Are you a Tarot blogger? Want to Hop with us? (Next topic: Respecting the Tarot)

Do you blog about the Tarot? Do you want to help build community among Tarot bloggers? If so, consider joining the Tarot Blog Hop.

Eight times a year (aligned with the eight Wiccan sabbats--but that is only because it was something that many of us Tarot bloggers knew, so it doesn't have to do anything with the sabbat the Hop lands on), a dozen or more Tarot readers, authors, and experts, blog about one of their favorite subjects--the Tarot.

The Tarot Blog Hop is in its fifth year.

What are the rules?


Members of the Tarot Blog Hop commit to doing two blog hops a year (out of the eight). They link to two neighbors, and create a link chain leading from one blog to another in a big circle. And most importantly, our posts are about a theme that a volunteer wrangler and cat herder came up with.


We organize the Tarot Blog Hop though a Facebook group (you must confirm that you blog about the Tarot before we let you join the group---because that's the purpose of the group).


What type of topics could you be blogging about?


Good question. The next Tarot Blog Hop is being wrangled by me (August 1, 2017), and here is the blogging prompt that I provided to the group:


Our theme for this Tarot Blog Hop is pretty broad--Respecting the divinatory arts, with an emphasis on Tarot.


When I was growing up, I spent some time with my Wiccan aunt. Many of the lessons I learned from her about the occult have affected me and the way I approach things. One of the lessons that I learned was to respect divination systems.


My first lesson in this was in relation to a Magic Eight Ball (as silly of a divination device as you can get). “Respect the Eight Ball, and it will give you accurate answers,” my aunt told me. Over the years, I have learned that she was right about this advice.


As a result, one of the things I teach is “Show respect to the divination systems you are using, even if they are silly systems.”


We all have rules, habits, customs that are our ways of showing respect to our divination tools--things that we do that seem to increase our connection (therefore, our accurancy) with our divination tools.


We also know things to avoid doing--things that seem to annoy our divination tools--things that end up with us saying, “Don’t do that--it upsets the cards.” For instance, my tools gets uppity when someone keeps rewording a question in an attempt to get the answer that they want to hear--snarky answers start to happen, and total silence descends if one does not get the hint that the cards have given all they intend to give you.


So your mission this Tarot Blog Hop is to discuss how you show respect to the Tarot (remember it is called the “Tarot Blog Hop”) and things that you have learned not to do. It can range from smudging the deck periodically to elaborate rituals like the Golden Dawn uses, from not using the cards until the dinner table is clean to well, whatever it is that you do. We all have stories about this subject--if you don’t, you would be the first reader I ever encountered that didn’t have stuff to say on this topic.


[Would you like to take part in the Tarot Blog Hop? If so, come join us on the Facebook group.]

Attention Tarot bloggers! (Want to blog hop with us?)

 Are you a blogger that writes about Tarot? If so, do you want to get involved in a community of Tarot bloggers? If the answer is yes, then now is a good time to join the Tarot Blog Hop community on Facebook. 

Eight times a year (about every six weeks), the members of the Tarot Blog Hop community get together and do a common theme blog chain.

The theme for the next Tarot Blog Hop (June 21, 2016), which is being wrangled by me, is Junk Mail Tarot, a "Tarot art project for non-artists."

The idea is to take some photos and/or artwork that someone else has done, and turn it into a Tarot card. Yes, I am assuming that you get junk mail and/or magazines. If not, there is plenty of random photos on the internet, including stock photo sites. And then, there are the meme making sites.

Here are some examples.

Examples of Junk Mail Tarot. 

  Created using index cards, some photos from magazines, and a pen.

More examples of Junk Mail Tarot. 

. Same idea.

These could have been Junk Mail Tarot. 

While this looks like actual artwork, bear in mind that these two cards are actually based on a scene from an old TV show, and a urban fantasy book cover. I could have just as easily did them with screenshots or photocopies.

