Pamela Coleman Smith was remarkable and the 1909 RWS was revolutionary and has had profound impact on the world of Tarot. There is no way around that. BUT it isn’t the end-all and be-all to tarot. Often other decks capture the flavor of the message much, much better.
To be honest, I don’t care for the pale/pastel color palette and religious and social class imagery. Here, for example, the be-grateful-for-your-pittance, kneelingI don’t believe in higher walls, I believe in longer tables., begging quality to the lower figures on a card that is supposed to be about generosity, magnanimity and reciprocity – it just sends me in all kinds of ways.
I don’t believe in higher walls, I believe in longer tables.
Chef Jose Andres
To that end, for every virtual coffee you buy in support of Sage Sips during the month of August 2026, a portion of the proceeds will be donated to World Central Kitchen.
Prosperity is being in the flow of life. Prosperity is more than money.
It’s having enough to eat. It’s about shelter that has a safe and comfortable temperature. It’s about time with loved ones. Meaningful things like that are the real river of flowing prosperity.
Money helps get those things, but it isn’t those things.
Find your river. Flow with it. Get some, give some.
If you want to help me Brew It Forward, please visit my Ko-Fi page
Of the different meanings for the Two of Swords, “of two minds” comes to mind. A lot of times when we think of that, it means that two options are equal, and there is no obvious, logical, good way to decide between the two. There is six of one and half dozen of the other as they saying goes.
So what do you do when you are of two minds and both options are equal: equally bad that is? What do you do when you don’t know what to do at all? What do you do when you are of two minds and neither one of them knows what to do?
It’s ok not to know. It’s ok for some things to be unknowable. And it’s ok to try and find out. If you don’t know, ask. If you don’t know, learn. If you don’t know, welcome to the universe. It is like that sometimes. We haven’t figured it all out, and that’s OK too.
“I’d rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”
Q: What do we most need to know right now in the United States following Lindsey Graham’s death and conjecture about Mitch McConnell’s.
I drew this card with this question in mind, right after seeing a social media post from someone who I typically has good points and real food for thought. This may well be the first time I’ve disagreed with him.
But no, this isn’t a time for tut-tutting about “speaking ill of the dead” from either side of the political divide. Graham was not a good person who, because of his political power, inflicted real harm on real people and contributed much to the rise of fascism and white christian nationalism in America today.
I’m sorry for the loss of any kind person who feels his – or their – passing. But at the same time it is fair to think they are lying in the bed they made during their lifetime.
The social media person clucked something on the order “saying these things says more about you as a person than it does about them.
Not this time.
If making fun of a powerful bad man says something about the person saying it….what does a powerful man’s silence about the death of school girls at the hands of unnecessary war, the death of women at the hands of politically and religiously motivated abortion bans, the death of schoolchildren at the hands of our lack of gun control….and on and on and on. What does silence about these dead say about THEM? I’d rather people make merciless fun of the politicians who caused harm than remain silent in the face of the harm they caused.
It’s more important to be kind to everyone living than to worry about what is said about the dead.
Laughter is good medicine. Public figures who caused real harm aren’t going to be any less dead if we only say nice things about them after they’ve been rendered harmless by the inevitable. Momento Mori.
In the noise of current events, the Ace of swords reminds us to cut to the chase, get to the point, simplify. Tune out the static and get right down to what really matters. In the end, kindness is the only measure of what that is.
It doesn’t predict the future. I won’t use terms like ‘divination’ or ‘fortune telling’ here. Mostly because I see things as cause and effect driven – in spirituality as much as in physics. Magick happens when real world action harmonizes with subtle energies and the natural flow of things.
Tarot is spiritual GPS. It’s about navigating the current energies and making choices that both ease our current anxieties and helps us to do the things that cause the desired effects. Or, as I’ve said dozens of times:
Tarot isn’t about predicting what will happen in life, Tarot helps you figure out what to do when life happens.
Many times the Tarot message is about looking to the present moment. We need to be reminded to pay attention to the here and now. We naturally seem to look ahead and imagine. Often we imagine things that make us feel afraid but it is also why we, as humans, can see cause and effect and act accordingly.
Today’s card is a reminder we are able to look ahead and that is a perfectly good thing to do. The energy today supports a sort of quiet optimism and hopefulness. You need to decide what you want before you can lay the foundation to make it a reality. You have to decide where you want to go before you can take the first step in that direction.
It is ok to just stop and think about the what and where. It’s ok to look ahead.
