7.4 Tarot

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

There is also a third and, I hope, final version of the previous instalment ‘A New Age’ which you might like to read before this one, if you haven’t already.

Frog had a pack of tarot cards and several books on their history and meaning, and he’d impressed me when we first met by doing me a reading.
    I found the cards fascinating and spine-tingling, with their strange markings and mysterious characters such as The High Priestess and The Emperor. I couldn’t read them myself however as the pictures in his pack were symbolic rather than real, with stick people making stylised gestures, and the more I read about the cards the more confused I became.
    So when Cheryl offered to teach me about them, I leapt.
 
At the same time, I was researching their background for the encyclopaedia.
    They first surfaced, I discovered, in Europe in the fourteenth century but may have been much older than that and drawn their influences from all over. The Hanged Man card for instance derives from Norse mythology. The early New Agers related the entire structure of the pack to the Kabbalah, a Jewish mystical tradition that dates back to before the Middle Ages. The four suits reflect the traditional elements of earth, air, water and fire, also found (with extras) in Chinese traditions dating back four thousand years.
    The early twentieth-century psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, whose ideas had stuck in my mind after I read about them (in my blue Penguin Introduction to Jung’s Psychology) when I was twenty-one, called the images on the cards ‘archetypal’, by which he meant that they were the bricks of our ‘collective unconscious’, a layer of the psyche common to all humans and which we are born with. This is the layer that surfaces in dreams, fairy stories and myths.
    The cards may originally have been used simply for ‘divination’ (fortune telling) but they may also, according to the early New Agers, have been a record of the mystical side of all religions, kept secret for fear of persecution – and perhaps ridicule I thought.
    No wonder I was confused, no wonder the cards gave me the shivers, and no wonder I had always conducted my real life in secret from everyone except Frog, seeing as so much of what makes us human had been forced into hiding for so long. It wasn’t only me.
   
Frog joined me in learning about the cards from Cheryl, as did a charming but alcoholic musician, ex-partner of Beth who had introduced me to Cheryl. We sat round a table in Cheryl’s moody sitting-room, curtains drawn and incense burning. I felt as if I was going to be inducted into the mysteries of the universe.
    The best known tarot at the time was the Rider-Waite pack of 1909, named after its male creator and publisher but omitting any mention of its female artist Pamela Colman Smith. This was the pack Frog had, whereas Cheryl used a modern pack called the Cosmic Tarot.
    As she fanned it out in front of us, real people with recognisable expressions flicked past. I craned over them, hardly daring to breathe in case I missed something.
    ‘There are twenty-two Major Arcana,’ she began.
    I’d already looked up the word ‘arcana’ and knew that it came from ‘arcane’, yet another word for secret and yet another word like ‘occult’ ‘esoteric’ and ‘hermetic’ loaded with extra meaning, not all of it complimentary. For me however these undertones only increased my fascination.
    She picked out a few of these cards and placed them on the table – The Lovers, The Chariot, The Star – and something stirred deep inside me. I knew what Jung meant.
    ‘These describe our soul’s journey and they begin and end with The Fool.’
    She held up a card which showed a jester dancing on the edge of a mountain with a little dog dancing at their heels. The picture touched something from childhood, something I’d forgotten until then. It reminded me of how I felt when I met Frog.
     ‘The other cards are arranged in four suits like playing cards.’
    She sprinkled a selection, and people doing things I recognised, like yoga or DIY, or kissing, or fighting or clutching their heads in pain, confusion and sadness, popped up.
    ‘These cover everyday ups and downs.’
    Yes, I could see that so clearly.
    ‘They are arranged in four suits – pentacles, swords, cups and wands.’
     I tingled. Even the names sounded magical.
    ‘Pentacles cover the practical, physical side of life, swords represent thoughts, cups our emotions and wands creativity.’
    How obvious. How simple. Now it was all starting to make sense, in a way none of Frog’s learned books had done.
    ‘The four court cards represent real people. Look out for them when you’re doing a reading.’
    She pulled out a few. Princesses, Princes, Queens and Kings.
    ‘I’ve always identified with him,’ said Frog pointing to a card called the Prince of Wands.
    Yes, I could see that too. The prince was a young man with an open face and long curly hair, like Frog’s hair when I met him. Exactly like Frog, he had thoughtful eyes and a dimple in his chin.
    ‘You can lay the cards out in any order you like, so long as you’re clear in your mind what the positions mean. These patterns are called “spreads”.’
    I remembered all the complicated arrangements in the books and the diagrams which had only made me more confused, and breathed out, my shoulders dropping in relief.
    ‘Let’s try a few.’
    And so we began.
 
