Death Archives - Tarot by Hilary

Category Archives: Death

The season of death, the veil is thin, and a tarot tribute

The Death card from the Mary-el Tarot by Marie White

This is Scorpio season, the season of death, the season where the veil between this world and the next is the thinnest: it has also been a season for me and mine in which we’ve lost more loved ones than previous years.

This past Saturday, my coven celebrated Samhain, the Witches’ New Year, the sabbat made for honoring and revering and celebrating the dead, our ancestors both of blood and spirit that have crossed the Veil before us. For more information about how witches celebrate Samhain, Courtney Weber covers it here.

I’ve felt disconnected from this holiday in the past. While I’ve had family members that have died (my grandparents), and I’ve loved them, it was an obligation of love: of course I love(d) my grandparents! But I never really knew them or had much interaction with them because they lived in England. We would go to visit them every few years, but it was not the same as the relationships I saw between my friends and their grandparents, or even my now-husband and his grandparents. The loss of them happened either when I was a baby, when I was around eight years old, and later on in my teens the last of them passed. I didn’t really KNOW know them as people.

But this Samhain was hard, not only with the first of my friends passing (I’ll get to that in a moment, which is what this post is mostly about), but with my uncle passing, my husband’s uncle passing, and his grandmother passing unexpectedly as well. It was all too much, and the Veil felt more inhabited on the other side than the living side this time. It felt… crowded. So many souls clamoring to be with the living, to communicate with them, to party with them. Maybe this is how most witches feel during Samhain, but for me it was a very new sensation to feel a familiar soul on the other side.

This year, I lost someone that I knew, that I considered a friend and a tarot colleague. A few years ago I met two lovely women that live in Westchester who are also tarot readers: one came to me as a client with a full-on “hey, I’m a reader, but you know how it is sometimes when you can’t read on a subject…” and one I met at Readers Studio (the tarot conference) only to find out I had worked the same PTA fundraiser with her 2 weeks before really “meeting” her.

Since then, we have all kept in touch, and a few times have gone out to eat together and talk shop, and refer each other to clients when we can and when it’s applicable. We affectionately call our little trio the “Three of Cups”…… Continue Reading

Don’t Shoot the Messenger!

Oh crap, the Tower!!!

The other day before I did a reading for someone on shindigtarot.com, the client said, “Not the Tower, not the Tower!” It is almost the tarot version of “No Whammies! No Whammies!” Poor Tower Card. I think that might be the only time you will ever hear anyone, anywhere, say that.

It made me think about those misunderstood “big baddy” cards that no one wants to get. You know the usual suspects. I’ll put them in the order of what I think are the biggest and baddiest (your list may include the same cards, more of them, and/or less):

Death (“Does this mean I’m going to DIE?!”)
The Devil (“I’m possessed?!”)
The Tower (“Oh my, that doesn’t look good at all…”)
10 of Swords (the resolution of a very volatile situation… maybe)
9 of Swords (what I like to call the nightmares card)

Of course we all have had some experiences in readings of cards that we, personally, don’t want to see. Perhaps a certain card that is the significator of an ex popping up in a reading, giving us a warning that sometime soon he would come a’knocking back at our door. Perhaps you had a reading that stuck with you in a bad way, and seeing one of the cards from that reading takes you back to that time and that bad memory. Whatever the reason, what is it about these cards that make them into the boogiemen of the tarot?

I would say, a) misconceptions, and b) no one likes to hear difficult news. Simple answers, yes, but let’s keep in mind the title of this post. I’m not talking about me being “shot” as the messenger, just by being a tarot reader. The messengers in question are those self-same big baddy cards.

Donnaleigh (http://donnaleigh.net/) tweeted a quotation that really hit this idea home with me. The quotation was, roughly, “Nothing is good nor bad. It just is.” Again, a simple idea. But I have found lately that “keeping it simple, stupid” is increasingly harder to do in an ever-more-complicated world, but so necessary.

So the next time the Tower comes up in a reading, I’m not saying to welcome it with open arms. But don’t blame the Tower for the destruction it’s telling you is happening (which will consequently lead to the building of a strong foundation after the dust has settled). Accept the message the Tower carries with it, but do not let the Tower become that message forever.