I’ve had a kind of simmering interest in tarot since I was a teen. I never learned enough to read cards without a book at hand, but I’ve almost always had those sorts of books in my personal library.

I picked up a deck of Blue Bird Lenormand divination cards while visiting Cassadaga last summer, and it started me thinking about cartomancy as a whole. If you know the Lenormand deck well, you can use a traditional 52 card deck for your read.

And, because I got the Lenormand deck, JB got me the Hoodoo Tarot deck and book last December as a random gift. I love the changes Tayannah Lee McQuillar made to the traditional tarot deck, and the way she distinguishes hoodoo from voodoo. In the Hoodoo deck there are no court cards (for example) because she’s building a deck to reflect the practice of rootworkers in the American south.

This started me wondering how I’d put together a deck if I was working from scratch. I like McQuillar’s idea of drawing on regional folklore, so I’d incorporate some Florida weirdness, but more than avoiding the court cards I’d also want to avoid the whole Kabala and ‘Egyptian’ metaphysical underpinning, and strip my deck of that 18th and 19th century occultism. There’s a lot of othering and orientalism baggage to unpack from the popular metaphysics of that era. I’d focus more on celestial experiences (oh! I’d need an eclipse card) and universal personality categories. And then laminate a bunch of weirdness on top of that.

I’d probably have a suit of moon cards. Probably 28 for each day of the moon cycle. I’d have solstice and equinox cards, as well as cross-quarter cards. I’d also want cards that reflected elements of personality, as well as virtue/vice cards.

Anyway, someday I might take a minute to craft my own deck, but before I do that I’d probably want to read more on cartomancy.

I’m currently reading A Wicked Pack of Cards (it’s kind of expensive so I picked up a copy through my library’s interlibrary loan), which looks at the development of tarot through a more scholarly/historical lens.

“Tarot cards were invented in Italy in the early fifteenth century, and for almost four centuries used exclusively for playing games. In late eighteenth-century France, however, they were purloined from the card-players for fortune-telling and the occult. For a hundred years, the use of Tarot cards for divination, and their interpretation as enshrining an occult meaning, remained all but exclusively confined to France. Professional French fortune-tellers, French exponents and practitioners of magic, and the occasional French charlatan, developed uses for Tarot cards and baseless theories about them which were virtually unknown in other countries. The authors trace this phenomenon through the writings and activities of many advocates of Tarot occultism, including Court de Gebelin, Etteilla, Levi, and Papus, showing how an extraordinary variety of occult theories – from Hermetism to Rosicrucianism, from the Cabala to Freemasonry – was brought to bear on a pack of playing cards.

“In the twentieth century Tarot divination has spread throughout the Western world; the very word ‘Tarot’ is now identified with the occult, fortune-telling, and cartomancy. This book tells the fascinating story of how Tarot divination was born and grew to maturity in a single country.”

As far as the divination accuracy of tarot goes, I feel the same way about tarot and astrology as I do about self-help books or self-improvement podcasts. Their value is in creating a space for critical introspection. For me, it matters less what my card says or what my daily horoscope says, than the fact I’m changing the frame of my outlook. I’m not particularly concerned if the self-improvement book I’m reading is riddled with anecdata and lousy scholarship. What matters is having a different lens through which to look at life. And from that I have the possibility, the opportunity, to reflect critically on this new perspective.

I doubt I’ll start creating that deck anytime soon, but who knows? Something might light a fire under that interest and turn the simmering up to boiling.

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 052 of 100)

Today I stumbled across this dissertation about invented religions (includes this link religionvir.us).

Here’s the lay summary:

“As an artist I have spent the past 13 years inventing a fictional religion as art. My project, called RELIGIONVIR.US, has been performed, exhibited, screened and published in over twenty five countries worldwide. My projects are presented as episodes in an ongoing performative space opera, exploring broadly how religions are constructed by constructing my own religion as a philosophical, ontological exercise. Following many of my ritual performances audience members have approached me to inform me of “religious experiences” they had inside of my performances and installations, although most of these confessors admit to not being religious. I became interested in how religious experiences were constructed and they were possible to artistically manufacture. This thesis is an attempt to probe what constitutes a religious experience and what artistic media or devices are required to elicit such a response. I muse on questions surrounding the nature of belief and art in the information age, proposing religion as an artistic medium, and the notion of religion as a form of multi-media production. I attempt to situate my own invented religion within the study of invented religions, emerging out of religious students and the study of new religious movements. Ultimately this thesis explores my 13-year practise of inventing a religion as art while analysing the phenomena of fictional religions from the unique perspective of being both student and practitioner of invented religions.”

