Shining with the Tribe

It's been awhile since I've blogged. Most of my input happens on IG which is more of a visual platform than a written one. Not that that deters me lol. This reading however merited a longer post accompanied by my aspiration to back into more regular blogging. My deck choices of late have been focused on the Motherpeace, Shining Tribe, Tarot of the Crone, and the like. This morning's reading came from the Rachel Pollack's Shining Tribe Tarot. And what a potent reading it was. I used a three-card spread created by Rachel Pollack herself.

Shining Tribe Tarot by Rachel Pollack

Spiritual History ~ The Hermit
Spiritual Challenge ~ Two of Birds🦉
Spiritual Gift ~ Nine of Rivers

Rachel defines the Spiritual History position as an archetypal pattern we've been living out to arrive at the present moment. Pulling that Hermit card was right on point. I’m a double Hermit, soul and personality card. I’m a Virgo rising, The Hermit’s ruling sign, and I’m in a Hermit year birth-wise. So to pull it for spiritual history felt utterly accurate. Honestly I have the felt-experience of traveling across lifetimes as this archetype, a mountain range of incarnations. It’s lonely and rich, both.

The Hermit ~ Shining Tribe Tarot

Loving the imagery here, a bird-being joyously ascending a hill holding a staff with a Goddess head carved into it. The sacred feminine both leading and supporting the seeker. And this Hermit’s body is an echo of the Shining Vision glyph (found throughout the deck) as is the landscape on which s/he stands and the blue flower on the hillside. I love this mirroring of earth and body, reiterating the reality that we aren’t separate, that awakening is an interdependence.

In this image the lantern we so commonly see The Hermit holding is to be found on the other side of the fabulous blue door carved into space. Implicit in the invitation to step through its threshold is the recognition and awareness of differing states of consciousness. This recognition contains within it the realization of movement as deeper truths are absorbed and embodied. Of course we are both door and lamp as well as the seeking of them in the same way that this Hermit’s body is a mirror of the landscape s/he travels.

In the position of Spiritual Challenge comes the Two of Birds aka Two of Swords in a traditional deck. The card in this position indicates a challenge or issues to face. I find it so interesting that in the first card a bird-being is the central focus and here in the second card there are two seemingly opposing bird-beings.

Two of Birds ~ Shining Tribe Tarot

There is tension here. It makes me think of what happens when two magnets are put together and they don't stick because they share the same charge. As if neither of these birds can move from their seeming opposition.

The snake wrapped around their ankles joining the two of them seems to hold the key. It feels like the staff in the first card, the feminine wisdom which guides and grounds. If they can access then movement, momentum is possible again. In terms of a spiritual challenge it feels like my relationship to the myth of duality, of a belief in a separate self and how that creates a sense of inner conflict, stasis and stress.

Snake is a totem and seeing her here feels like a vital piece of information. In terms of integration, that kundalini/Shakti energy is key. Snake's teachings on release of old 'skins, on transformation and womb/belly wisdom are a way through to a deeper understanding of and living in alignment with the Beloved within. This is interdependence.

Lastly in the position of Spiritual Gift comes the Nine of Rivers. It's an interesting image for a card normally associated with wish-making and granting and gift-giving, the fairy goddess-mother card is how I sometimes think of it.

Nine of Rivers ~ Shining Tribe Tarot

We see nine pots, eight of which have small cracks in them and liquid flowing out and one large pot  intact and full of a luminous elixir. Rachel describes it as the card of healing, acceptance of responsibility and rebuilding after a loss. There are themes of social awareness and helping out there, and concern to ease the suffering of others. What a powerful card to receive in this position of Spiritual Gift which she describes as the energy that will help with the challenges of the second card.

The dark blue water spilling from each of the eight broken pots brings me back to the dark blue door on the first card. Perhaps by embracing the dark blue cracks in our being, the schism of the Two of Birds, then the door into a more boundless sense of self becomes possible. That Hermit's lamp is waiting just beyond the dark blue door. It's like the ninth jar in this card, shining, luminous and whole.



