Dear reader of signs,
Welcome to the Saturday, the 24th of June’s observation from my daily ‘Reading the Signs’ June challenge, an exercise of paying attention with a focus in mind as the day unfolds.
I can feel my enthusiasm for this project slipping somewhat — the simple grind of getting up, photographing the cards, and writing up my observation of the previous day has been dragging on me over the last couple of days. Perhaps it’s the listlessness of high summer; the sun is pausing high in our skies, and I feel ambivalent too. And at times like this doubt slides into your DMs: ‘why are you doing this?’
Yet, I do what you must do when the novelty wears off and you have a project to complete: you dig into the commitment of doing what you promised. This simple habit is what I’m working to retrain. To sit and write despite uncertainty and doubt. To not succumb to paralysis. I’ve had too much of that.
This day I reached for the Vertigo Tarot, with art by Dave McKean and text by Rachel Pollock. I got the Page of Pentacles and the King of Cups.
The first edition of this deck was released back in 1995 and was during the peak period when Vertigo comics could do no wrong. The Sandman (written by Neil Gaiman, and drawn by a variety of artists, but Dave McKean was the cover artist for the run) had been a massive hit, and it spun-off many associated titles like The Dreaming, Lucifer, House of Mystery and Dead Boy Detectives.
My memory of this deck is that it was difficult to get and expensive, and I snapped it up when I spotted it, considering it a kind of investment. I almost never look at it, because as much as I like McKean’s style for individual covers, I found a Tarot composed of his style too… McKean and not enough Tarot.
Still, those were my observations of my younger self, and I decided to approach this deck with a more generous openness.1
This Page of Pentacles is a body split in half, with the pentacle keeping the sides together. The fossils are meant to remind us this is an earth card but they evoke evaporated oceans to me. This Page is a new initiative from ancient tradition attempting a forged identity. The prominence of the pentacle is interesting, a mystery coin central to the piece.
Beside it is the King of Cups (the second appearance recently), but here it is only the head of the king, submerged, part of the dreaming ocean of intuition. Splashes of insight erupt into the world of air from below, manifesting as text. This King wants little to do with the world above, and communicates erratically.
There is the clear symbolism of the body and the head making a whole: the creative thinker is necessary but so is the physical body that animates everything. Each requires the other.
I spent much of the day skipping between various modes of thinking, including writing, planning and scrolling some of my feeds. Later, I forced myself out to walk among the trees, to consider their rootedness and their striving toward the sky. I left their company feeling inspired and invigorated. I know that I can get too inward-focused, too all up in my head, and walking the body, inhaling the scent of flowers and the rain-drenched earth, grounds me in the reality of right now.
Dream, then walk the mud track.
It’s unlikely to become a regular of mine, but I better appreciate the layers of meaning McKean has assembled which allow for a complex reading. Because that’s what Tarot is for: to puncture the unconscious via symbols and haul up insight.