It’s great how things come together sometimes. When a combination of planning plus serendipity collides to make something really *work*, it’s deeply gratifying. That’s how Lá Bealtaine was this year.
First in the new house. It is my habit most years to make a flower crown in May Day colours (yellow and white) for the day itself and then dry it out and hang it on my wall somewhere. The number of crowns grows as the years pass. Intentionally, however, I did not bring any of the flower crowns from the old apartment into the new house. So this year, the first crown has now officially been made, used in art, used in collective spellwork, and is drying in preparation to take it’s place on a fresh new wall.
That “Joy of the Future” card from the Heart of the Faeries Oracle is proving HILARIOUSLY CHALLENGING!!! Da fuq!?
I have been going through a really…interesting… time lately with old baggage and insecurity. It’s a good thing I’m a witch who knows how to eat their old skins. I’ve been reading the cards (and asking friends) repeated questions over and over, from different angles… really trying to go the distance with a few snags in the ball of twine that is my life. Pull on one thing, find it loops back to a shadow wiggling behind you, journal about it, cry about it (a LOT), feel it begin to process, rinse, repeat. I am aware that having the good fortune to finally feel safe in my living environment has provided the perfect setting for this kind of work – it’s in the safety and quiet that you finally realise… it’s just you now, bitch. Do you even KNOW how to be happy!?
The answer is yes…or more accurately, that I can learn. If there’s one thing I KNOW I’m good at, it’s learning…and beginning to learn… and beginning to begin.
So May Day. Full moon. Time to let some shit go. Also the first day of my period such as it exists. Other than emotional dysregulation (grrrreat), my chief symptom is swelling… waxing full and round just like the fucking moon. Good for shadow work though. And I guess it means I’m sloughing more than just metaphors…
I went a bit quiet in the days preceding. Journaling, reading cards, squirming at the answers, and resting. Then May Day came and despite the swelling, I wore all cream and white. All handmade. Two petticoats with lace trim. A handmade corded bust support based on the top half of the famous Symington “Pretty Housemaid” pattern. A corset cover inspired camisole made from the same wide lace trim that’s gathered into the hem of one of my petticoats. I had intentionally left my hair unwashed (but *not* uncleaned or untended) for over a month (May Day was day 35) and my roots were growing in like crazy (half an inch in a single month! weee!!!). Then I attended Mixtress Rae’s radio show to dance with my shadows and expel evil. I took part in a planned collective spell she lead during the show – 5 people working the spell including me, I think… across 3 continents. She followed up the spell with Kate Bush’s “Get Out of My House” which was very cathartic and effective.
I kid you not, that Faeries Oracle card is “A Collective of Pixies” which was not only perfect for the show, for dancing, and for May Day but ALSO for the precise thing I’ve been asking the cards over and over again. For those of you who own the deck, go read the guid book entry for that card!!!
I took all of this very seriously (amidst the joy of dancing and so on). I mulled my readings over and did follow up readings through the course of the weekend. I also finally fully washed and re-henna’d my hair. I haven’t used shampoo or conditioner in 3 years… or anything soap-like on my hair in 2.5 years… what I use varies a little but it’s mainly a hand-prepared clay mixture followed by a diluted vinegar wash about once a month at the moment. I like that I have to pay attention to it. I followed this up with some ‘home-spa’ style care. It was good. Medicinal. Needed.
“One morning, one morning, one morning in May, I saw a young lady all wrapped in white linen. All wrapped in white linen and cold as the clay.”
I’m not done processing things, of course. Who is? Ever? But this is ultimately what witchcraft is about for me… I’m grateful to have it. None of it’s my first rodeo but *that* feels pretty fucking cool!
Sitting in my weedy lair, thinking over creative ambition, doors between worlds, and the way witchcraft works wonders – staring out at blackbirds, hooded crows (and a wren!) flitting between drifting spells of rain – I finally finished two poems.
The first, paradoxically, took over a month.
If fantasies are fractals, then Death is periwinkle.
The second was a classic case of how most of my poems emerge… “No-facing” them up from the gut and barfing them all over the page like so much ectoplasm.