This has been such a nourishing and surprisingly on point reading done on a whim with the app on my phone and then translated into the actual with my deck. This deck has become one of my top go-tos this year. I like it so much that it merited a special wrap which I knit up this week. Seeing it contained within my own work, a bit of red jasper tucked inside the ties, makes it feel all the more potent.

Five of Swords ~ Instinct and Intellect

Celestial Tarot by Kay Stevenson and Brian Clark

Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time, writes Hélène Cixous in 'The Laugh of the Medusa.'

I've been reflecting on this phrase for a couple of months now. It came up a couple of months back when the Five of Swords was the card for that particular month. This depiction above, from the Celestial Tarot, shows us Pegasus, the divine winged horse, who was born from the severed head of Medusa. Censorship and severed heads have obvious, if visceral, points of intersection. And my subtitle for this card, the inner critic, carries on this theme of the silencing of voice. Medusa, with her hair of writhing snakes, could only be looked at with a mirror so deadening was her gaze. It's an interesting metaphor, reflection as a way in, the use of mirror, of indirect gaze as a tool for awakening.

Cioux writes in such a way as to leave the reader with questions as to the verity of this dark goddess's maligned nature. Censorship as the patriarchal silencing of feminine instinct, of kundalini energy, of uterine power. Not only does she draw a correlation between body and voice, implicit in her writing is the reality that body IS voice.

The Swords align with both communication and conflict. They represent the element of Air, the medium by which our spoken words are carried. Astrologically the Air trinity includes Gemini, Libra and Aquarius, each looking for its other half through relationship's mirror. One might look at the suit of Swords as the Earth longing to become aware, as a depiction of the seeming conflict between instinct and intellect.

Holding Cioux words in my awareness I lie down on the kitchen floor. The house is empty but for myself, the dogs and bird. I can see my limbs, breasts, belly, can sense sinew, muscle...all arranged on the worn wood surface, its uneven architecture lined up beneath me. Each pale strip holds stories, hollow and spacious like birds' bones, a poetics of emptiness. Feeling into the experience of censorship, of somatic censorship, that Cixous writes of here. Trying to find words for the flesh of the moment. And I realize that my throat is not big enough for this language that wants a skin.

Embodiment is a paradox. It’s a pilgrimage that ends ultimately in loss. There is no resolution in its mutable dialectic. Descending into the body is to grasp at the pages of transience while at the same time touching the limit of form. This tension mirrors the tension in all the Fives.

Soil and Stardust

Mesquite Tarot ~ Nature's Pharmacy Deck ~ Compendium of Constellations

It's a three-deck day today. Sometimes that's how it goes, the mind needs more rather than less to work with. I'm reminded of a teacher of mine who once shared that dull minds did well with complex meditation practices. I feel the truth in that today ;) Drawing from the newly published Mesquite Tarot along with the Nature's Pharmacy deck, put out by the New York Botanical Gardens and available on Amazon. It remains a favorite botanical deck for its simplicity and classic design. Pulling from the earth I decided to pull from the stars with the relatively new Compendium of Constellations. This turned out to be a relevant choice based on the qualities of the first card in my reading.

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Queen Ann's Lace🌿

Novice of Cups🏆

Four of Pentacles📀

Six of Pentacles📀

Sagitta 🏹

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Queen Anne's Lace is pretty spectacular. I know it best as the flowers that grew by the country roadsides and at the edges of meadows of my childhood. Its name inspired thoughts of castles, female magic, strength and beauty. Reading up on it now and I'm taken in by its presence, intelligence and generosity. Its large airy flower is shaped in such a way as to receive both air and light deep into its inner petals and radiate that energy back out. But its root system is equally impressive giving us the lowly and deliciously nutritious carrot! In short it's a balancer of soul and body, a mediator between upper and lower realms. 

