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1. 

   Natural Mystic Guide

   A blog by Natural Mystic Guide in Member Blogs

   • 117
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   Recent Entries

   • Tarot Netivot Star of the Week Reading Sunday April 13 through Shabbat April 16, 2025
   • Tarot Netivot Star of the Week Reading Sunday March 30 through Shabbat April 5, 2025
   • Rosh Chodesh Reading for the month of Nisan 5785
   • Tarot Netivot Star of the Week Reading Sunday March 23 through Shabbat March 29, 2025
   • Tarot Netivot Star of the Week Reading Sunday March 16 through Shabbat March 22, 2025

   

   Latest Entry
   

   Tarot Netivot Star of the Week Reading Sunday April 13 through Shabbat April 16, 2025

   

    

   Feedback -- questions and comments are welcome.

    

   This reading gives us insight into specific energies that we can focus on during specific days of the upcoming week as well as throughout the entire week as a whole.

    

   Today’s reading will use The St. Croix Tarot created by Lisa de St. Croix.

    

   Here are focal points for our meditation:

    

   Sunday:             How Can I Express Generosity?                                              XXI                              Oreget                                 'Web of Life'              Exercise class.  Menu.                

   Monday:            How Can I Set the Emotional Tone for My Week?                 Two of Wands                                                         'Commitment'           Check in about trip to America.                                                  Tuesday:           What Do I Want to Manifest?                                                   Eight of Cups             Shmitah                               'Spiritual Retreat'      Do a personal reading.

   Wednesday:     What Wisdom is Coming to Me?                                              II                                 Torah                                    'High Priestess'        Study Active Dreaming material.

   Thursday:         What do I Want to Develop?                                                     Three of Swords, Rx                                              'Peacemaker'           Work on 'chicken hand' and mentor MCR Mahjong

   Friday:               How Can I Connect with Romance, Friends and Nature?      Nine of Pentacles                                                  'Financial Independence'  Work on legacy.

   Shabbat:           How Can I Rest?                                                                         VII                                 Merkabah                         'Financial Independence'   Death Wishes

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2. 

   A Magical Journey

   A blog by Luna-I-V in Member Blogs

   • 3
     entries
   • 2
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   • 158
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   Recent Entries

   • A Crystal Mix for Sleeping
   • Nighttime Tea
   • My First Entry!

   

   Latest Entry
   

   A Crystal Mix for Sleeping

   You've finished your homemade tea (or just tea from a box, or even no tea at all, I don't judge!) and it's time to go to bed. It's probably later than you'd like to admit, and you know it'll be tricky, so here's a mix of crystals to help you get a good night's rest. I like to keep mine in a little bag under my pillow, but you should do whatever works for you!

   • Amethyst
   • Selenite
   • Clear and Rose Quartz
   • Hematite
   • Black Tourmaline
   • Obsidian

   I hope this helps!

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3. 

   The Five Element Approach

   A blog by lyredragon in Member Blogs

   • 6
     entries
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   • 518
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   Recent Entries

   • The Cardinal Virtues and the Tarot
   • Who are the Ladies
   • Who are the Maidens?
   • Que qualia, Qualium? Bijective counting
   • Bonus Content: Poetry and the Major Arcana

   

   Latest Entry
   

   The Cardinal Virtues and the Tarot

   We see two different approaches to the Cardinal Virtues in the Tarot. There are a set of them displayed in the Major Arcana, but there are also cards in the minor arcana that also address them. 

   Most of us are familiar with the major arcana ones:

   Justice (VIII or XI)

   Wisdom/Prudence (the Hermit, IX)

   Strength/Courage/Fortitude (VIII or IX)

   Temperance (XIV)

    

   The Cardinal virtues come from Classical Antiquity. They predate Christianity and were debated by Socrates and Plato, sometimes even to the point where he and his fellow philosophers had to agree to disagree. The OT writers had their version written into the Wisdom of Solomon in the 2nd c BCE, but that means it's already Hellenistic in origin, as Egypt belonged to Greece in the middle of the Hellenistic Period, as did Israel and Judah. The Greek understanding is, in fact, older by quite a bit. Aristotle, taught by Plato, tutored Alexander, after all.

    

   This is all part of Virtue Theory, the idea that morality and ethics defines your character. For the Socratics, natural Reason was more important than any supernatural source. They might have been monist, but theirs was a natural philosophy. Reason was a human concept, not a divine one.  It's different from the philosophical Abrahamic viewpoint, which places the god of Abraham as the source of morality and ethic. Teleology is really the aim of oracular Tarot, regardless of the arche of existence. People are always trying to find the intrinsic or extrinsic Reason for the things and concepts they encounter. 

