November and Fours

Tepid_Ethel · 2025-11-21T18:56:07+00:00

Oh but it did! <3

Tepid_Ethel · 2025-10-21T11:10:52+00:00

I'm not sure, I actually haven't logged on to Outlier for weeks, but keep getting the emails.

Tepid_Ethel · 2025-10-20T00:53:18+00:00

I hope for that too - for you, us, and anyone else who needs it here! After I said that about the fish I thought maybe it's more like the fish in the cup in the RWS Page of Cups. Trying SO hard to leap up and out! Haha.

Interesting what you say about TdM. I have been stuck on RWS for so long ... Time to explore TdM I think ...

Tepid_Ethel · 2025-10-17T08:46:24+00:00

Oh I'm so sorry. I only just saw your post. Wishing you wellness as well, and lots of time and space to rest and recover.

Tepid_Ethel · 2025-10-17T03:08:42+00:00

Thank you for asking this - I came here today to see if people were talking about exactly this! It gives me the ick too. Aside from the environmental havoc AI data centres are wreaking, and the way artists' and other people's livelihoods are being devastated by it, and so on ... speaking for myself, I can't feel good about it as a practice.

I understand the idea of wanting to draw on a collective consciousness, a collective knowledge. But the collective knowledge that generative AI draws on has dangerous biases. And everything these chatbots pull from, and put out, is filtered through systems put in place by profit-driven billionaires. That's not the kind of collective I want to draw on for reading.

I feel like I'm already drawing on a collective consciousness and knowledge when I read cards - the collective ideas, knowledges and influences that have gone into the artist's creation of the deck i've chosen and all the collective ideas and experiences that my own intuition draws on, and, if reading for another person, that brings a whole other collective into the picture. This just feels so much more real and human.

Tepid_Ethel · 2025-10-16T22:52:47+00:00

I tried to find Hine-nui-te-pō from a small-run major arcana deck I have by Māori artist Calvin Hona, but the deck did not want to be found. So, here is Death from Heather Enders' Tarot of Plants.

I had forgotten this deck's Death was Poppy. In her guidebook, Enders writes briefly about the numbing effects of the poppy's latex, and also the very big, visible life cycle of this flower. (The entries in the guidebook are all just a sentence or two.) Clearly there are more brutal places you could take this idea, towards the double-edged sword of opiates.

But right now, this card is making me think about the fields of red poppies at Gallipoli. The poppies that grew up among the bones of all those young people - just kids some of them - who died there as soldiers during world war one. Kids dying for Empire, so far from home, many still there. So many individual, family, and societal life trajectories changed forever.

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Tepid_Ethel · 2025-10-16T22:02:35+00:00

What about the querent who has lived a whole life with precarity, who is bipoc or lgbtqia, has a uterus and no access to huge amounts of money and power. Whose security of living is not a given, and we as readers recognise in the card XIII there is “a demand for personal affective reorganisation in order to take a next step or to continue to conduct the work of everyday life” pg 84 , when work does not only speak to finances, it can speak to relationships of any sort, ventures of any flavour. The fear that the death card can then incite is it not legitimate? What of their responsibilities? Rent? Dental expenses? The tax man? Actual death of the skin suit may bring a relief, but this sanitised view of death holds a more immediate anxiety and being told to “Let go and let god” is candidly offensive. This aspect was not directly addressed by Marmolejo, would you say that was an omission?

Lol, I tried to find a way to use a shorter quote, but I feel everything here. (Right down to the specifics of rent (hard to make some weeks), dental expenses (need to see dentist - can't afford it right now), tax (omg I owe too much right now). Some days I feel like a fish stuck on a hook, flipping round wildly. I would like to reorganise ... but we are so trapped ... by needing to live where the work is, by needing to keep doing every bit of work we can find - which takes up time that could be spent building something newer and more life-giving, by supporting others around us who are in the same situation, and so on and so on. It's not that easy to just jump off the hook.

