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Geometry studies: the Six-Around-One hexagon and the root rectangles with their subdivisions.

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The Cheimonette Tarot

The Deck

In the fall of 2013, I ran a Kickstarter to fund the printing of the Cheimonette Tarot. It was funded far beyond my expectations, and I was able to make my stretch goal of printing with Cartamundi, the oldest card printing company in the world, and a producer of many top quality cards used around the world.

The decks and accompanying full-color booklets, in which I have written about the meaning and symbolism of each card, can be purchased by clicking THIS LINK to my online store.

The Music

Six of the west coast's most talented musicians were inspired to write original songs and music about the artwork and concepts in the Cheimonette Tarot deck. They have produced an album that is a mixture of pop electronica and soulful vocals, darkly beautiful gothic cabaret and moody lullaby-ballads about grief and redemption, elegant cello music paired with sweet songs and eerie ambient electronica.

These talented people are Mark Growden, Artemis Robison, Star St. Germain, Jill Tracy, Unwoman, and Meredith Yayanos, and the album, the Sonic Arcana, is up for pay-what-you-want download on bandcamp.

Click THIS LINK to download the wonderful music from the Sonic Arcana.

Background

In 2003 I began to design, illustrate and paint my own deck of Tarot cards. I had been interested in tarot for a long time, at first because of the mysterious and fascinating artwork, and later because of the wonderful historical and mythological symbology which organize the card system. I synthesized a lot of the research I did about the meanings behind the cards over the centuries, and I also overlaid a lot of my own ideas about the individual meanings and images behind each card, and about the connections between them. In 2007 a friend helped me to publish a small run of the decks, and I was able to use the cards I made for the first time.

Those original decks are all long gone. Over the years, many people have asked about obtaining their own Cheimonette Deck. I made some improvements and modifications to my deck, and wrote a booklet about the unique symbolism I use and my personal relationship to the tarot.

The new card decks are just beautiful. They are printed on heavy cardstock, in brilliant color and velvety black linework. It has been a pleasure to use this new, high-quality deck.

Read more about the cards in the Cheimonette Tarot deck in my previous blog posts:

The End of the World

The Maiden and the Beast, or How I Crossed the Egyptian Border in a Bikini

The Wishing Well

Ada and the Queen of Swords

Synaesthesia

The Dizziness of Freedom: Fortitude and The Devil

Atlas / Alas / At Last

The Numinous

You can see the full photo set of all my cards on Flickr, and an expanded version of the companion booklet to the deck is available for free download.

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can i please have a reading? :3

The Cheimonette Tarot, 6/28/14 5:48pm

Four of Staves: Inner strength. change through self-motivation and endurance. Beauty and art. An individual dances on the front of the card. They hold staves in each hand, and even two between their toes.

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Could I have a love reading?? Thank you ^.^

Cheimonette Tarot, 6/29/14 9:51pm

XXI: The World- This is one of three World cards for the Cheimonette Tarot. This one shows what almost looks like a portal. Branches or roots form a circle, entangling together. Within them is a spiral or a snake. At the middle of the spiral is an eye. Around the roots are what could be bubbles or planets. Take the world into your hands. You can look back at the eye, stare into the abyss as it stares back. You might learn something. At this point, every thing seems complete. Like the world is your oyster. This is an appearance, and appearances can be deceiving. Do you wish to stare at the portal, or take a chance and see what lies within?

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In other news, my Cheimonette Tarot came yesterday, but I wasn’t home. So I got it today!

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Selected cards from the suit of cups, from the Cheimonette Tarot! This is your LAST DAY to join the Kickstarter and pre-order a deck, the accompanying album (with songs by seven wonderful west coast musicians who have written music about the cards), the artwork, and more!

Join us! We've hit the second stretch goal, which means top-quality deck printing with Cartamundi. http://kck.st/GWWbGD

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Card of the Day: the Seven of Staves from the Cheimonette Tarot. (Wishes)

Get a deck, the artwork, and the music by joining the Cheimonette Tarot Kickstarter! Only one week to go: http://kck.st/GWWbGD

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The Artist's Legend

There are some metaphorical concepts at that lie at the core of many of the images than run through the Cheimonette Tarot. I saw René Magritte’s legend last week, at his special exhibit at the MOMA: a mirror, a bird, a ribbon in a bow, an apple, a bowler hat, a candle, all collected on one canvas, for the benefit of his beloved observer. So, here is mine, explained for my best beloved reader, and you can add your own, and we can make our own language together in this way:

There are deep things and there are high things.

