Tarot Experiments: Rediscovering Knowledge

One of the things that’s come to fascinate me of late is the problem of lost knowledge. How do you recreate, rediscover, or excavate the kinds of knowledge that were traditionally handed down from generation to generation when those pathways for transmission were violently broken? War, conquest, colonization, and genocide are all ways knowledge transmission can and have been interrupted. But how do you reclaim something like a spiritual practice when such practices were outlawed, recordings of them were destroyed, and children were forcibly taken from their parents and educated in a different knowledge system that teaches such cultural practices were evil, ignorant, misguided, or simply false? If a language or a practice dies and traces of it are erased, are there nonetheless ways that it can be gleaned from what remains? Can there be such a thing as a historicism of the spiritual?

I’m visiting family in central Texas this week and was stirred to the question once again by the smell of oak and cedar that permeates the area. While oak can be found throughout the state, the redolent smell of the local cedar trees — or juniper, really, if you wish to be correct about it — is particularly distinctive to the Hill Country around Austin, where the trees have become something of a nuisance. Scrappy, twisted little things that have a tenacious ability to thrive even in arid, rocky soils, the trees have taken over the hills surrounding the city, sending local residents into fits of “cedar fever” every winter as clouds of pollen roll down into the valley of the city. As I smelled the trees on the wind, I got to wondering about the juniper’s metaphysical properties. Is it lucky? Protective? Does it represent longevity or wealth or any of the many things various herbs and trees can represent? I came inside to ask the Llewellyn Book of Correspondences, but just before doing so it occurred to me that I might actually be able to ask my tarot cards, instead.

Imagine my surprise and delight when the cards turned up a series of meanings that a follow-up search suggests are pretty accurate! The list of abilities historically attributed to juniper are not exhausted by my tarot reading, but they are included within it.

There are a lot of cards here, owing partially to the fact that I use a pendulum while reading in order to refine my interpretation of the cards. One of the things I’ll frequently ask the pendulum after drawing a set of cards, for instance, is whether I need to draw any more. In this case, the pendulum kept urging me on, and so I’ve ended up with a rather large spread. I’ve grouped them according to adjacent meanings, however, helping to make the reading a little cleaner and more succinct. Some nuance is lost this way, but it’s made the reading a little more manageable.

Shall we, jump in, then?