Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls
Self-sabotage and the tarot pt. 2
I have two separate trains of thought running through my head this morning. These ideas are swimming, meeting up, separating, paralleling each other curiously. The first is a little disarming.
I have such strong beliefs about this process which is tarot, the cards’ ability to help guide and make meaning, so similar to other tools like prayer, psychotherapy, astrology, art, writing itself. Making meaning, healing, providing structure and hope. My guiding principle might read: “Tarot for Hope, Healing, Transformation. Tarot for GOOD.”
But…
What if it were to go awry? Is it fragile? As fragile as our own human experience, in the depths of despair or grief or anger or delusion? What if I lean so heavily on my beliefs about how the cards are to be used that I self-sabotage myself with delusion? What if I fall into a toxic and false positivity spiral as I read the cards, and am too much of a coward to say what I see? What if it's a way to avoid my own discomfort?
I try to approach tarot first with my heart and then with my mind. The oath of DO NO HARM guides me, but the tarot also gives me the opportunity to share hard concepts, to offer help in addressing that which a person may be blind to. As I move into 2024 I know in my heart that my readings need to become more textured with difficult conversations when the cards present themselves as such. It’s complicated I think, and also it is why reading tarot is an art, not a science, and also why the relationship between querent, reader and the cards themselves create an alchemy of spirit.
Valentin Tomberg, the now not so anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot, dives deeply into the cards of the Major Arcana, and presents The Devil as the opposite of Temperance, the card preceding it, “the secrets of the electrical fire and the intoxication of counter-inspiration.” (p.401)
Think of this concept of counter-inspiration and how it might be intoxicating. Permitting ourselves the abyss, where we can numb to truths and avoid life, that's really what The Devil shows us, warns us against. It's serious, this disengagement with inspiration, our inner light, though we may turn off for potentially very good reasons. But this counter-inspiration is often the dulling, muting, dissolution of the self, the soul. Tomberg warns us not to get too close to it, and yes he uses the word evil (not a word I am comfortable with in Tarot). He says our goal is to meditate, to commune with all the cards…but not this one. I say there are no bad (or evil) cards and will stick with that, because if The Devil card appears for you it is a gift, a gift of awareness that something needs to turn around in order to regain inspiration, which Tomberg finds in Temperance, the card preceding The Devil.
So if The Devil has appeared for you in a Daily Pull, or in a reading, it should not be glossed over or laughed about. It is serious business and should be addressed with deep thought about what inspiration you are denying, what truth you are avoiding. The Devil is the penultimate card of self-sabotage and its gift is the wake up call to get on, get real, turn around,
Listen here to TLC's iconic song It struck me that those of us who continue to back our way in and out of the Devil’s presence (I am part of this contigent), are asking for waterfalls when rivers and streams are what move us forward. But oh, waterfalls are exciting, uncontrollable, but in some ways don’t go anywhere.