What does Sellavision have to do with tarot, I hear you ask. Well…

1) It includes a tarot reading. Ten points will be awarded to anyone who can identify the deck used…
2) It was written, produced, directed, edited and generally poked and prodded about a lot by my husband, who is very clever and talented and who is also married to me and I have loads to do with tarot.

Please go and watch it if you have time. It’s miles better than a lot of the crap out there, I promise, and it’s only 16 minutes long (cut into two parts, so you can go and get a cup of tea in the middle – just like a real TV programme)! And if you watch it and you find yourself with a bit of leftover time on your hands, please rate it, comment or pass it on to your friends. The tarot gods will indeed smile on you (it’s true, I asked them and they agreed).

Here’s part one:

And here’s part two:

Altogether now: Hooray for tarot! Hooray for Sellavision!

Against all better judgement, I’ve bought a copy of the Tarot Universal Dali to sell at Tarot Chest. Why is this potentially a bad idea? Because it’s a very expensive deck and if it doesn’t sell, I’m going to feel a bit foolish. But I couldn’t resist. It has shiny gold edges. It comes in a furry red slipcase. And…it’s the Dali Tarot. It’s literally a work of art. It took me almost an hour to add it to the site this afternoon, mainly because I couldn’t stop flicking through the scans at taroteca. (Occupational hazard…I can’t tell you how many (wo)man hours we lose to that every year. )

Now I have the difficult task of seeing it on the shelf every day until someone buys it. And I’m not sure I possess the willpower required to let it just sit there. How long can I last? Will anyone save me? Or will I succumb to temptation and make it mine? Tune in again for the next exciting installment…

P.S. This is my favourite card. No, hang on. This one is. And this one.

This morning I asked, “What can Tarot do for the world?” I wanted to know if Tarot had anything to offer us in the 21st Century. By us, I don’t just mean tarot lovers; I mean the world at large and people in general. I wanted to know if Tarot could save the world.

The answer I got, drawn from the Aquarian Tarot, was the Seven of Pentacles. Which is such a perfect answer if you think about it. The Seven of Pentacles is the pause button. Tarot gives us the opportunity to pause, to evaluate our lives. I have spent the past six, almost seven months, stuck on play (occasionally on fast-forward). I’ve had very little time for Tarot. Almost every day I have questions I’d like to ask but don’t. Instead, I just get on with things that need doing, leaving the questions unanswered.

Having an unanswered question or two doesn’t sound so bad. What that really means, however, is that I daily have thoughts and feelings that go unexamined. I repeat the same mistakes because I don’t make time to understand why I’m messing up or to work out how I can do better. I’m making big, huge, major decisions – moving house, finding childcare for my daughter, falling out with my parents – without sitting down to consider how I really feel. I am being swept along by my life instead of stepping out ahead of it.

I’m not saying I need tarot cards to tell me how I feel. But when I sit down to do a tarot reading some kind of switch goes off inside. It’s the intention: by taking the time to do a tarot reading and putting the rest of my life on pause I’m saying this – this issue, this situation – is important to me. It matters enough to warrant careful consideration. Without tarot cards, I may think endlessly about the same problem, but not in the same way. I think in circles. I might think about it as I’m washing up, bathing the baby, cooking dinner, working, but without Tarot I don’t have an excuse to sit still and only think. Tarot takes the problem out of my head and spreads it in front of me. It freezes it so I can walk around it, look at it from all angles, see what’s really going on. It’s these moments of stillness in life that allow me to check my progress, to make sure I’m still on the path I want to be on.

In the 21st Century, everything moves at the speed of light. Tarot gives us the opportunity to slow down – not to stop, but to pause, check where we’ve been and where we’re heading, and make navigational adjustments if necessary. Or, as Ferris Bueller says:

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

And that’s what Tarot can do for the world.

Last night I came across this poem by Robert Frost in a book.

Can you guess which two tarot cards it made me think of?

