never

now it is finally clear

things are never going to get better
things are only going to get worse

not prepared
(she said smoking her final cigarillo)

The Hermit

The Hermit is card number nine and in the Thoth Tarot it is depicted in a very fascinating manner. The magnetic centre is given by the light the hermit is carrying, a light whose rays spread all over the card. It is a lone figure, who embarks on a journey into himself (or herself) to find his (or her) way. Personally, I have been through a very difficult period which has weakened me greatly. I focused on The Tower because almost everything in my life fell apart. Recently, something happened that awoke an energy inside of me that I thought was dead. Things have not changed much, things keep on falling aprt in my life, but this sparkling light inside of me is making me think of The Hermit and his (or her) search for a path to find balance and sense again. That is why I am choosing The Hermit from now on as the card on which to meditate.

only skulls

solitude

"There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself -
Finite infinity". Emily Dickinson

tarot reading as meditation

 I discovered the tarot world more than seven years ago. I worked as tarot reader for five years and fell in love with the cards and their shape-shifting meaning. I do not read the cards to predict the future or things like that. I use them to meditate and reflect on things that happen in my life or in the life of the person I am reading them to. I believe they are an insightful instrument rich in history and symbolism. I have various decks, but the one I prefer is Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot. At present, for example, due to grave things that happened to me, I feel my tarot card is represented by The Tower (see here) which is a tough card. In the picture you can see The Lovers which is a beautiful card dealing with choices. 

destruction as revelation - The Tower

The Tower, Thoth Tarot card XVI.

The Tower is usually considered to be the wrost tarot card of all the Major Arcana and it is but is not just that. The picture shows Frieda Harris's eloquent representation of this trump for Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot with a big overseeing eye emanating its rays over the rest of the image made of different figures and objects. Among them, a few abstract humans fall from an amost bending tower. At the bottom, a huge opened mouth shoots tongues of fires. This Atu, as Crowley termed his Trumps, is synonimous of destruction but also of liberation and, I would say, revelation. In this sense, as with all the tarot cards in general, even this one should not be interpreted univocally but in a more layered sense.

Persephone Books - London

Persephone Books is a Publishing House and a bookshop based in London. It is dedicated to the publication and sale of books written by "mid-twentieth-century (mostly) women writers". It has a delightful and classy book design in silver grey with the endpaper of each book made of colourful and elegant patterns reprinted in bookmarks that come with each book.

Persephone Books was born in 1998 and has since then grown into a culty Publishing House, for its ability to have rediscovered some lost classics and published unknown forgotten excellent authors, "our books are also linked by the idea of 'home', though that doesn't preclude their characters having a career or flying an aeroplane. Mostly, though, a grey Persephone cover is a guarantee of a good read".

I visited the shop during my last trip to London, last September, and found it very welcoming. I had known about it for a few years and really wanted to go. I was not in the least disappointed and after browsing for a while, I chose to buy Diana Gardner's The Woman Novelist and Other Stories (will talk about it as soon as I finish it) first published in 1946 and the bookshop's beautiful, big resistant and, of course grey, tote bag.