TaoCraft Tarot by Ronda Snow – Page 4 – Sage Sips / TaoCraft Tarot

Attention Span

TaoCraft Short Sip is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee which is good if that is all the attention span we have on a … what day is it?

Welcome to TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast. I’m glad you are here.

Today’s card is the Chariot in reverse.

This is one of those times where changing a card’s meaning into its opposite like the old school Tarot readers and taking the reversal to mean blocked, turbulent or complicated energy both take you to pretty much the same place. Both speak to having decreased attention. No insult to goldfish and hamsters, but they shouldn’t fly supersonic aircraft.

Neither should humans, metaphorically speaking, when they are tired, sick or otherwise have no attention span to speak of. I’m not a pilot or flight surgeon so I can’t really say what the parameters for safe flying really are. Again it’s a metaphor. It’s an interesting, attention-getting way to talk about knowing your boundaries, knowing your limits and working with them intelligently.

Brace yourself for all of the Tom Wolfe, Right stuff analogies that I love to bring to Chariot card readings. The difference is that today’s energy isn’t about being in the moment, focus, pushing the envelope or hauling it back in.

Today’s energy is about being in no fit mind space to do any of that stuff.

No one can be one hundred percent one hundred percent of the time. It’s just not how the human species is hard wired. If you look at it from the cosmic perspective it is a wonder we have any attention span at all. It is a huge wonder that we exist at all much less pay full attention to that existence.

Instead of pushing the envelope, sometimes you need to reinforce it.

Or at the very least know where your envelope is.

Socrates advised to “know thyself.” Part of knowing thyself is knowing thine limits.

It might be upside down, but it is, after all, still the Chariot card. Pay attention but this time pay attention to your fork limit. Know when you are done. Pay attention to where and when you need to hand the command seat off to a co-pilot. Know when to bring things in for a landing.

Know when to push the envelope and know when to turn tail and run from it.

You are doing everyone a favor when you do that, really. Not only do you keep yourself in good working order to fly another day, you spare other people from cleaning up the mess of your crash site.

Take care of yourself. We need you. Together we are stronger.

Thank you so much for reading and listening! I really appreciate your support, likes, subs, shares, follows, questions and comments.

If you enjoy the blog or podcast, please visit the Tao Craft Tarot ko-fi page and consider getting a seat at the Tarot Table or becoming a Patron of the Tarot Arts. Members get exclusive content (including the ‘pathway through the month’ three card Tarot reading on the members-only blog. The May 2022 edition will be available later today)

Proceeds from the sale of PeaceTarot ebook in the ko-fi shop will be donated to Doctors Without Borders USA throughout this year.

No appointment needed, private email readings are available HERE

Thanks again, and see you at the next sip!

Sunday evening cuppa tea

It’s hard to believe, but I’m not all coffee all of the time. In the evening when the day is winding down, I switch to tea. Unpaid spontanious fan-girling: Celestial Seasonins is a favorite. Depending on the weather and time of year, it might be cinnamon-y (like Bengal Spice) or something fruity and zing-y like Red or Wild Berry Zinger, although I have been into GV Strawberry hibiscus lately too.

Before I curl up with a good book, wanted to pop in to let you know that the Tarot Turnover intuition exercise is up on the ko-fi members blog.

The Path through the Month reading will go up tomorrow morning.

Tarot Table membership includes a monthly newsletter, three card members only tarot reading only on the ko-fi blog, and random special offers.

Have a good evening everyone! Cheers!

Be careful what you ask for

TaoCraft Short Sip is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee, Today The Lovers card reminds us to be careful what we ask for, we just might get it.

Hello and welcome to TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast. I’m glad you are here.

A few days ago, I put a few announcements just in the print blog with summer hours and how things stand now, in essence it was a post for me to get my proverbial ducks in their proverbial row and that we should all read it quick because my ducks are a bunch of anarchists and lining them up is closer to herding cats.

It turns out that today is one of those crazy duck kind of days, so no reels, shorts, or tiktoks. It’s also a lesson in being careful what you ask for. It’s true that you just might get it.