I love this idea of creating a fictional religion. In fact, given the massive cultural fracturing we’re undergoing, I imagine a few hundred thousand new religions blossoming across the globe.

A little further digging shows that Michael Dudeck (author of this dissertation) is way ahead of me. He created a Invent Your Own Religion Workbook as part of a conference intervention/provocation.

This project is so much fun, and thought-provoking. My only quibble is that he attributes Discordianism to Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land instead of Greg Hill with Kerry Thornley (and later popularized by Robert Anton Wilson). Heinlein’s religion in Stranger was The Church of All Worlds (and introduced the word grok as a unique type of comprehension). But that’s truly a minor detail considering the substantive amount of work and research put into this project. I think I’ll try to conjure up a new religion or two this weekend.

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 051 of 100)

The original impetus for 100 Days of Blogging was to create a structure to re-establish a blogging mindset. I had some vague idea that doing something for 100 days helps establish that behavior as a pattern. That is – it takes 100 days to make something a habit.

I don’t know where I got that idea. I strongly suspect it’s some internet BS that got lodged in my brain along the way (just looked it up, thanks Google! and it IS some internet BS). Nonetheless, 100 has a nice ring to it. From the day I made the decision to the end of 100 days roughly covers the length of a semester, so that helped make it a more personally meaningful goal.

Only after making the decision did I learn that there’s a whole culture surrounding the 100 Day Challenge.

Ick.

That was almost enough to make me change the name, but I decided to ignore it and plow ahead.

This is post 50 of 100.

It’s mostly worth it, mostly fun. It’s one more tool to avoid doomscrolling through social media. It’s nice to get comments and make new human connections.

It’s frustrating because there’s never enough time to get really in-depth on something. Most posts are somewhat frivolous, and even short posts can take longer than you might expect. And sometimes on those short-but-time-consuming posts I fret that I could better be using my writing time elsewhere.

On the whole I’d say it’s more rewarding than not. I have fifty days to decide what it will mutate into next.

Oh, coincidentally, just as I’ve passed the halfway point on this little exercise, we’ve all just passed the equinox. Happy equinox everyone!

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 050 of 100)

One of the volunteer docents at the Koresh State Park Historic Site told us a story about Vesta Newcomb. Vesta was the longest-serving participant of the Koreshan faith. Vesta Newcomb’s mother started following Cyrus Teed when Vesta was nine, and Vesta lived on the Koresh property until she was 96. The story was that at age 15 Vesta moved to the Florida community from Chicago with five younger girls in her care. After arriving at Fort Myers the only way to the compound (around 1893) was taking a boat up the Estero River. Unbeknownst to the young women the person taking them on the boat was the disgruntled son of the original landowner. Halfway to their destination he made the girls get out and walk the rest of the way, through the river and wild shrub, wearing long dresses and carrying all their luggage.

JB wanted to know more about this fellow, and so looked him up after we got back to the pyramid and found a brief memoir online. His name was Elwin Damkohler and he tells his version of how his father was suckered out of his land by a charismatic con-man.

Cyrus Teed, the man who founded Koreshanity, obtained the property for his religious community from Gustave Damkohler. Damkohler’s son Elwin believed he was robbed of his inheritance and did not have a favorable view of the Koreshans. In 1967 he pulblished his memoirs in a slim pamphlet titled Estero, FLA, Memoirs of the First Settler.

It’s only 18 pages and worth a few minutes if you like that sort of thing.

Gustave Damkohler purchased 320 acres of Florida scrubland in 1882 and moved his young family out there to raise bees. It did not go well.

Gustave planted black-eyed peas and sweet potatoes to feed the family, and decided to try pineapples as a money crop. A fire destroyed the crop within a year and the son believed it was local cattlemen trying to run the homesteaders out. Gustave’s wife died within two years of moving to Florida, two weeks after giving birth to a daughter. The infant died a short time later.

