The Thursday Newsletter (11.18)

Time and Tarot--some practical notes . . .

As mentioned more than once, I’m excited about 2022. Beyond the obvious number symbolism, it’s a once-in-a-century opportunity to reconnect with key events in Tarot history—and renew a substantive, creative vision of Tarot.

Here’s my reasoning . . . .

A Commemorative Calendar

Since we don’t have a specific birthdate for Tarot, we can’t have obvious anniversaries. But let’s pretend for the moment that Tarot sprang into being (somehow or other) in 1422. That’s not an entirely whimsical idea, since we know there were decks being made by around 1450.

Fast forward half a millennium, and you land at 1922—the year when Paul Foster Case formally launched Builders of the Adytum (BOTA), shifting the momentum of esoteric Tarot from a declining tradition in Europe to a newly emerging American approach. In the same year, a second edition of A. E. Waite’s Pictorial Key to Tarot was published, and T. S. Eliot’s Tarot-tinged poem The Wasteland made its first appearance.

Eliot subsequently played down the poem’s Tarot references, which he had picked up from Jessie Weston’s 1920 study of grail mythology, From Ritual to Romance. But the process of connecting Tarot with literature, art, and psychology was taking shape, and would expand continuously throughout the twentieth century.

So . . . why not declare 2022 an anniversary of sorts?

Now that I’ve thought about it that way, I’ve decided how to celebrate the new year in my own work. More to come soon.

But for the moment, some ideas about . . . .

Telling Time

As I’ve indicated in several Exploration Project posts, I believe there is a place for “the future” in Tarot work. Otherwise, I don’t see how it’s different from any other form of self-reflection or imaginative interaction. (If you want to catch up on my attitude, there’s more in The Future Factor, Fortune/Telling, and Divination Deconstructed.)

I didn’t start out with that expectation, and in fact I resisted the idea for quite a while. But the “future” dimension of Tarot-reading gradually became apparent to me (even insistent), and over time I worked out some specific ways to locate the temporal dimensions of a reading.

Although the EP newsletters have rarely included strategies for reading, I want to go a bit more in that direction during the rest of 2021, and plan on offering my own timing approach with more detail.

For now, though, I want to share someone else’s methodology—which I had never thought of, but find intriguing.

Ordinarily, I could just summarize, and point you to the original presentation. But the person who wrote about this method has since removed it from his blog site, along with every other bit of content he had published over several years. All that remains is a farewell note, indicating that he wants to shift his work in another direction.

Most people do leave their content in place when they abandon a site—in fact they usually just drift away, without any sort of formal ending. So I take it seriously that this person has decided to separate himself from past work in an explicit way.

And thinking it over, I decided the best course is just to explain what I took away from the original post. Simply put:

• That suits have different time tendencies. For example—Swords are fastest, Pentacles are slowest.

• Based on these tendencies, you could link each suit with a duration. Swords might be hours, Pentacles might be years.

• You could take that a step further, and interpret the number of a pip card as a quantity. Ten of Swords might be within the scope of a single day, while Ten of Pentacles might represent a decade.

The original post went into more detail, and added some seasonal correlations. But the above will give you a general idea.

Other people may have developed a similar approach independently. I hadn’t, though. And now that I’ve come across it, I’ve been thinking about whether/how I would implement it in the context of my own methodology.

Here’s that part:

1. In my view, there wouldn’t be any fixed set of correlations—more of an intuitive connection that might be different for each person.

2. At the same time, elemental associations seem suggestive. “Earth time” is our slowest terrestrial measurement, spanning eons. So it makes intuitive sense that Pentacles would be the slowest suit. Air offers the least resistance, and objects move through it much faster than they move through water—so it makes intuitive sense that Cups would be slower than Swords.

3. There are various ways the time dimension of a suit could be applied in a reading. The application would be most obvious in spreads that have time-specific components. In a traditional Celtic Cross, for example, the Ten of Pentacles in the place of the “Past” would put an event or influence much further away from the present than the Ten of Swords.

4. In a different way, a preponderance of one suit in a spread might indicate a timeframe—and that might be helpful in interpreting the spread as a whole.

I haven’t tried any of this in practice, but I plan to. Meanwhile, I wanted to share the idea with EP readers, and open up the topic of time in readings. I’d love to hear about other approaches.

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If the person whose work I’ve referenced above happens to see this, please let me know if you would like to have credit, or perhaps share the original post.

I have some things stacked up on my desk and hope to share them over the weekend, so keep an eye out. Meantime, thanks for reading, and—as always—warmest regards.

C