Monday Majors - Theme for the Week: The Magician

Throughout the time I have been blogging about tarot, I have only drawn The Magician on its' own one other time, and oddly enough, out of the 600+ decks I own, it came from the same one I have been drawn to today, the Templar Tarot.  This rendition of the Magician is still about faith to me, which makes sense as this deck is, for me, deeply spiritual.  I feel good when I use this deck, because it does not ask me to choose between my Christian faith and my belief that the Bible holds some truths, but some are written elsewhere.

The Magician is a card, that at its' root, is about magic.  When we see the Magician, we can ask ourselves, "What does magic mean to me?"  My answer is that it is the conscious act of bringing the Divine into our everyday lives is what makes magic to me.  In this rendition of the card, circumstances are less than ideal.  The spectators are a woebegone lot, yet even the one whose hands have been cut off stretches her stumps forth in praise, in awe, and that is a conscious decision we can make, regardless of our circumstances.  We can choose to honor the Divine, we can choose to dance, if that is our gift, we can choose to worship, we can choose to continue on, whether it's through tears or laughter, or that heady inexplicable mixture of the two, the point is, love is a choice we can make, day by day, minute by minute.

Here is the lotus flower again, to reiterate the point that beauty springs forth from unexpected places, and to remind me that a little guck is a small price to pay for it.

As a theme for the week, The Magician is showing me how to not just invite the presence of sacredness into my life, but how to revel in it, how to let it lift me up and cause my feet to dance, unafraid, in joy and communion.  I am reminded that God meets us where we are, and the only thing we are asked is to be the best selves we can be.

Update, March 21, 2011:  One of the things about the Magician in this deck I did not pay real close attention to is the troubadour aspect to it, the fact that this Magician is a storyteller.  I am a storyteller, too.  Why didn't I see this correlation?  She dances and sings to tell her story, because she has to, and that is why I write, too, because I have to.  Characters spring, fully formed, in my head sometimes, and they demand to be brought to life.  They want their words to be heard, their existence to have meaning.  I write to share the great and sometimes terrible beauty of this world, I write because it's unbearable to me to keep it all locked inside my own mind, and I write because it is the only way to get to peace for me, sometimes.

This card related deeply to my work this week, as I picked up the Magician's tools and began to dig in deeper to my spiritual path, to my own story.  I began a course in Intuitive Astrology, which is the way the stars tell a story, and I feel myself becoming more immersed in the work of being a writer.  I am terrified of that serpent below her feet, and for the moment I am just counting on dancing so deftly it won't have the chance to strike out at me, but soon I will know how to soothe the snake so the thought never even enters its' mind.


This achingly lovely deck is the Templar Tarot by Allen Chester, available here, and an amazing supplemental book of the same name available from Amazon.com