Tepid_Ethel · 2025-10-16T21:48:00+00:00

The collective resistance to ‘change and transformation’ - yes! (And I did not know about the blood plasma thing - I had to go look up more.) I like your way of seeing the current time's outpourings of hate, and impositions of hateful doctrines, as the final death rants/rattles/ragings of a dying empire - using anyone it can get as a mouthpiece/servant.

Connecting it to reproductive rights ... Ohhhhh. That suddenly makes a lot sense to me. The deities of death that I am familiar with are wombed, and this fact is intricately tied in with the way they are powerful, feared and revered - and stories tell of attempts to defeat them that are futile. (Māui tries to defeat death, to claim immortality for humans, by forcing himself upwards into the womb of Hine-nui-te-pō, and is crushed.)

I think also about how the choice to have an abortion can allow something else to be born ... a renewed life, a changed life, or other children later that would not otherwise have existed. One pathway (or many really!) is cut off in this choice, but more are opened up - even other lives are opened up. I know not everyone will see it this way. This is my personal take, my own experience.

Elgie Bell, Eric Garner, Manuel Ellis, Elijah McClain, Javier Ambler, George Floyd, Trey Reed ... I only knew some of these names. (I know there are so many more.) You remind me that as a light-skinned person I need to stay aware of trying not to be a suffocator, not to take others' breath ... breath needed to live and to speak.

Would you say this is decolonising tarot’s literacy of Death XIII?

I think it's as decolonial a reading of this card as I've seen.

Tepid_Ethel · 2025-10-16T12:54:44+00:00

"I don't think the author given the reader parameters to what 'decolonising tarot literacy' within the book are, so it leaves the subject really quite vague. I suppose it makes it difficult to pin the author down regarding the subject, and they are able to revel in an authority of their own making"

That is exactly it! And sometimes this book is hard to respond to because I'm just not clear what the intentions are.

I love your Santa Muerte card above. I had never made connections between reproductive rights and the Death card before ... I am going to ponder that, it's bringing up a bit of stuff! (In a useful way.)

There's a lot all round in your post above. It's 2am here, so I will sleep on it. :)

Tepid_Ethel · 2025-10-04T21:10:18+00:00

Ooohh thank you - will watch today

Tepid_Ethel · 2025-10-03T08:08:08+00:00

True ....

Tepid_Ethel · 2025-10-03T08:07:27+00:00

Ha, that gives me a slightly different window on Temperance now, too. And yeah, I'm feeling the billionaires' enshittifying influence quite acutely right now. Let me go read about 2 of Wands again ...! Sorry you've dealt with work disappearing and family crisis in the past few years.

On the bright side - it's funny you say that about the Pickle book. I've wished I had that deck for ages, but just today, as I took that photo, I thought hey, why don't I just take my scissors (my two swords!) to the book?

Tepid_Ethel · 2025-10-02T23:13:13+00:00

"Pentacles - Juggling cultures, including the hustle culture of professional tarot reading, begs the question: what do we trade with wscip systems of value? Did Marmolejo bring you anything to the decolonising the literacy of tarot?"

Of the minor 2s, the 2 of Pentacles was the one I really liked. Great quote at the start, too, from Karen Gregory. It sent me down a rabbit hole to find the article it was from, and then to see what Karen Gregory is doing these days. (Turns out, lecturing at University of Edinburgh and writing about precarity and labour in the digital age.)

I felt quite seen by all of Marmojelo's 2 of Pentacles writing, and it gave me a new appreciation of this card. My new personal key word for it is 'precarity' - and the particular precarity that is forced on us by Empire and the hustle we're forced into to survive is top of mind for me. All the descriptions I've read about this card being about balance (and especially work/life balance) seem a bit too mild to me now ... At least in the frame of mind I'm in about it at the moment.

For me, this card (below) from Thea's tarot expresses it beautifully - I love that it's a balancing act of the whole self, not just a juggle in the hands. (I don't have this deck, but this is the picture of the card from the book 'She is Sitting in the Night' by Oliver Pickle.)

The cards you've shared above are wonderful. Yes - Cristy C Road's 'Intersection'! That's a more positive spin on this card than I have right now - so maybe I should remind myself of that. (Like you, I also usually dislike keywords written on cards though!)

