself for the next harm to come to me that I missed out on what was actually happening, the joy of the particular moment.
The depression came after. The worry was gone, but the pain still remained. It took me a long time to understand why I acted that way, why I thought I had to do it all on my own. I had a ton a unresolved trauma left in my body, but my emotional and mental capacities were not great enough to hold space for all that hurt. I had to acknowledge all the ways that I had been harmed. I had to bow to the pain that was already here, the wounds and scars that had already made themselves at home. Some of them I had forgotten about and some of them I dissociated from, a very common way for the body and mind to protect itself. It would be years later that I would finally be able to speak it out loud, beginning with the comfort of a professional couch service. Enter therapy.
The light is coming to give back what the darkness stole.
Ariana Grande
We go to doctors to repair a broken leg. We use crutches to aid and support us in this healing. For some reason, as a society, we cannot comprehend the need for other types of support systems. They tell us to push forward, to walk it off, to suck it up. They tell us that we are weak for needing help. Alex Jamieson, chef and artist, calls this the “false taint of failure.” We have these capitalistic frameworks guiding us into, quite possibly, the wrong directions we should be going in. If we can learn how to accept the invitations nudging us back into this moment, if we can learn to rest in the unknown of it all, if we can widen the view of everything that is possible to include the positives and not just the negatives, than we can ease our way through the discomforts in this life. We can see more clearly that we are enough just the way we are.
The Card of Success
As a recovering people-pleaser, I have a tendency to give too much of myself over to other people. As a Libra, the sign represented by the scales, this seems to be my soul’s lesson on this life’s journey of mine. Balance, a thing I have never quite understood, nor have I been able to accomplish. The Six of Pentacles, which is our guide from April 30 to May 10, embodies “the full harmonious establishment of the energy of the Earth element” (Book of Thoth). This tarot card is all about energy exchange, not money. It’s about give and take in equal measure, not giving ourselves completely over (Whoops!) and not dumping the entire bowl of Halloween candy in our own plastic pumpkin-shaped buckets, leaving nothing for the next guy. Guilty, as charged. This has been a hugely difficult concept for me to grasp, for obvious reasons.
The Catch 22 of this whole concept of balance is that we can get so caught up in trying to achieve this perfect harmony with work and home that we can sometimes lose the point of it all. In our vain attempts to reach some sort of equilibrium, we can find ourselves lost in a sea of #goals that look pretty on Instagram, but aren’t necessarily conducive to real life. It’s become exponentially harder to separate the two with more recent events (Ahem, pandemic.) that have left many of us trying to do all of this while quarantining at home. I am, for the most part, simply trying to get through the day without having some sort of meltdown.
No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
Aesop
The Six of Pentacles invites us into the deep realization that these stories in our heads aren’t ours to begin with, which means they could quite possibly be entirely false. I like to think of my life as a book, the chapters propelling me into new pathways, new experiences. Furthermore I like to think myself as the author and editor, which means I can rewrite them. I can write better stories, ones that suggest that the ‘not enough’ story I’ve been telling myself all these years is a bunch of flaming hot garbage. It’s time to take the trash out.
I no longer believe that balance is even achievable, at least not in the way it’s presented. If only we could achieve this perfect symmetry, this perfect teeter totter of back and forth, than everything will magically fall into place. That sounds like some sort of fairy tale, something highly unpractical. I am trying desperately to release this attachment to find the holy grail of balance. I am trying really hard to just show up without shrinking myself, as I have been known to do in that past. They say that’s half the battle. I doubt they meant for this to be the other half of it.
The Card of Failure
There is a tale of an old farmer who becomes so eager to assist his crops that he went out one night, and under the moonlit sky he tugged on those little shoots, pulling them right out of the ground. That was a big mistake, one I think we have all made. Maybe not that exact one, but one similar enough. I’ve said it before, and I’ll scream it from the rooftops if I have to, but failing does not mean you are a failure. Mistakes are how we learn, and sometimes we have to review that lesson until it finally sinks in. Just me?
The Seven of Pentacles, which shepherds us through our final part of Taurus Season (May 11 to May 20), depicts a man contemplating his harvest. He is assessing his progress thus far on his journey, knowing that the fruits must remain on the vine until fully ripe. Patience is what this card is asking of us, patience as the “fruits of a great tree, its solid roots in fertile land” (Book of Thoth). The imagery provided by the Motherpeace Deck illustrates a woman in the eighth month of her pregnancy. This is the part right before we enter into the delivery room.
The problem is that we want everything now, and I do not say this to put myself above all of that. I am a millennial and I do love the fact that I can get everything and anything delivered to my doorstep. I have tried to rush through many things in my life, essentially embodying that gardener, who then had to replant all those seedlings. Poor old Michael Finnegan. Begin-again.
Don’t look at where you fall, but where you slipped.
African Proverb
I can get all wrapped up in the failure part, and forget to look at how it happened. Sometimes I refuse to look at these things because I don’t want to have to admit to myself that I was the cause of my own demise. In school I can confidently say that it was because I never studied. I actually had to learn how to study in college after almost failing Calculus, a class that I didn’t even end up needing to take, but that’s a whole other story for an entirely different day.
Mad love, Jenna
deck credit: Rider-Waite Tarot Deck, drawn in 1909 by Pamela Colman Smith under direction of Arthur Edward Waite
