7.3 A New Age

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

Some of you may have seen an earlier version of this post. I deleted that because it was so awful and wrote this one instead. Sorry for any confusion.

Cheryl decided to pass on her methods of reading tarot cards, and put together a small group. This included me and Beth’s charming but alcoholic ex-partner as well as Frog who’d long been interested in tarot. He had his own pack and several books on the subject,  and had impressed me when we first met by giving me a reading.
    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 pack concentrated largely on presenting symbols, whereas Cheryl used a modern pack called the Cosmic Tarot which included pictures of recognisable modern people and so was much easier to understand. And Cheryl herself with her simple and relevant translations of the cards' meanings brought the cards alive for me in a way that none of Frog's learned books (by men) had ever done.
    As she explained, the twenty-two ‘major arcana’, which contained arresting pictures of ancient and archetypal (another Jungian word) figures such as The Fool, The Magician and The High Priestess, portray our soul’s journey. The ‘minor arcana’, arranged in four groups like ordinary playing cards, dealt with individuals and our everyday ups and downs in four areas - physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.
    You read the cards in different patterns called 'spreads' and doing it Cheryl’s way involved using not just knowledge of traditional meanings but also your own intuition and insights, and putting these together to make a story.
    Tarot cards still had a bad press at the time, like everything 'occult' (meaning 'hidden’ but often used pejoratively). But they were, I realised, simply a language, a way of accessing our ‘higher selves’ (an occult term). And perhaps more.
    We read for each other, and occasionally the results could be spine-tingling. It really did seem at times as if a higher power was speaking through the cards.
 

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 and now occupied only a small part of me.
    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.
 
I managed to find some sources of information in the local public library, an MBS shop in Exeter and the Somerset town of Glastonbury which was a mecca for ageing hippies (or as Frog called them 'acid casualties', acid being the hallucinogenic drug LSD). From these I put together a synopsis and wrote some sample entries, for what I envisaged 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.
 
The first thing I discovered was exactly where the term ‘new age’ came from.
    It started in the late nineteenth century when a group of people who called themselves ‘theosophists’ became interested in ancient Eastern religions and mysticism. At the same time a secret society called The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was reviving Western occult traditions such as witchcraft, tarot, magic and astrology. The society was secret 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.
    I liked the sound of all that.
    None of it was exactly new to me as all these ideas were flying around during the hippie era of the 1960s when I was a teenager, but at the time I was too young to participate. Now I could.
 
Cheryl next set up a workshop to teach people how to contact their ‘spirit guides’.
    There are many different sorts of spirit beings according to occult and native traditions, as well as in religions, but according to 'esoteric' (secret) spirituality each of us has a human spirit guide, a person no longer on this earth who has elected to look after us. They speak to us through our intuition and imagination.
    I didn’t much like the idea of having a spirit guide. It made me uneasy to think that someone was watching everything I did. Nonetheless I was intrigued, and trusted Cheryl. So I decided to give the workshop a go.
    A group of us met one evening at Cheryl’s house. She was making quite a stir by now, with everyone it seemed wanting her to sort their life out, and there were a dozen or so of us in the group. Some I knew, some I didn't. Frog hadn’t joined me this time.

    We took our places around the room in a sort of circle, with the usual dim lights, incense and evocative posters setting the mood. 

To be continued . . .