It occurred to me to ask why it should matter even as I fished one of my tarot decks out of the bottom drawer of the altar. I tossed it on the table in my living room and asked again. If candles are lit in a dark room and music is played and a draw cloth is laid down on the table—why should that matter? Why can it not be a bright room with only the noise of the fans and the AC and a clear workbench?
I have come to believe that it likely doesn’t.
The gods are powerful enough to step in regardless of the circumstances, but the trappings of ritual provide a sense of security and containment of the unseen for we mortals—a way to reassure ourselves that we are still in control. It is also an invitation. Invitations can be given in other ways, but the preparation of a mystical space signals one’s intent most clearly. It leaves no doubt about one’s consent.
I finished reading Filan and Kaldera’s book on God Possession today. Now, I should mention, I was not reading it from an instructional standpoint: I have done aspecting and shadowing before, and I have some extremely hesitant and limited experience with channeling that I would be embarrassed to recount, but have never experienced a full on possession by anything, god or otherwise—and I am very grateful for that after having read the experiences of the authors. I read the book mostly out of curiosity and because I had seen a reference to it elsewhere, and it served to satiate my lingering curiosity about the phenomena. It is not a how-to manual anyway, though there was some practical advice, which I took from the text, for dealing with deity communication of all kinds regardless of how it is received:
In one chapter they advocated the combined use of omens, dreams, and divinations to confirm (or cast doubt on) messages one receives from the gods before acting on those messages. The general concept is to verify one form of communication with another—sort of like when one calls their phone company to confirm that they really were the ones who sent the e-mail asking for personal information. Double checking helps prevent the unseen equivalent of phishing scams. Which makes sense to me: these are gods we’re talking about here, it’s reasonable to expect them to be strong enough that they can at least confirm that the messages really are coming from them.
But in my case, doing that means giving them permission to answer a question I may or may not really want the answer to. So here I am, sitting in the living room with all the lights and fans on and staring at the tarot deck on the table, wondering if I’m brave enough to ask: Is it really you? Am I really hearing you? And if so, is this appearance just an FYI or do you expect me to act on it? Is there something you want me to do?
I hesitate to give full permission for them to answer me—because I suspect they will. I ask other questions through my actions: just how badly do you want this? Will keeping the lights on be enough to make me not worth the bother? Will you raise your voice to talk over the fan? If I am impure in my womanly way, and not in white, and far away from the designated shrine, and sitting at a table I eat on and work at…will that be enough buffer of human reality to keep you from answering?
Some part of me fancies that I am playing the scientist (as my atheist family would expect me to when making such a serious decision) when I insist on being rational and controlling the variables: I will shuffle the cards in this particular way and deal them in this particular way which relies on randomness and numbers more than intuition. I have picked a new deck I feel little connection to, and I know very little about it, so I am unfamiliar with the symbolism and images and will have to rely solely on the accompanying book for interpretation and not my own intuition.
But I don’t want to seem unwilling, either—because I’m not. I just want to know if this is really Them or just craziness talking through me. I just want to know if I am really “keeping one foot always in the unseen” or if I am simply stepping into fantasy. A small part of me wants the answer to be that this is no fantasy, and it is that part of me which wants to find my old drawing cloth and turn down the lights and go back to my old ways, and light the candles, and purify as best I can.
I compromise. I will draw the cards on my cloth, but I will still draw the cards careful to keep myself separate from the reading, and there will be no music or mystical funny business, just slightly dimmed lights and a single candle—at the core, this will merely be me, fresh from a shower, sitting in my living room at a table, stating my intentions and humbly asking for confirmation or doubt as They see fit to give me either: Is this you; is this real?
I will return and record when I am done.
------------
It’s Them.
I am not imagining this; I am not making it up in my mind.
The yes/no mechanism of the spread showed three in favor, two not. The last one I turned over was the deciding card, because they apparently like suspense, and when I first saw it, I thought it was a “no” card because the image looked upside down (I was using reversals as “no” and uprights as “yes” since this deck doesn’t assign meanings to reversals), so I had a moment to go “whelp, that confirms it” and get a good feel for exactly how strongly I had been expecting that outcome and exactly how much more comfortable it was to think there is nothing to all of this but an overactive imagination. But on closer examination, my heart skipped a beat when I saw that it was indeed upright after all. It was just the style of the art that made it momentarily look reversed.
At first, I was still underwhelmed even if I was mildly surprised. After all three out of five isn’t an overwhelming or resounding “yes”— the chance was 50/50, hanging on that last card. It was the content of the cards that pushed me toward believing the general outcome was right. Reading the descriptions of them made me cry for how brutal and spot on they were—however, even that I could have talked myself out of given enough time. But there was one final, unmistakable sign, not only of Their hand in the reading, but also of Bast’s confirmed presence in this:
The center card representing both me as the seeker and the “core” of the present issue was the single card (and I know it’s the only one because, believe me, I checked) from the 72 card deck which happens to contain an image of a solitary house cat. A house cat that is suspiciously similar to the one in my dream. And who is standing beside a woman who reminds me vaguely of myself. On a card whose meaning perfectly fits what I’m facing.
I’ll admit that was a nice touch.
By my estimation, there was only a 1.4% chance of drawing that specific card in that specific place. Even the scientist in me can’t deny that’s one hell of a coincidence given the circumstances, especially since I had no control, not even subconscious control, over the fall of the cards…and that estimate still doesn’t even touch on the chances that the artist who made that particular deck (which I purchased several years ago as a collector’s piece without any intent to ever read with it) just happened to draw a housecat on one of the 72 cards when the meaning didn’t call for it and the cat isn’t mentioned in the artist’s description of the symbolism. I checked my other decks, and six of the other seven didn’t have any images of house cats at all much less on that specific card—hence I doubt the image is common place—and the one other deck I own that did have depictions of house cats didn’t have them on said card (the other deck with cats in it was, ironically, my first deck and the one that They helped me pick out back when I was a teen—the only one selected before I was Kemetic).
Touché.
I believe in you now.
No comments:
Post a Comment