Offering: August 2021

Difficult tasks, personification & love, The Tower in an unexpected role

Dear friends,

It’s been a whole month since I started doing the weekly offerings and I’m loving it so far. We’ve been exploring the myth of Cupid and Psyche, which we’ll do more of in today’s offering—with context of course, for those who haven’t been following along—and it’s been cool to walk slowly through a story in this way. I’m thankful.

I know I’ve said this before, but I am really feeling attuned with the seasons here after a long winter of listening and reading by a fire and feeling really at odds with offering anything new to the world. It’s summer now and I’m feeling more like the black cherry tree in my backyard, dripping with fruits to share. Some more ripe than others. :)

In September I’m offering a new Tarot Reading class, which is for people interested in adopting a process-oriented style of reading as opposed to a results-focused one. This is a style of reading I’ve been doing for years, but it was more recently that I’ve found adequate language to describe it through the fields of liberation psychology, philosophy and mythology. I guess needless to say, I’m really excited to share with those interested. Click the link to read more. The Tarot 101 class is also back after a brief hiatus, click the link to read more and sign up if you desire!

Finally I have to drop a link to pre-order my new book Tarot for Change: Using the Cards for Self-Care, Acceptance and Growth. I think this book is particularly good for people who are interested in a printed collection of writings I’ve done about each card that you can use when you pull for yourself or others. But there are lots of charms in there.

Hope you enjoy the offering this month! If you want to sign up for the weekly version, you can do so here.

Onward (or backward, inward, upward, diagonal),

Jessica

[Image description: Six Tarot cards by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider Waite Tarot. Left to right and top to bottom, they are The Lovers, Three of Swords, Ten of Pentacles, The Fool, Eight of Swords, The Tower.]

I spent the month of July reading the myth of Cupid and Psyche (The Lovers), specifically the version by Apuleius which I found for free online. I was initially drawn to the story because James Hillman mentioned it in his book Re-Visioning Psychology, but the images pulled me down a different path than the one I’d planned. Which I feel proud about.

I’ve been sharing scenes from the story in my weekly offerings, and excerpting those in Instagram posts. Maybe you’ve been following along. If not, the basic premise of the story is that there’s a girl named Psyche who is so beautiful she makes Venus—the goddess of beauty—angry. As punishment, she’s exiled to the top of a mountain to live in matrimony with a serpent.

But her new husband turns out not to be a serpent, and the mountaintop dwelling is actually quite idyllic. In fact, Psyche is married to Venus’ son Cupid, who’d fallen in love with her when his mother ordered him to make the girl fall in love with the most horrible creature of all time.

There’s a catch, of course: Psyche can’t know who her husband is, so she’s prohibited from looking at his face. Even as their relationship is progressing, and she gets pregnant with his child. She has no idea she’s married to a God.

One night, fueled on bad advice from her jealous sisters—Psyche tries to cut off her husband’s head with a razor while he sleeps. As she lifts the lamp to do the job, she sees that she’s married to Cupid, god of love. She tries to hide the razor before he wakes up and pretend it never happened, but it’s too late. Once he wakes and realizes she’s seen him—which she’d been clearly told never to do—he flies away, furious. 

—

At this point (which is where I’ve left off in the weekly offerings if you’ve been following) Psyche is so anguished and broken hearted that she hurls herself into a river (Three of Swords).

The water, knowing Cupid’s wrathful side, takes pity on her. The river knew he was liable to bring her waters to a boil, making a blistered mirror of the floating Psyche to match the fire in his chest. The river ejects her onto the banks, where she lays weeping atop soft marshmallow leaves and willow roots.

I love this scene.

The river has mercy, and foresight, and will. Human traits.

Lou Salomé, who was a student of Freud, believed that to love truly required personifying. She said that humans could only be in an emotional relationship “with whatever we experience anthropomorphically and only such can we include in our love…” And if “by contrast, we explore nature objectively and scientifically, we alienate our objects from us.” 