Deep things, being either underground, underwater, or buried burning within the core of some star or singularity, are slow-moving and silent. They take on the aspects (the surge current, the echoing crunch of seismic uplift and subduction, the blinding glow of irradiated atomic fusion) of their environments, and express their identity by a profoundly isolated and recursive imagination. In the way that the infinite field of postulated “collapsed” Calabi-Yau dimensional spaces take up no space and yet exist at every point in the universe, deep things each contain their own, disconnected little internal worlds.

High things have their own mass, their own energy and their own gravitational field. They do not take on the aspects of their environments because those environments have no size or shape of their own. Biological or tectonic forces keep the surface of the earth in a state of flux, and by the time we rise up into the stratosphere and beyond, the crowd of molecules and their motions have thinned out to a bare minimum.

Therefore there are only two directions in the whole world in which we may move: higher and deeper.

There are eight spokes in the tenth card in the major arcana, The Wheel. At the end of each spoke, where a limb of an angel terminates, there is an icon. This is the eight-letter pictogrammatical alphabet of the Cheimonette Tarot.

The Heart-Apple: the fruit of the tree of knowledge.  This is the ability particular to human understanding, in which we are able to grasp our position in relation to the world, and exert ourselves to change it. (This tree is also known as the tree of death.)

The Mandala-Flower: the fruit of the tree of life. This is the temporary escape from the demands of biological existence we find in profound feeling and creative understanding. This flower, when eaten, is also called freedom.

The Crescent Moon: the sign of truth. Not only is truth not always beautiful, it is not always even righteous. It is simply the course of events along the inexorable passage of time.

The God Sign: the mark of a divine concept or entity that cannot change or die. Really a rough zero and one, placed together like a phi.

The Real Eye: the symbol of life. Life is to be understood as the whole arc, from understanding and joy to suffering and intellectual darkness. Life as an opportunity, life as an adventure, life as a cruel trap, life as a responsibility: all of these.

The False Eye: the symbol of death. Death may also be understood to be eternal life (in which life is not life, but a changeless observation tower in which the corporeal body transforms into a bird and never returns to the mortal coil of existence and non-existence).

The Bubble: the number zero. Like all bubbles, zero is a potential event and trajectory that has not yet happened: a star that has not yet exploded, an egg that has not yet hatched, an eye that has not yet opened.

The Helix: the number one. A 1 curled up on itself, this number is both linked with numerical concepts such as zero and infinity, and also the beginning of all real numbers, which constitute the set of the visible universe. One is the integer who makes its debut into the world of flux, change, and chaos in which we find ourselves.

(Author’s Apology:

This world that surrounds us is in fact not self-made, but in our own subversive way we create another world out of differentiated labels (this is how language is made).  We are nothing but helpless children in the midst of the lovely and fascinatingly unfamiliar light projections of our dreams, which we can of course never touch but which we mindlessly worship as the truth.  What we are constantly forgetting is ourselves, holding out our palms sadly to one another and each of us wasting our desire on these things, which have been created by us, after all, and are not in themselves real and cannot compare to the indescribable beauty of their creators.)

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The Disks cards, from the Cheimonette Tarot. The Kickstarter is funded, so get your deck now! http://kck.st/GWWbGD

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Card of the Day: the Ace of Swords. I feel brave today.

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This deck is definitely happening! The Cheimonette Tarot Kickstarter was funded in less than a week, and we’re working on our stretch goals. Come pre-order a deck, the art or the music at http://kck.st/GWWbGD

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The End of the World

The end of the night is a little like the end of the world sometimes, when you wake up from your dream or your nightmare, when you wake up from the daze of love and find you were in love with a ghost, when you realize that you’ve been working for eight hours straight in the dim shadows of the early dawn. It’s over. Ready or not.

Lately, I’ve been pulling a lot of late nights and all-nights, working on my paintings and writing, deep in the wonderful trance that artwork and writing generate, and nothing else exists for a while. Next to my art table, I’ve got a few prints of Mondrian’s trees, and I like to look up at them sometimes, while I work.

If you’re thinking “Trees? Wasn’t Mondrian that guy who exclusively painted rectangles in primary colors?” then you’re in for a treat: Mondrian’s early work was startlingly different from his later obsession with rectangles. If you follow the early work (the trees in particular) chronologically, you can see how he got into geometry. He is clearly preoccupied by the way the trees divide and fracture the sky behind them. The spaces between the branches become more and more dominant until they swallow up everything else.

In the end, Mondrian throws out everything but the math and the primary colors: elementary particles of the world of the artist.