We continued to meet as a group, reading for each other again and again until the given meaning of each card was fixed in our memory.
    Like hypnotherapy the cards uncovered a part of me that had lingered for eons in the dark corners of my mind. They helped me to see connections, make stories and find ways out of seemingly impossible situations.
    I began to understand that they weren’t the work of the Devil, they were a language, and once you’d learnt that language you could do with it whatever you wanted.
    Or so I thought at first.
   
One day Cheryl asked me to read for her.
    Two cards popped up. Death, a skeleton with a scythe and ruins all around. The Tower, flames shooting from the top of a tall building and people plunging to their death.

    I began to shake.

    ‘There are no “negative” cards,’ Cheryl had said. ‘Everything that appears is there to help us. If a card appears upside-down, note that but turn it the right way up.’
    Why then did these two cards terrify me?
    I forgot everything Cheryl had taught us about their meanings – sudden change, change forced upon you because you’ve left it too long - and stared at her, speechless.
    Cheryl nodded back at me and I knew that she knew what they meant, what they meant for her, even if I didn’t.
    Then I realised that the cards weren’t simply cardboard pictures after all. Sometimes a higher power spoke directly through them. 

To be continued . . . 

  

7.3 A New Age (version 3)

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information on the series and a list of instalments so far, see right.

NB This is yet another version of this post – a third and, I hope, final one.

Meanwhile I was still working freelance from home, copy-editing and proofreading books. I liked the independence but the work was beginning to tire me. It made my brain ache as it was too intellectual. I might once have been a brain on legs but I was more than that now – or so I hoped.
    I worked for several ‘Mind, Body, Spirit’ (MBS) publishers as that was a genre starting to be popular and was something I knew a little about and was interested in.
    Even so, during the course of my work I kept coming across words I didn’t know and couldn’t find in any dictionary, just as ‘reiki’, ‘feng shui’ and ‘tofu’.
    Someone should write a dictionary of all these new words, I thought, but no one appeared to be doing so, and eventually I realised that someone was me.

From what I already knew, I put together a synopsis and wrote some sample entries, for what I called a New Age Dictionary, ‘new age’ being a term that was increasingly used to describe the new MBS movement. I envisaged it as a sort of ‘devil’s dictionary’, not as scathing as Ambrose Bierce’s, but slightly tongue-in-cheek nonetheless.
    Three publishers were interested and I chose the one which seemed the most honourable and the least likely to interfere with what and how I wrote. However, they wanted me to call the book an encyclopaedia rather than a dictionary and I agreed, not realising how much that title was going to change the book’s content and how much work it was going to mean. I asked for a year in which to write it.
    And so my New Age Encyclopaedia was born.

Because the book was now an encyclopaedia, I felt duty bound to include a whole array of subjects, from complementary health to alternative, Eastern and native spirituality, and set off on my quest for enlightenment.
    I found a small MBS section in Exeter library and a shop in Exeter’s Fore Street - a scruffy hill outside the city centre where the independent shops lurked and which Frog and I called Exeter’s Left Bank. The shop, called Evolution, specialised in all things esoteric and had a large section of new and used MBS books. Cheryl worked there sometimes, both on the shop floor and as a psychic.
    Frog and I also increased our visits to the Somerset town of Glastonbury which we already loved for its vegetarian cafes, its dramatic tor (hill) and the colourful array of ageing hippies who sold their wares on the pavements. Frog called them ‘acid’ casualties, acid being the hallucinogenic drug LSD which I’d never dared take – I didn’t trust my own sanity. Why would I want to make the world any more scary and strange than it was already? – but Frog had several times and survived, apparently.
    Glastonbury had been a spiritual centre for thousands of years, first pagan then Christian, and claimed to be the site of Avalon, the mysterious island where King Arthur was buried. It was also situated at a point where many powerful ‘leys’ converged.
    Leys are straight lines which run between prehistoric sites and geographical features, thought to have been created as route markers or to mark energy flow. I knew about them from Frog, who had several books on the subject and a collection of maps which he’d overlaid himself with a gridding of this mysterious phenomenon.

First I needed to find out where the term ‘new age’ came from.
    The story began, it seemed, in the late nineteenth century when a group of people who called themselves ‘theosophists’ became interested in the esoteric (secret) and mystical traditions which they considered lay behind both Eastern and Western religions.

    At the same time a group called The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was reviving Western occult (hidden) practices such as witchcraft, tarot, magic and astrology. The society was hermetic (closed) because most of the practices were considered deeply wrong and counter to Christianity, if not illegal. (Witchcraft for instance didn’t become fully legal in the UK until 1951.)
    According to astrology the Earth, because of its wobble, moves to face a different ‘sign’ (arrangement of stars) of the Zodiac (star belt) every two thousand years or so. Round about now (give or take a few centuries) we move from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius.
    During the Age of Pisces, institutions, religions and centralised power dominated. During the Age of Aquarius, we will have greater freedom and equality, more connection to nature and each other, and an emphasis on individual spirituality.
    If only, I thought.