Now for the writing part...because search engines love indexing text and words and stuff like that.

For the writing part, talk about why you choose the images, and how you are associating them to a particular Tarot card.

Now, for the rules:

Bloggers must take part in two hops per year. Bloggers must post their posts at the same time. Yes, some people end up posting at 2 am---after all, it is an international blog chain. Bloggers must link to their neighbors in the chain, as well as the Master List. Bloggers must comment on five other blogs. And the coordination of this blog chain happens on Facebook.

SIGNUP DEADLINE for the June 21, 2016 blog hop is June 16, midnight MDT

You can find the Tarot Blog Hop Facebook group here. (Look in your "other" folder for a private message from one of the moderators asking you to confirm that you have a Tarot blog.)

Card of the Second Harvest (Tarot Blog Hop)

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Hi everyone! I am Mad Uncle Morgan. And welcome to another edition of the Tarot Blog Hop.

My regular readers will note that this is the second blog hop that I have done this month; the first one being the Tarot Jam blog hop. For those doing the hop, there is a chance that you just came from the Denver Tarot Convention blog, which is actually a guest post that I did about a Tarot field trip during the June 2015 convention (I was assigned the task of taking a photo for the Tower card).

As always if there are breaks in the hop chain, you can always go to the Master List to correct your course.

The idea for this hop comes from our wrangler's experience of creating a Maninni Tarot deck ("maninni" is Italian for "many little hands"). Instead of trying to create a whole maninni deck, we are focusing on what Tarot card is best suited to represent Mabon, the second harvest and the Autumnal Equinox.

Now, for those people in Golden Dawn, or who study its Tarot system (Book T), there is no question which cards are assigned to Mabon....or is there? If we were only looking at the Wiccan holidays from a Northern Hemisphere position, we would have clear cut answers. The problem is that the Southern Hemisphere is (sort-of) dealing with Ostara as we have Mabon in the Northern Hemisphere. (I say "sort of" because my understanding of the seasons is that they are not the polar opposite of ours; seasons are unique to their location. For instance, Egypt has three seasons, not four that Europe and America has. Therefore, the Wiccan Sabbats as created inside Traditional British Wicca are not a good fit for much of the globe.)

Golden Dawn Tarot system applied to the Wiccan Sabbats

I first became aware of this problem when I started to design the Rite of the Magical Images of the Wiccan Sabbats (now available on Amazon). Initially, I considered using the Tarot as the basis of the magical images for the Sabbats. (A magical image is an image that is used to connect with the energies of a divine or astrological force, for the purposes of divination, mediation, and magic.) I also considered using the traditional images of the zodiac degrees that the Sabbats fell upon.

It was the Southern Hemisphere problem that convinced me that this was the wrong solution to use. (When I was involved in the Sanctuary of Maat, several of the students that I was proctoring were living in Australia and New Zealand--thanks to them, I became acutely aware of the fact that the Southern Hemisphere and its seasons complicated things that were considered cut and dried in the Northern Hemisphere. Today, though the Sanctuary of Mau, I still deal with Golden Dawn students in the Southern Hemisphere---therefore, I tilt at the Southern Hemisphere problem still on occasion.)

My solution to the problem was to treat the Wiccan Wheel of the Year and its eight Sabbats as symbols of a mystery tradition, and not as solid fixed points in time. Basically, I came to the conclusion that the Wiccan Wheel of the Year was an artifical creation, and part of a modern myth cycle designed for modern pagans. Once that decision was made, I could divorce the holidays from the zodiac wheel. This also meant that the Tarot was unsuited to the new system that I was creating.

In my script of the Rite of the Magical Images of the Wiccan Sabbats, I described the magical image of Mabon as "A man wrapped in ivy and grape vines standing in front of a standing stone. He holds a horn stuffed with grapes and corn, and he makes the sign of silence." Since that initial version, I have made a couple of chances in the magical image for Mabon.