The winter weather continues but I’m not sad about it. On Imbolc, I went for a river-side walk for several hours. Starting in the morning mist and ending in the midday sun through fields and several different woods, my partner and I saw two grey herons fly overhead with sticks in their beaks. The Cailleach gathers firewood! Six more weeks of winter. As it happened, we also saw their nesting place: five full grown grey herons perched in the tree tops overhanging the edge of the river… uncanny in their beauty.
~ Saoirse.
(Decks shown: “Trionfi della Luna (Paradoxical)” – 3 of Coins, Knight of Wands, 2 of Coins – and “Oracle médiéval et merveilleux” – “Colère” – in inverted blacklight)
PS. A personal reminder, “Eviscerate” by Faetooth playing as I post this <3
So, I’m in the middle of a massive change right now and, at the same time, I have also recently done myself the (mixed) favour of getting two full days of colour-work done for a tattoo that covers almost a quarter of my body…
Suffice it to say I’m hecking tired and I’m gonna stay that way for a bit and I did it to myself and that’s what really hurts >_<.
To make up for the lack of posts – but *not* the lack of creativity and general witchery – this post essentially contains a photo dump of (some) recent projects and artistic goings on amidst ::wooooooo:: big change ::woooooooo:: ^_^
Recent shots of my desk – homemade beeswax candles, card readings, and musical practice. You may recognise the first image as the thumbnail for my most recent video post. Terribly cringey and an algorithmic shot in the foot… sorrynotsorry!Before and after mending a rip in my skirt (not pictured is the black cotton backing I incorporated into the stitching) & some homemade earrings (paper layers, glue, varnish; real wishbones, cleaned and varnished; paper mache clay, gold paint, varnish.)Recent shots of glamour altar (including perfumes, paper mache clay horns, and ultraviolet pigments) & a shot of the colours my tattoo artist was mixing and blending directly onto my skin!Adventures in making my own nail polish colours! Ultraviolet green (in various layer combinations)… I called it “Poison Apple” but my partner wants to call it either “Mutant Ninja Ooze” or “Aggressively Green”… thoughts?Random OOTD shots of the general vibe I’ve beeen going for these days! Complete with Evenstar & glow in the dark bugs and sex dice! ^_^
That’s all for now folks. Have fun storming the castle!!!
NOTE! With apologies for repeating this content ~ this is a reposting of the original page on the Dreams of Pantagruel Oracle. It has been reformatted as a pinned blog post in the remodeling of this site.
Hm. This does not feel like one of those moments where I may triumphantly declare:
“I made an Oracle Deck!”
As it happens, I did make one …only I didn’t. It’s called “The Dreams of Pantagruel Oracle” and it is part magical tool, part divination method, and part the extended overtures of a rare old book nerd. The ‘book’ in question is “The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel” (original French: Les songes drolatiques de Pantagruel) – a public domain reproduction from 1869 of an original volume from 1565. (See introduction/companion booklet below for more!)
Pantagruel is a giant – a character invented by Francois Rabelais in Renaissance France – whose escapades (and those of his father, Gargantua) form a collection of scholastic, social, and religious commentary as well as baudy, irreverent, often inebriated stories…aimed, it seems, at delighting and enraging the social order of 16th century France.
I did not draw these images… Neither did the 19th century publisher (Tross) of the volume from which they were taken… Neither did the 16th century publisher (Breton) of the volume from which that publisher reproduced them… Neither did Rabelais himself, to whom Breton attributed the artistry of these images… Learned discourse suspects it was illustrator/engraver Louis Desprez who produced other work for Breton in a similar style.
Dreams of Pantagruel with the Joie de Vivre Tarot
The deck has 123 cards in total, measuring 2.75” x 4.75” (70mm x 120mm) in linen card stock and they are now available on MPC.
In the shoplisting I promised a PDF booklet introducing the deck – it includes some basic historical information, some indications of why I made it (other than just wanting it to exist), asks some questions, and leaves the door very wide open for any manner of uses at the total discretion of those who choose to acquire it. It also includes citations!!!
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What follows are some of my own personal initial thoughts about the deck at this time. My journey in using these cards has only just begun but here goes…
Firstly, I am very interested in the weird ‘Bosch’-like world to be found on the margins of society. I like to ask myself questions about how society asks questions. Having worked in different kinds of archives over time, fulfilling queries for different kinds of researchers on different topics, it’s astounding just how much the assumptions in approach inform (or limit) retrieval and results. Of course, the way information is catalogued can also skew things… as do ‘hidden collections’ – collections that exist but are horribly back-logged, invisible until allocation of resources and social priority allow ‘us’ to ‘see’ them.
