Today, whenever I see anything about Greek or Roman goddesses (a theme in The Metaphysical Detective) or about the sacred marriage (a theme in The Alchemical Detective), I can't help but take notice.  Beltane, on May first, combines both these ideas.  So while I can't say I'll be celebrating this Celtic holiday, it's certainly a "big" day for my writing.

Beltane falls on the mid-point between the vernal equinox and summer solstice.  Like Samhain (i.e. Halloween), it’s believed to be a liminal time, when the veil between the worlds is thin and the supernatural walks among us, though in the form of fairies rather than ghosts. 

The holiday is the time of the sacred wedding of the Green Man to the May Queen, a living representative of the Roman goddess, Flora.  This goddess was a natural by-product of the ancient three-day Roman feast of flowers, Floriala, which reached its apex on May 1^st, and was marked by uninhibited sexuality. 

At an archetypal level, the marriage between the Green Man and May Queen may represent a unification of the Anima Mundi and the Spiritus Mundi – the female and male aspects of the World Soul.  Fertility rites representing the sacred marriage, or Hieros Gamos, between heaven and earth remain a key component of this holiday.

The idea of a sacred marriage uniting above and below, heaven and earth, is also reflected in the Beltane tradition of lighting bonfires, which may represent bringing the Sun’s light down to earth.  "Beltane" translates to "bright" or "brilliant fire.”  Women jumped across these low fires to manifest fertility, and carried their children across the fire’s embers to ensure their good health.  Ashes from the fires were then thrown onto the crops for protection and fertilization.

What does this have to do with alchemy?  That's another post!

I suspect eBooks will some day make paper and ink obsolete.  But there's something beautiful about a book - the feel of it in one's hand, the smell of it, the sound of the pages turning.  I love the ease of producing an eBook, and the commensurately lower cost.  But it will be a sad day in Mudville if "real" books go away.

 

Coming in May, 2012...

 

A psychic has been murdered in an occult ceremony and the police pay a visit to metaphysical detective, Riga Hayworth.  But this time, she’s not a consultant on a case, she’s a suspect.

There’s a storm on the horizon.  Riga’s lost her magic and has come to Lake Tahoe to recover and spend time with her new love.  But life for Riga is never simple.  A psychic’s been murdered, and the police believe Riga has a connection to the crime.  The problem for Riga is: they’re right.  And if that’s not enough, Riga is drafted as the host of a reality TV show about the local lake monster, and her niece is rejecting her metaphysical abilities, causing psychic repercussions.  Juggling demons, daimons, and angry tarot card readers, Riga must catch a killer before she becomes the next target.

The Alchemical Detective is a paranormal mystery that explores a world of alchemy and the imagination.

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"The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year."

 –Mark Twain 

Cultures going back to the ancient Romans have celebrated holidays when the normal conventions of behavior did not apply, when people shunned the rules and played the fool, such as the Roman festival, Hilaria.   While the roots of All Fools Day are lost in the mists of history, the holiday appears to be connected to these lighthearted springtime celebrations.  

The spring equinox was celebrated as the beginning of the new year in medieval Europe, and plays a role in one theory about the origin of the holiday.  Many believe that All Fool’s Day celebrations derived from the switch in Europe from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, a changeover which progressed from France in the 16^th century to England in the 18^th century. During this period of transition, the rural folk, who continued celebrating New Year’s Day at the beginning of spring, may have been considered fools by the more “sophisticated” urbanites who made the switch to a January 1^st New Year’s – hence All Fool’s Day on April 1^st.  But this rather complicated theory has a gaping flaw: the Julian calendar also celebrated New Year’s Day on January 1^st, and All Fool’s celebrations in France and England actually preceded the calendar changes. 

January 1^st may be the first day of the calendar new year, but it's the spring equinox that signals fresh beginnings for the Northern hemisphere.  It's more likely that the roots of All Fool’s Day derive from the lightening of hearts that follows the first bursts of green after a cold, dark  winter.  The spring equinox is a sort of solar balance point, when the hours of day and night are roughly equal.  From that day until the autumn equinox there are more hours of day than night, and the extra sunshine naturally lifts people’s spirits, just as the lack of sunshine during winter can cause Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). 

