This week has been an awesome whirlwind of Austin Tarot events. Here’s some notes from the 3 events I attended over the past few days:

Tuesday – The Magic of the Minor Arcana (a Tejas Web class)

This class is broken into 4 weekly classes, each covering one of the suits. The first class was the Swords class (Swords = Air = East, being the first Quarter traditionally called in Circle). After a brief into to the make-up and history of Tarot, we jumped into discussing the Minor Arcana. A really interesting part of the discussion that I had never thought of is the way geometry fit so well with the traditional numerological meanings of 1-10 in relation to Tarot.

Cat and Suzanne then talked a bit about the Court Cards, and helped us understand all this ceremonial magic “earth of air” “water of air” craziness, which actually made sense.

  • Pages = Earth
  • Knights = Air
  • Queens = Water
  • Kings = Fire

Therefore, the King of Swords is “Fire of Air,” meaning he displays the qualities of Air through his more Fire-y nature… does that make sense? Or if the above correspondences are that court’s “worldview” you can see where they all experience Air differently even though they’re all Swords. Heh, made up that last little analogy myself :P

From there we did an automatic writing exercise using the Swords’ Court cards, which was very revealing. Cat lead us on a meditation from the Ace through the King of Swords and guided us through using our intuition to understand and develop our own meanings of the cards. Afterwards, we discussed meanings as a class and talked a little of traditional meanings. I loved when people with really unique decks would show us how that deck portrayed a card. At the end of the class, we did a mini-spread with just the Swords suit, which is a scary proposition but was actually very accurate despite using only 14 possible cards. Can’t wait for next class – the Wands!

Wednesday – Austin Tarot Talkers Meetup: The Hermit Constellation

This Meetup was also the first of a series of meetups about the Hermit constellation, which includes the Hermit, the Moon and the four 9s pip cards. This meetup was just on the Hermit, yet it was hard to stay focused when we kept getting off on wonderful tangents. Despite that, I think everyone left with a greater understanding of the card. We each showed our card and developed our own meanings.

After sharing, we used a variety of books to research any symbolism or aspects of the cards we didn’t know. Everyone at the meetup was a lot of fun and there was a variety of people, from “I just bought my first deck 5 minutes ago” to seasoned professionals. Looking forward to the next meetup in this series – the Moon.

Thursday – Austin Tarot Enthusiasts 1st Meeting

The birth of this group is a match made on the Internet. Arwen, who recently moved to Austin, wanted to start a Tarot group here in town. I’d been following her on Twitter for a while so when I read her tweet about an Austin group I jumped at the opportunity. She then advertised the group online, which attracted a variety of people. Five of us made it to our first meeting, where we discussed what we wanted out of the group as well as fun things we could do. An important decision was agreed upon regarding meetings: we’re going to try and meet at the Denny’s in south Austin along the I-35 southbound access road if they’ll have us (one of the group is going to call).

Our plan is to meet every 1st, 3rd (and 5th) Thursday of the month, schedules willing. This is not an exculsive thing either, we look forward to a fluid group with people coming in and out attending and teaching when they can. We even want beginners to try and lead a discussion – no better way to learn than to teach! If you’re interested in coming to meetings, join our Yahoo group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AustinTarotEnthusiasts/ to get the most up-to-date schedules, etc.Next meetup: The Fool

Have a great weekend!

PS – I’m on MySpace now. If you have an account, please add me :)