Offering: October 2021

Shame, fantasy & an excerpt from my new book, Tarot for Change!

Dear Friends,

It’s autumn in the northern hemisphere where I am, but wherever you are, I hope you’re feeling. I’m thankful to be feeling excited on this day, because it’s the first time I’m revealing a piece of my new book, Tarot for Change: Using the Cards for Self-Care, Acceptance and Growth, which comes out this month. In case you don’t have time (or interest) to read the whole of the offering, the excerpt starts toward the middle, I’ve marked it with bold.  

Real quick: I’m offering another Tarot Reading class on November 14. This class is focused on a process-oriented style of reading that emphasizes relationship, questions and the mythic imagination. I present a set of guideposts drawn from the fields of mythology, counseling, philosophy and others. But we also draw much from what emerges through the space made for discussion.

Onward,

Jessica

[Image description: Six Tarot cards by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. Left to right and top to bottom, they are Six of Wands, Eight of Swords, Eight of Pentacles, The Chariot, Strength, The Sun.]

I spent much of September exploring variations on the problem of irredeemability through the fantasy of some wild animal; a bristly, slimy, or unruly character ready to taint the sweet, and spoil the pristine. 

I wrote about the hairy and tusked Cundrie, of the Grail Legend, the sorceress on the mule with the braided eyebrows who stands for shame and guidance at once. Who speaks many tongues. 

Cundrie is a shame-bearer. When everyone’s celebrating Parzival’s induction into the famed Round Table—the pinnacle of knighthood, his dream—she’s the one who breaks it to all in attendance that actually, Parzival is a fool. 

After all, he’d gone to the grail castle and didn’t ask about the grail. And was therefore, at least in the eyes of Cundrie, completely unworthy to be praised. 

Last week I wrote, “there’s a scowling face in every victory parade…who walks in the procession…ready to tell everyone your sins. It could be someone else, it could be you. It’s there, is what matters. And the cost of being in that number is…you have to engage with it.” (Six of Wands) 

—

My work is based on an understanding that image makes ideas soluble. 

I learned this firsthand. I would read about behavior change at my day job in psychology publishing and then pull cards from Pamela Colman Smith’s tarot at night. 

This strange and unlikely marriage did magic on me. With words alone, I could know the concepts. Through images, I could understand them. The pairing changed my life, and I wanted to share it. Which is how I wound up here.

I’m into psychologizing, which James Hillman defined as “whenever reflection takes place in terms other than those presented.” 

Symbol, metaphor and image are trapdoors out from the cage of street-level literality (Eight of Swords). I love words, but words can keep you looking from the same set of vistas, over and over. To the point of exhaustion and no movement’s happening. 

When people want to broaden their point of view, to shake things loose, to see what they’ve not seen, they do Tarot, or they go for a reading. 

As a reader, common queries I hear are things like what am I not seeing, and what do I need to be aware of? It’s rarely about solution, it’s about deepening one’s understanding about the essence of a problem. By way of the imagination. By way of fantasy.

In Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman wrote that the alchemists would say: “Beware the physical in the material.” For us, this means that as we move through the material domain, we should be careful not to take things too literally. 

So if you were going through something and it felt super hard, you could ask questions to find some deeper or allegorical meaning. Dive under the particulars and into the essence. How is this situation more than the problem I’ve named it? How is this deeper than some tedious, physical obligation (Eight of Pentacles)? What forces are interacting here, what is the purpose of this? 

—

One thing I find super interesting is how Hillman distinguishes between problem and fantasy. 

Problems are difficult, he writes, and “serious…One is stuck with them, they don’t go away.” 

Fantasies, on the other hand, are harder to pin down. They’re not considered “weighty” or “basic,” as problems are. 

The etymology of the word fantasy, he continues, connects it with “visibilities, light, showing forth, like a procession of images presented to the mind’s eye.” 

Whereas, the word problem has more to do with “a barrier, an obstacle, a screen.” 

The point is that the two—problem and fantasy—have different qualities to them. Which means they ask different things from us.  

Material problems demand something very specific: Will power, which I see as being symbolized by The Chariot.

Fantasy is a de-literalized version of a “problem,” it’s a mythic version. It’s the thing that makes invisible forces visible (Strength, which is called Force in some decks), seeks the deep scent of the matter, the shape of its hoof tracks in snow. 

If problems are an invitation to heroes, with the will and wherewithal to solve them, fantasy shifts us out of the “heroic ego” and into an “ego of the imaginal.”

Few would argue against the need for imagination when dealing with challenges. I bet even fewer have the capacity to get crafty when we’re face-to-face with a wild foaming beast and convinced that what we need most is for it to go away (Strength, again).

People can and often do interact with problems—like fear or shame—as clinical or pathological issues to be solved. And we can do more. We can seek visuals that invite us into the fantasy, the imaginal, that help us learn to work with and walk alongside the things we’ve assumed we’re up against. 