Not long after his mother’s death a man arrived whom Elwin refers to as ‘the stranger’ and Mr. X. This man purchased some of Damkohler’s land when the money was sorely needed.

A few months later all the children were stricken with some unknown disease. Elwin’s little brother, little sister, and older sister all died. Elwin was Gustave’s sole surviving child.

Elwin believes Mr. X poisoned the children as part of an elaborate scheme to take control of the Damkohler property.

Father and son managed to carve out a life for themselves for the next decade or so. Then came the fateful day they met Cyrus Teed.

Teed, already convinced he was the second coming of Christ, was in Florida looking for land on which he could build his New Jerusalem. As they were taking Teed and his companions to the Damkohler property Teed shot at some birds for fun. The young Elwin frowned on this frivolous behavior and never took a shine to the prophet.

Gustave, however, became enamored of the charismatic Teed and signed over the rights to his property.

Elwin claims that within a few days of signing over the property Gustave came to his senses and wept, realizing he had disinherited his son. This didn’t stop Gustave, however, from continuing to work for Teed and Teed’s righteous vision.

Elwin goes on to describe, in very unflattering light, the development of the Koresh community. He claims that Teed lied about all the things he would do for the Damkohler’s if Gustave signed over his property. He protrays the group as generally inept, and points out some simple tests for proving we live on the outside of a globe and not the inside.

If Elwin did behave in the ungallant manner claimed by Vesta it must have been not long before he left the compound to make his own way in the world. A moment when he was simply fed up with the deceit and incompetence of the Koreshans.

When he was about sixteen Elwin left the compound, found a job, got educated, and started his own business. He eventually became a guide for sports fishermen.

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 049 of 100)

Long day. Here’s the pyramid we’re staying in. It’s not really a pyramid? Or, it’s weird combo chalet of two pyramids? Regardless, in the upstairs bedroom the ceiling peaks into a four-sided pyramid.

Tomorrow I’ll have more detail about living inside a pyramid, and a story about the beef JB uncovered between Cyrus Teed (the prophet of the Koreshans) and Elwin Damkohler (the son of the man who owned the property on which Teed built his community).

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 048 of 100)

After our last arbitrary stupid goal led us to Cassadaga I started fishing around for our next long weekend destination. Since it shared a similar Florida weirdness vibe I settled on Koreshan Park and put a note on my bulletin board to “visit KP next”.

“In 1893, the Koreshans, a religious sect founded by Dr. Cyrus R. Teed, moved here and built a settlement based on a commitment to communal living and a belief that the universe existed on the inside of the Earth. Living celibate lives, the enterprising Koreshans established a farm, nursery and botanical gardens.

“The park is home to 11 immaculately restored and nationally registered historic buildings erected by the Koreshans between the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”

Covid spikes and general busyness have kept us from getting away until this weekend. As JB was looking around for a hotel or AirBnB she saw some pyramid-shaped chalets that made her laugh.

“Pyramid power!” I said.

“What’s that?”

And so I told her the story of how pyramid power was a popular new age concept in the 1970s and 80s (and maybe even later?). What I remember most is the claim that pyramids could keep razor blades sharp.

After telling her about the pop phenomena of pyramid power she said “We’re staying there.”

So, a little more than we might usually spend on a weekend lodging, but tonight we’re sleeping in a pyramid.

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 046 of 100)

The equinox is March 20.

Equinox, however, is not the day that has equal amount of day and night. Equinox is the moment “the geometric center of the Sun’s disk crosses the equator.”

Here in Tampa the 12 hour day was yesterday, March 16.

I like to use these sorts of celestial cues to guide my semi-regular meditation. For the days between the 12-hour day and the official equinox I am meditating on balance. Work/life balance, other/me balance, sunnyday spending/rainy day savings balance, indoor/outdoor balance, screen/non-screen balance, etc.

As we move into spring is there anything in your life that needs balancing? Anything that got tilted too far in one direction over the last few months?

The Timeanddate site has more.

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 045 of 100)

I’ve been putting off reading The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune for a long time. Mostly because of the length.

In some ways I regret not reading it earlier, because I’m loving it. But really I feel like it’s the right book at the right time.

