A deep dive into the world of Tarot, and significant work on my website.

Website

If you’re reading this, it looks like I got the site back up. After redownloading a version of the caddy binary that included http.git, I decided it was safer to have my jackblog repo public rather than leaving unencrypted keys laying around my webserver. So I turned the gitlab repo from private to public, but it deleted all contents in the repo!! What?

Well github had the business sense to allow free private repos recently (which was the only thing keeping me in gitlab) so it was trivial to switch over. Github even noticed a version of bootstrap on an old (unused) theme hanging around in the repo is vulnerable to XSS. Nifty! Microsoft Gitlab’s got my back.

So I got the git setup for both the base site (jackklika.com) and this blog. It’s tested to work, so from now on all I need to do is push to the repo from my laptop and it pulls the repo every 30 minutes.

In addition, filemanager filebrowser updated to a new version less than a month ago. Cool stuff; it just involved migrating the database and changing the Caddyfile syntax a bit. I still don’t know where the database is being kept but it’s persistant across resets.

It’s fun to watch how fast caddy and related projects are moving!

The Oxford Essential Guide to Writing

Making my way though The Oxford Essential Guide to Writing and doing the exercises. I enjoyed the examples in chapter two of how sentence length can indicate tone, and in other chapters what kind of rules there are. (Usage rules, Grammar rules, and Style)

One quote stuck out to me in particular: “In personal writing, words are not simply an expression of the self; they help to create the self. In struggling to say what we are, we become what we say.” What I’m writing here in these journals is forming my thoughts, forming what I am, and forming the answers to questions people ask such as “What did you do yesterday?”

The Way of Tarot

I’m beginning The Way of Tarot (ISBN 9781594772634) by Alejandro Jodorowsky. I know him from directing The Holy Mountain which was arguably my first “art film” and had tarot symbolism in its characters. What a fantastic movie, anyone reading this sentence should give it a watch. After looking though the Yi Jing the other day I was thinking about the Western analogue of this sort of divination and Tarot seemed to be it.

My interest in this is based in how people interpret the world. Us humans like to categorize things as it’s easier for our heads to wrap around than chaos. So these cards have distinctions such as human/thought vs human/nature, or comparisons between economic/profession and invention/production.

In the numerology section of this book, the author separates further into things like male/female, where the even numbers of the minor arcana have feminine aesthetic and odd numbers have male. This corresponds to the numerology of the Chinese as well, where yin/female is associated with even numbers. This makes me realize how startlingly cross-cultural this sort of mysticism is.

Also, many of us have probably thought that since certain people remind us of other people, there could be some universal classification for personality, archetype, or character. The Major Arcana represent many of these characters, and so do concepts like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, astrology, Hero’s Journey, or Catholic Saints. When it comes to writing and storytelling, knowing some of these archetypes may help me create more entertaining and memorable (not necessary realistic!) characters.

As for the divination aspect, people have many of the same fears or anxiety about the future. These might include seeing opportunity but an inability to move into action, stagnation, being tricked by a swindler, solitude, or death. As tarot card readers would do their readings for clients, or as court scholars did for old Chinese emperors, they have to address these fears and will do so with their interpretation of the cards or hexagrams. Therefore we can see through these methods and materials of divination some cross-cultural and shared fears of everyday life.

So in short: These methods and materials have no power besides what man assigns to the ritual. But the influence and power of the ritual, the way it makes people think, and the deep concepts of the human psyche which it describes are interesting to me. What causes people to be drawn to this divination, and why do they feel satisfied afterward? What is the oracle thinking as they read for a client? I want answers to these questions.

Aaaaanyways, here’s some notes I was jotting down when reading. These kinds of notes help me remember and organize things, and save a lot of skimming through the book later. This is only what I gleamed from a day’s look through the book, not really my original insights. If I got home to America and bought a deck and did readings for myself and others, over years of experience I would likely form my own interpretations. But for starters, Alejandro Jodorowsky convinced me through his passionate introduction to the book that he put a lot of thought into all of this.

Notes

A standard tarot deck is composed of 78 cards. This book is written referencing The Tarot of Marseilles, a comparatively older version of the Tarot deck.