Mabon as a Tarot card/ magical image

I have modified the image so that the figure is no longer using the sign of silence. The figure is now standing in a vat (barrel) full of fruit and grains. The horn that the figure is holding now also includes grain.

My use of the magical image is representative of issues where one is in the middle of an income cycle. One has already recieved profits and income is at the half-way mark, but one still have some profits and income that has not been recieved yet. It is also representative of taking resources and converting them into something else, like turning grains and fruits into alcohol; or taking raw clay and chemicals to produce pottery.

If I was to replace an existing Tarot card with this image, I probably would put it in the place of the Three of Cups. Or maybe the King of Cups. But I am most likely to use this image, and the other seven Sabbat images, as part of a "side deck"---cards that can replace or be added to another deck. Or maybe as part of an oracle deck. Honestly, I am not sure yet. And we are in the days of print-on-demand Tarot and Oracle decks--there is nothing saying that we are stuck using the only traditional seventy-eight cards.

So that is where my current development of this particular image is at. Thanks for reading, and please consider reading some of the other posts in this edition of the Tarot Blog Hop.

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Getting to know me (Tarot Jam)

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Welcome to the first Tarot Jam blog hop. My regular readers will note that this is the second Tarot based blog hop that I am talking a part in. The other one, the Tarot Blog Hop, happens a week from today. 

As always in a blog hop, if you like, you can navigate the hop though the Previous and Next links; and if there are any breaks in the hop chain, you can use the Master List link to hop over the broken sections. 

The theme of this blog hop is: Getting to know me as a Tarot blogger.

....I am not sure that I have ever done this subject on this blog. If I have, my apologies to my regular readers. If I haven't, I apologize for not doing it sooner. And as always apologizes for me being an opinionated angry blogger. 

My introduction to Tarot came in 1984. I may have read snippets about the Tarot before that point, but I had never actually see a Tarot deck in the flesh (so to speak). And quite honestly, I couldn't get a Tarot deck to work for me to save my life. (Therefore, I used "Norse" runes for years instead.)

When I stumbled my way into Hathoor Temple (1992)---a sort-of Golden Dawn lodge (no actual connection to the original Order), my superior forced me to create my own Tarot artwork. At the time, I did not see the point. And let's be honest, I am a terrible artist--the only thing worse than my writing is my art. 

But the Tarot did start working for me, so I guess that my superior actually knew what he was doing. And that is about how far as I ever advanced in the study of Tarot. I know the bare minimum about Tarot.

A couple of years ago, when I started doing the Tarot Blog Hop, I started to create my own set of Tarot cards---simply so that I did not need to worry about copyrights and obtaining permission to use images of other people's cards. My cards are....well, let's go with fugly as a description (I think that they may actually make people's eyes bleed.) 

There are times I like to pretend that I am going to finish the artwork for the current Tarot deck that I am designing (and we all know that is not going to happen), and actually find a way to get it published (yeah, no legitimate publisher is going to touch it), and sell a few copies (and by a few, I mean none at all). 

Mad Uncle Morgan (Morgan Drake Eckstein)

Quite honestly, I have no clue on how Tarot works. It does. And I have no current theories either. I leave that to the experts, those people who can do twenty readings a day, write decent articles, and perhaps even design decent cards. 

Fool from Mad Uncle Morgan's Political Tarot

Though the course of my current "art project," I have came up with a list of questions that I ask as I get ready to design a card. Basically, I ask:





What are the main symbols of the existing versions of the card?

What is the card's central meaning?

How does the card fit into the rest of the Tarot deck?

And what are my personal symbols to convey the card's meaning?





As the example shows, I get an F on all four questions, as well as an F for being able to draw anything better than a stick figure.

Some questions to ask when designing a Tarot card

Well, at least, I have no illusions about my abilities as a Tarot reader, writer, and artist.

Thanks for reading, and consider checking out some of the other posts in this blog hop---posts actually written by people who know what they are doing. Have a good day.

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