Offering: Solstice 2025

How to access secrets

Pamela Colman Smith’s Strength card from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot

Hi All,

This past week I was revisiting an account of the legend that tarot came from the Book of Thoth¹, which was said to be written by the god Thoth himself. I then heard through the grapevine (Wikipedia) that there was a spell in this book that would make the spell-caster understand animals and, needless to say, I had to know more. An interpretation of a myth about two ancient Egyptian princes² verified that when one of the princes said the spell from the book, “he discovered what all the birds of the sky and the fish of the deep and the beasts of the desert were saying.” What I took from this was that humans have been longing to understand the more-than-human world since forever.

I have a list of to-read papers about grief that I chip away at little by little, and this week chose one by philosopher Becky Millar called “Can Animals Grieve?” which is a good example of how, despite (what I take to be) the fact that we can never truly know what goes on in the hearts of others, the effort to understand is a noble one that commands respect (shout-out to Donna Haraway for this language³). Millar’s paper is really interesting (and open access!). It challenges some dominant assumptions about animals, but also about grief itself. It’s worth a read, though if you don’t enjoy reading philosophy I did my best to review it in yesterday’s newsletter.

There's another really fantastic part in the legend about the Book of Thoth, in which a priest is telling one of the princes where the book has been hidden: Deep in the water, inside a golden box. But the golden box is inside a silver one, which is inside a copper one, which is inside an ivory and ebony one, which is inside a juniper wood one, which is inside an iron one. And in case that doesn't sound hard enough, there's also miles of "serpents, scorpions and reptiles" including an "eternal serpent" who comes back to life every time he gets killed (until at a certain point in this story, he doesn't).

I tend not to think that the most secret and precious things—like what goes on in a heart after significant loss, for example—are tucked in a box somewhere, awaiting those with the rigor and know-how to access them truly and once and for all. I do think, however, that many things of great value do become accessible to us in the noble quest that is continually asking. Maybe that’s what the eternal serpent is about; the one who attained to the treasure was the one who understood that there’d be no end to his task.

Happy solstice, thank you as always for being here.

Onward,

Jessica

1. This is told in the letter on Wheel of Fortune in Meditations on the Tarot.

2. In Miriam Lichtheim’s Ancient Egyptian Literature: Volume III: The Late Period

3. From Haraway’s “The Companion Species Manifesto”