The cover blurb claims that reading the book “is like being wrapped up in a big gay blanket.” And I definitely feel that comfortable, cozy sensation. It’s not that there aren’t high stakes. Why, one of the children has the power to destroy the world! But, since it leans into gentle humor and the tropes of the romance, you know it’s all going to end well. The last six years have gouged and corroded and sandpapered my psyche to such a degree I feel the only type of entertainment I can consume is something that will wrap me in a cozy blanket, gay or otherwise.

Even cozy murder mysteries are too harsh because there’s the murder at the center of the story.

Cerulean Sea is a sweet story about compassion and caring. And the main character is already kind, but becomes unblinkered through the story and finds ways of becoming an even better person. The humor is not Douglas Adams level absurdity, but rather gentle self-deprecation and good-natured ribbing.

If you’re looking for something cozy I can recommend it.

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 044 of 100)

UPDATE: Had to contact my host this morning because the site has been down for the last ~12 hours. But since I wrote the above last night and attempted to post, I’m going to claim the streak is still active.

This isn’t a fiction writing exercise. It has its roots in the writing of scholarship, but I think it might still be valuable as a way of working with any text you’ve written.

I like the premise of addressing the text directly.

This exercise can be found in this blog post.

“In the workshop ‘Monster Writing’, which was held in November 2019 at ETHOSLab, the IT University of Copenhagen, we explored text as something somewhat monstrous. Drawing on Nina Lykke’s exorcise of ‘writing the posthuman’ – in which she suggests that the writer addresses the object of their writing as a ‘you’ directly in the text – we wanted to experiment with what it might be like to address the text itself in this way, as a you, but out loud. A summoning. We therefore asked the participants of the workshop to bring a text that they were somehow not completely happy with.”

The workshop exercise was subsequently folded into a scholarly article titled Writing bodies and bodies of text: Thinking vulnerability through monsters.

“The aim with Monster Writing and thinking about writing through the monster is not to do away with the experience of vulnerability in the encounter with the unruly, at times anxiety-inducing text. On the contrary: with this exercise we hope to acknowledge the vulnerability at stake in the encounter with the unruly text and to find ways to live with the monster-text. In this article, we explore how the act of writing can be understood as an act of living with the monstrous “other,” and how despite not being in control of one’s creations, the creator must still remain accountable for them. As such, we argue that writing methods are fundamentally a question of ethics; one must remain accountable for how one learns to see and write the world…, as well as for the text creations the creator unleashes upon the world. By approaching writing through the figure of the monster, we hope to find means of expressing and thinking vulnerability not as an issue that must be circumvented, but as an inherent part of writing.”

So many fun and interesting ideas in this article! Can’t wait to start digging out some of these citations.

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 043 of 100)

When I worked at a bookstore (remember bookstores?) in the 1980s there was a book title that made me crazy. The title was Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow.

“What I love,” I’d tell the book, “is lying on the couch, eating Chee-tos, and reading schlocky fiction. If that paid I wouldn’t be standing here stocking bullshit self-improvement books.”

I was thinking about this today because I spent the day lying on the couch dozing and reading a cheesy book instead of going to work. The time shift messed with my sleep hygiene, but more disruptive was Zorro’s persistent hacking cough. (He saw the vet today, and it may be allergies. He’s getting an x-ray soon to see if it may be something more dire.) The combination left me without any sleep, and so I took a day. (I recognize I’m in a super privileged position to do something like that, and I’m grateful I had that choice.)

Around the same time I was stocking shelves in that bookstore I came across a work that resonated more strongly with my sensibilities, Bob Black’s “Abolition of Work.”

“Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

“That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act. Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of the same debased coin.

“The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality.”

Let me hasten to add, in case Black has been cancelled in the ensuing three decades, that I haven’t followed his work since around 1990 or so. That essay, though, had quite an impact on the young me.

Black wasn’t the first person to rail against the indignity of work. Bertrand Russell tread similar ground when he wrote —

“I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.”

More recently David Graeber took on the pleasures of idleness and curse of work in his Bullshit Jobs. (Before David Graeber wrote the book Bullshit Jobs he wrote an essay about the problem with work.)

“In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more.”

Give me a life of goofing around with my friends between bouts of lounging around and reading books. Who knows? Perhaps I’ll eventually get bored and do something “productive”

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 042 of 100)