Secondly, I’m interested in the shapeshifting nature of personal characteristics but I want to be very clear that, in my opinion, equating moral or social value with physical appearance is unacceptable. There is enough work on our hands to undo tropes around ‘disfigurement = sign of evil’ in fairy tales and fantasy without adding to it through the misuse of our creativity going forward. The characters in this deck are not automatically marginalised or considered unfavourable. The worldview that created them was flawed (for one thing Rabelais, author of the Gargantua/Pantagruel stories was definitely sexist!) and the worldview of ‘curious persons’ who view and respond to these images will create what they bring to the deck… to put it bluntly.
Dreams of Pantagruel with Le Tarot Noir
Thirdly, assessment is on-going…but this deck is one step in the much larger personal aim of seeing the world in terms of the imaginative qualities of its inhabitants. I guess you could say I wanted a deck of ‘friends’ to support me in that work. “Familiars”? “Servitors”? Demon-cohorts whose names are Legion?
Fourthly, I’m SLOWLY going to be learning as much as I can about the historical details in these images. I already recognise certain clothing elements that leave clues as to what some of the jokes or references might be. (Such as pin cushion codpieces…) It’s not immediately clear to me how much of these images are already understood from an (art) historian’s point of view, but I’m eager to see the extent to which whatever details I uncover influence my own self-styled way of being, visually and otherwise.
Fifthly, it’s no fluke that Renaissance imagery should make sense in terms of tarot visuals. I’m enjoying the way this pairs with various decks in my own Oracular Library!
Dreams of Pantagruel with the Magicae Daemonibus Tarot… this morning’s shadow work!
Lastly, within the framework of Irish myth, medieval literature, and various iterations of ‘fairy-faith’ or dealings with the Other Crowd… there is a lot I want to explore about how I perceive denizens of Otherworlds and how that fits into my own mythological/cosmological framework. I’m in the process of exploring and expanding my own astral realm (a place I have been referring to lately as “the little cosmos”) but none of that is solidified and it’s well beyond the scope of this blog post…
I hope my ideas are not too superimposed onto the deck for having shared them a bit here! And I hope very much that whoever decides to buy the deck enjoys it and derives benefit from it in some way. I’m going to explore other ways/platforms of making it accessible in time but, for now, do remember that the images from the 1869 volume are in the public domain! Go check them out too!
Yours in sincere drollery,
Sorsha.
Price Breakdown for Transparency
€53.45 (1 deck)
123 cards
MPC earns a non-negotiable €48.15 of that total.
Images are in the Public Domain, just cleaned and and formatted by me so I set profit to 11% (€5.3)
These figures apply to purchase of a single deck, bulk purchases function differently
Time for some #spooky #autumnal #fallvibes! Featuring tarot and witchy shit. Call me crazy, but I think there’s something in this group of concepts – something creatively stimulating at least!
Decks featured:
The Somnia Tarot by Nicolas Bruno
The Deviant Moon Tarot (Paradoxical edition) by Patrick Valenza
Two books that strike me as worth reading in tandem with tarot are “Piranesi” by Susanna Clarke and “Titus Groan” by Mervyn Peake. It would be tempting to consider picking a specific deck to work with in each case but there might be the risk of over associating that deck with those books afterwards. An idea to be approached with caution, perhaps.
I seem to have regained my ability to read fiction for the first time, properly, in over a decade! There are many reasons for this but paramount for the purpose of this blog post is that I have been allowing myself to define my own terms for my taste. I know what I’m looking for in a work of fiction at this current stage in my life and I am allowing myself to articulate that and pursue it.*
Titus Groan
I can’t vouch yet for the further Gormenghast novels (the rest in the trilogy or any of the further works – short stories, the ‘rediscovered’ book written by Peake’s wife and so on) but I suspect they would all make an interesting study with tarot.
As I finished Titus Groan one specific card leaped to mind: Justice. Justice, in any system (meaning whether you see it at the 8th or 11th Major Arcanum, I think it would apply).