That’s what the Lover’s card is really about. Sure, there is a lot of steamy romance misconceptions about the card out there, but that’s not the core of it. If you want the get-married card, look for the two of cups. If there is a relationship connection with the lovers card I’d put it in the realm of pure lust, playing the field as the saying goes, and figuring out what you really want from your love life but not about an enduring healthy relationship with any one particular person.

That being said, the Lovers card has application in any part of life. It is about deepest desires. Do you want a long term committed relationship or do you want insert-any-warm-body here companionship? What do you want from your job: a paycheck or fulfilling work or some combination of the two? The same thing applies to anything you want in any facet of life. Sometimes it is all one giant multiple choice test question. Do you want this, that, both or neither.

Deciding what you really want is a critical first step in getting it.

In my experience, it usually turns out to be one of those little bits of both , middle way, yin and yang together solutions. It’s what puts the Tao in Tao Craft Tarot.

There are, however, times when things get black and white. Usually it is the bald faced goodness, yes or the oh-heck-no answers that spark the strongest emotional response. That response can be as telling as the card or the reading.

If you get a white hot flare of anger or rejection when you see a card or get a particular answer in a reading, that tells you what you really want. That tells you that you already knew the answer to what you want or you wouldn’t instinctively reject the card so hard.

If you know what you want, it is easier to get it. If you know what you really deep-down want, then you can’t kid yourself about it. If you know what you really deep down want, you can’t sugar coat the hard parts or BS your way through it.

That’s why the Zombie Cat yes/no layout is far and away one of my favorites. I use it for myself as much as any other, maybe more than any other. It echos the I-ching three coin readings. It can be a clear frying pan to the face kind of reading. It lets you know when to stop screwing around and come face to face what you really want and the buried decisions that you have already made for yourself. The i-ching notion of “changing lines” which are lines that are SO yin or SO yang they can easily tip into their opposite. That’s what the dots in the yin yang symbol are about. Each thing, in its extreme holds the seed of its opposite.

If you read the cards individually in addition to the top level yes or no answer, you can get a lot of nuance and guidance out of the whole thing. The Zombie Cat part makes it light and fun and snarky and playful in the process. I use it all the time as an ice breaker when I am doing fortune teller entertainment at events, like the one at CMU recently. I’ll sit and do yes-no readings for any silly little thing that pops into my head, like will the Pens win the Stanley Cup this year. The answer is always yes to that one, by the way, whether the cards say it or not because this is Pittsburgh and they are the Pens, after all. On an energy level, it sets the right playful, entertainment vibe for a “fortune teller booth.”

The Lovers card asks us to take a hard, honest look at what we really want. The yes or no layout is a good tool to help gain that focus and clarity. That’s the be careful part.

If you tweek the old adage to say be CLEAR about what you want BECAUSE you are PROBABLY going to get it, then you are suddenly living in a whole different universe and it is a pretty good place to be.

Thank you so much for reading and listening. See you at the next sip!

The blog and the podcast are not monetized and depend on audience support. If you are enjoying these Tarot readings, please visit the Tao Craft Tarot page on ko-fi and consider becoming a Patron of the Tarot Arts to get exclusive content and members-only special offers. Peace Tarot is a short ebook about daily meditation Tarot. Proceeds from the sale of Peace Tarot in the ko-fi shop will be donated to Doctors Without Borders USA during 2022. Both ko-fi proceeds and private readings ordered on the blog website support the creation of the blog and podcast.

Of course, your likes, subs, shares, follows, questions and comments are always, always appreciated!

Ride and Abide

TaoCraft Short Sip is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee. Today, ride and abide with the Knight of Cups.

Welcome to TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast. I’m glad you are here.

Today’s card is the knight of cups. I’m using the Alleyman’s Tarot deck, with the knight of cups card by Lacy Martin & Christine Scanlon.

The knight of cups has a little bit of surface contradiction to it. Knights are action oriented, while cups are water and emotions. At first glance, the obvious interpretation would be put your feelings into action.

