Talking with the Honored Dead

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This season's Tarot Blog Hop is about seeking advice from our honored ancestors. 

For this one, I decided merely to do a simple Tarot reading. Now one of the tricks I learned when consulting the Tarot for a specific matter, is that you can remove the significator from the deck, decide what card represents the issue, shuffle, turn over cards until you find that card, and the next cards in the deck are the ones that you are reading.  

In this case, I chose the Magician card to represent myself (as a writer), and the Death card to represent advice from the honored dead (the crossing card).

Dead and beyond the veil.

Reading the next three cards, I assigned them to the three pillars of Kabbalah, and to specific people in my ancestry.

Pillar of Mercy (and my father): Page of Wands--Pages are students, and I always associate wands with pens, so I am reading this as "Practice makes perfect, or at least, better." And that is something that I occasionally forget as a writer--basically, I always feel like my first draft should be perfect, and that is not actually the way it works.

Pillar of Severity (and my mother): Two of Wands--One of the meanings of this card, according to Tarot For Writers (Corrine Kenner) is the will and power to move beyond the initial stages of creation. In other words, finish the work. One of the problems that I have struggled with as a writer is actually finishing projects; I am ok with smaller projects, but I tend to abandon larger projects because I feel like I should be working on "money projects"---unfortunately, I keep changing targets because I doubt that my current work-in-progress is going to make money. Basically, I need to learn to actually finish things. (I am getting better at this, thanks to the yummy bipolar meds.)

[The reason that Tarot For Writers was consulted was it was the only Tarot book near me, and there is a cat asleep on my lap. The reason for it being close is that tomorrow is the start of National Novel Writing Month, that delightful time when some writers try to hack out fifty thousand words (the amount of words in a novel) in thirty days.]

Pillar of Mercy (and my witchy aunt): Three of Pentacles--This is a card that shows both spiritual support as well as blueprinting it out. Think of an artist being influenced by the rules of their craft (the themes that you see in certain types of works, for instance, detective stories), as well as the muse (who is not even sure that an outline is a good thing). This actually seems to indicate that the project that enjoys such an interaction is the next one that I should be working on...and I think I know what one it is (the taxi driving troll that becomes a private detective--Harmic Burrows). 

So that was my advice from the honored dead....unless it was for one of my readers. And a example of a quick way to do a reading using the idea of significators and crossing cards.  

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