I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about the objectification of the natural world and how that can translate to certain behaviors, like bystanding to violence. A few months ago I watched a talk by Andy Fisher, author of Radical Ecopsychology, in which he argues that once the natural world is de-animated, conditions for eco-violence and exploitation are ripe because, as Salomé argued, true love—the type to move us—is necessarily personal. 

The image of a river with human traits is healing because for the majority of my life I’ve understood a river as a collection of objects; water, fish, rocks, mud. But there’s also this plot point that yes, Psyche loved her husband before she tried to kill him, but it wasn’t until she saw his face—who he truly was—that the eros became real. 

Then, hers became the kind of love that overrides the rational, forges new worlds, and that, when lost, or under threat of loss, brings inescapable anguish and fear. Maybe the stakes don’t feel real until you really know someone or something, since to know is to realize you’re braided together. And that may be an unfashionable statement amidst so many who are doing necssary boundary work in interpersonal relationships. I believe we can have it both ways. 

—

I’ve also been sitting since spring with something I read that Joseph Campbell wrote, waiting for the right moment to share. In The Grail Romances he said that in myths, when a community was under a spell, there would always be a number of people around who knew they were under a spell, and knew the rules of the spell, but didn’t know how to break it. 

That’s led me to wonder about the spells the communities that I belong to are under, about what the rules of those spells are that I personally know and abide by, but can’t break despite knowing they don’t serve life. I want to share here a bit more from Andy Fisher’s talk, which I mentioned earlier:

“Part of the ideology of capitalism is to suck the psyche out of nature and society…and make it an individual thing. And then if I’m depressed it’s my problem, it’s not because I’m alienated from the natural world, or not because I live in a loveless society, it’s because I don’t have enough serotonin in my brain or because I’ve got some other problem…That’s an ideological move and it does two things. 

One, it takes psyche out of nature, it de-animates the natural world; takes the spirit out of nature and leaves behind this kind of brute matter. For capitalism to do its thing, to get going with the bulldozers, we need a nature that looks like that. If it’s full of spirit, and if our souls are incomplete until we’ve developed relationships with all the plants and animals and developed a deep bond with the land (Ten of Pentacles)…how can you do capitalism? 

…Similarly, you gotta pull the psyche out of society, make it an individual thing so society can just keep going on doing what it’s doing without being implicated in all this pain and suffering that’s going on. In fact, it feeds on it.” 

Fisher’s lecture is available on YouTube if you want to watch it. 

I can’t speak for others, but I think I could make an argument that the de-animation of the “natural world” and the perception of soul in interiority in my culture have something to do with the spells we’re under. Of course then the million dollar question is, how do we break them (Eight of Swords).

There are a lot of people in my life who don’t understand my attraction to fairytales and myths and even Tarot. But I didn’t grow up with a garden, or knowing the names of wild herbs, or riding a horse. Then I spent my whole early adulthood sitting behind a desk in behavioral science publishing. So when I read stories about merciful rivers, helpful ants and singing reeds, yeah, it feels important. It feels like waking from a thirty-something year poison-apple induced slumber.

I try to remind myself of Campbell’s idea that the enchantment is always broken by “some naive person doing the thing that has to be done unintentionally, out of his true nature. (The Fool)” Not because I see myself as breaking spells but because in a backwards environment being naive or foolish might actually be a sign you’re going in the right direction. I don’t like trite, but if it’s true I make an exception.

—

After begging for mercy in the temples of multiple goddesses and praying her love will return to her, Psyche is captured by Venus who still only wants to punish her. She’s super mad now, because despite her initial efforts to get rid of Psyche, the goddess’ own son wound up married to her. And to make matters worse, a baby was on the way.

How it started was Venus wanting Psyche gone. How it's going is that Psyche is now about to give birth to the goddess’ grandchild. You have to laugh a little bit here at how Venus’ inability to manage her envy without violence causes the exact thing she’s jealous of to literally proliferate, and this time much closer to home.