From my admittedly limited experience, the Justice card will often get described as cosmically neutral. It’s not automatically synonymous with legal justice, or social justice, or anything anthropocentric in nature. It’s often viewed as possessing the kind of neutrality that registers to the subjective human mind (and the collective) as “cruel”… unfeeling.
What is interesting about that, however, is that in any given reading where we receive the Justice card, we rely on the cards surrounding it to provide context. In Titus Groan there is a bewildering amount of heavily detailed (deliciously rotten) context. There is a total pointed stylistic preoccupation with the minutiae of a given moment from many vantage points. The book doesn’t really have chapters as such but the manner in which it is structured seems aimed at giving the reader a very specific kind of whiplash…and gaslights you about it too. It oscillates between the estate/house of Gormenghast occupying all our ideas and definition of ‘the world’ or ‘the cosmos’… gets us deeply invested even in the movements of its motes of dust (so often likened to starlight) let alone the emotional landscape of it’s morose and Bosch-like characters… only to zoom far out, like a choppy jump cut, to the world outside the walls; full of archetypal passion plays, journeys, trade routes, forests, and mythic relationships. Every switch takes only a page or so to re-frame your sense of perspective and proportion. It warps your sense of time and space in a deeply compelling way. To be back inside the walls of Gormenghast is almost to forget the narrative of only a few pages prior.
And none of this sense of “loyalty” that you develop in the reading is particularly well rewarded if what you’re hoping for is Justice in its more desirable or “fair” aspects. “Loyalty” is actually an explicit theme in the book but it’s presented as a lived reality, an arch concept, and a dysfunctional source of festering rot. Justice lurks behind it all. Past a certain point, every page feels like a waiting game and you, the reader, bear witness to sociopathic plots and action with no clear idea of the deeper motivations or drive behind specific characters …other than as projection of the rotten dysfunction of Gormenghast itself. Gormenghast (with its own societal ideas of “Justice”) is the living breathing house that is THE world but is also only one small estate inhabited by the rigid seemingly endless loyalty to pattern, ritual, and heritage. What is structurally integral and societally established IS ‘just’ and ‘good’… right?
If this rendering of Justice makes you feel rather enclosed and sweaty, I think its supposed to. It’s also weirdly sympathetic though. I felt continually rather caught and called out!
In Gormenghast, Justice is communicated through sensory experience… a pendulous blotch of wine on white linen flashing in and out of the shadows… its details never relent but that’s the point: perspective becomes acrobatic!
All of this is enhanced, of course, by the fact that Titus Groan is only the first book – as far as I am aware – for the convenience of publication. Weren’t the Gormenghast materials intended as one long work of fiction? As the book opens and closes it feels very much like you have only read a near 400 page ‘first act’.
The Justice card stood out to me throughout not, per se, in its conspicuous absence (though… kind of) but more because the book just screams out that you don’t even know what Justice IS. You are just as limited and ridiculous and totally absurd and strange as any other character in this narrative.
Piranesi
With its overt thematic play on labyrinths, Piranesi feels similar in genre to Gormenghast. The writing is much more direct, the method for telling the story is totally different than Gormenghast. But the tarot also would make a great tool for exploring the book. And the book would do the same for exploring tarot.
What is our concept of Justice in Piranesi? I’m reminded in a way of the development of mind, voice, and perspective in the works of Albert Camus: the Stranger, the Plague, and the Fall. Each has their sort of hints at the next, archetypal touchstones… anchor points.
In Piranesi there are many deliberately archetypal presences. The albatross is a purposeful one, both real and full of reference. The point, perhaps, is that the literary reference is what makes it real to begin with. The statues take on roles almost of silent guides, warnings, or companions. Popes, charioteers, cloaked figures shining lamps in the dark or perpetually pouring vessels of water, nature goddesses, fauns, personifications of becoming, personifications of time or of youth and innocence and so on. There is explicit divination in the book too of course which I found totally riveting… “ornithomancy”.
I loved the book SO intensely and, as is often the case with me when I really get into something, I read it in a single evening. It’s not long and it’s characterised by a clear and open writing style (unlike Gormenghast) so it wasn’t difficult to just sort of… flow through it. It’s also very deliberately structured and that the reader might ‘flow’ through it’s clear and segmented ‘structure’ is VERY apropos and clearly purposeful.
