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Deviant Moon Tarot Study Group, Olympia, WA (2025)

07/02/2024

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Patriotic Americans of all religious faiths and none, I call upon you to reach out to the Founders of our nation on the Fourth of July, and ask for their help in the forthcoming time period between now and the election in November.

Reach out for spiritual assistance to the Founders of the USA. Their help is much needed at this time in American history.

The Founders set the mold of our nation, born in resistance to an English King, and stained with the blood of millions, people who died to uphold the idea that all people are created equal.

The Supreme Court in its lack of wisdom has set down a decision on presidential immunity that directly contradicts the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America. Chief Justice Roberts has written a decision that takes all legal limits off the president, whoever he may be. The decision profoundly changes our nation, and elevates the president above the law.

This is a fifty alarm fire in our government, an alarm for every state.

So please, everyone consider calling upon the Founders on the Fourth of July, and asking for their help with our situation.

The Founders and their determined resistance to tyranny birthed our nation. Their stories and writings continue to inspire people, as we near the USA's two hundred and fiftieth anniversary.

Please ask the Founders for help with these six rogues in judicial robes issuing biased decisions, accepting bribes, and shilling for a failed businessman, a short fingered life long con man, convicted felon, lothario, and ra**st.

People of faith, please call on your Gods and Goddesses, your divine matrons and patrons, the pantheons of Old Europe, the Americas, Africa, divinities venerated by all kinds of Americans in our melting pot culture, our Founders as Sacred Ancestors, Lady Liberty, and Freedom, shown here, the statue that is atop the Capitol building in Washington, DC, across the street from the Supreme Court and their six partisan, corrupt, misogynous, extremist, religiously bigoted rogues in judicial robes.

Our national birthday is Thursday and its a dark moon.

Witches, Pagans, Wiccans, Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems, Sikhs, Jews, Baha'i, minority religions of all kinds, and all the varied Christians in the USA who love our comparative freedom in this the land of the free, home of the brave, please call upon the divine Ancestors who founded our nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle that all men are created equal on July 4th.

This is the time. Your nation needs your activist prayers, your commitment to freedom, and your resistance to tyranny now.

Democracy is a work in progress that proceeds incrementally. Stop quibbling, and focus on electing Democrats at every level of government in every state in the Union.

The house of democracy is on fire, the presumptive GOP nominee is a convicted felon and ra**st who carries water for Vladimir Putin and would sell out NATO.

It's time to focus on defending democracy.

President Biden is old. Get over it, and focus on preserving democracy.

Only one political party in this nation is still dedicated to the ideals of our Founders. Vote blue.

Act now, prevent a second Trump administration, or this will end in a very serious conflagration comparable to the Civil War.

The right wing plutocrats are well along in their multi-year scheme to bend the American legal system to their will. The last forty years of "trickle down" economics destroyed the American middle class and moved trillions of dollars upward to people of obscene wealth like Musk and Bezos.

Ask for divine intervention, people of faith. It's our turn to defend democracy in the United States of America, before it requires violence to return to historical American norms of democratic conduct.

Our democracy is not perfect by any means, but let's not throw out the liberty baby with the fascist bathwater.

12/25/2023

The NYTimes runs a feature at this time of year called The Lives They Lived, about notable people who have passed over the course of the last year. Here is their entry on our beloved Rachel Pollack. I have marked this public; please share.

Tears. I loved and admired her very very much. It was a privilege to know Rachel personally, through presenting Shining Tribe Tarot as an app on The Fool's Dog, and through taking amazing classes with her at Tarot events.

"Rachel Pollack
B. 1945
Her life as a trans woman gave her insight into the transformative power of tarot. By Carina del Valle Schorske

There are at least as many stories about the origins of tarot as there are cards: They represent the secret oral teachings of Moses, the Egyptian Book of Thoth, a hidden resource created by a papermaking guild of Cathars. But Rachel Pollack — considered by many, at the time of her death, to be the world’s greatest expert on the cards — always refused esoteric theories. “The more I think about it,” she wrote, “the more it appeals to me that these are playing cards.” Tarot decks have four suits that run from ace to king, but also include 22 illustrated “trump” cards, among them Death, Temperance, The Lovers. Over time, players imagined new uses for the cards, radically expanding the field of play to include occult interpretation, artistic elaboration and fortunetelling.

Today, tarot is more popular than ever. For many, Pollack’s “78 Degrees of Wisdom” is their first guide to the cards, a best seller first published in 1980. Pollack moves nimbly across a staggering range of mythic traditions in her interpretations of the cards, but she has always been an antischolastic kind of scholar: “We can use tarot,” she argued, “to remove the pins that hold down all those other traditions,” to reveal heretical connections between them. Common wisdom teaches us to play the cards we’re dealt, but tarot reshuffles the formula: What if the meaning and function of these cards is not fixed — if we can change the game by deepening our powers of perception?

Pollack was born in 1945 to a middle-class Jewish family in Brooklyn. In her early years, they moved to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where her father supervised a lumberyard and her mother worked as a secretary at IBM. When Rachel was 8 or 9 — already harboring an intense desire “to wear girls’ clothes, and somehow, in some vague way, be thought of as a girl” — she suffered chronic nightmares that only relented when her great-grandmother told her mother “to place a small Jewish prayer book” beneath her mattress. The image of the sacred text, hidden from consciousness but nonetheless active, would become a touchstone for Pollack’s philosophy of knowledge. “All myths have their uses,” she later wrote, referring to social constructs like gender and the clock alongside the theologies of organized religions and ancient cults. But she would be the one to choose among them in the moment, to entertain those that extended her sense of life’s possibility, and break down those that aspired to the status of doctrine.

