Day Zero wouldn’t be the end of Q2 or the beginning of Q3 or part of any rigid structure. Not yesterday’s tomorrow or tomorrow’s yesterday . . .

Perhaps each of us would get one Zero Day to spend every year, and …

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Today is not the tomorrow I had in mind at the end of Dispatch #6—but it is in fact the day after yesterday. So does that make it a double tomorrow?

Only if counted from the day before yesterday, obviously. But I bring this up because “tomorrow” is one of those words that is fundamentally dependent on its relationship to some specific mar…

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The new part of this post will be brief. I started out today with an impulse (inspiration?) to create an AI ecosystem trained to think about Tarot through the structure of ideas developed in the 300+ posts created so far on EP.

Which I think will be a fascinating journey. But I have to admit—it’s requiring more …

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Since I didn’t send out a “Daily” Dispatch yesterday, I’ve decided to just call them “Dispatches” from now on, and number them sequentially. I still plan to finish a whole week, though.

I felt a little reluctant to write a Dispatch yesterday because there was so much troubling news going on, in so many places. I’ve been careful not to t…

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This year there is only one, and we’re having it right now.

When I start thinking about an EP post, I almost always begin with a quick look at the numbers and/or calendar significance of the date. Not always bu…

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The Dispatch format for the rest of the series includes:

• Spotlight on an EP reader who is also a Substack writer

• A serial discussion of Tarot thinking

• An interesting deck

For today and tomorrow I have a guest contributor of sorts: my trusty AI sidekick, otherwise known as Gemini 2.5 Pr…

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I’ve decided that each Dispatch will highlight an EP reader who is also a Substack writer. And I want to start off with someone who’s quite new to Substack—but a well-known Tarot theorist and practitioner.

TARO Currents

This is a Substack for those who know that tarot is not just about symbols — it is a system, a spirit, and a temple. TARO: essays, rituals, invocations, and guidance drawn from The Book of Thoth

By Paul Hughes-Barlow

Paul arrived on…

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Hello everyone—and a special welcome to new readers.

I wasn’t able to publish EP on a regular schedule the past few weeks, so I’m making up with a week-long series of daily emails. I used to do this once in a while, under the heading “Daily Notes”—but now that Substack calls its social media component “Notes,” I decided to avoid any confusion and name this new series “Daily Dispatches” instead.

I have in mind a mix of older posts worth revisiting, current news from the Tarot community, and ideas/events that capture my attention along the way. Plus a few announcements.

So tomorrow I’ll go further afield. But today I want to reshare some of a post I wrote in April of 2022, relating to Russia’s then-recent assault on Ukraine. I was thinking at the time about the fact that Tarot seems to have appeared just at the end of the Hundred Years War (1337–1453)—a series of inter-connected conflicts that raged across Europe for over a century, killing at least two million people.

If you’d like to read the whole post, it’s free this week.

But I want to highlight the following portion, because I think it pertains to the present point in time. A point at which many of us are increasingly concerned about what’s happening in the world—not just in distant countries, but on our own shores . . . .

It’s a prevalent assumption that the original Tarot images were shaped by a pervasive Catholic religiosity. I could offer a dispute, but let’s not bother. After all, religious zeal—along with thirst for power, material greed, hubris, and ideological obsession—is one of the threads permanently intertwined in warfare, from the Siege of Troy to Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine.

So it’s all the same story. And that story is condensed into the Tarot. Intentionally or otherwise, it doesn’t matter.

The “plot” of the story is not circumstantial, it is archetypal.  That means it will play out along lines that are predetermined—by fate, by human nature, or however you want to look at it. And it has never ended, just paused.

We are presently watching the same chain of events that has transpired over millennia in different forms. But like everything else in modern life, it is now speeded up, and magnified. So we have a time-lapse view of this archetypal process. Plus a fore-knowledge of its outcome.

Not one war in history has ended cleanly, or left the world in a better place. People just stop for a while, nurse their grievances, plot their revenge, and look for the next excuse or provocation. Not everyone, of course—but a majority.

In the last couple of centuries, there have been efforts to prevent the next round of bloodshed, and we even see a little progress in that direction. But it’s a very steep uphill journey. And in a sense . . . Tarot tells us why this is so.

Every trump is like a see-saw, tipping from light to dark. The Fool is a sage or an idiot, The Chariot is constructive or destructive energy, The Star could be aspiration or delusion. And so on.

Since entropy always tends toward disorder (that’s why a broken egg cannot become unbroken), every time you put the seesaw back into balance, it will stay that way for a while, then slowly tip toward darkness and disorder. Exactly the same thing happens in the lives of individuals, and of nations.

We can level out the see-saw, time after time. But since combatting entropy uses more energy than just going along, it takes a lot of effort. And humans (as a species) don’t work that hard proactively. They wait until there is no choice.

So here we are, again.

Closing thought: Tarot is arguably the best of all divinatory tools, though that is only one use. It works for many purposes because the Major Arcana provides us with a condensed catalog of the cosmos, depicting every element I can think of—and it is utterly realistic about the mixture of goodness and evil that makes up our world.

For that reason, we can use it to study anything realistically. Even war.

We can also use it to evade reality, by pushing down on the light side of the see-saw, and insisting on a happy meaning for every card. But that seems like a waste.

To abbreviate the story (this installment, anyway) . . . yesterday I traveled into Dallas for an ophthalmology appointment—another step on my path tow…

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The reason I often don’t get to anticipated items is that other things pop into view, and seem more immediate.

It’s happened again, of course, because while I was wrapping up the art thing, the jazz thing inserted itself …

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Running through those varied forms and genres are interconnected ideas and thematic threads that stand out even more clearly in her teaching.

For many years, Rachel teamed up with noted Tarot author Mary Gr…

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For this post I had planned to focus on how she expanded the boundaries of super-hero comics. And that’s still the plan—but I’ve since rea…

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Today’s note focuses on Rachel’s accomplishments as a novelist and writer of short fiction. Our starting place is Th…

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In case there are any readers not familiar with her exceptional contributions to the study of Tarot, here’s an inadequate summary.

• Rachel’s signature work, 78 Degrees of Wisdom, was first published as a c…

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As a result, my environment is only semi-functional—so I’ll take advantage of the “opportunity” to share a long excerpt from History, Mystery, and Lore on the late medieval convergence of magic and Kabbalah.

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It’s also the last 22 of 2022—so of course I’m already thinking that I didn’t enjoy the previous eleven 22s enough. And scandalously, it appears I’ve only posted on one date 22 this whole year before now.

What was I thinking?

But at lea…

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I’ve always been fascinated by the pattern of seasons, but I’ve never been patient enough for the kind of engagement that forms a true connection with the earth and its rhythms. Luckily though, there are gifted creators who bring planetary awareness to Tarot practice.

Among them: Joanna Powell Colbert,…

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There’s one big exception, though.

Every Friday I get a report on which of my stories have been viewed the most that week. And it always looks…

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Also like Court de Gebelin, Levi let himself be carried away from the heart of the matter by a wave of romantic enthusiasm. It’s apparent that the Kabbalah and the Tarot resemble o…

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I’m not revising the original texts, but will add a note of update/expansion after each one.…

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