What it is: The Whip. Harshness or conflict is at hand. Even if it doesn’t directly involve you, it impacts the environment where you live and function. Think of war or inflation that makes things worse for everyone. Now is not a time for impulse. Prepare for any storms, real or metaphoric, as best as you can. A paramedic instructor once told me that “if you prepare for the emergency, then the emergency goes away” meaning that it doesn’t change what is actually happening but it seems like less of a scary big deal than it would have otherwise been. Calm is contagious.
What to do: The Key. The Key card indicates that a choice is at hand. The choices we make today are the key that unlocks (not predicts) our future. Choosing not to choose is still a choice. You can choose inaction. You can choose to watch, wait, learn. You can choose to accept the outcome of inaction or you can choose to do everything you can to unlock the outcome you want. In the words of David Axelrod of the Barak Obama presidential campaign “The least we can do is everything we can do.”
Even if things don’t go the way you want, at least go into that situation knowing you did everything you could to make it right.
The time has come to choose your side. The fence, the middle ground has thinned so that those who do not choose will fall unwillingly to one side or another. Action speaks louder than words. Inaction is no longer silent.
In the words of Desmund Tutu, “If you remain neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
How to do it: The Bear. The Lenormand Tarot deck gained popularity in the eighteenth century, but bears symbolized protection then just as much as our ‘mama bear’ meme does today. Important choices are seldom easy and even less often consequence free. Protection can guide some choices. Choose the thing that protects your path forward. Choose the thing that protects the people you love (including you.) Choose the thing that protects your resources during lean times. Choose what lets you see the happiness you already have. Choose the path that protects your inner peace.
Deck: Healing Light Lenormand by Christopher Butler copyright 2021 all rights reserved used with permission llwellynpublishing.com
A doorway works perfectly fine in both directions.
Never mind the dedicated pressure triggered in and out doors at the supermarket, I’m talking about your ordinary door.
Threshold, portal, liminal space – its all the same basic idea here.
The collective energies have been niggling at us through the eight of cups for a while now, and it isn’t done with us yet. The energy hinted at turning a corner with it as we talked about the other day in the Standing in the Shimmer post and the brilliant @spiralseatarot on threads once again wrote the eight of cups and about holding space for good things to fill the gap where we have let go of the things that no longer serve us.
Inspired by the gap in the cups that she pointed out, I intuitively heard “portal in time.” Time is something worth exploring in connection with the eight of cups.
The card at its core is about letting go of something while at the same time walking toward something better. It looks back and ahead simultaneously from the portal, the gap in the cups, this bubble we forever live in, this present moment.
Setting mindfulness and the present moment aside for another time, let’s think of the two directions we can cast our attention with this card.
With the classic Pamela Smith artwork, we can’t see what the figure is walking toward. The future is literally out of view. The crescent and round face in the clear, cloudless sky very likely was mean to communicate moon energy, but the crescent and round shapes seem a bit of a moon and sun combination – yin and yang together. That with the clear, cloudless sky both hint at infinite potential held in that out-of-view future.
The Tao Te Ching tells us that one becomes two (the unified oneness of everything can be understood in harmony of opposites, yin and yang) and the two becomes three (I see it as an echo of biological reproduction) The three becomes five (the five classic elements) which in turn comprise the totality of the physical world to this system of thought.
Long story short, the future hold a LOT of potential with this card.
The portal to the future, the gap in the cups, the space Spiralsea advises us to hold is where we draw from that infinite potential. The gap/portal/space is this right-now moment where we make the decisions and take the real world actions that influence the way things go from here. The figure on the card is taking a step. It’s not the cliff dive we see on the Fool card. This has a deliberate quality. This is a decided first step in a new direction.
It takes courage to step in to a new and unknown direction.
It takes courage to deal with the past.
If the background of this image hints at an unknowable but potential laden future, and space in the cups is our portal to time and the sacred liminal space in which we hold our hopes and intentions for the future, then the foreground deals with the past. The ground is beige and barren, with the rest of the card filled with blue, sky and water. The cups rest solidly on the bottom edge of the card.
On one hand this card is about walking away from a bad situation, expunging something harmful or dismissing something from the past that is of no more value. You’ve heard me quote it dozens of times, this again reminds me of that quote from the movie The Last Jedi where Kylo Ren says something akin to “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to. It’s the only way to become who you were meant to be.”
A change that profound should never be made rashly.
The past may be barren, lifeless ground, but it is ground just the same. It is solid. It exists. It happened, it ain’t changing, the memories are yours forever.
When you walk away from the past, you can’t change what happened but you have absolute control over how the past affects you. In the gap in the cups, in this present moment space we hold, we choose how much of the past we allow through to the present. When we let go of the past, the past events still exist unchanged, but the effect it has on us is transformed.
We aren’t letting go of the literal events of the past, we are releasing the mental and emotional hold those event have on our present moment – and in turn their hold on the future.