The year 1971 was a crucible for Pollack: the year she first encountered tarot, and the year she came out as a woman and a le***an. She didn’t look to the cards for reassurance: “I found I had no interest in any predictions.” Instead, she was fascinated by each symbol as “a frozen moment in a story” that only she could mobilize. She began to publish science fiction under her chosen name; she joined the Gay Liberation Front in London; she pursued surgical transition in the Netherlands long before such procedures were common practice. But for Pollack, transition was never about achieving “a desired end result” or making “a sensible life choice.” She assumed the position of tarot’s Fool, dancing on the cliff’s edge, driven by “the passion of experience” over and against what she called the “Empire of Explanation.”

Rachel Pollack joins a line of major figures in tarot history who led q***r lives: Pamela Colman Smith, illustrator of the world-famous Rider Waite; and Alesteir Crowley, mastermind of the Thoth deck. The writer Alexander Chee, who is gay, and befriended Pollack while they were both teaching creative writing at Goddard College, told me that q***rness and occultism are “about learning that the world is not the way we are told it is.” Chee remembers Pollack draped in amulets, like a “small-town librarian who is secretly a witch of great power.” She was always careful, however, to remind us that her power wasn’t “special” — we all have the opportunity to derive wisdom from our desires and disenchantments.

But even when we try to formulate original questions, we often find ourselves following familiar scripts: “Will my mother accept me as I am?” “Should I leave my husband?” Pollack would often encourage readers to surrender their questions to the cards, to begin by asking: “What do I need to know now?” Chance — so often an agent of tragedy and chaos — can also surface difficult insights. In writing this remembrance, I shuffled the deck and drew a card in her honor: Death. For Pollack, Death symbolized “the precise moment at which we give up the old masks and allow the transformation to take place.” But “those are ideas,” she would say, insisting we find our own meaning in the image, particular to the moment of our reading. “What do you see?” I see: a black flag, a white rose, a child whose future we still have time to save."

Carina del Valle Schorske is a writer and translator living in Brooklyn. Her first book, “The Other Island,” is forthcoming from Riverhead. Her essay for the magazine about New York’s plague-time dance floors won a National Magazine Award.

09/06/2023

Dear Ones, if you see the Ace of Wands, and you have *not* received the Zoom instructions and the first hand out by email, please send me a private message!

I think I have sent everyone the Zoom instructions, so please ping me if I am INCORRECT.

I have reserved Zoom time for a two and a half hours, beginning at 10:30am Pacific Time. I will try to make myself available for anyone with questions before and after the class hours of 11am to 12:30pm. The Zoom reservation ends at 1:00pm, or earlier if there are no questions.

I will record the class, with subtitles, starting at 11am to the end, around 12:30pm pacific time.

Hugs and blessings! I am excited to share this material with you.

The second class is scheduled for Sunday, October 15th, at the same time as the first class. It will be about the Swords and Wands.

The November class, Cups and Pentacles, will be on Sunday, November 12th, at the same time.

07/20/2023

To Register:
Send $30 to healing at summary dot net

Please include the email address you prefer, so I can send the Zoom information including the passcodes for the three classes.

Thank you!

Dear Ones,
Announcing a set of three classes about Deviant Moon Tarot, to be held on Zoom, on Sunday, September 10th, Sunday, October 15th, and Sunday, November 12th, starting at 11:30am Pacific Time.

Since this is the first time I will be teaching this class, the three 90 minute classes will only cost $30.

I am planning to cap the registration for the autumnal classes at 50 people, and ask everyone to write a paragraph of feedback for me when the class is completed.

If there is demand, I will happily add a section starting in early February, March, and April. That class, also for fifty people, will cost $50 for the set of three classes.

The focus of the classes: how to read effectively when nasty people are doing nasty things nastily.

Sadly, there are people in this world who habitually victimize and abuse others. There are life situations outside the norms of legality. Reading cards about extreme situations is a good skill to develop, whether for self or others.

I began working with Deviant Moon this way when my family was being victimized. The deck helped me move away from gauzy illusions, and understand harsh actions and events more accurately.

Specifically, Deviant Moon is *by far* the best deck I have found for reading about people doing unethical or even criminal things. Child abuse, spousal abuse, and financial crimes, they are all shown in Deviant Moon’s iconography.

In my experience, Deviant Moon reads exceptionally accurately about a variety of crimes based on greed. Greed based crimes are tragically common, especially in families during divorce. Deviant Moon also reads accurately when competing heirs are jockeying for a larger portion of their parents’ estates.

Deviant Moon reads truthfully about jealousy, manipulation via withholding affection or money, abandonment, and other difficult aspects of human life. The cards deftly expose those people who say one thing, but behave very differently towards the querent.

Deviant Moon is masterful at diagnosing mental, emotional, and spiritual illnesses. For example, the deck includes scenes of soul loss, vampiric spirit possession, and cursing magic.

There are cards that speak of self-sabotage, anxiety, panic, hostility, alienation, and depression. And of course, there are also wonderfully positive cards.

When we are being victimized, it is best to understand the aberrant psychology and sociopathy of abusers as clearly as possible. With understanding, we can respond more wisely to lack of ethics, psychological abuse, and even criminal acts.

Finally, Deviant Moon is a fantastic ally when working to reduce one’s personal shadow. I consider personal shadow work to be an essential component of self-healing, something magical workers especially need.

Deviant Moon Tarot is a very sophisticated wisdom tool. It is superbly well-designed for people willing to be ruthlessly honest.

The material in this class is drawn from Patrick Valenza’s massive guidebook, combined with my own insights from reading with the deck for more than a decade, for myself and for students, and for clients.

Patrick Valenza has given me his blessing to teach Deviant Moon.

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