    

   Tarot's oracular use is is syncretic. There are plenty of people who take a deistic stance with the cards and that's valid. Hermetic thought really baked into the most popular kinds of cards, but with the caveat that Modern Tarot's concepts are specific to Rennaissance Hermeticism. That's how we can have Thoth decks and Rosicrucian decks and pagan decks and gnostic decks and so on. Hermeticism is also deeply rooted in Christianity, starting in the 2nd C. CE.

    

   Hermeticism starts in the 2nd c. BCE as Greek thought and Egyptian thought meld. That 500 or so years in there is where Alexander made his conquests, the ancient empires of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant unified and separated and then got conquered again under Rome are the origins of pretty much everything we consider Western Philosophy until we hit the Industrial age.

    

   This is the time of Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), was trained in Albertist and Neoplatonic thought and philosophy. He was born just 40 years after the Visconti-Sforza decks were commissioned in Milan (1442-1447), right at the time Leonardo DaVinci (1452-1517) was painting. Leonardo, of the Order of St. Luke was also a Neoplatonist. The Last Supper, commissioned by Ludovico Sforza, was around 1495-1498. What does this matter and how to connect these, the man that wrote on Occult Philosophy and the tarot deck that is the precursor to the modern one? The Second Italian War. 1499 Ludovico Sforza flees to Austria. The French take over Milan the same year that Agrippa is entering the University of Cologne.

    

   It's hard to imagine such philosophies being passed around the HRE right in the middle of nasty conflict, but that's how human progress tends to go. And where soldiers go, gambling goes. Agrippa was a soldier under Maximillian I for a time and then patroned by Margaret of Austria in 1509 from there to Würzburg and England and then Pisa. Leonardo during the same time (1509) was in Venice, Austria also working as a military advisor, then back to Florence and then to Rome and to Paris.

    

   To add to this, Leonardo dies but Agrippa is still alive and well when Luther nailed up his Theses in 1517. And you know, you don't have the secret societies of the Reformation era starting up a century and two later without that. 

    

   Did they know of one another? More to the point, did they play Tarot? It's not something they would have mentioned in any biography. Both working for the HRE, both Neoplatonists, both associated with the military, both in Austria around the same time. Both patroned by the highest houses, Agrippa by the Hapsburgs and Leonardo by the Borgias among their many respective patrons.   

    

   But it's that Neoplatonic and Hermetic thought that runs through both that unites them, even if they were almost literally like two ships passing in the night. And Tarot, as a card game, is getting popularized right there along with them, even if they never played it, brought around Europe not only by soldiers and mercenaries but the Romani and the Calé. It was definitely also a diversion in the court of Vienna as well as Rome and Milan. And it was definitely connected to Hermeticism there. The Sola Busca deck was from Vienna, fully illustrated in 1490 with definitive Hermetic designs.

    

   So, by the 17th c. the Rosicurians are picking up the deck and assigning their meanings to it. It relates. They are the ones that kind of tied all of it together with Hermeticism and letting Tarot be legit in a divinatory use in a way that isn't resulting in getting stiff fines or getting burned, pilloried, or tortured. And they are the ones that are also picking up Agrippa and Da Vinci and Michealangelo's ideas. They're rich and literate men, so they have that privilege. By that time, there were actual divinatory decks away from the Tarot that these men didn't get hold of. There were even oracle decks. But these guys had control of the presses so they got the popularity. Meanwhile there's stuff like the Hooper Deck, the Leonormand, Proverb Cards and the game of Hope which are mostly forgotten unless you deep dive into cartomancy.

    

   But as to the virtues, as they appear in the Majors, are there because of that Neoplatonism. Triumphs and Follies of the Fool is the allegory that goes with them. And it really is allegory, quite similar to other allegorical literature of the time: Dante's inferno (1300) written right at the time the very first recognizably Tarot game decks were being put out all the way through Pilgrim's Progress (1678) for example. The allegory is the triumph procession, a Roman Parade from antiquity blended into the Carnivale. and then made performative by the 12th c.

    

   Cards made stories accessible. Tarot in its own way kept the classical virtues in the hands of the people when the reading of it by the layman was only to be had through a church education. Even when the church clamped down on public spectacle, they couldn't keep the cards out of the hands of the laity. 

    

   Three overt virtue cards and one obscured. But do they have to belong to the majors alone? They kind of did when the Majors and courts were the only ones that had illustration for most people. Sola Busca, with images clearly aligned with Renaissance alchemy, made in Ferrara for a Venetian client (1490-1) is a huge exception but you don't see the full illustration of the cards in common use until printing became cheap and RWS got to see the Sola Busca in black and white photos at the British Museum. And then you don't see full color SB printed for the masses until 1998 (thank you to the publisher Wolfgang Mayer) even if that print was only 700 copies.