Last week I got the Tarot of the Imagination, an OOP Lo Scarabeo deck. It’s very colourful, very striking, but also a little odd, a little foreign to me. Reading it, I think, requires me to “suspend my disbelief” – a term used frequently in my Theatre Studies classes way back when in school. “Theatrical” is a good word to describe it; “impressionistic” is another. The images were painted/chosen to suggest a mood – as such they often veer wildly from typical RWS depictions. It’s a challenge for me as my reading style is very logical.

A few days ago I wanted to try a reading with it. The situation I was reading about was a nebulous, shifting situation. My thoughts kept going round and round in circles, bouncing from hope to fear to sadness to optimism and from question to question to question, without finding any answers. I needed to impose some sort of order to do a reading but didn’t know where to start so I came up with a new spread, one designed specifically to loosely hold the impressionistic images of this deck.

It seems like it would be a useful spread for any time you need to try and pin down a confusing situation.

The position meanings are:

1 – THE DREAM, what I hope for the situation

2 – THE NIGHTMARE, my fears for the situation

3 – THE PAST, where the situation has come from

4 – THE FUTURE, where the situation is going

5 - REALITY, what I need to accept is true about the situation

6 – FICTION, what I need to realise is false

7 – THE PATH, the way out of the situation

I got a pleasant surprise today when I unpacked a delivery for our other store. I instantly recognised the artwork on the cover of Dancers in the Dusk, one of the new roleplaying releases that arrived. Look, it’s by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law!

Aaaahhhh. So lovely…..

The past couple of weeks, I’ve been finding comfort in my Haindl and instead of wildly posting here every single tarot thought that comes to mind (or at least, trying to), I’m enjoying some quiet contemplation here.

It’s a bit too quiet though…apparently, I one day I got a record TWO visitors. If you like the Haindl and would like to make my contemplation a little less quiet, please come visit.

This week, I’ve had the great pleasure of perusing the new Lo Scarabeo Tarot Gallery, which is a lovely big hardback book featuring full colour samples of all their decks. To a tarot geek, it’s a thing of beauty; even though I know of all these decks, and even though I have – at one time or another – stocked most of them, I still get a thrill at every page turn. Decks that I thought I didn’t like somehow come to life when viewed in a double page glossy spread. Even – and this shocked the hell out of me – the Tarot of Reincarnation, which still may not look much like a tarot deck but does look extremely attractive.

I’m guessing the Tarot Gallery has been produced to create desire in retail stores. Browse these pages and dare to resist our wares!  However, this is much much more than a superficial selling tool. They’ve clearly invested a lot of time and effort in making it. The cards are actual size, which is great, and for those decks that feature gold and silver impressions, LS have glued a copy of the card to the page. Also, the sheer number of decks is mind-boggling. I counted 96! And these are in-print decks mind you, not discontinued ones (and it doesn’t even include any of the upcoming 2009 releases)!

Sometimes a lot of Lo Scarabeo bashing goes on at certain forums. Certain people seem to get personally offended that LS “churn out” so many decks with different themes every year, as if being prolific was a sign of low standards or even worse…gasp…commercialism.

But being prolific is just what I like about Lo Scarabeo: you never quite know what they’re going to do next. You may groan at the thought of a UFO Tarot or roll your eyes at the latest “Tarot of the Little Pink Pixies” (I made that up), but there’s no denying they always give you something to talk about. And there’s also no denying that they produce some very good and very beautiful decks: the Universal Fantasy, the Classic Tarot, the Nefertari, the Tarot of the Secret Forest, the Samurai Tarot…I could go on. Sometimes a deck is a “miss” but often their decks are resounding hits. 

What’s more, they have an energy and enthusiasm that you just don’t get from US Games/Llewellyn/AGMuller/etc. Lo Scarabeo constantly dare to try new things. Why not have a UFO Tarot? Why not a Manga Tarot or Tarot of the Robots? It’s important I think to remember that LS make playing cards as well. Some people like playing cards with cats on. Some like playing cards with cheeses of the world. LS seem to extend the same vision to tarot. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a tarot deck featuring mermaids?” Does it need to be justifiable in some serious, studious tarot way? Of course not  – and anyway, who gets to decide what can or can’t be a tarot deck? Sometimes all a deck needs to be is pretty, or interesting. To a collector, all a deck needs is the word “tarot” in its name.