Ten years ago, I painted the last of the major arcana cards, The World. At the time, I was mad about abstract mathematics (not that I’m not still, I simply have learned to be less heavy-handed about it). I was just

beginning the process of designing and painting my tarot cards, and I was still having trouble figuring out a method. My head was always a confusing tumult of images and ideas, and I usually didn’t know how they would fit together until I put it all down on paper. I would sometimes go through four or five unsatisfactory card paintings until I got it right (energetically tearing up an unacceptable card, catharsis suffusing me with each shred of paper that fell to the floor). I was in the process of teaching myself how to use watercolors. I had never done a large-scale art project before. So, there was a great deal of trial and error, but by the time I had gotten to the World card, I had refined my process to a gracefully attenuated point.

As much as I was inclined towards the final card of the tarot’s major arcana, I found (and still find) the World a challenging card to interpret. After all, it is a word that is meant to encompass everything. Where are we even supposed to begin? Going through the knucklehead prehistory of our current understanding of the universe is of little assistance. Both the Rider-Waite and Thothimages of the World are symbolic representations of the human experience (which, actually, is what all the science we have on the subject amounts to as well), so I decided to begin with us—specifically, with the foundations of identity: our place within our environment. As the Fool is a blank card, depicting an entire lack of experience or identity (and the Angel is the Fool’s transformation from an empty vessel into a divine being), the World must be about the acquisition of a self, and of a relationship with the universe outside the self.

The first version of the World was made of math: two trees composed of infinity signs (and whose shadows reveal them to be the Trees of Life and Knowledge), with a child in the space between them (demarcated as human and therefore finite by the “1” inscribed on her hand), orbited by a cluster of zeroes or planetary bodies. This is one story of the original bitten apple: how our species acquired almost godlike powers of understanding and control over our environment (though, as anyone can see, without any of godlike powers of foresight which comes along with the dubious ability to live indefinitely).

Which brings us (somehow, but you’ll see, just you wait) to a tiny little jewel of a poem by ee cummings, from his book “95 Poems”.

wild(at our first) beasts uttered human words —our second coming made stones sing like birds— but o the starhushed silence which our third’s

Within the jumbled flavors of human evolution, religion, sound, and sex, the poem has always seemed to be about the arc of creation and destruction. Language, technology, and a strange cosmological quiescence at the end: the human body, the human race, the planet, and the whole universe will ultimately destroy itself, much in the same fashion in which, in the beginning, it created itself.

I did not have a clear notion of this when I painted my first version of the World (beasts uttered human words) back in 2004, but the velvety black shadows of the trees and the fury of the child between them seem to me to

portend the last two versions, which I painted only in recent months (each painted all at once, in two

isolated all-night electrical storms of artistic energy).

The second World (stones sing like birds) has several of the same elements: the trees and the orbital band of

planets. The human child has vanished, and in its place is a black snake (or is it a serpentine hold in the fabric of the universe, through which the great eye of some god or monster shines?) The moth of the swords

suit (the same moth first introduced in the clothing of the pregnant, masked figure in Death) hovers above the trees, whose roots and branch tips intermingle in a

continuous ring. In the third World (but o the starhushed

silence), the trees are replaced by golden serpents (a duplicate version of the

Ouroboros world

serpent, eating its own tail, a representation of a primordial and eternal unity). The death

moth has vanished, and no central figure exists between the trees and their orbiting

planetary belt.

What began as a human child and transformed into a black serpent with a human eye has ended in simple darkness, as though it is an open portal into some other world, brand-new and unknown.

As though the world had already ended and nothing was left but a cloud of postexplosive, poststellar material gathering itself along the last remaining vectors of gravitational and electromagnetic forces. As though nothing was left but the mathematical principles behind the grand set of the physical laws of the universe.

The World card, last of the major arcana, is really the end of the world. Only upon the conclusion of the bigger story do we discover its meaning.

This post is part of a series about my deck, the Cheimonette Tarot.

The Kickstarter to fund its publication is currently live! Pre-order a deck or the artwork here.

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Come Join the Cheimonette Tarot Kickstarter!

The campaign went live last Tuesday, and we've already passed 75% of our goal! Come hop on board and check out this exquisite, unique deck, the artwork offered, and the music written about it. West coast musicians Jill Tracy, Meredith Yayanos, Unwoman, Mark Growden, Myrrh Larsen, Star St. Germain, and Artemis Robison are all contributing musicians who are writing new music about this deck, which you'll be able to get as part of the project!