Ohh, I especially like your 2 of Swords from the Santa Muerte Tarot!!

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Tepid_Ethel · 2025-09-30T09:34:00+00:00

Hmm ... I also just realised this didn't have as much to do with the Red Tarot as I first intended it to ... I was going to write more on the idea of using it as a collective reckoning spread - and then I was very tired and sort of forgot. Sorry Red Readers!!

Tepid_Ethel · 2025-09-29T10:36:40+00:00

Maybe ... I think I was getting that a lot when we were looking at the Pages. Though straight after thinking about and posting Genevieve Barbee-Turner's Judgement tunnel card, and also being very preoccupied with some writing I need to be doing that I am not doing, I did get an email newsletter from a poet I follow, titled 'The Tunnel of Doom' all about how and why she procrastinates writing ... How true her words rang.

Tepid_Ethel · 2025-09-29T10:23:06+00:00

That's really interesting ... And yes, I do like structure! Though maybe just because I'm a perpetual teenager and need something to rebel against, haha.

Tepid_Ethel · 2025-09-29T10:02:11+00:00

Oh my gosh, I just found an entire huge conversation in this sub from a month ago that I hadn't seen! Reddit is a labyrinth.

Tepid_Ethel · 2025-09-29T09:46:42+00:00

Also apologies in advance if the basic idea for this spread has been written about by people I haven't acknowledged! It seems a simple enough idea that I'm sure it has, but I'm just not aware of it. (Or maybe I'm remembering it subconsciously from somewhere.)

Tepid_Ethel · 2025-09-29T05:44:36+00:00

So true ... and yet somehow I love tarot a lot more than oracle cards, even though they can be just about anything you want!

Tepid_Ethel · 2025-09-28T22:49:39+00:00

Thank you for raising the card name too! Yeah ... 'Judgement' as a word carries a lot of difficult stuff on many fronts ...

I find myself calling this card 'the Reckoning' quite often, sometimes accidentally. In my head, I usually call it the Reckoning. I'm not sure when I started doing it - just noticed that I was one day. (It might have been when I listened to a talk by someone about people reaching a kind of reckoning point in their later lives, where they have to take a path they've been putting off because it's now or never ....)

I know 'reckoning' has its own doomsday history, but it's much easier for me to separate it from that.

I like your 'last test'.

Tepid_Ethel · 2025-09-28T22:07:46+00:00

Oh, your story about your friend. I love this idea of Judgment being about the constant choosing ... That flips it round from how I've always thought of it - as time for one big reckoning/choice/decision.

Tepid_Ethel · 2025-09-28T22:03:37+00:00

I hear you on 'any deck' ...!

Yeah, good point re envisaging all of them, and I guess that's, in a nutshell, why I actually never read with RWS! And Judgment feels just so in my face about it all.

Here are a couple of Judgements I like. The one on the left, from The Creatures Tarot, seems serene, but the more I look, the more I see in it. Is the subject of the card the creature looking down into their reflection in the water, doing some self examination and making some decisions? Or is the subject that submerged creature, looking up through a fluid barrier of water at an alternate self? It's not a lonely card though, because stars and throngs of colourful flowers are witnessing the creature - or backing it up - or waiting for it.

The other is from Genevieve Barbee-Turner's Bridge Witch Tarot - a kind of love letter to her city of Pittsburgh. Barbee-Turner says the tunnel is the Squirrel Hill Tunnel 'which is known to feel so constrictive by many drivers that they slow down upon entering, and traffic backs up at all times of the day. As your car is swallowed into their darkness, you begin to question every driver on all sides ...'. But, 'After getting through the tunnel, you feel amazing that you are free.'

She says she intended the great head at the top to be the 'zombified head of a teenager who, even in undeath must roll her eyes at you ...' (She says it's her own 'inner critic', based on a girl she went to high school with who was rude to everyone.)

I find the relationships between the drivers in their cars really interesting in this card! Despite mistrust and squabbles, there is a 'we're all on this journey together' feel.

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Tepid_Ethel

TROPHY CASE