That might be the case for you, that is the right thing for some days, but I don’t get a sense that is the message we need today. That isn’t the overall vibe I’m getting this morning.

Card reversals pop to mind a little here too. It’s a fair question. If this is about NOT acting on something, why wouldn’t the knight card be reversed?

We’ve talked about this in previous episodes where the card was reversed. Reversals aren’t all that. Like I said then, I take all aspects of the card into consideration during a reading be it positive, be it negative, be it neutral be it what have you. Today’s card is an example of that multifaceted consideration of an upright card.

There is nothing blocked, turbulent, complicated or cautioning about this energy message, so the card is not reversed. It sounds a little like a double negative when we talk about it this way. It’s sort of like the cartoon where a student tries to trick the teacher into letting him out of class by asking to please not never be dis-excused to the restroom or something like that.

“Sit down Carl!”

It also reminds me of a TikTok that I watched earlier today from Senator Cory Booker. If you have access, I encourage you to look for it and watch it too. It posted on Tuesday April 26, 2022 and was captioned “How I learned a lesson in nonviolence.” In it he talks about how emotions inform us less about the people and situations that provoke them and more about the places where we need to heal and grow. He wanted to act, but instead found a way to nonviolently abide with the situation and his emotions about it. Again, I urge you to find it and watch it and hear Senator Booker’s wisdom in his own words in this short but powerful video.

Here is another less elegant, less kind, less wise but perhaps more relatable example. It imagery is closer to older decks like Marseille and Waite Smith decks. On these you have your standard issue knight in shining armor on horseback, so you can read in all the usual tropes about chivalry and defensive honorable combat and so on. He is holding a chalice, which presumably holds water or wine or some drink.

Now, bring in a fairly well known anime. In the early seasons of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, our hero Jonathan had to fight an enemy while holding a goblet of wine without spilling any in order to graduate to the next level of his Sendo (Hamon) training. Good-guy hero in action with a glass of wine: See the similarities?

You have to be fully accepting and comfortable with your cup of wine to fight without spilling anything. You have to be fully comfortable and accepting of your emotions to move with them without sloshing your stuff all over other people. In short,make friends with your emotions as you move through your day.

Today’s advice isn’t to act ON our emotions but rather act WITH them. Today is a day to ride AND abide.

Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate your support including likes, subs, shares, follows, questions and comments.

Thanks again. I’ll see you at the next sip!

This blog and podcast is not monetized and depends on your support. If you enjoy these readings, please visit the TaoCraft Tarot ko-fi page to become a Patron of the Tarot Arts and get exclusive Tarot content, intuition building exercises, members-only special offers and more. Membership proceeds support the blog-cast.

Today’s Accomplishment

TaoCraft Short Sip is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee. Today is a day. Having one is an accomplishment!

Welcome to TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast. I’m glad you are here.

Today’s card is the four of swords.

There are reasons for all of the lore around Tarot decks.

Bottom line, they are bits of heavy paper with pictures on them. Full stop.

It’s not the cards, it’s the person using them and how they are used. They are the big theater screen where we can project our intuition and make it easier to see. They are a giant mirror that reflects ourselves so we can see that better too.

The genius in Pamela Smiths treatment of the minor arcana number cards is that she hits on very archetypal, foundational, core ideas. It’s hard to improve them. So, so many decks are rightfully derived from that body of work. Before Smith’s work, as I understand it, most decks had pips…a grouping of the suit’s symbols…instead of fully fledged images like the ones she created.

Some of the cards are fairly consistent across all of he derived decks. The three of swords is a good example. Almost every three of swords that I’ve seen has some iteration of heart and swords and something getting stabbed. The four of swords has much more variation. In the RWS deck, you see a knight in repose, taking a lil’ nap with all of his favorite pointy objects, no stabbing in sight. Mark Evans, artist for the Witches Tarot, depicts a grumpy looking lady with one sword in hand, dress swirling to denote movement and activity, with the other three swords close by. It’s not a particularly restful image. Here Lenny Magner give us four disembodied heads stabbed with swords for the Alleyman’s Tarot. The faces look sleepy, possibly dead, and winds up being more disconcerting than restful. Seven Dane Asmund’s interpretation of the card resonates with this image. The Alleyman’s Notebook interprets it as having to do with self-doubt, where he writes “nothing sticks like the daggers we put in ourselves.”