Traditional interpretations of the Fool card in Tarot fit neatly with All Fool’s Day’s celebrations.  Aleister Crowley perhaps said it best in his Book of Thoth:  “The Fool stirs within all of us at the return of Spring, and be cause [sic] we are a little bewildered, a little embarrassed, it has been thought a salutary custom to externalize the subconscious impulse by ceremonial means.  It was a way of making confession easy.  Of all these festivals it may be said that they are representations in the simplest form, without introspection, of a perfectly natural phenomenon.”  

While the Fool card is now associated astrologically with Uranus, in the same text on the Fool, Crowley takes care to mention that the Sun enters Aries at the spring equinox – the start of the astrological year – almost as if Aries is a secondary attribution to the card.  This makes some sense as Aries represents many classic “Fool” traits, such as having a pioneering spirit and the ability to live in the moment.  However, the Aries/Fool impulsiveness can have its downside too.  Partnered with other Aries/Mars influenced cards, one might ask if these tendencies are leading to destructive or constructive results.

Aries, which holds sway from March 21^st to April 19^th, is attributed to the Emperor, and there is an elegance to All Fool’s Day falling within the Aries/Emperor calendar period, suggestive of state-sanctioned high jinks.  However, the Emperor brings a warning as well.  In The Book of Thoth, Crowley says of the Emperor: “With regard to the quality of this power, it must be noted that it represents sudden, violent, but impermanent activity.  If it persists too long, it burns and destroys.”  Fools must know our limits.  Do we step blindly off the cliff?  Or, like the man in the Three of Wands (another All Fool’s Day card, attributed to March 31^st – April 10^th), do we take considered risks, contemplating what lies beyond the cliff’s edge?

Over the last month, my fiction writing has taken a quantum leap forward.  I'm not saying that to be boastful.  On the contrary, I'm ashamed that I didn't know last October, what I know now. 

What happened?

I got an editor for The Alchemical Detective.

Weirdly, the changes happened before she even began editing that manuscript.  Since I'd be spending money on an editor, I wanted to get my next manuscript in top shape before she saw it, so I knuckled down on my editing, and found a terrific old book called "Revising Fiction, A Handbook for Writers," by David Madden.  And wow.  It all seems so obvious to me now.

The next thing that happened was I finally took some very old advice and read the manuscript out loud.  Typos and errors that my eye had read over half a dozen times, leaped off the page when I read it aloud.  It was tiring, but worth it.

Knowing now what I didn't know then, I couldn't bear to have The Metaphysical Detective on the eBook shelves without revising it.  And knowing now what I didn't know then, the editing process was... fun.  The second edition is finally finished, and I'm really pleased with the result.

So thank you to my friends and readers for all your support.  Thank you to my writing group for your terrific advice.  And thank you, thank you, to my Alchemical Detective editor, Diana Orgain, for kicking me into gear!

What would Tarot be without the Golden Dawn, that band of mystics who loved and fought in equal measure?  Individually, the society’s members, who ranged from the poet W.B. Yeats to the occultist Aleister Crowley, accomplished great things.  When they joined forces, however, their collaborations led to innovations and inspirations which resonate throughout the world of Tarot to this day. 

The Golden Dawn was a magical order that was founded in the late 19^th century and splintered in the early 20^th.  Its lingering influence extends far beyond Tarot – into Gardnerian Wicca, Thelema, and other spiritual traditions. 

However, the Golden Dawn’s best known legacy is perhaps the Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) deck.  This Tarot, published in 1910, shines with the art of Pamela Colman Smith, who graphically translated the esoteric card meanings of fellow Golden Dawn member, A.E. Waite, into exoteric images on both Major and Minor Arcanas. 

Today, a Minor Arcana illustrated with scenes of people in action seems standard, at least in North America.  But picture a world without it, where decks are modeled only after the Tarot de Marseilles (TdM).  Imagine Minor Arcana that look like ordinary playing cards, and are decorated solely with the symbols of their suit – wands, cups, coins, and swords – where there is no happy family beneath a rainbow of cups, no bound woman trapped amidst eight standing swords. 

If the latter illustrations sound familiar, it’s because Colman Smith’s scenes and symbols appear in different styles and permutations in hundreds of Tarot decks today.  Though the Sola Busca deck from the 15^th century can stake claim to being the first with scenes on its Minor Arcana, the RWS deck has surpassed the Sola Busca in terms of fond reinventions throughout a universe of clones. 