There’s 56 Minor Arcana cards (where ‘Arcana’ means card) which include:

• The standard 1-10 in four suits, Batons/Wands, Swords, Cups, and Coins/Pentacles.
• Four figures of each suit, which are like the Jack/Queen/King in traditional playing cards, but in this case are Pages, Queens, Kings, and Knights.

There’s an additional 22 Major Arcana (or trump) cards. These are the ‘picture cards’ which include famous figures like “The Fool,” “Wheel of Fortune,” or “The World.”

Within the book the author talks about what he thinks of as suit correspondences:

• Sword: Being. Intellectual Energy, Language, Myths, Meditation, Head. Active. Human/Heaven.
• Cup: Loving. Emotional Energy, Feelings, Heart. Receptive. Human/Heaven.
• Pentacles: Living. Material Energy, Body, Health, Prosperity, Economy, Flat of Feet. Receptive. Human/Earth.
• Wand: Labor. Sexual/Creative Energy, Reproduction, Creativity, Imagination, Growth, Pelvis. Active. Human/Earth.

Each of these move into each other in the order above. This is indicated by hints on the cards, such as a pentacle in the ten of cups which suggests movement from the ten of cups into the ace of pentacles. This also indicates that intellectual energy will move into emotional as sword to cup, or once economic material is accumulated a couple can move onto reproduction as pentacles to wand.

As for the Figures:

• Page: Desire. Hesitancy, Uncertainty, Earth.
• Queen: Dynamics. Fully within the suit, closed off but sure.
• King: Action. Authority, Knowing what is in possession and near, and at the same time contemplating the unknown.
• Knight: Transformation and Moving Forward. Awareness and acceptance. Communication, conquest, unification.

The Degrees are the numbers each card corresponds to. For example, the Ace of Swords, Ace of Cups, Ace of Pentacles, Ace of Wands, I Magician, and XI Strength, all are Degree 1 and suggest totality or energy without experience. 0 The Fool and XXI The World have no degree.

While an interesting concept, the Mandala of the tarot which our author lays out feels superfluous. But as a way to “familiarize oneself with the entire deck” as the author suggests, it does the trick.

Jodorowsky then moves into the symbology of colors, each of which is a way to read the cards. In hindsight I should have skipped this section, but I already wrote the following so I’ll keep it here:

• White: Union and Purification, Cold and Death. Extreme.
• Blue: Reception and Attachment, Immobility and Asphyxia. Realm of Heaven.
• Yellow: Intellect and Gold, Aridity and Destruction. Realm of Heaven.
• Flesh: Humanity and Vitality, Materialism and Carnality. Human.
• Red: Warmth and Activity, Death and Spilled Blood. Realm of Nature.
• Green: Birth and Nature, Envy and Absorption. Realm of Nature.
• Black: Beginning and Germination, Chaos and Void. Extreme.
• Violet: Wisdom and Royalty, Sacrifice and Death. Rarely found in the cards and an “outside color.”

Part 2 is a deeper look into the Major Arcana: This part is thick and probably would do better by a daily read into each of them. Same goes with the Minor Arcana in part 3.

Part 4 is the “Tarot Two by Two” and is devoted to the synergy between cards. It brings up the concept of Tarot as a language, and like verbs change and conjugate when paired with other words, so do the Tarot interact with each other. These combinations include:

• Decimal Series Duets: For example IIII Emperor and XIIII Temperance.
• Logical Couples: For example III Empress and IIII Emperor, 0 Fool and XXI The World, or XVIII Moon and XVIIII Sun.
• Pairs that add to 21: Since XXI is the World, two combinations would add together to become ‘whole,’ like I Magician and XX Judgement.
• Numerical Succession: The author mentions here that order here really matters, like the difference between XII-XIII and XIII-XII.

Part 5 is about reading the Tarot. Here’s the fun part! Alejandro Jodorowsky recounts some experiences as a tarologist and the taological industry. He also decides not to assign any particular meaning to reversed cards.

He gives some basic tips to start with:

• Read on the level of the individual, don’t act enlightened or superior. Provide help!
• As a beginner, a good exercise is to draw one card a day and interpret it in at least three different ways (the author suggests concrete level, psychological level, and spiritual level)

He gives some examples of questions asked for a reading. Examples are questions like “What are my intellectual limits?” “What are my emotional limits?” “What are my sexual or creative limits?” Or having a decision at hand and drawing two cards, where one is an advantage and one is a drawback.