As disparate as it all seems, all of these different images fit together like pieces of a bigger picture.

Think of the ubiquitous and sometime slightly annoying email courtesy of telling people to “have a great day.”

Not every day is great. Some days are a hot mess. Other times you need to turn down the wattage and have just a day. Any day. A no big deal, kinda routine, go make the donuts day. Those days are as great as any other. When we expect perfection from ourselves, it is all too easy to slip into stabbing ourselves in the head with self-doubt. A little rest and repose from self-imposed expectations can be a wonderful thing. Even the Witches Tarot sword swinging grumpy girl has a part to play. External activity, working and adulting still has to happen which covers the action aspect of the swords cards in general. Sometimes you have to, as the shoe commercials used to say, just do it. Swords are also associated with intellect and the mind. That is the kind of rest and repose the four of swords talks about today.

Give being your own worst critic a rest.

Nevermind great. Sometimes just having a day is an accomplishment.

Thanks so much for reading and listening! I’ll see you at the next sip!

The blog and podcast are not monetized and depend on your support. Please visit the TaoCraft Tarot ko-fi page and become a Patron of the Tarot Arts for exclusive content, special offers, and private readings.

Of course, your likes, subs, shares, follows, private reading orders, questions and comments are always, always, appreciated.

The deck pictured is the Alleyman’s Tarot by Seven Dane Asmund, used with permission.

Hawkeye’s Head

Wth the YouChoose Interactive Tarot on the TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast you do just that: choose. You choose when to read and watch. You choose which card and how to apply it.

Welcome to TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast. I’m glad you are here.

To start the week, let’s do a “you choose” style reading. It’s Monday morning here, so naturally a look at the energies for the week ahead is top of mind. You can use the card you choose to look ahead to any day or any week at any time you see this, or you can use it as a general guidance meditation or get some clarity about a particular topic or question. As alway, you choose.

There is a video of the real world card draw above if you are reading the blog, or on the spotify version of the podcast if I can get it to work. If you are listening to the podcast, imagine a circle, a star and a square. Pick a shape to pick your card. Choose from circle, star or square. You can pause the video or podcast if you need more time to think about it. Then restart to see which card goes with the shape you chose; circle, star or square.

Or, on the blog, just keep reading.

Circle: Six of Wands. Be generous and kind to yourself when it comes to mental and spiritual things. Don’t waste brain cells on worry. Stressful times need balance. If you have been extra active or extra stressed, you might have to deliberately be more quiet or more isolated than is usually your nature to balance things out. The six of wands is often associated with peace after war, calm after struggle. Think of this card as the mental and spiritual equivalent of taking a nap after a hard workout at the gym. The strongest hurricanes have the lowest pressure in the center eye of the storm. Be the eye of the hurricane.

Star: Ten of Swords. When life gets you down, it’s ok to down stay there a minute and gather your thoughts before getting up like the unstoppable melty-metal terminator robot that you are. The point isn’t that you get up in a dramatic martyr-like show of strength. The point is to get up at your best and ready to function at your best despite past failures. Sometimes the point is to get up at all.

Square: Justice. Work smarter, not harder. Detachment, balance, and level-headedness are your friends. The Justice card is a card of wisdom. It’s hard to make really profound, life altering decisions on the fly. Sometimes following your impulse, intuition and gut instinct is the exact right thing to do. If you chose this card – now is not the time for that sort of thing. Now is a time for pondering, intellect and logic. It’s like the six of wands folks just heard: the most powerful hurricanes have the lowest pressures in the center eye. You need to be the eye of the hurricane, too.