However, the word “clone” is too unkind a word to describe the colorful and sometimes brilliant homages to the RWS Tarot, which has inspired decks to tickle every reader’s fancy.  From the Tarot of Dreams to the Halloween Tarot to the Touchstone Tarot, we can wander through a rich world of varied imagery, and understand it because even if we haven’t memorized Waite’s definitions, we can grasp the stories these pictures tell.  The Tarot visions of Pamela Colman Smith leave us scope to dig into our own histories, myths, and meanings to interpret the cards.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with the pre-Golden Dawn, TdM-style decks, and I will defend the right of any Tarot reader to declare its clean lines of cups, staves, swords, and coins to be the gold standard in Minor Arcana.  But life without RWS clones?  Unthinkable! 

However, Waite and Smith were not the only Golden Dawn alumni to leave their footprints on the Tarot world.  Paul Foster Case, an American member of the Golden Dawn, split from the society to found the Builders of the Adytum (BOTA) and to “correct” the RWS Major Arcana, revealing what he believed to be deliberately hidden secrets or misleading symbols. 

In 1947 Case also unveiled to the masses the Golden Dawn’s Hebrew alphabet correspondences to the Tarot Cards in his book, “The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages,” publicly linking Tarot and the Qabalah.  In a very “American” and democratic move, Case made his teachings available to the masses via correspondence course.  The BOTA course is still available today and Case’s teachings retain their relevancy for those interested in the esoteric meanings of the cards. 

Case, like Aleister Crowley, another ex-member of the Golden Dawn, returned his Minor Arcana to the simpler style of the Tarot de Marseilles and other European decks. Crowley, however, took things a step further in the vibrant Thoth deck he created with Lady Frieda Harris. 

Though still rooted in Golden Dawn teachings, in the Thoth deck Crowley and Harris not only fashioned their own universe of Major Arcana images, but also broke with the Golden Dawn tradition of numbering Justice 11 and Strength 8.  Crowley and Harris reversed the placement of Strength and Justice, bringing them back in line with older Tarots, while retaining the cards’ Golden Dawn astrological correspondences (respectively, Leo and Libra).  Crowley also switched two Hebrew letter correspondences for the Emperor and Star cards, which has the effect of changing the placement of these cards upon the Qabalistic Tree of Life. 

A master like Crowley knew when to break the rules (though it could be argued he went overboard at times).  However, the rules had to exist to break them, and the phenomenal task of developing the original Golden Dawn Tarot correspondences can only be imagined.  These correspondences remain perhaps the society’s most significant and lasting contribution. 

Described in Book T by MacGregor Mathers, a founder of the Golden Dawn, the society’s Tarot correspondences meld Kaballah with Hermeticism, and are a synthesis of Renaissance magic, French occultism, and teachings Mathers claimed were received from spiritual guides.  The RWS, Thoth, and BOTA decks – alongside countless of their so-called “clones” – are based upon these correspondences. 

The concept of correspondences, while not necessary to a good Tarot reading, can certainly enhance it.  Stuck on Temperance?  Remembering that it’s associated with sporty yet philosophical Sagittarius can be just the trigger needed to relate it to the client and her situation.  The Tower giving you trouble?  Knowing its Hebrew letter association (Peh) means “mouth,” can remind us of the destruction words can cause.  Having such associations rattling around in a reader’s conscious or subconscious mind can add new dimensions to a reading.

In spite of the numerous Tarot decks the Golden Dawn has influenced, it’s important to remember that the society was not a group of Tarot readers.  They were magicians dedicated to connecting with the divine, and with their own sacred selves.  The use of Tarot and its symbols was just one method along that path. 

Israeli Regardie, a past Golden Dawn member, perhaps put it best when he wrote in What You Should Know About the Golden Dawn, “symbols are of the utmost importance in the Qabalistic and magical scheme, for it is by their intervention and use that we are able to enter into the life of other parts of our consciousness, and through them into the consciousness of the universe about us.”  Perhaps this is the Golden Dawn’s greatest contribution to the world of Tarot.  The Golden Dawn took Tarot beyond fortune telling, and into the realm of self-empowerment and self-enlightenment.

In America today, this “psychological” approach to Tarot reading is quietly gaining ground.  Before telling the client what the reader “sees,” many readers now ask their clients what the symbols in the cards mean to them, exploring the client’s private stories, hopes, and fears through her personal reactions to the cards.  Some readers rely upon this style entirely, calling themselves Tarot consultants or coaches, and expanding the usage of and market for Tarot reading. 