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The Tarot's guidance begins with the Novice of Cups, the Page equivalent. Dipping my feet into the emotional realm suggests a titration of feelings, just enough to get my feet wet. The Four suggests I sit with those feelings silently, not to share until I'm ready which the Six then encourages me to do freely. This feels like more of an inner-outer ray than upper and lower and yet it keeps the theme of bridging two seeming polarities.

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Finally the stars offer me 'Sattiga', meaning arrow in Latin. Its keyword is 'Objective' suggesting two possibilities. One to consider what I'm aspiring towards and two to keep a spacious, non-judgmental attitude. This last bit is key, is integral to the alchemical process of becoming. Without space there's no room to grow, to see further, to be present to the amazement and complexities of the moment. 

Roses and Sun and Lions, Oh My!

Lioness Oracle Tarot by Alejandra Léon Wolfe Rocha

Just a short post to keep my foot in the blogging door. I've been working with the Lioness Oracle Tarot lately (available here) and really loving its feminine vibe, its depictions of the marriage of strength and receptivity. Today's question focused on a work-related proposal and the cards def came through. Seeing the Sun card my heart just sang. With its unapologetic claiming of vibrant space it elicits a similar response when looking at it. Radiant, strong, receptive and beautiful.

With Autumn just around the corner I imagine some of my more somber decks will make an appearance but for now this luminous beauty takes center stage. Leaving y'all with the blessings of The Sun.

Touchstone Tarot ~ Soul Work

Touchstone Tarot by Kat Black

This morning as I surveyed my decks I felt a restlessness. Not really interested in reading symbols, imagery, doing a spread for the day and so forth and none of my decks were calling to me. What was it I really wanted? And then came the words, an encounter with Soul. Yes, that was it! Something deeper than a surface reading, than using the usual map. And no sooner had this aspiration arisen than the Touchstone Tarot ,with its portraiture of soulful, evocative figures, leapt out as the deck to use. And oh my, it did not disappoint. 

From the top of the deck I drew The Hermit, from the bottom of the deck I drew the Three of Cups. The Hermit is both my soul and personality card according to Mary Greer's formula for calculating your cards using your birthdate. I also happen to be in a Hermit year based on the same birthdate calculations so seeing this card come up felt juicy, real, magical. I felt heard. Which is what we all want in the end, isn't it.

The Hermit ~ Touchstone Tarot

This particular Hermit is full of earthy and ethereal magic. I immediately noticed how his hand seems to be gently releasing the women in the Three of Cups, with the graceful kind of touch that we see in da Vinci's Hand of God painting. And sure enough he meets them, transformed, into Owl, Stag and Cat. His eyes are closed here suggesting a different kind of vision is needed to navigate the inner realms. And his yellow lantern swinging by his midsection speaks to me of third chakra work, the solar plexus, seat of power, will and mental acuity. No coincidence that yesterday I drew a card focused on this chakra in relation to body work I've been doing. 

What this card speaks to for me, is the necessity of acknowledging the animal body, its instinctual wisdom, its strength, its intuitive knowing. There is such movement here with the tilt of his head, the gesture of his left hand, the swing of the lantern and drape of his robes. And yet there is presence in that movement, awareness and receptivity. 

This is precisely where I find myself. Working with the body in this slow, quiet, receptive way. Opening to its language, a different kind of listening is being asked of me. It's new territory, to be attentive, gentler to this body. I'm pulling from several different traditions and teachers as I find my way, often in the dark but with the will to know, to learn to really want to inhabit it more. Solar Plexus energy is fire, it's digestion and assimilation. Mine has been compromised for various reasons and this is an area I really find myself needing to dig deep. The number Three of the Cups card underscores this chakra work for me. It's definitely inner work, a pulling in and back from things. 