Taken together, the energy this week seems to be asking for cooler heads and calmer emotions to prevail. Keep some humor about it all. A little light humor can go a long, long way in diffusing fear and anxiety, so keep some dad jokes at the ready. You just might be the one who needs them.

Remember Hawkeye’s wise observations on the TV show MASH? Use your head, like Hawkeye. This week’s cards remind me of the time he said “If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, then you probably haven’t checked with your answering service lately.”

Thanks for listening! I’ll see you at the next sip!

The blog, podcast and YouTube channel are not monetized and depend solely on audience support. Please visit the TaoCraft Tarot page on Ko-fi. Shop sales, commissioned readings, and memberships all support the creation of this free to access Tarot content. Your likes, subs, shares, private reading orders, questions and comments are always appreciated!

Weekend Tarot Turnover 23 April 22

Hi guys! Welcome to the weekend turnover. It’s Saturday morning, time to read a card together over a cuppa coffee. This time I sip, and you stretch your intuition to read the card.

Since this is members only exercise now, let’s try and make it as valuable of a post as we can. AS ALWAYS I would love to hear what you think and what you want to do on any platform but it goes double for everyone sitting around the Tarot Table. Tell me what Tarot (or other related) content you want and I’ll do my best to create it.

Let me grab my cards and pull one for us to work with today….

Members can read the rest on the ko-fi blog.

Want to learn DIY Tarot reading while getting loads of other member benefits? Join us at the Tarot Table for weekly one card meditation Tarot reading practice. Your questions are welcome and I’ll coach you through the membership blog – it’s like taking a kitchen table class with a group of friends and lots of one to one attention.

Other Tarot Table benefits include:

FREE copy of PeaceTarot ebook when you join
Members only ko-fi blog content including “Path Through the Month” Tarot readings and monthly newsletter
Weekend Tarot Turnovers intuition building exercises
Members only special offers

OR become a Patron of the Tarot Arts and get all of these benefits PLUS private, individual one card readings by email whenever you like up to three per calendar month.

JOIN HERE

It’s a web, not a rope

TaoCraft Short Sip is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee. Today’s card is The World, especially for earth day 2022

Welcome to TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast. I’m glad you are here.

It’s Earth Day today. I can’t think of a more appropriate card than the World, so I shuffled through the deck and drew it on purpose.

There is nothing really all that mysterious about the World card. This is a place where the utterly practical and deeply spiritual meet.

In the fourteenth century, in the earliest known days of Tarot, the world was pretty much as big of a concept as you can get. The deck as we know it first emerged around the time of the Renaissance, just before great scientific minds like Copernicus and Galileo and philosophers like Spinoza and Bruno began to think in terms bigger than the world. In many ways the abstraction of the World in the major arcana Tarot card and the modern concept of the cosmos have much in common. Much as in everything.

As Carl Sagan said, “The cosmos is everything that is or ever was or ever will be.” The Earth is an inseparable part of that. An itsy bitsy teeny tiny speck of it, but part of it. So are we; each of us individually but also collectively as part of the human species.

Or as Max Landis et al wrote in the TV adaptation of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective agency, “everything’s connected.”

So yeah, symbols and ideas represented on pieces of cardstock can affect your choices. Your choices inform your actions, your actions become causes, and causes create effects. Tarot cards help you create your future but they don’t predict it.

So yeah, hatred and bigotry really does reverberate out to the cosmos. But so do thoughts of peace and compassion. Both are subtle causes with subtle effects, but effects nonetheless.

So yeah, that one plastic shopping bag really does make a difference, along with that one solar cell phone recharge and that one meatless meal.

So yeah, the atoms of your body really were born in long ago stars.