The way it depicted divination, spiritiual knowing, and total quietude felt uncanny in that it reflected so well how I think and feel about these things. Even down to the use of certain phrases – which, of course, to my mind is the act of affirming the efficacy of witchcraft… To me, it’s not a “what are the chances!?” perspective. It’s a “but of course” perspective. If you’re engaging with it and pursuing what you care about than many aspects of it will feel shared even as they differ in various details.
That’s how we get to talk about things like thought forms, egregores, shared culture, collective gnosis, and build systems like tarot!
But the book also shows us the dark abusive side of this. In my opinion, it makes for GREAT reading if you are already a little familiar with the history of Western Occultism… some of the specifics of societies like the Golden Dawn, figures like Aleister Crowley and so on. I’m sure the more you know the more you’d notice is snuck into the pages of Clarke’s fiction, but a baseline acquaintance will do! The book absolutely ‘goes there’ in looking at the dark underbelly of magic and the occult, particularly in its collective iterations. It asks what each of us become, what ‘being’ is vs what ‘doing’ is… What the evil, the ambiguous, the perpetrator, the victim, the isolated neutral, and the open work of having curiosity all are.
Justice sits behind all of this too. And both books don’t ‘answer’ our feelings on it, in my opinion, mainly because the Justice card/archetype isn’t a question. A tarot reading is often predicated on the formation of a question but, paradoxically, Justice isn’t an answer without that subjective context… the role of the reader and/or querent.
Neither of these books answer anything or even exist unless it be in the moment of interaction with their reader(s) and in so far as their readers share how they experienced them.
Okay, so maybe …two Major Arcana: Justice… and the World. But again, no answers. Only contemplation after the provision of context.
Have you read either of these books?
If you have (or if you haven’t and you don’t mind spoilers) let me know what you think! Would you pick the same cards or something else entirely?
~ Saoirse.
* I think the proliferation of blogs, aesthetic terms, and the existence of booktube have helped with this. As a ‘fantasy lover’, back in the day, there was a lot of pressure to ‘read everything you can get your hands on’ … which has never possible for me. Now I feel more able to just say what I’m aiming to read and why!
At the moment, I’m in the midst of a massive change. Posts and so on are going to be sparse for a little while…
However, I want to offer some thoughts and updates on how I have been interfacing with the world and raise some perspectives that, honestly, I’ll never be ‘finished’ exploring.
The best feeling of sanctuary is well before sunrise.
Ever since I was little I have been obsessed with the minutiae of what it’s like to live creatively. Have you ever read a favourite book (in my case, mostly fantasy) and then seen a photo (sometimes at the back of the book with a short bio) of ‘the author at home’. Or perhaps you have stumbled across a photograph, blog post, or a short video essay that portrays ‘the artist in studio’. Have you ever seen this and thought I need to know how they got to that point in their life?
Cardboard cutouts I made years ago of Terri Windling and Ursula K. Le Guin. I used to tuck them in my planner and bring them with me everywhere!
I don’t mean ‘art for art’s sake’ but rather something very much embodied in the world and part of it’s extended network of sensibilities. Something that interfaces with real ecosystems or socio-economic environments and real time periods.
Is there any purer form of magic than the little glimpses you get of those lives? I don’t think they require endless descriptive detail because the idea is not to replicate them. You have to make your own for it to work and that’s what witchcraft *feels* like to me. It’s what I spend most of my youtube channel, this blog, my whole life pursuing.
Recent reading right before a VERY intense first time experience.
In my case, it has output that others can experience because I feel the creativity must go somewhere but I’ve never been the best at keeping track of my portfolio (and, indeed, I was always rubbish at tracking my repertoire when I was a performing violinist too. #myexecutivefunctionsucks)
But this is why I’ll so often mention something in detail, something relatively mundane but *just* off the beaten track (debatable) and then go “see? Witchcraft!”
And the reading AFTER that experience to get a sense of where it was going.