Jealousy is a big thing in a lot of old stories I’ve read—mostly European and Mediterranean—and one thing you see time and time again is that no matter how bitter the green might get, how mad, real gold stays shining with or without the blessing of a jealous God. 

If gold bothers you, you can try to lock it away. You can send it to the top of the highest mountain. You can make it the other, call it “over there”—oh, she’s so, he’s so, they’re so. But you could also free it. I should say, I could free it.

I could give it a different type of life than one hidden away in the tower of someone else’s having been born with all the luck. I could take it in, feed it, attend to the spots in me that get sharp when they see it. I could turn toward the thing in me with the good eye for brilliance, even if the brightness frightens me.

—

Once captured, Venus gives Psyche all these impossible tasks to complete, which is another thing you see a lot in old stories. It seems to do with some generative energy in hopelessness and despair, with miracles for the faithless, and with taking and learning to trust help when it comes. In this story, it’s also about the way nature and Psyche (remember that Psyche means soul) work together to do miracles. 

First, Venus demands Psyche parse into distinct piles a heap of wheat, barley, mill, poppy seed and lentils before nightfall. She doesn’t even try here. Without love, she’s lost hope. But then these magic ants arrive. One after another they come, they sift out, they flee. Venus returns from her party incredulous, and gives a next task in the morning. 

Next, Psyche’s sent to the forest to bring back wool from the golden rams who live there. Seeing the strength and unruliness of the flock, and knowing in her blood the impossibility of the task, Psyche is ten rungs below despondent. Soon a green reed starts to sing to her, a song of instruction. She’ll wait until the rams have cooled off in the river. Their golden fleece will get caught in the briers, then. She’ll gather it in her apron and deliver it to the Goddess. And she does. 

Third, Venus commands Psyche to climb to the top of mountain, fetch water in a crystal bottle from the deadly River Styx, and bring it back. There are vicious dragons on either side of the river who never sleep. Psyche is so distressed, Apuleius writes that she couldn’t even comfort herself by weeping. You ever been in such deep trouble and so all alone in it that even crying loses its appeal? I have. There’s a futility to tears when you’re standing on the banks of the underworld.

A nearby eagle, “remembering his old service” decides to help. He tells Psyche, point blank, you’re not gonna get this water. But then he fills the bottle himself, and Psyche brings it back to her wicked mother-in-law. Convinced Psyche is a witch, Venus gives her one last task: An underworld journey. 

But before she goes, a fantastic thing happens! Even with all the help she’s received, all the times and ways she’s been surprised, saved, grace-stricken, Psyche still lacks faith. I can’t say I blame her, given the task, which is not just that she literally go to hell, but that she attain a hidden treasure there and bring it back alive. 

She finds the highest tower where she plans to throw herself off headlong. This time, it’s not an ant, not a reed and not an eagle who aids her, but The Tower itself, which says: “Why are you being so rash, giving up on your last hard task? It’s not too far where you’re going. Just listen…” And the Tower gives her a specific set of instructions about who and what she’ll encounter, how to move through the traps unscathed, where to retrieve what she went for, and how to get back alive. 

I’ve always loved The Tower card, it was the first card I ever really wrote about. And the more I learn about where its lived in history (see the June offering for a Tower of Babel reflection)—the deeper the love goes. The sixteenth arcanum carries secrets about how moments of destruction and bottomlessness and even terror can be carriers of magical instruction, if you’ve ears to hear.

—

I’m still processing what happens next—the whole underworld journey and what comes of it—and will be sharing more thoughts and feelings in next week’s offering. If you’re interested in signing up for those, you can do so here. Otherwise, see you next month! Thank you for being here. 

If you’re interested in working with me I have a new Tarot Reading class in September, plus the Tarot 101 class is back, too. Click the links for details. My book Tarot for Change: Using the Cards for Self-Care, Acceptance and Growth is also available for pre-order, on shelves October 28. <3