None of this was of course exactly new as it had been a large part of the 1960s’ ‘counterculture’. Frog and I had unfortunately only been in our teens and still living at home at the time so unable to participate fully but the influences were flying around and we’d both explored them as much as we could. I’d done it in secret as usual through books, and Frog through books and music.

During the 1970s I’d branched out through travel and Frog through drugs – as we put it. When we met we had one book in common - Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, an account of his experiences with the hallucinogenic drug LSD, something I (unlike Frog) only knew about in theory. 
    And then during the 1980s and ’90s we’d been busy marrying, working and setting up home.
    Now, I could explore the whole subject in more depth and, with Cheryl’s help, put some of it into practice.

To be continued . . . 

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SERIES Pictures of Aura Portraits

For more about the Autobiographical Series and a full list of instalments, see right.

Here by popular demand are the two pictures of my aura that Cheryl coloured for me, as mentioned in Instalment 7.1 and Instalment 7.2.

This is the first one, described in Instalment 7.1. I think it's faded as the brown patches aren't as apparent as I remember them, but it's worth including as a comparison to the second portrait.

Here is the second portrait, the one Cheryl did a year later. As I said in Instalment 7.2, while there are still dark patches, the aura itself has exploded in size.

NOTE Cheryl is no longer available on this telephone number so please don't use it!

7.2 Wellness

This is part of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments, see right

I reeled out of Beth’s house, feeling as if something momentous had just happened. I sensed that the meeting with Cheryl was one of those fateful events, destined to change the course of my life. Not quite in the same league as my first encounter with Frog, and very different, but vital nonetheless.
    I made my way back down the main street in a daze, not noticing who I was passing and bumping shoulders at every step.
    As I reached the village square and the exit from the Market, I walked into Frog’s brother Simon and his family who were staying with Frog and me.
    I couldn’t help blurting out what had occurred, thinking that they might understand.
    ‘You paid ten pounds for an aura portrait,’ exclaimed Simon. ‘Are you mad or something? What a waste of money.’
     I hardly heard him.
 
The next morning, as soon as the hour was reasonable and without telling anyone except Frog who was resigned by now to my emotional excesses even if he didn’t always understand them, I made my way back to the village and hammered on Beth’s door.
    I kept on hammering even though it took her a good five minutes to open up. When she did appear she was wearing a dressing-gown and her eyes were half closed. I’d obviously woken her and she didn’t look too pleased to see me.
    ‘You’d better come in,’ she sighed.
    Once inside I refused a cup of coffee and found myself blurting out the whole story of the pregnancy, the termination and Thomas, my face streaming with tears.
    Beth listened in silence and I sensed that she was reluctant to get involved. She had her own problems.
    At last I drew to a halt. I didn’t know what had come over me and began to feel slightly stupid.
    ‘Why don’t you go and see Cheryl again,’ said Beth. ‘Her details should be underneath the aura portrait.’
    Yes, I thought. That was what I needed. That was exactly what I wanted to hear.
 
Cheryl lived in a terraced house in Exeter, the walls decorated with New Agey posters like dolphins and zodiacs. She kept the curtains half closed and burned incense. She wasn’t surprised to see me and sat me down without preamble. Which was lucky as I couldn’t have explained why I was there or what I wanted.
    All I knew was that I was in love with those gorgeous swirling colours. It wasn’t so much that I was concerned about the brown splodges. I already understood why they were there. It was the energy of the aura that drew me in. I wanted more of it. I didn’t want anything in its way.
    The first thing Cheryl suggested was an exercise in intuition. During the week I wrote down every one of those thoughts, ideas and feelings that seemed to come from nowhere and what I did about them. What was the result? There were some astonishing congruences and I began to see that those insights were more ‘right’ – more helpful – than all my lists, plans and conscious attempts at self-improvement.
    She had me read a novel called The Celestine Prophecy which illustrated ‘synchronicity’, a word invented by the psychologist Jung (in the early twentieth century) for those strange coincidences that speak of a meaningful world and a connection between us and the rest of creation. I was inspired.
    We worked on affirmations, positive descriptions about me and my life, such as ‘I am safe’, ‘I am perfect as I am’. She advised me to write each affirmation down many times on a piece of paper and then go through the lines, alternating them with all the negatives my brain came up with. Eventually I would run out of negatives and suddenly see that on a higher level the affirmation was true, at which point my eyes would fill with tears and I would be overcome with relief.
    She led me through meditations and guided visualisations and encouraged me to try doing the same on my own. My walks with Brindle took on a whole new importance as I followed her advice and parked myself daily in secret places at the tops of hills and under trees and dreamed of better things.
    At the end of another year she coloured me another aura portrait and, while there were still dark splodges, the colours reached the edge of the paper and beyond.
 
