BATS Post BATS 2015

Perhaps my favorite SF BATS yet, this past weekend was a blast of fun, Tarot, Lenormand, scholarship, collecting and meeting new and old friends! SF BATS is the San Francisco Bay Area Tarot Symposium, the annual event organized and executed by one-woman show Thalassa Therese and her scurrying minions of the Daughters of Divination.

Some of my dear favorites were not able to attend this year (You Know Who You Are) but those who attended were richly rewarded with serious scholarship in the art of cartomancy and serious fun in the off hours. And I have to say that my loudly-voiced complaint is still my lasting impression: There were just too many good programs to choose from. I was SO annoyed with my inability to be in three places at once to see all of the presenters' classes. If anyone out there has a spell for multiple instances of the same person in three classrooms, I'm looking for it!

Some (not all, by any means) highlights:

• Carole Pierce's study of Virginia Woolf's surreal story "The Watchtower" and how many of the images feel much like a spread of Tarot cards. I have not studied Woolf closely in the past, so this was just like a welcome home to my original college degree in literature.
• Newcomer Benebel Wen broke down just a few of the Asian written words for Fortune Telling and Divination with a look to the origins of those words as clues to their differences in meaning in Eastern culture. How wonderful to have this fresh look from a knowledgeable source! Catch her book on Amazon if you have not already.
• The always intriguing Carrie Paris shared her new project which will become the Relative Oracle, sharing old family photos for an audience participation exercise in psychometry. It was a mesmerizing exercise, stimulating for the class participants and validating for Carrie. I couldn't help but catch up with Carrie after class to talk about the photo I had randomly selected from the pile. "Carrie, I had the most interesting experience! My photo was a man standing next to a little girl who was riding a mule. I couldn't get anything at all from the girl, but had all sorts of information about the man, including the message that he wished he hadn't smoked so much." Carrie laughed and told me that she wondered who would get that picture. Our instructions were to get impressions of people from the Other Side. My photo, as it turns out, was of Carrie's own grandfather (now deceased) and of her mother who is still alive. I passed the test! I can't wait for more from the delightful Carrie!
• Mary K. Greer's discussion of Jung was great fun with slides from ancient alchemical texts juxtaposed with Tarot cards and Myers-Briggs personality typing tying in. Mary's work is always fascinating to me. When she earlier presented a choice to the SF BATS attendees between the Jung presentation and a dissection of the historical meanings of the Lovers card I was sorely torn! Why not both?? But of course, there was so little time and there are so many interesting topics. I'm holding out for a future class on the Lovers in History.
• Rana George had a fun audience-participation Lenormand game to make us stay with that all-important question that is asked when answering using three cards. Her jumbo-size cards are from her new deck coming soon, so stay tuned! Rana threatened to be "mean" to us, but that quickly went by the wayside since "mean" is just not Rana's wheelhouse!
• My own class on the Lenormand Grand Tableau was well-attended (so grateful for that!) and was a hands-on exercise with the participants setting out their cards and looking for the major landmarks in their own spread. Naturally the worst part for me was keeping the class to an hour because...well...I talk! Class members were asked to work through their readings with the tools they had (handouts handy) in a safe space. I was at least able to reassure good friends Don and Sue that the kids had not burned the house down while they were away since the clouds and scythe were nowhere near the house.
• With all the follow up questions from my own class in the hallway, I barely made it to the very end of Kristine Gorman's class on a new spread Shaking the Tree. I was so disappointed! Lucky for me that we carpooled on the way home and she kept me entertained and awake by going through her class with my very own personalized class in the car. It's an insightful spread, great for a Tarot reader who gets "stuck" when reading for themselves. Happily all my A-HA!! moments were from the spread and Bay Area traffic conditions were ideal.
• Vendor Market: I was on a budget this time or I think I would have bought at least one of everything. The vendors were excellent this year: my friend Beth Seilonen with her handcrafted decks and boards, plus: vendors of jewelry, tea, spices, crystals, pillowcases, books, decks, tiaras, boxes and the Millard Fillmore Memorial Garage Sale where bargains galore are snatched up by the clever early birds (that's Birds+Sun+Fox for you Lenormand students).
• Donations throughout the conference went to worthy causes including the SF BATS traditional donation to bat conservancy in nature and finding a cure to white nose disease. Bats are key pollinators and bug-eaters around the world and do not get tangled in your hair! But another important cause was also highlighted this year. Tarot's bright light, Rachel Pollack, is now in remission from Hodgkins' lymphoma and while still taking treatments has a GoFundMe site to help keep her going through this ordeal. The generosity of the Tarot community was evident in the huge number of delicious drawing prizes. Rachel, get well soon and come back to SF BATS!
  
• Finally, one of my favorite activities at SF BATS is something not specifically on the program. It's meeting with all of the brilliant attendees and vendors, veterans and newbies, where we can sit down and laugh and talk seriously about readings, decks, spooky experiences, projects, family and plans. I love my SF BATS family! And this year I had the pleasure of meeting Marieke, Benebel, Richard, Nora and Yolanda for a little extra conversation and connection. I was thrilled to see Bonnie Cehovet at SF BATS for the first time, a respected name in the Tarot community and valued reviewer of books and decks. I was gratified at the partnership between SF BATS and NWTS organizers Jay and Jadzia DeForest of Devera Publishing. From my "old-Bies" and "newbies", I felt the love and I send it right back atcha with big Aunt Marplot hugs and a reading from an obscure Sacred Text from 1971, Ace of Cups style, spilling all over your good outfit, drowning your snackplate and dripping on your shoes! Let's do it again--soon! Now, where's that cup of tea?