The example readings are interesting in that the author employs many features of the card. In one example on page 445 there are two cards in the reading, a situation and conflict card. The conflict is III which is a lower number than the situation of XI, he reads the individual is afraid they lack experience.

In this chapter I’m seeing a point made by the author that it isn’t just about a typical reading you would see in movies where a person is dealt a few cards that answer a question or tell a fortune. Rather, like the Yi Jing, it’s a tool that can be used in many ways, such individuals contemplating a card or series of cards in varying configurations. An example is using the VIII Justice to answer a question like “What is she weighing?” and drawing two cards to answer the question, or asking “What is she cutting” and drawing one card to correspond with the sword.

My favorite is “Tarot Poker” where two people put five cards face down in front of them. One player reveals one and asks a question “on behalf of the card,” and the other player reveals a card and answers it according to the Arcana.

Final Thoughts

After making my way through the book (but skipping the specifics of the Arcana, as that will be left for when I can get a deck in the US), my thought is this: Reading Tarot cards serves many purposes, but the most common is a method of therapy. Some people when making decisions need someone to talk to them. Someone who practices reading cards would be good at giving this kind of advice. A reader could adopt one of many strategies to find the best way to communicate advice and make the individual think about their problem in a different way. This is particularly clear on pages 463-4: “We will then be able to find more subtleties or combine the observations obtained from each strategy by having a dialogue with the consultant to end up with the answer that will be the most helpful to him or her.” It’s about helping the other person!

Also on page 467: “An advanced tarologist should abandon the notion of fate as well as that of prediction. He or she is not there to give advice but to show people their own possibilities so that they may personally discover what they should do.”

From part 5, The Reading of the Tarot, I’m getting a lot of flashbacks to the card tricks I’ve learned from The Royal Road to Card Magic, how the individual being read or performed to is not aware of how much is improvised or hidden from them by the Tarot reader’s experience, practice, and perhaps misdirection (where the individual is intentionally led to believe one thing is important while it is a distraction from the trick.) This is mostly since the reader can choose whatever strategy they want to best help the individual, for example on page 475 where the reader is encouraged to try sneaking a peek at the bottom of the deck while the individual is shuffling. The strategy of the reading is how the reader controls the reading. Any detail of the card can be chosen, and any relationships between the cards can be used. On the top of page 530: “Every message obtained by reading the cards can be contradicted by a second reading of the same cards.”

I’m also seeing a lot in common with being a dungeon master for dungeons and dragons, where a lot of the “magic” is hidden from the players. Also where the cards are almost used as storytelling devices

Things I’m Liking

• Let’s Speak English!: A autobiographical webcomic about a girl teaching ESL in Japan to Children. As a former student of the Japanese language, it’s easy to enjoy these kinds of stories. Japan really is a special place and this (now finished) webcomic shows off the cuteness and uniqueness of the foreigner experience in the country.
• Vimium: Have you ever thought “I wish I never had to touch my mouse when surfing the web!” Well, check this out. It’s vim keybindings for your browser. There’s simple stuff like x to close the tab, your familiar hjkl G gg to move around, but it shines with the f key where a bunch of letters pop up over every link, and you can just press that letter to follow it. Also [[ and ]] can navigate paginated sites by following ‘previous’ or ’next’ patterned links. This is great for stuff like webcomics or some documentation.
• Aeclectic Tarot: One of those old-style “vintage” websites that’s been around since 1996. It’s simply about different kinds of tarot cards. It’s an interesting world I’ve never dived into. There’s cats, queer/gay history, line drawings that reminds me of posters a horse-adjacent grade school friend had in her bedroom, christian apocalyptic themed cards, Silicon Valley cards from Steven Jackson, the surreal, and the horrifying.

Misc

The cafe I’m at is playing some instrumental covers of music from Touhou, currently Night of Nights. After moving away from playing church music on piano as a kid, songs from Touhou were the first songs I started learning on my own, mostly from marsay8. Here in China, I’ve been hearing these songs all over, typically as background music in shops or douyin videos.