This deck is based on traditional tarot structure, but uses a lot of new symbolism and forget new connections between the cards. There's a lot of wonderful complexity in this deck. Take a look for yourself in the images below, and please share widely. More backers means we're farther along, not just to reach our goal, but making some important stretch goals: getting enough to do the highest-quality printing with Carta Mundi, and a full-size book about the tarot, with full-color images.

So excited to make this happen! Join the party by clicking on this link.

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How to Not Ruin Polyamory for Everybody in 6 Easy Steps

I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s been thrilled at all the good press that polyamory has been getting lately. I’m seeing articles about what polyamory is, some of the myriad ways that people practice it, and, more recently, how to not be an asshole to your polyamorous friends. That’s nice! I like it when people are not an asshole to me and mine.

 The trouble is that I’m also seeing a lot of monogamous people express that they have a rightfully-earned bad impression of polyamory. It’s not that they’re threatened or insecure about it, the way a homophobe acts when confronted with the upsetting fact that gay people exist. This is more of a garden-variety irritation, inspired by an association of polyamory with smug, more-evolved-than-thou grandstanding.

 It’s a well-earned reputation. I am no stranger to That Poly Person, having myself been poly for over a decade and no longer able to think of it as some kind of big deal. I’ve seen a lot of well-meaning people fall into the trap of making polyamory a topic that mono folks would rather gloss over.

 So how do you avoid being That Poly Person? I’m glad you asked.

Read More

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The Cheimonette Tarot Kickstarter is live! Please follow the link if you'd like to pre-order the deck or the artwork: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/27209155/the-cheimonette-tarot

Card of the Day: Nine of Staves. Inspiration, courage, and the raw materials of human identity. This card is about the apotheosis-like experience of developing belief in oneself and one’s abilities and strength. This kind of belief is forged in the midst of hardship and real danger, finding oneself rising out of the mire of suffering and the petty cares of survival, into exalted mental and spiritual splendor.

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Trumps cards from the Cheimonette Tarot.

http://www.facebook.com/the.cheimonette.tarot

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The Maiden and the Beast, or, How I Crossed the Egyptian Border in a Bikini

I've talked about Fortitude before on this blog, but it's one of those cards that keeps coming up this summer. I wanted to focus on this card specifically, rather than just on its connection to the Devil.

Fortitude: where did it come from?

Fortitude is the eleventh trump card in the tarot, today commonly known as "Strength" (in the A.E. Waite deck, Strength shows a young woman and a tamed lion genuflecting at her feet, and older decks, dating back to the 16th century, usually depict a person either subduing a lion or breaking a stone pillar). In my card, the central characters of "the maiden and the beast" remain, but the maiden is a naked, winged woman, blindfolded as though she fancied herself the statue of blind Justice on the steps of our Supreme Courthouse, and the beast is a headless, charging horse.

Weridly, a headless horse with open, seeing eyes.

Although I created this image in 2004, my understanding of the beast in Fortitude didn't really crystallize till the summer of 2012, when I was in Israel/Palestine, working as a researcher and urban planner on the pilot project of an NGO think tank based in Tel Aviv. To inexcusably collapse what is a very long and involved story, I consistently had a difficult time with border guards and other IDF staff while I was there. I don't know precisely why it happened, but my luggage was always given a special search, I was always taken aside for meticulous questioning, and I usually had to provide contacts from work for them to call to confirm that I really worked there. Sometimes there were more profound intrusions into my private affairs and possessions. I obviously wasn't an ordinary Jewish tourist, and I didn't have any family to vouch for me there. The fact that I was there to work for several months baffled and alarmed the guards, and I quickly learned that my naïve explanations about working for human rights and social justice only made me suspicious and strange.

About a month before my contract was up, I planned to take a trip down to the Red Sea to do some diving. I hopped on a bus after work, rode with a pile of sullen young people dressed for a European discothèque and a scattering of shrieking tourists and their comatose, sunburned children, and was deposited at the door of a tiny diver's hostel at 11 pm. The temperature had dropped (it was late July) to about 105 degrees Fahrenheit, and the labored breathing of the four walruslike men sleeping on the bunks in the dorm room mingled with the waves breaking on the beach just outside to create a peaceful white noise. I fell asleep in my bathing suit, which, as daytime temperatures regularly reach 125 degrees in the Negev desert, became my only outfit for the three days I was there.