One of the articles I’d been commissioned to write was on the subject of ‘Wellness’. Full of confidence, I’d trotted out all the stuff I’d already written about and knew so well – the healthy eating, the exercise, the complementary therapies – and sent it off. But reading the article later, I realised that it was missing one huge chunk of existence – the spiritual. I’d said nothing about how we could care for, cultivate and connect with our souls. And I began to realise that this was what Cheryl was teaching me.
 
But there was more, much more to come. I was only just beginning.

To be continued . . . 

PART 7. 1 The Aura Portrait

This is part of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments, see right

1997
 
‘Would you like a portrait of your aura?’ said Beth.
     I knew Beth from my yoga class. She was standing outside her house in Silverton’s main street, her head bobbing among the home-made dream-catchers (Aboriginal mobiles) that she was selling.
    It was August, almost exactly a year after Thomas’s death, the day of the annual village Street Market, attended it seemed by the entire population of the village, plus hordes from outside. The streets thronged with brightly dressed pedestrians.
     ‘Ooh’, I said, ‘that sounds scary.’
    Did I really want to know what was lurking in my ‘aura’? I feared the worst, in spite of all my therapy.
    What with my eating disorders, my migraines and all my life events, I was becoming an expert on complementary therapies. I felt as if I’d tried them all: acupuncture, reflexology, osteopathy, cranial osteopathy, aromatherapy, herbalism, homeopathy, naturopathy, massage and flower remedies, to name but a few. Not to mention counselling and hypnotherapy. So much so that I was now writing about them for magazines and encyclopaedias.
    So I knew a little about auras – the energy field that surrounded our bodies, or ‘subtle energy’ as it was sometimes known. But I hadn’t had much to do with them.
    So, in spite of myself, I was intrigued.
    ‘Go on,’ said Beth. ‘Cheryl’s brilliant. She’s in my sitting-room. Why don’t you go in and meet her.’
    She pushed her front door open and I wandered through, trying to look nonchalant.
 
It was dark inside and I bumped into some furniture before spotting Cheryl at the back of the room next to a small table.
    She was young, in her twenties I guessed, with long, straight, dyed-blonde hair and a delicate face.
    She watched me without smiling or making any form of greeting and pointed to a chair in front of her.
    ‘I can do you either a tarot reading or an aura portrait. It’s ten pounds,’ she said.
    Already I believed in her. Her confidence was rock-solid.
    ‘An aura portrait please,’ I said, sitting on the chair and handing her the money.

    Tarot I vaguely knew about already as Frog had a pack as well as several books on the subject and had impressed me when we first met by doing me a reading with the cards. Auras were what I was here for.
    Cheryl picked a pad off the table and began sketching with a selection of crayons, looking through me rather than at me.
    ‘You get headaches,’ she said.
    ‘Yes,’ I said, taken aback that she’d seen so much so quickly.
    She carried on sketching without answering.
    Finally she stopped colouring and turned her paper round, placing it on the table so that I could look at it.
    I wanted to cry. Even I could see what it meant.
 
Over the summer when Frog and I were planning to marry and our lives were in such turmoil we’d attended a course on ‘human development’ over several weeks in the evenings at a local alternative centre. This was called the Grail Centre and situated in one of Exeter’s side streets with a vegetarian café that Frog and I often visited on a Saturday.
    Here we learned about the seven stages of human life, modelled on the colours of the rainbow. The first stage was the physical, and coloured red (or black). The orange stage was about social connection, the yellow related to the intellect, green (or pink) the emotions, blue responsibility, indigo intuition and violet creativity, spirituality and selfless service.
    Each level had it pluses and minuses, and you learnt to deal with these as you moved up the levels approximately every seven years.
    Ultimately - ideally - you became a fully formed human being, having reached the white level which included every colour.   
     Both Frog and I were fascinated by this model. It made so much sense. And as a result of the exercises we did in the group, we placed ourselves - at that time - at the green level. My mother I decided was probably yellow, and my father blue. No wonder we didn’t get along.
    Later, when I started yoga, I realised that these levels equated to the chakras, the body’s seven centres positioned from the groin to the top of the head, spinning discs where according to yogic philosophy we take energy in and release it back out again. Interestingly chakras also relate to the conventional endocrine system – the glands that produce hormones. As well as to our poetic understanding of our bodies – the head, the heart, the soul and so on.
   
Over an outline of the human body, doubling its size, Cheryl had coloured beautiful flares of pinks and purples, blues, yellows and greens. But from the pelvis downwards around the outside the colours, on the palms of my hands, in the centre of my body above the waist and over one side of my head were foul brown splodges.
    Cheryl pointed to them one by one.
    ‘You have to do something about these,’ she said, ‘otherwise you’re going to become ill.’

To be continued . . .