They’re also willing to experiment with the format. They’ve brought out no end of mini tarots, and the lovely - and under-appreciated – grand trumps. They produce bags to match their decks. Last year they added spread cloths; this year they’re trying their hand at rune sets and some shiny chakra thingies. Last year they published a gorgeous book about their first 20 years. And this year they’ve produced this Tarot Gallery.

That’s why I like Lo Scarabeo, and why I think they’re still probably one of the most exciting – and hardest working – tarot publishers around. So there.

I’m giving up on the Deck of the Month. It was a nice idea but…it enforces an artificial schedule that makes me feel all claustrophobic. My Anna K. has arrived and I want to play with that but I’m supposed to be using my Hudes. It makes me want to stamp my feet and say “No! Shan’t!” And that just creates bad feeling all round.

Besides, I just don’t have the time at the moment to do anything with my Deck of the Month, which kind of defeats the whole purpose. It seems I need a more relaxed approach which will allow me to get to know a new deck – say, oh I don’t know, the Anna K. – over a few months, instead of trying to squish it all into one.

And as for Card of the Month…don’t get me started. Ugh.

It seems that no matter how long you study tarot and how familiar you think you are with the cards, you will always find something new to enlighten or surprise. This week, I have been learning about the 5 of Pentacles. I wrote about a couple of things specific to the Hudes 5 of Pentacles in another post, but this post is about the 5 of Pentacles in general. To me, this card has always represented some kind of physical hardship or poverty – whether that’s poverty of money, health, possessions, time or spirit. In readings, my interpretations revolve around the idea that what was stable and relied upon, taken for granted even, has been lost.

What I’ve failed to appreciate about the card, however, is its message of shared hardship. This is not a particularly outlandish interpretation of the card – after all, it traditionally depicts more than one person and many books mention shared hardship as a possible meaning. But it’s not a meaning that has resonated with me before. Until this week.

This week, the 5 of Pentacles turned up as the “Opportunity” card in my weekly reading. I thought it probably referred to some temporary setback in my health or finances, such as catching a cold or getting a large credit card bill (for lots of tarot deck purchases no doubt). In actual fact, the card seems to have had many things to say about many different aspects of this week, but the one I want to talk about is snow.

Here in the UK, we’ve had snow. Tons of the stuff. Oh, we have snow occasionally – if we’re lucky there’ll be a snowfall once a year and if we’re really lucky, there’ll be enough to make a miniature snowman – but real deep snow that settles and hangs around for days is pretty rare. So far the snow here has lasted for five days and has been both a wonderful treat and a complete nightmare.  A treat for me because I don’t have to go anywhere, except to the park to walk the dog; a nightmare for most other people who’ve had to get up early, shovel the driveway, scrape down the car and trundle along at 15 miles an hour just to get to work (and then get home late only to do it all again the next day).

The snow here has brought life as we know it to a standstill: schools are closed, roads are closed, buses and trains are cancelled and Royal Mail – who are out every day come rain or shine – are not delivering mail. The weather conditions have been the top news story all week. And it’s all pretty much doom and gloom. But we’re all in it together, and that makes you feel a part of your community like nothing else can. Suddenly, you’re talking to kids from around the corner about the snowman they’re building (a giant). Suddenly, you’re out pushing your neighbour’s car that’s got stuck, or you’re checking that the old lady down the road is all right. You’re putting food out for the birds and having your photo taken with the Chinese couple that you’ve always said hello to even though you didn’t know their names and still don’t (true story). Suddenly it’s not just about you anymore. You see people who need a hand and so you lend yours.

And that’s an aspect of the 5 of Pentacles I’ve never really considered before. Of course, this goes on all the time even when there isn’t snow but the conditions this week have made it all the more noticeable. In a way, it relates back to the Hierophant – the big five. Because one area of life he is concerned with is community. We are all part of the same tribe, yet much of the time we are wrapped up in our own little worlds. The snow this week has got everyone outside, talking to one another, helping each other out. And that, my friends, is how the 5 of Pentacles works as “opportunity”.

“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” – John F. Kennedy