Three of Cups ~ Touchstone Tarot

These three women here feel very inclusive in their communion. There is a place for me here to participate in their quiet joy. Those three feminine bodies within, Maiden/Mother/Crone, feel welcoming. Their gazes are full of the mystery of what it is to be human, to share, to be a woman. They're not giving much away and yet what they o offer is full of presence and depth. Just the kind of energy I wanted to meet today. Quiet, unassuming and powerful. All the blue suggests throat chakra energy, giving voice to connection, to joy.

It's not as though this pair of cards are the arrival, more that they are part of the process, that of listening in to what is being asked for, what is needed in the moment and moving from there. Rather than giving me concrete answers it feels as though the cards have gathered round me, have offered me a container, a mirror and way in. And they've done so with beauty, with grace and with gravitas. 

I shall be sitting with them for a while, working with them, listening to their guidance, their mysteries and poetry. Sometimes it's not about the answer but more about the question that begins the journey. 

Ophidia Rosa Tarot

Ophidia Rosa Tarot by Nicole Rallis

A new deck has found its way into my sub-collection of botanical-inspired decks. I love these kinds of decks both for their artwork and the energy that the plants bring to readings. Perhaps the most well-known is The Herbal Tarot by Michael Terra. This is a lovely deck that is very RWS influenced but with the addition of plant medicine for each card. The colors are bright and bold and the illustrations have a simplicity and purity to them that makes them easy to read.

This latest deck, the Ophidia Rosa Tarot is done by the same artist, Nicole Rallis, who did the Pythia Botanica Oracle which came out last year and there is even more attention to detail in this Tarot deck. The packaging is gorgeous. The box is sturdy with lovely white ink drawings on a black inside. From the moment you open this deck you have the sense of its refined, elegant feminine energy.

All the cards are tea stained (as is the case with her Pythia Botanica Oracle) and the pen and ink drawings are beautifully subtle with just the hint of color here and there in deep roses and dark teals. The hand drawn borders just right, card stock is a good thickness and she's gone the extra mile by having it edged in matte gold. This last detail gives such a graceful, vintage feeling to the deck.

The overall effect is one of quality, subtlety and beauty. It arrived on the Full Rose Moon and this synchronicity was not lost on this Rose. I worked with her for a full Moon reading that night and the simple three card spread has stayed with me.

Full Rose Moon reading ~  Ophidia Rosa Tarot

A beginner would be challenged by this deck. And even seasoned readers might struggle with the lack of obvious symbolism. There is not much of an LWB, just a small pamphlet with a few poetic lines hinting at the essence of the card's energy. The plants aren't identified and at first I was put off by this. But a wonderful thing happens when you are forced to rely on a different layer of intelligence to receive the message.

Ophidia Rosa Tarot Majors

You can see the some of the Majors to the right here and how they are quite intuitively rendered. The creator describes it on her website like this :: The Ophidia Rosa Tarot came to be over a year-long period, cared for and pondered through four seasons of natural change. While framed by the tarot's ancient tradition and structure, my botanical world―full of such transformation, from the soil to the seedling, the sprout and the bloom―placed an emphasis on change bursting forth all around me. 

Something more intuitively tangible was born of the tarot, where even the phases of the moon and the mysterious, serpentine movements of creatures in the garden brimmed with a power for prophecy, contemplation, redemption and a quest. Each of these 78 cards―the full Major and Minor arcana―draws on the tarot's timeworn truth carried closer to home. There's always something growing in our hearts, transforming ourselves and our visions, from the soil to the stars.

Her description very much conveys the atmosphere and energy of the deck. It’s a bit like coming upon an old wooden gate, covered over with trellised roses and vines and pushing it open to step inside a wild landscape that lives according to the ancient rhythms of light and shadow, rain and wind. I've been working with the deck for a couple of weeks now and am very much enjoying my readings with it. They are definitely not traditional interpretations of the cards, and yet something of the energy of the card remains.