I love scenes in fantasy stories** that describe the seemingly mundane elements of a witch’s living space. Let’s say you’re in the Brooklyn apartment belonging to your aunt (umpty times removed). She has a gas hob that she lights with matches. There’s a colourful pot of coffee on. A fruit bowl sits on the coffee table below a daffy painting of old lovers in clashing robes. You wonder why their necks are so long… A cat lounges near an old pile of yarn or perhaps on a tatty armchair tucked in the corner. You look out the kitchen window to see she’s let the black-eyed susan vine overtake the fire escape …something looks different about the city though. “Honey, pick a different window” or “Sweetheart, come look at this old book of poems… people go mad looking out there too long.”
A reading about a specific… quandary and lived/sensory question.
Is it just because of the city chaos? Or is that the road to an Otherworld? What’s the difference between personal eccentricity and a real witch? Who gets to make that call?
… I’ve taken to washing my hair once every three weeks now instead of the usual two. I’m combing it, which I never thought possible with curls, but it seems that the key lies in using a wooden comb. I oil it with olive oil mixed with peppermint, fenugreek seeds, and rosemary (which I cooked in it myself. Magical intentions included.) Recently, I changed up my henna mixture for colouring too… the henna kept oxidizing far too dark and I prefer a lighter pinker red. I did a whole bunch of research on it and ended up with henna, catnip, and madder root! There are medieval recipes for colouring hair but I went with modern recommendations made by those interested in retaining length. Just in case.
So now I’ve got even more of a medieval-inspired head! Though I have no idea if it will register on camera over time, I’m very happy with the difference.
I’m making myself a new (to me) type of corset. And I’m going so very slow with it … partly because most of my time is eaten up with something else non-negotiable at the moment. But progress is happening! Hopefully, I’ll like it? I’m learning so much in the process though.
I’m still working on my current jumper project… historically inspired with billowing sleeves. And yarn the colour of crow feathers (black, but with many tiny multicolour fibres within so it has the optic effect of shimmering.) I can’t wait to finish it!!!
In other lights it looks more blue green!
I’ve also migrated over to the dumb phone life. I’d wanted to do this for a long time and had steadily uninstalled as much as I could from my old Samsung (having left a certain soul-sucking fruit-named empire behind years ago!) But the thing was still such a drain on my life.
My internet is based in my hotspot so my dumphone does have that capability. It’s the Matrix phone, for anyone wondering. A Nokia 8110 4G – and oddly it’s WAY faster than the old hotspot. I theorised to my techie BIL it might be that I couldn’t entirely keep my smartphone from doing other things in the background. He agreed.
In the absence of so much stimulation elsewhere, I have been getting better at aimlessly browsing less. And my witchcraft has immediately felt more real. More present. It’s colours are more vibrant. My relationship with deity has been reviving. Not that it was ‘dead’ but I had felt like I was fighting some kind of film that lay over it before I could really access it. That is much less the case now and I anticipate it changing further.
I mean, for example, Macha and Badb make an appearance masquerading as artists and tarot readers… They call themselves ‘Melodie Moonlight’ and ‘Breda Fairfoul’. One has blue hair, the other red. They ride a motorbike. They chew tobacco and smoke cigars. They file enamel handcuffs with their teeth and cry acid tears! What more could you want!
The way I keep describing it is, “I feel like I can see things better.” It’s not the best analogy but it will suffice for now.
Which brings us back to the magic in the mundane. Call it aesthetics, but I want to make real what I feel and perceive to be important. It takes sketches, notes, and even pin boards just as much as it takes altar work, moon phases, or wax drippings. Magic is art, art is sensory, and art and magic are visual-tactile-aural living.
The end.
(Or the beginning?)
~ Saoirse.
PS. I’ve been re-reading a lot of old favourites… Hounds of the Morrigan, The Left Hand of Darkness and so on… but I’ve also been embarking on a shocking amount of new stuff for me! Movies I’d never seen… The Crow (1994), What We Do In the Shadows, Witches of Eastwick, Beetlejuice (1988)****. I have THOUGHTS about all of this that links into what I’ve laid out above. Hopefully, I’ll get to post again soon!
** Urban fantasy is great for this but I can think of a few Patricia A. McKillip moments or Patricia C. Wrede moments and many others that do this really well too.
