Tag: Liminal

Tarot and the All Seeing Eye

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3rd eyeThe engraving pictured above is familiar to most everyone but few know what it’s about. Titled “The Flammarion Engraving,” the artist is unknown, but most likely was Camille Flammarion himself; the art was for a book he published in 1888. It depicts a missionary (a seeker of truth) who unexpectedly discovers where Earth and Heaven meet. More precisely, he came upon the liminal space (threshold) between them. That’s the stated objective of Chrysalis Tarot’s Papa Legba: to aid you in your discovery of liminality.

This blog is the third and final piece in a series about how tarot works. Many (quite wrongly) believe that tarot is something to be taught; that it is simply another decoding methodology, in this instance of randomly dealt cards. “This means that and if it’s next to that, then it means this and if it’s upside down, well then it means something entirely different.” Put bluntly, that’s just utter nonsense. It is, however, nonsense that quite a number of people successfully have turned into a profitable cottage industry constructed upon the twin pillars of medieval superstition and self-serving esoterica.

As long as tarot is identified primarily with woo-woo fortune-telling rather than with spiritual growth, it will never (and should never) earn anyone’s respect.

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This is not to suggest that tarot doesn’t work – it most certainly does, as we all know. We suggest only that this is not the way tarot works and that true cartomancy, as opposed to woo-woo fortune-telling, is not comparable to, say, a Captain Midnight Decoding Ring. Not in the least! True cartomancy involves psychical communication with an unseen realm.

To glean meaning from tarot – valuable, useful, spiritually nourishing meaning – you first need to develop your innate intuitive skills and sow a fertile field for human imagination. You must, like Flammarion’s awestruck missionary, peer through the firmament that separates the seen from the unseen, the finite from the infinite, the known from the unknown, and become truly awe inspired.

We accomplish such an awakening not by consorting with rote definitions and fanciful gimmicks but by raising our Third Eye into consciousness and trusting our inner voice; by allowing ourselves to embark upon an astral journey like the lady pictured above and by contemplating energy patterns (chakras) that twist around the backbone of our being like a coiled snake – kundalini energy, which is female. The Third Eye is also known as the sixth chakra or indigo chakra. A Third Eye mandala is pictured below between two Chrysalis cards that invoke Third Eye symbolism.

Tarot employs what we might call speculative metaphysics or meta-philosophy, which is nonsensicalism to most materialists. Only those willing to peer beyond the veil can begin to comprehend the true nature of reality. At Chrysalis, we urge you to contemplate (not analyze) Holly Sierra’s extraordinary artwork on each of our cards rather than aspire to decode it.

The human psyche interprets symbols and archetypes via its personal unconscious – a realm of female energy symbolized by the moon and the serpent; the masculine conscious realm is symbolized by the sun and the raven. Archetypal symbols often mean different things to different people but always represent an initial spark of understanding that becomes the kindling of enlightenment.

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Serpentine Apotheosis by Hakan Hisim

© Toney Brooks, 2018

Halloween Disambiguation

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8850-munch-the-scream-Many well-intentioned people conflate spirituality with religion, but the two differ considerably. Spirituality can be likened to a crystal-clear, free-flowing stream; religion, on the other hand, is the dam that arrests the crystal-clear flow and then seeks to define the brackish muck that collected behind the dam. Halloween can help to illuminate this point.

The word Halloween is a contraction of All Hallows’ Eve that denotes the evening before the Christian celebration known as All Saints’ (All Hallows’) Day, a festival invented by the church in the 8th century. But the rich history of celebrations on this day is well over 2,000 years old.

The ancient Celts celebrated New Year on November 1. The Celts, of course, were Pagans, a word that simply means country folk but has become a pejorative. The Pagan feast, which the church sought to eradicate, is known as Samhain (pronounced SOW-in). The word itself comes from an Old Irish term meaning summer’s end. Pagan feasts begin the evening before the feast day itself. Indeed, Samhain is still celebrated on Oct. 31-Nov 1.

Samhain calls attention to what is known as a “liminal” time – that betwixt and between separating spiritual time (eternal) from worldly time (temporal). It’s a time when ancestral spirits danced on the curtain separating the two. Liminal time is also associated with the hypnagogic state between wakefulness and sleep;  with out-of-body experiences resulting from deep meditation, and with bilocation, the ability to be in two places at once – to possess an earthly body and an astral body simultaneously.

Eight of SpiralsPropitiation of the ancestors, which the church vulgarized and anathematized as “ancestor worship,” as well as paranormal expressions of liminal time, are heresies. Hence the dam named “All Saints’ Day” was built so that this unseemly Pagan spiritual nonsense could be corked, codified and rendered respectful. This is what dogma (correct beliefs) does to living, breathing spirituality.

As a secular holiday Halloween is a joyous occasion, as are all holidays that sharpen our focus on kids and families. But there comes a time to “put away childish things,” said Saint Paul. You can do that by mitigating the brackish water of dogma and by not allowing it to morph into a self-satisfied entropy of your spirituality.

For adults, tonight is also a night to remember and honor our ancestors. It is a night to light candles, muster courage and venture behind the threshhold curtain; a night to experience the spiritual wonderment commonplace to our ancient pagan ancestors – Celtic, Greek, Roman, First Nations, Latin, Asian, Aboriginal, Egyptian, et al., but especially to the shamans of the world, masters of the ultimate liminal experience.