Quantum Tarot: the Four Swords

nisaba

It's past my bedime, and the card I pull to discuss tongiiht tells me exactly that. It tells me there is healing to be had in rest. I'm tqalking, of course, the Four Swords. In my comfort deck, it shows a desert island with a couple of palms, a hammock between them, sunset-lit water and a bottle bobbing in the waves with a note inside it clearly saying "don't come". Retreat, and more particularly retreat in solitude, is deeply healing for some of us all the time, and for all of us occasionally.

We see in this card the profile of a face, lying down, four swords lying in the space above it parallel. there is light and energy blazing away in the distance, reflecting off the polished blades but leaving the hilts in soothing darkness. A stream of tiny purple particles, neutrinos, comes out of it, nd floats through the sleeping head as if it were not there.

Neutrinos are the unsung particles in the universe: with minimum mass and size and no charge to affect and be affected electro-magnetically, they drift through us, untouched and untouching, utilising the spaces between the sub-atomic particles and possibly even the textured vibrating strings of those parti\cles themselves, as their ground for moving.

If they want our attention they cannot get it: They are the loneliest particles in the world, unable to touch us, be seen or be heard. their pathos reminds me of Echo: a forest nymph raped violently by Zeus, she appealed to Hera woman-to-woman for help and justice, and instead saw the shadow side of a wife's jealousy. Wanting healing, she is offered violence: wanting justice, she has her lovely looks replaced by invisibility, and her powers of speech taken away - or almost. To torment her even more, Hera decreed that from that time hence, in lonely places, she would be able to repeat the last syllable of any human speech she heard, so as to tantalise without ever being able to gain the help and true communication she needed.

In the same way, neutrinos are invisible and almost unheard by us, echo-ed in theoretical necessity and otherwise almost undetectable. Echo - and neutrinos - have to find what healing they can in silent travel through aeons of solitude.
 

swimming in tarot

Wow. I'm studying this deck, myself, right now. What I am coming to realize (and your insights just make this all the clearer) is that I am hobbled by my own...I don't want to say shallowness...but absence of vast resources of associations to draw on. I'm not without them, but I don't know if I can always do this deck justice. Do you find that this deck works best with a picture-stimulated reading method, rather than referring much to the LWB if at all, in spite of its out-of-this-world references? The images are different from any I've seen, but often speak loudest to me if I don't bring too many preconceptions with me.
 

nisaba

<smile> Well, I've been drenched in Tarot for almost as long as I can remember, so I think my understanding of these cards is based on prior experience bringing to life unusual and complex images. Now, I'm not saying all decks are alike - many are very, very different indeed, but they all bring something to that inner mental construct I carry around inside of myself that I call "Tarot".

I look at the image. I look at its name on the card. I look at the image again. Then I go to the booklet and look at what its scientific subtitle is, then I look at the card again. As a last resort <grin> I'll read what the book has to say a couple of times.

Basically I'm informed by the name of the card and how it looks, the book merely deepens it for me after I've already formed some kind of working idea about it.
 

Leo62

nisaba - I'm struck by your melancholic evocation of lonely neutrinos - never thought of them like that before! I always think of them as slightly happy and lazy, floating around in a kind of hippy-marijuana-haze kinda way. How odd, to be anthropomorphising particles, but I guess that's inevitable if you're gonna create a deck based on physics ;)

I love the 4 of swords and I love it when it comes up in readings cos it gives me an excuse to lie around and do s*d all :D
 

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nisaba

Damn, Leo, if my camera's batteries weren't on charge, I'd be a mischievous little girl and take pics of a dozen or more 4 Swords and post them here for you! (But you'd probably never wake up from a dose like that, so maybe it's just as well).