What’s also striking about the Golden Dawn is that we know about it at all.  The Golden Dawn was, after all, a secret society.  Fortunately for us, neither Waite, Case nor Crowley were terribly particular upon that point once they had left the order, believing that it was more important to share their knowledge than keep their oaths to the fracturing Golden Dawn.  They went on to found their own occult schools and societies, spreading their interpretations of the teachings of the Golden Dawn far and wide.  Today we can download Golden Dawn manuscripts off the Internet, purchase Golden Dawn-inspired Tarots, and listen to podcasts about the Golden Dawn’s astrological and Qabalistic correspondences.  Many of us do this as a matter of course in our Tarot studies, frequently unaware of the origins of these Tarot materials. 

Tarot without the Golden Dawn? 

Unthinkable.

After three rounds of edits, The Alchemical Detective is ready to be sent off to the editor - finally!  I've learned a lot during this process, and plan to re-edit The Metaphysical Detective, with its second edition being released at the same time as The Alchemical Detective.

But in the mean time, I'm working on the back cover blurb.  Even though I've studied marketing and enjoy writing, blurb writing is hellish.  How can I happily write and edit a 70,000 word manuscript but stumble over a two paragraph blurb?

Anyway, here's the first cut.  If you have any ideas to improve it, I'm open to suggestions!

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A local psychic has been murdered in an occult ceremony and the police look to Riga Hayworth, Metaphysical Detective.  But this time, she’s not a consultant on the case, she’s a suspect.

There’s a storm on the horizon.  Riga’s lost her magic and has gone to Lake Tahoe to recover and spend some quality time with her new love.  But life for Riga is never that simple.  A psychic’s been murdered, and the police believe Riga has a connection to the crime.  And if that’s not enough, Riga is drafted as the host of a reality TV show about the local lake monster, and her niece is rejecting her metaphysical gifts.  Juggling demons, daimons, and angry Tarot card readers, Riga must catch a killer before she or someone she loves becomes the next target.

I stumbled across this song/video - Johnny Cash's "last" and thought it's a very Riga Hayworth tune.  Also, the video project is really cool.  The actual song starts around the 2.45 mark.

 

 

I thought I'd have some fun with this and turn the trailer for The Alchemical Detective into a puzzle with an actual prize/freebie at the end.  Can you follow the clues?

Note:  Since my initial post, I've remixed the video so the clue is a bit easier to spot.

Viriginia Woolfe said that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."  I'm not going to speak to the former but for the last three years I've been writing on my dining room table, my laptop and reference materials sprawled about me.  Meals were taken wherever I could find a large enough patch of open tablecloth to fit a plate. 

I'd gotten used to it, but recently, I inherited a rolltop desk that belonged to my great grandfather.  I didn't know where to put it, and toyed with the idea of putting it in storage until that happy day when I got a larger place.  But then I realized what a waste of space a guest bedroom was for someone who never had guests.  My brother agreed to take the sofa-bed off my hands and I'd put the desk there instead.

If you know anything about antique rolltops, you'll know how heavy they are.  Since I moved in, I'd wanted to get rid of the ugly grey industrial carpet in the guestroom.  The thought of moving the desk in, then moving it out to re-do the floors, then moving it back in again, was daunting.  Clearly, I had to put new flooring in before the desk arrived. 

This triggered a chain reaction of fixer-upper activities.  I couldn't put the floor in until I'd removed the 1970s era heater that abutted it.  That gone, I had to spackle and repaint.  I had to take everything out of the room for the floor installation and discovered a lot of junk I didn't need - off to Goodwill!  The floor went in, the room was ready.  We loaded the desk into the back of a truck, and my brother suggested closing the rolltop for travel.  It made sense, so I did, and it automatically locked.  No problem-o, I've got a key.  We lugged the desk to my condo, where I had to take my front gate off the hinges to bring the desk through.  Desk in place, my brother was putting the gate back together when I stuck the key in the lock, turned it, and...  couldn't open the desk.  The lock didn't work. 

I called out a locksmith the next day and got a new key.  Now all that remains to be done is to install a new heater and touch up any painting around it.  But I have a room of my own to write in and it's such a relief.  Not only do I have a writing space, I also have my dining room table back. 

Before (note heater behind couch)

After!