One of the best things we can do for the Earth on Earth day is to think of it all as if we were in outer space. Like Copernicus. Or the Apollo astronauts. Or the World Tarot card. See the Earth as a whole. See it as a tiny fragile ball of rock painted in a thin layer of a miracle. We are a mote of dust painted in a near-nothing layer of life. If the world is a speck in the cosmos, how does our few miles thick biosphere stand up to that comparison? Such a tiny home for something as enormous as the human mind and consciousness that is capable of knowing and understanding the Cosmos itself. Try celebrating Earth day by reading Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. Celebrate Earth day by learning what the minds who live upon it have learned about the universe that contains our little Earth-speck. When we think of our world from that perspective, renewable energy seems easy. The little things we all can do become microscopically trivial, to the extent that we should burn in shame for not doing them.

It’s a web, not a rope. When you pluck one strand, the whole thing vibrates. Thoughts pluck. Words pluck harder. But actions twang the whole thing in a big way.

Or break it.

It…meaning that grand everything…is part of you. You can’t cause harm or think hate without it affecting something. Something including you. There is a good chance the thread you pluck will vibrate back to you. There is nothing good or bad about it. It’s just the mechanics of how things work. Good or bad is up to you to decide. Whatever you decide it is, that’s what reverberates. What goes around, comes around, however you judge it to be. What you send out into the world comes back to you sooner or later, one way or another.

Send well.

Thank you for readings and listening. Your likes, subs, shares, follows, reading orders, questions and comments are always, always appreciated.

The blog, podcast and the companion videos on YouTube are not monetized and depend on audience support. Please visit the TaoCraft Tarot Ko-fi page to become a Patron of the Tarot Arts and get exclusive content in the ko-fi blog, private readings and members-only special offers.

Thanks again. See you at the next sip!

Nasa.gov photo from Curiosity rover of Earth from Mars

Deck: Alleyman’s Tarot by Publishing Goblin llc and Seven Dane Asmund used with permission, featuring the “BNF again” world card from the Jeude Minchiate de Fantaisie. Image of Earth from Mars from nasa.gov, to the best of my knowledge is in the public domain.

Announcements: MSTBT

spring/summer 2022 schecule, announcements and MSTBT (meat space throw back Thursdays)

Spring and summer are starting to take shape.

It is looking like Thursdays and Sundays are the days where meatspace has my attention and the blog/socials will be mostly if not totally quiet. When time allows, I’d like to do MSTBT…MeatSpaceThrowBackThursdays. I’ll pull something out of the TaoCraft archives to post here on the blog. Modern Oracle archives are going to close on April 30. That’s the plan, anyway, but you know how THOSE go around here.

The podcast definitely won’t be happening Thursdays and Sundays unless it is some sort of extra special bonus episode.

That being said:

EMAIL READINGS NEVER CLOSE! Order 24/7/365 no appointment needed. Delivery times are less than 12 hours on a typical business day, but may take a few days if you order during nights, weekends, US holidays, or announced vacations etc.

The NEW Ko-fi shop never closes! Ebook are always available for instant download. All proceeds from the sale of PeaceTarot through the k0-fi shop in 2022 will be donated to Doctors Without Borders, USA

The OLD Etsy shop never closes! Meditation beads and bead jewelry designed and handmade by me is still there and will be for the foreseeable future.

Scheduling by email never closes! In-person Tarot for both individual and parties require advance appointments (sorry – no same day appointments) BUT you can schedule any time by sending an email to TaoCraftTarot@gmail.com

The phone number never answers! Due to changes in the voip service I use, the phone number on the contact page only accepts voicemail and text messages. If you schedule an in-person reading or party, I will provide a number where you can call me the day of the appointment if needed. Call it more cost cutting so I don’t have to raise prices.

Meanwhile, I got meatspace stuff I gotta do so here is a YouTube video. See you at the next sip!

https://youtu.be/zpjgz4Qqbjs

The Makings of Magic

TaoCraft Short Sip is Tarot for your day (or evening) in the time it takes to sip from your coffee (or tea). Today: The Alleyman’s Tarot Lightning in a bottle and the makings of magic

Welcome to TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast. I’m glad you are here.

Today we are drawing from the Alleyman’s Tarot by Seven Dane Asmund of Publishing Goblin LLC, used with permission. It’s a big deck, with one booster pack already in it and yes, you bet I’m planning on getting the other booster packs if possible.