Best wishes!

Seeing With New Eyes

Taking a fresh look at things doesn’t always help us understand the past. One of my pet peeves, although it’s turned into a pet amusement over the years since being peeved gives entirely too much energy to something trivial, is a tendency to pluck events or people or artifacts from history without considering the historical context.

Maybe it started with the whole long hair thing in the late 60’s. In my small town in New Mexico, not exactly the vanguard of cutting edge fashion, it was not unusual for the police to pull teen-aged boys over in their cars, ask them to step out and then give them a haircut, usually a buzz-cut or some variation of that. The citation was a Biblical one, that long hair was an abomination.

In my tender and passionate teen years, even I knew that the reason long hair was considered an abomination had nothing to do with whether a guy expressed his individuality (questionable, of course, as all teen fads are more herd mentality than individuation) or even his feminine side, but of course more to do with lice and the dearth of CVS pharmacies in Biblical times. Back then, I would probably have said Rexall pharmacies. And in a way, that’s just my point.

You might not know what a Rexall pharmacy was, or a Sprouse-Reitz or a Sambo’s or even a Five-and-Dime. If you didn’t live in the South, you wouldn’t know what a Piggly-Wiggly was or why hushpuppies are good. You might not know whether you would have preferred a Nehi Orange or a Nehi Grape, for instance. You might not have had a short Coke for a nickel or a tall one for a dime. Basically, you had to be there.

Older people are likely to tell younger people stories, not just because they remember them better than what they had for lunch yesterday, but because they have an awareness that things have changed. Lots of things have changed. In the time before cell phones and video games and the internet, kids played outside all summer until the sun set, often giving their parents a much-needed break in summer evenings. As long as they could hear you, they figured you were safe, even if you were fighting with each other. Like kids and even adults in every culture, every “advancement” of technology, we played with what we had available.

Out of context, “Ollie, Ollie, Oxen Free” and “Red Rover, Red Rover, send Marcia right over!” mean about as much as an alien language. Were you really going to throw a ball all the way over a house? Would the child summoned break through “enemy” lines?

One of my Facebook friends recently bought an old whist deck and was looking for rules for whist, wondering if anyone played any more. As it turns out, there are many variations on the game of whist. While commuting on the ferry to San Francisco and back, I played bid whist with a booth full of pals. A book I purchased recently has the rules to many card games with a little historical background, just scratching the surface, but it lists the huge number of whist variations.

“Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?” becomes more interesting when the child’s rhyme is found to be a not-terribly-well-disguised political statement about religious persecutions during the reign of Mary Tudor. Suddenly, “with silver bells and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row” sounds a lot creepier than jumprope. Yet, often the frustrations, anger and sorrow of a culture can be hidden in a game or child’s rhyme, something to soften the blow, something to remind people of what happened, something to put a little bookmark in the page of history so people can cope with the impact of a sudden change or terrible event.

Out of context, of course, Mary Mary seems like something of a funny nonsense rhyme and if context is lost it loses its irony and cultural significance.

One of my favorite Irish tunes, “The Last Rose of Summer,” sounds sweet and nostalgic until you find out they are talking about the high infant mortality rate during famine times. How do you soften the blow of the loss of a child, many children? All her lovely companions are faded and gone.

Robert Place and Rachel Pollack are working together on an oracle deck that I’m eager to purchase when it comes out. Two fine minds of Tarot and cartomancy like theirs, combining Bob’s artistry and diligent research along with Rachel’s writing talent and understanding of spiritual symbology (it’s hard to pin down what these two are best at because they are so terribly good at so many things), are creating a stunning joint effort called The Burning Serpent Oracle. Bob and Rachel are meticulous in their research and truly have considered the context of their study. It's one of the things I value most about them, where others may not have been so strict in their facts.

As part of Bob’s ongoing research into Tarot and Lenormand, he has delved into some of the roots that take us to earlier times than late-14th century northern Italian provinces, into the games of “Goose” and its more ancient ancestors in chase games. Chase games are the kinds of board games most of us are used to where we generally roll dice or spin a wheel or some randomized number representing our turn and advance and take the consequences, good or bad, for where we have landed. It’s a chase game because whoever gets to the end first is usually the winner. Winning, itself, may have its ramifications, too.

The Wheel of Fortune in Tarot is that kind of spinning wheel. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. It seems like things go in cycles of want and plenty. The lowly rise to fame and fortune. The mighty fall from grace. Sometimes it can seem like a game, a roulette wheel of entertainment; sometimes, the spin of the wheel means everything you have.

There’s speculation that an artifact from ancient times may be an early form of just such a game. It’s tantalizing to think that such a thing could have survived. We think of Archaeology with capital letters so often and expect the Finding of Important Artifacts. Growing up in my mother’s antique shop, I realized that the things most likely to survive and to be stumbled upon are the jumble of everyday life, the stuff in the back of your top dresser drawer. You don’t throw it away and when you get rid of the dresser, you probably don’t even clean it out. How often when you move from one residence to the next do you find that the last thing left in your old place is a bunch of coat hangers? They have no great importance but in their small way they signal something.

So I wanted to show you the Phaistos Disk, courtesy of Bob Place, plus a little extra fun that I’ve added. We don’t know what the disk means, whether it was a game or something extremely important. There are hieroglyphs on the disk, pictures that seem familiar, but without their temporal and cultural context are a bit of a mystery. And with the disk, I provide my irreverent cultural misidentification of what’s really going on here by applying a too-modern point of view.

Best wishes!