*** The header image is just a bunch of old photos of me aged approx. 16-21.
The issue of lacking social terminology to define my own sexual identity and preferences for expression is pretty perennial for me. For some context, I grew up in a town known (at least in that general set of townships) for being a *relatively* inclusive place… we were one of the early towns in our part of the state to have a rainbow painted crosswalk etc. However, the language of most parents and highschoolers I encountered was not only highly heteronormative but also rather homophobic and … honestly well ignorant of anything resembling fluiditiy of identity, expression, or lived experience. I and my friends spent a lot of time watching and attending Rocky Horror but didn’t have access to too much else… and most understandings of sexual expression were contextualised along lines of ‘promiscuity’ rather than a more sex-positive outlook.
This was this morning’s tarot reading… It’s what inspired me to write this post.
My college – at least at that time – was fairly unusual in that there were no bathrooms segregated by gender identity. All dorms, bathrooms, and shower areas were gender neutral. Asking for pronouns was considered a totally run of the mill polite thing to do. People had classes to go to and life to explore and nobody gave a shit whether you were prone to monogamy or followed any specific paradigm of any kind at all. Coming back to my home town/area for work after college was a massive culture shock.
Years later, I remember having a conversation with my BIL over pints about how the secondary school one of his kids was attending was talking to the parents about possibly introducing gender neutral bathrooms and (at the time) he was really against it for a man who seemed only to have unanswered questions. A lot of ‘what if’s’… to which I was able to say, ‘Well, I can tell you from personal experience [insert anecdotal answer here]… and that was 10 years ago.”
The same night (over more pints) the discussion around consent came up. It was a topic newly in circulation at the time (the #metoo movement had arrived in the awareness of the slightly older generation in Ireland by then) and I heard the usual stock answers of ‘Isn’t it a huge turn off to just ask someone if you can kiss them?”
Jesus CHRIST on a split banana, I had things to say.
So here’s my perspective on the benefits of promoting diversified vocabulary along with some musings on my own identity.
Personal preference is like a favourite colour. We don’t have bathrooms only for those who pick green. We don’t care if someone used to be purple but now they’re silver. We don’t have to have full blown personal crises if ‘suddenly’ we don’t get to assume everyone loves blue. You can ask or be interested in the world… and you will find that some people *do* love blue. Just blue. Nothing but blue. Other people don’t care about blue but they’ve noticed they like blue things… blueberries (with a purple tinge), the sky in late summer, the dark slate blue of the glistening sea. Other people will verge more toward periwinkle. Other people will swear that they don’t mind blue but they’d NEVER wear it… and still other people will be somewhere else in the colour wheel entirely and, as a matter of fact, don’t engage with cool colour shades at all.
What matters (of course, this is not revolutionary) is that we give people language and vocabulary while also communicating that words are allowed to be an approximation.
So, personally, I find very little terminology to express what I feel I am in social terms. Usually this doesn’t bother me – I benefit from a lot of intersectional forms of privilege. But it really irks me when it comes to the erasure of daily lived nuance.
In the past, lacking better words, I would have described myself as a ‘nympho’ or ‘hypersexual’. I’ve been ‘boy crazy’ since I was 5 but my understanding of (loosely speaking socially male or socially masculine) beauty is highly sensory in nature. I love line, texture, movement, colour. I love expression. I love embodiment. And I love these things physically and sexually… My creative impulse is strong, constant, and sexually expressive. It’s amazing I’ve ever been called a ‘tease’ given that I am and always have been ‘easy’ as fuck.
As a teen, there were certain partners (and especially one particular individual) who would have used this term ‘tease’ but at the same time were operating on the assumption that there was no such thing as a ‘woman’ who just said ‘yep! let’s go’ if you asked her directly if she’d be down for various things. They’d resort to indirect forms of emotional manipulation – verging on coersion (pouring my drinks etc.) – to get me to ‘put out’…when all they had to do was just ask and we’d have gotten there already. If anything, messing with my boundaries made me clam up. Once, I can remember literally already being naked by the time someone felt they needed to get me more drunk…which had the effect of making me put my clothes back on and call my mother to come pick me up. For the record, we still did it generally, just not that night. My attitude has always been – don’t insult my intelligence, it’s a turn off.