I’m not a collector by nature, but I’ve been around collectors and I understand the passion. It’s not a greed thing or a materialistic thing. It’s a surround yourself with symbols of something you love thing. As a professional Tarot reader and Tarot writer slash blogger decks appeals to the maker part of me. It’s a “right tool for the right job” kind of vibe. On one hand they are a collection of specialized precision tools, yet on the other hand “every tool is a hammer” as the Adam Savage book puts it.

I know some Tarot readers who have dozens of decks. The Alleyman’s Tarot is my eleventh. I’m enjoying it even more than expected. It is a virtuoso deck, that pushes your comfort zone just by the vast array of tones, images and artwork. It’s also challenging by virtue of the cards like this one that are absolutely gorgeous, but not traditional RWS or lenormand symbolism. I can’t imagine anyone with the wherewithal to collect well over one hundred decks, but the vast array of different cards all beautifully curated by the creator gives you a taste of exactly that. Seven Dane Asmund has pushed all of our Tarot reading envelopes. Now it is up to us to haul it back in.

I’ve been watching the new season of the Witcher, so the Mages of Artuza came quickly to mind when I saw the lightning in a bottle card – specifically the scene where initiates were in a cave with a hole in the roof during a thunderstorm and were required to capture lightning in a bottle in order to become fully fledged Mages.

The phrase “lightning in a bottle” has been around much longer than TV shows. Generally, it means sudden, unexpected, unconventional but huge success at something rare, at something once thought nearly impossible. Lighting in a bottle is a get rich from YouTube, put a ding in the universe type of luck-meets-skill achievement.

Reliable origins of idioms like this one are just as hard to find. A quick search of the google machine gives you the idea that it refers to eighteenth century experiments with electricity like Benjamin Franklin’s kite and Leyden jars. Leyden jars are conductive material on either side of non-conductive glass in such a way that it will hold a small electrical charge. It used to be party entertainment to get a little spark from them, kind of like scuffing your sock feet across the carpet and touching a door knob on purpose. In the poetic language of the day, those little sparks were literally lightning in a bottle.

The Alleyman’s Notebook that accompanies the deck connects this card with a situation that can’t be forced. That interpretation fits in with the pop culture analogy. You can’t MAKE lightning strike. You can’t MAKE opportunities happen but you can position yourself in such a way as to be in the conditions that more favorable for the right opportunity to happen. You can put yourself in a mental and physical space to take full advantage of it if it does.

You can’t make lightning strike any given place at any given time. Putting real world electrocution aside for a moment, if you stand on an iron rich rock near salt water ocean with your arm up in the air during a thunderstorm, there is a better chance that you, the lightning and a bottle will all wind up in the same place at the same time.

There is a practical, mundane, banal side of catching lightning in a bottle. It may seem lucky or miraculous, but the most unlikely success still has elements of practical intellect and persistent effort. As Thomas Edison famously said “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent perspiration. Lightning in a bottle is random luck plus the courage and cleverness to take advantage of unexpected opportunity with a healthy dose of effort to follow it all through to fruition. These are the elements of mundane magic available to anyone.

There is one more element. A subtle one, the one that makes you into a lighting rod and gives you the power to contain it in the bottle. This is the part that makes the apprentice into the sorcerer. It’s the part that takes us back to the rainy rocks at the witch school of Artuza.

Harmonize with nature.

Lau Tzu gave us this advice in the Tao Te Ching a long, long, long time ago. If you are a grower by nature and you are in a sunny field, plant as you wish. If you are by the sea, step out onto the rainy rock and lift your bottle to the sky with confidence.

Thank you for reading and listening. The blog and podcast are not monetized and depend on audience support. Please visit the TaoCraft Tarot ko-fi page to become a Patron of the Tarot Arts which gives you access to exclusive content, private email readings and members-only special offers. Proceeds support the production of these free to access posts and episodes. Of course your likes, subs, shares, follows, reading orders, questions and comments are always, always appreciated.

See you at the next sip.