After two days of good diving, someone at the dive shop suggested I go to their partner dive shop, just over the border in Taba, Egypt. Egypt's relationship with Israel no longer had any pretense of friendliness at that time, and the Israeli dive instructors and divers couldn't go, but I could. They told me to grab my passport and dive log and get in a car, as one of the staff was heading that way anyway. It was a small miracle that I decided, at the last minute, to bring my sandals. I had (and I should certainly have known better) thought we would simply drive over the border and I would be left at the Egyptian dive site for the day, but to my astonishment, the young driver cheerfully indicated that I had to get out and walk over the border. "Taba dive shop just over there," he said. "Walk on left side of road through border patrol and turn left after donut shop." Of course I was still in my usual round-the-clock outfit: a faded, flimsy, purple bikini.

I was nearly alone, standing in line. Desert insects droned, and the border terminal was quiet. A German family outfitted in tropical print clothing stared humorlessly at me. The immaculately dressed Egyptian border guards continued to gaze straight ahead, impenetrably grave. The resort town of Taba, in the middle of the day, was mercifully somewhat deserted, but occasionally a traditionally dressed couple would stroll by, carefully training their eyes at the pavement, away from me. Both religious Muslims and Jews have a culture of modesty in dress, especially for women, and I was sure that I seemed like an affront, an alien and an outsider without the humility or common decency to respect local traditions as I intruded myself into their home. I had always been careful to dress plainly when I was in traditional communities, with my arms, neck, and legs covered and my hair tied back, and here I was in a string bikini. I was at this point heavily encrusted with the salty residue of evaporated sea water, my bruise-colored bikini was frayed in several places, and I found out later that there was a ribbon of seaweed tangled in my hair. I took some comfort, at least, in the fact that I didn't look like I was trying to be sexy.

The young guard at the border had the good grace to giggle a little when he asked me if I was carrying any concealed weapons.

After one of the best days of diving I had ever experienced, I had to walk over the border again, this time through the Israeli terminal. My scantily dressed swamp monster appearance did not seem to dampen the usual suspicion I created, and I wound up in the private office of a soldier, perspiring into a leather chair while she regarded me dubiously from behind her desk.  For the first time, I was asked if I was Jewish (I had always offered this information before). I said that I was, and, visibly relaxing, she began explaining why they had to ask me so many questions, excusing herself as though to a troublesome relative at a family reunion. I mumbled something I can't recall anymore, and dragged off towards a bus shelter, where I waited glumly for the Eilat dive shop to remember to pick me up again. Somehow, the apologies were even worse than the suspicion: I felt even less understood than I had before. It was, in fact, a somewhat risky thing I had done by going to Taba for the day. At that point in my trip, I had gone into the West Bank to stay at the headquarters of a Palestinian resistance movement in a small farming community. I had attended a protest against the acquisition of Palestinian land by local settlers. If the soldier had learned about any of this, I certainly would have been kept much longer for questioning, and I may have had more difficulty leaving the country as well. I doubt I would have had to spend time in jail, but it was not out of the question that I might have been held for 9 or 10 hours for questioning, or even had my electronic devices temporarily confiscated and forcibly inspected on my way out of the country. I was grateful to have gotten through relatively easily, but it was so strange to feel so naked and also so invisible. From where she was sitting, she really couldn't see me at all.

The headless beast in my card represents things that behave like people. The impetus that drives a person's life, work, or desires is bigger than interpersonal relationships, and includes abstract concepts and imaginative ideals: a cultural narrative, the dream of a better life, a union with the beliefs of a religious community, a story of a higher calling and heroism, the promises of a powerful corporation, the mythology of a whole nation. These entities (a nation, a corporation, a religion, a cultural norm, a philosophy) sometimes influence us as though they had feelings and thoughts of their own. As though they had desires. As though they understood us, and whispered the truth into our ears.

The State has eyes, but it has no mind. It may wander aimlessly, be guided by those who care for its power, or even race blindly towards its own destruction. The maiden's leap from the back of the beast is, like all leaps, a leap of faith. Despite being less powerful than the beast of a human institution such as culture, or religion, or country, she has come to trust herself more than she can trust authority. Even if she is leaping to her own death, she has a need to decide for herself. This courage, which is stronger than death, is Fortitude. And when I sat, shamed, nearly naked, confused and misunderstood by the agent of a mindless limb of the State of Israel, in the leather chair of the IDF soldier who thought she recognized me as one of her own, I realized I had not only taken that leap many years ago, but that the leap does not happen just once. It happens again and again and again, as new situations arise, and the beast attempts to fit us onto its back once again.

Is she foolish in her decision to leave the beast, and all its norms and known quantities behind?

The answer seems to be no: she has wings.

This post is part of a series about my deck, the Cheimonette Tarot.