I’m up on the Little Red Tarot blog this week, talking about the stabby three of swords and its (sort of) positive side.
…when we numb ourselves to our own despair for the world, we cut ourselves off from our creativity as well. We bypass the emotional experiences that can unite us with like-minded others, and we stunt our ability to imagine new ways of combating what threatens to destroy us. Slowly, persistently, the three of swords is showing me how to do the work.
Find the full post here.
There are some recurring themes in my life that are basically a mystery to me, but I know exactly where my love of ritual came from. I grew up Catholic in the South, a convergence of cultures that left me hard-wired with mystical leanings, like a genetic muscle memory.
There aren’t a whole lot of Catholics in Tennessee; when it comes to religion (and in the South things often come to religion), Protestants tend to view us as eccentric papist cousins at best and actual heathens at worst. I decided early on not to be ashamed about it. When your world history teacher calls you out during class to explain the theological principle of transubstantiation, you kind of just have to own that shit. Even if then everyone calls you a cannibal.
The religious rituals of my childhood were both comforting and arcane – utterly familiar, and yet always exotic to the rest of my life. I loved them. When I think of Mass, I still think of the smell: incense, beeswax, dark wood, and centuries.
Ritual, that inner-sanctum sensory space, has been missing from essentially all my adulthood. It hasn’t just been missing – I have missed it. For a while I couldn’t really come to terms with the feeling. I’d spent most of a decade slowly talking myself out of Catholicism, out of religion in general. Hadn’t I given up my membership like cutting up a bad credit card? Was I not staunchly rational now?
And yet, ritual creeps back in. A smoky scent I can’t quite wash from my skin.
Here’s how I’ve come to view my rituals, things I do like tarot and meditation and even lighting candles (Catholics simply can’t do without candle offerings). I no longer think these acts are irrational. I think my ritual acts are non-rational, and that they serve a rational purpose.
A few days after I got my cancer diagnosis, I had a spontaneous thought that surprised me: a gut-level relief that I no longer follow any organized religion.
The feeling was a surprise because it completely goes against the usual narrative about atheists and life trauma. When bad luck inevitably strikes, we’re supposed to feel a sudden and penetrating fear. We’re supposed to be hit by a fervent desire for traditional religion or for God, who has been waiting patiently for us to grow up and get over ourselves. We’re supposed to realize we’ve been acting like stubborn assholes.
I haven’t felt any of that. Maybe this is because I don’t fit the most narrow definition of an atheist; I don’t believe in any kind of personal god, but I do value a spiritual reverence for the universe. But I think my relief has more to do with a specific difference in the way I think about the universe now versus when I followed a religion.
subtle workings 