    

   With that exception They had to stay there for the sake of the allegory. But with the fully illustrated RWS deck, based on the SB deck, and then the Thoth deck there are echoes of the cardinal virtues also in the minor arcana.

   Prudence/Wisdom: The Eight of Coins/Pentacles/Disks --Thoth deck identifies this as the Lord of Prudence       

   Fortitude: The Seven of Wands/Rods/Batons --Identifies with courage and Perseverance and therefore, also the Strength card

   Justice: The Four of Cups/Chalices/Bowls. --this is a hot take, admittedly. But the card of evaluating choices is the work of Justice rather than the seat. We are not always satisfied by it. But we still have to deal with it.  

   Temperance: The Four of Swords-- also a hot take, but the idea of tempering is about the quenching and hardening of metal after its shaping, and that is what this knight is doing to himself, a knight being a living weapon of his king.

    

   That's the traditional placement. But cards do change and the minor arcana treatment of them is kind of odd. Travail does shift things around along elemental correspondences and makes the Cardinal virtues a true hinge, not for the Major arcana but for the minor. It forces an explicit commentary  on the interpretations. I chose the four of each traditional suit to place the four cardinal virtues, as the number four is also the four classical elements, the seasons, the compass points. To be a hinge, a cardinal point, is to be a concept that all the others revolve around. It doesn't have to be the midpoint. Levers and cantilevers show that very basically in physics and construction.

    

   The minor arcana's classical illustrations are honestly not that far off already across the fours. It was just the right place to put them where the weight of the three preceding cards offers sheer stress, the four is the bending moment, and the rest of the cards in the suit are the structural load. The virtues do also have elemental correspondence, and they are listed correctly in the Majors that way. So if they are correct in the majors, they should also be correctly assigned to the minors. 

    

   That's why you will see if you go back a couple of posts, names changed in the Major arcana where these concepts would usually go. Cardinal virtues are Universal virtues so they really do belong in the minor arcana which deals with universal, syncretic concepts of humanity, whereas the Majors are about individual, idiosyncratic encounters. For the Majors, where they are changed because of this, the card is an agency rather than a virtue card.

    

   Like the Lawyer, which is replacing the Justice card, ordered VIII in Travail. What the Justice card (4 of Cups) deals with is the universal concept, more akin to karma. It is the idea very akin to the trial of Anubis. We see this man with three damaged cups and one cup held in the clouds. Travail commentary on this is that whatever is left there in those ebbing three cups needs emptying into that one in the clouds so that the man can continue into celebration with a single full one. Of those three cards, they are each a third full, which is why he is so dissatisfied, in the Travail, Cups is read from highest to lowest, so this man is the man who has just come through grief, the 5 of cups. And indeed, grief is the reason for a cry for justice and if your three cups do not fill the singular cup offered, there is a burden still to be put to balance.

    

   These are the contents: After a time of sitting with grief (5 of cups) You fill the past with yourself. You fill the present with empathy, you fill the future with support. None of these can be completely full because you can’t abandon yourself, ask another to abandon themselves, or be completely helpless. So the figure in the card seems dissatisfied. Sure, the cups are all upright and whole and there is something in them. But it is not the fullness he expected after coming through it. The Universe (hand in cloud) gives suggestion that instead of sitting in apathy with ebbing cups, all of them should be poured into the cup of Justice it offers. Justice is the promise that balance will be restored if you let go of what is instinctively personal. It does not force this lesson. It just offers it. Forcing the issue, just like forcing people to move past grief, is in Justice the source of conflation with law and order; control. But only after you fill the cup will you understand how to move forward into the celebration of Fidelity. (3 of cups)

      

   On the other side, what the Lawyer card in Travail's Major Arcana does is the agency of justice, not as common law justice, but as Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat,-- Justinian, Digest, 6th c. CE. It is the presumption of innocence. Let he who accuses bring the proof. This take on the Justice card of the major arcana is desperately needed to not only fill the role for Justice, but to counterbalance the Devil card. So in the allegory, Justice becomes the Defense Lawyer to stand with the Fool while the Devil plays the prosecuting lawyer before the heavenly court. Just more simple nuance.

    

   Mechanically, What putting the virtues at the fours does is to balance the weight of three universal personal ideals against six universal interpersonal concepts and that's consistent across all the pips.

    

    

    

    

          

    

    

            

    

    

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