Maybe that means we call shame “the animal,” or tuck it into the messenger bag of a bristled woman with braided eyebrows. We can ask what it needs and where it came from. Determine which offerings may be pacifying, or aggravating. 

Taking the imaginal, scenic route probably means we don’t get to be the mythic hero or the epic beast slayer. For sure the part of me that wants that is alive and well, I see it every day. But this route does afford more space for us and for the animal. I think that means maybe, more movement can happen.

—

The following is an excerpt from Tarot for Change: Using the Cards for Self-Care, Acceptance and Growth, which is out in less than one month! 

This passage, like the rest of the book, is an example of shifting from the heroic, problem-focused ego to an ego of the imaginal, a demonstration of movement from problem to fantasy and of seeing what that can do. 

And I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please consider pre-ordering the book. I’ll stick another link down below.

There’s a very old and popular fairy tale about a frog and a young princess. The two become friends after the young princess’s beloved golden ball flies down a dark well and the frog, good with plunging depths and more comfortable than she is in damp dark spaces, offers to retrieve it in exchange for companionship.

The golden ball is a common symbol of the self in old stories, whose function is, according to Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz, “to unite the dark and light aspects of the psyche.” 

A frog who dwells at the bottom of musty wells and a princess who sleeps high in a castle at night come together and what happens is not unlike what happens when we start to unearth the hidden mysteries in our psychology. I’ll spare the details here but suffice it to say that when the frog insists on eating from the princess’s plate and sleeping on her pillow, there’s aggravation, irritation, and disgust.

You may know the feeling. It’s not unlike trying to have a nice meal or fall asleep at night after someone’s just told you that you did something manipulative, or when you’ve suddenly realized you’d been doing the absolute most just to avoid looking down into some deep well of grief. 

How is it exactly that parts of us become frogs and get cast down into these wells in the first place? For starters, each and every one of us has been experiencing rejection from the moment we were born. And while it may sound Brothers Grimm-level dramatic, it’s fact, not fairy tale.

Our personalities developed in part based on the cues we were given from infancy by our caregivers about what is and isn’t acceptable. We came into this world sorting what’s okay about us and what isn’t.

This—smiling, obedience, agreeability—this gets to live up in the big fluffy bedroom on the third floor of the castle. That—dissent, rapacious desire, the urge to control everything and everyone—that’s stuff for the depths, cast it down into the well way out by the property line. 

Our parents of caregivers had preferences before we were born and those preferences didn’t go away when we arrived in this world. They had visions and fantasies about what it mean tot be a parent or to have a child.

Those ideas were placed firmly upon us and, not because they were bad people but because they were human, our caregivers chose our names before we were even born. Before we had a chance to show the world what our eyes look like when we’re happy, what it feels like to be in a room with us when we’re scared, or who we can sometimes hear colors.

Far more than we were ever invited to be who we truly are, we were told who we should be. Poet and storyteller Robert Bly wrote, “The drama is this. We came as infants, ‘trailing clouds of glory,’ arriving from the farthest reaches of the universe…In short with our 360 degree radiance…And we offered this gift to our parents. They didn’t want it. They wanted a nice girl or a nice boy. That’s the first act of the drama.” 

Each and every one of us experienced this rejection of who we truly are and came here to be in some form. Because someone was counting on us to be something else, something they needed us to be, a supporting role in their own story. This old rejection wound is like a beast e lug around. It sometimes sleeps, but wakes easily, ready to emerge at the slightest hint of disapproval.

Psychologist Alice Miller wrote that even though we betrayed ourselves as children, though we sold our parts of ourselves and threw them down into the deep well, we can’t blame ourselves for doing all we really could in the circumstances to survive. The best thing we can do, she writes, is to mourn. But I think there’s more. 

The symbol of the golden ball as the force that seeks to unite the conscious and unconscious parts of our experience is a drive that is alive and well in you, and I know that because you wouldn’t be reading this if it weren’t. Without that drive you’d probably have little interest in cupping your ear to listen for the secrets of something like tarot. You’re here because you want to know the truth. And me, too.

In the illustration of the Sun, a baby rides a white horse naked through a field of sunflowers with the golden ball, the sun itself, at their backs. The task here is to shine a light on, and in doing so come into relationship with, the creatures that we long ago relegated to the bottoms of the damp wells on the edges of our awareness. It is to courageously follow the bouncing ball into the shadowy forests and see what’s there. 

In some versions of the frog prince story, the princess gets so frustrated with the frog that she throws him against a wall, while in others, they kiss. But in all versions I’ve heard, the story ends when the frog magically transforms into a prince, at which point he’s finally able to join the princess in a kind of harmonious communion. Just as we each hope to do when we create awareness around our old wounds and patterns so that we might begin to integrate those things as a route toward truer versions of ourselves. 

“The Sun,” was excerpted with permission from Tarot for Change: Using the Cards for Self-Care, Acceptance and Growth, out October 26 but available now for pre-order.

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