The doorway in time we see symbolized here goes two ways. It is a present moment liminal threshold where we can both plant seeds for the future AND stop the past from contaminating those seeds. We can let go of the past’s hold on us at the same time we can choose a new direction.
Please feel free to explore the archives. Type eight of cups or 8 of cups in the search bar on the right side of the page (laptop view) to see more thoughts about this card from old posts.
My first thought today was to do the usual Action Eases Anxiety layout with the usual Lenormand or RWS tarot decks.
But instinct, or intuition, or spirit or the muses – or whatever you want to call it – had another idea.
First, I felt pushed toward the Normal Tarot deck (by Seven Dane Asmund, used with permission) Then the layout seemed all wrong. Anxiety is often connected to outside conditions like *gestures wildly* everything in America right now.
At that point I hear “look within”
How very Bene Gesserit.
Look for and listen to your own deep intuition. It speaks quietly, and needs your full attention and maybe some amplification. Any microphone of your choice will do. For me it’s cards. It might be astrology, or a random song on a randomly chosen playlist. It might be that one wise snippet posted by someone in the middle of your nightly doomscroll. Whatever your amplifier of choice, look inside and listen to the spirit and intuition that is in there. Take yourself seriously.
Looking at the deck’s guide, the Drowned King is about tragedy at the hands of hubris. It is biting off more than you can chew, and then choking on it.
I am also reminded of the taijitu. The opposite colored dot in the middle of the widest portion of each color speaks to how anything in the extreme holds the seed of its opposite.
The advice is really about moderation. This is a week for taking the middle way.
Yell too loud and yes, you are heard, but you also let your enemies know where you are. Learn too far forward and you fall down. We’ve been called to action a lot recently by the Knight of Swords, but there are limits. Know yours.
When you’ve been pushing the “edge of the envelope,” you have to know when to “haul it back in” as the movie The Right Stuff put it.
Look inside and listen. You’ll know when to move, and when to stay put. You’ll know when to strive, and when to take smaller and chew so you don’t wind up like the Drowned king.
This card and the inverted star together let us know that we are where we need to be right now. Sit tight. Bloom where you are planted. Be present with here, now. Too much pushing or striving could lead to disaster.
Taking slow sips this week – see you at the next one
After the sun rises it sets. Days and weeks begin, and then they end. Tarot can help set the tone for your day or week. But it can do more.
Tarot gives you a 360 degree view. It can broaden your horizons, it can help you look ahead and plan, but it can also look back and understand.
Daily meditation tarot can help bring a day in for a soft landing just as well as it can get your day off to an inspired start.
The Star is about hope and aspiration and guidance.
In reverse it hears you when your compass is spinning and you don’t know which way to go.
Tonight, the Star suggests that when you don’t know which way to go that means you are already there. Be where you are.
When it is time to move, a new star will rise and you’ll know what to do. For now, bloom where you are planted. Find the contentment and happiness that is already there just waiting for you to feel it.
I don’t often share my own Tarot card draws. It defeats the purpose of looking at the collective energy. Looking at the collective energy benefits us all because the collective energy touches us all in one way or another. Everything is connected, one way or another.
But this week I’ll share the guidance I was given for the week ahead, because I think it is worth sharing. It may not be a reading OF the collective energy, but it is a good way to deal WITH the collective energy this week.
Be still.
Keep quiet. Agitated water stays muddy. Be still to let things settle, to let things become clear as they naturally will. Gravity still works. Things will settle eventually.
Protect your peace.
It is a treasure worth protecting, and protecting it is wisdom worth sharing.
We’ve had a stressful week here in the US. Even I thought we were going to all die in a flash of mutually assured nuclear destruction at the hands of the republicans. (BTW – this is a personal opinion blog and not a public business. As of today, if you are a Republican, support Republicans, want bipartisan cooperation with Republicans, are Chistian evangelical, are Christian nationalist, racist, or any variety of bigot please f**k right the hell off. That energy is not welcome here.)
THAT being said, today is a good day for a shift in focus. Things have been very yang, very outward, very existential crisis lately. It’s ok to turn off the big world news, pull in your energies and focus on you, your immediate personal space for a minute.
You…yes, you. Take just a moment away from the screen. Look around you.
So, how is it? Are you out of the weather? Hungry? Thirsty? Warm/cool enough? Sitting or standing comfortably? Is the room literally on fire? Are you in any immediate danger?
If not, take a deep breath. It’s ok to be ok for a minute.
Sometimes the best dream to chase is being OK with things as they are right here, right now. It is a dream that is forever already true.
Sage Sips / TaoCraft Tarot 
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