Morning tea with the Ophidia Rosa Tarot 

It lends itself beautifully to intuitive readings, guidance that one wouldn't normally get from a traditional deck. For example last week I was feeling fairly off. I'd taken a Tylenol earlier for a headache that was hovering around the edges but it wasn't really doing it. I had an event of my son's to attend later that night and I needed to feel my best in order to support him. So I decided to consult the cards on what might be needed in the moment.

Looking at this Five of Pentacles I was immediately drawn to the flower at the base, it's roundedness and solidity. I had the sense of pulling my energy in and down, creating a little haven to sit and breathe in. 

Root chakra yoga came to mind and so I closed the door to my office, pulled out some root chakra singing bowl music and spent a bit of time breathing into the earth of my body, drawing the energy away from my head.

It worked beautifully and isn't the guidance that I'd normally get reading this card with its image of a church and two ragged and destitute figures struggling to get by in a cold and unforgiving urban snowscape.

All in all I'm very happy with this deck and feel it will be one that will be in regular use...as regular use as is possible with a lot of decks in one's collection. Further information on the deck including how to purchase it can be found here on the artist's website, LeilaOlive.

Four of Cups ~ The Borderlands

Tarot of the Hidden Realm by Julia Jeffrey

Several weeks ago the Four of Cups swam into my awareness as one of those conundrum cards. You know the ones I mean. You understand the symbolism, you grok the traditional interpretation no probs but you feel like you're missing the deeper themes it speaks to. It's been my experience that holding the misunderstood card as a question and letting it live at the edges of my awareness without the need to analyze it eventually yields the kind of resonance I'm looking for. It's as if it takes on a kind of somatic reality that gradually trickles up to my mental reality.

Universal Waite by Pamela Coleman Smith
recolored by Mary Hanson-Roberts

And such was the case with the Four of Cups. Traditionally we see a figure seated at the base of a tree, arms crossed, three cups before him, one being divinely offered. On his face is a look of several possible realities, boredom, daydreaming, self absorption, disinterest, contemplation. It never really rang true to leave it at that surface level. But I was never able to get too far with it beyond this, at least not into something that felt resonant.

Tarot of the Hidden Realm by Julia Jeffrey

Enter this version from the Tarot of the Hidden Realm with its gorgeous and lyrical depiction of a selkie at the moment she is leaving behind her human body to transform into a seal and suddenly there it was, the deeper message. The level of her apprehension at taking up full embodiment in either realm is palpable. Leaving behind the riches of her Fey world is as daunting as not being able to swim freely in the ocean's currents. And it's this ambivalence that I think speaks to the heart of the card.

This is a card of navigating the liminal realms. Its geography is the borderlands, the edges. It speaks to a deep ambivalence towards incarnation, towards manifestation, towards the present moment. Betwixt and between is the phrase that comes to mind, and with it the suffering and isolation that ensues from such a state.





As I was musing on this very familiar state, on my own sometimes ambivalence at being present, occasionally at being in a body at all, I wondered at the possible reasons for it. The word perfectionism swam up to greet my inquiry. Yes, I imagine that is at the heart of things, an ideal so high that it's impossible to reach and therefore one spends a lot of time roaming, neither in the "imperfect" world of form nor the unattainable ideal world of, well, ideals. I dunno, for me this touches on subjects and themes that feel soul-oriented, that are questions I'm holding this lifetime. How often am I absent from the moment, from life, from myself?

The way the figure is seated at the base of the tree in the traditional depiction of this card gives me the sense that root chakra work would be a wonderful way to begin the slow and steady process of incarnation, of coming to terms with being here, now. Spending time with my back against a solid tree, feeling its roots spreading out beneath me, the ground supporting me. All of these bring the body into the present moment of sensation, of feeling and noticing. Perhaps even spending a bit of time each day connecting this way would go a long way to redress the imbalance between ether and earth. And I think when this card comes up for me now I'll have a much better sense of its message, not only emotionally but also somatically.

Tarot of the Hidden Realm by Julia Jeffrey