I struggled to find concise terminology for my own identity. I have a long and dark history of ED so some of this is complicated by learned shame around my natural embodied reality. In a recent google search, trying to find something other than ‘hypersexual’ (which comes with connotations of compulsion and addiction in the clinical sense, which doesn’t apply to me) I came across an article where someone invented the term “flammasexual” to imply easily ignited and with gusto. Like, frequently and merrily aflame with sexual impulse and desire. Sex like spiritual fire in the solar plexis. Sensory experience like visionary ecstasy in the finger tips. Magic pouring from carnal portals.
If we think of that in ‘Wands’ terms, I think that makes excellent sense. It makes for a good descriptor.
However, if we then turn to qualifying identity in ‘romantic’ terms… I’m not sure I have a suitable word yet. I don’t always know what ‘romantic’ means. For me, it’s never been proposals, rings, monogamy by default, roses and candlelit dinners. I’m more of a ‘explore an old crypt with a loved one and talk enthusiastically about medieval mysticism over pints later’ kind of person. A let’s live through things together and have fun kind of person. These are things one can do with friends. So, for me, my ‘romantic’ relationship is down to longevity of closeness, dedication to mutual development and growth, shared language, and… sex! Certainly I think there is a romanticism to how friendship at least *can* work. I really enjoy seeing the sensory beauty of my friends. I love seeing the colour and temperature in someone’s face or the way their hair sticks up in the wind. I love the suddenness of some people’s humour or the gentle slow burn of a joke that takes ages to be gotten in full. And the level of disappointment I feel when someone I thought was a friend turns and all but says “yea we share interests but I’ve decided to be mean to you about something or to forget that you matter” cuts deep… Perhaps, I romanticise friendship too much then?
So, personally, I understand a romantic perspective on life… I understand romanticism… but I’ve never overtly linked them with sexual interaction and expression. They can and do co-occur but they’re not interdependent. Would that be… ‘aroflux’? Or ‘abroromantic’? One term seems to emphasise the fluctuation and the other the romanticism… Neither have ever been as constant a part of my identity as sexual desire, attraction, expression, and sensory experience.
I’ve been romantically in love with fictional characters (‘fictoromantic’) with whom I can’t ‘consummate’ anything except on the astral so… Thoughts in the comments if you know terms that approximate what I’m trying to get at here!
Is ‘Gomez & Morticia/Laszlo & Nadja with a healthy dose of Leonard Cohen’s carnal mysticism thrown in’ a sexual/romantic identity? Because if so, that’s what I’d align with best.
Lastly, the emphasis for me has always been on clear, useful, and honest communication. On not pushing boundaries where they aren’t willing to go. Perhaps this is because I am autistic and am oriented toward seeking clarity over hoping I can risk passing something off as smooth and cool.
A final example of what I mean. I had a conversation recently around the lack of opportunity and cultural permission to speak openly about things – especially as a non-binary* person with what is often perceived as a feminine style of dress. (I was assigned female at birth and I allow those pronouns only as an approximation and out of vestigial/uncomfortable social inertia. I struggle with the awareness that other people hear things I don’t mean if I use female pronouns. The binary is a system very few benefit from, if anyone really, so for clarity my pronouns are currently she/they.) As an introvert who has been in a monogamous sexual relationship for over 16 years and is now socially perceived as an ‘ageing woman’… there aren’t many people who get to hear the way I talk about things on a natural daily level or understand that my worldview doesn’t necessarily match their assumptions.
In this example, a person was surprised to hear that I don’t emphasise monogamy by default and that I see no practical use for society being so rigidly founded on monogamous partnership. The ‘polyamory is just an excuse to cheat’ clause came up and I said NO – polyamory [or any other non-monogamous relationship structure] is not cheating because it’s founded on open communication and consent.’ If a person enters, say, in to a relationship on the explicit understanding that their consent is founded on a condition of exclusivity, then their partner ‘cheats’ in so far as they violate those terms for consent. In this case, if ‘the lads’ (mates of the person I was talking to) have sex with someone else (sticking with the sex-based example here) knowing their wives are not okay with it and then return home to conceal that truth… they are tampering with the conditions of her consent. Could not this kind of problem be avoided if we placed less automated emphasis on ‘everyone should get married, in specifically this kind of ceremony, in this one kind of partnership, spending this certain amount of money, within this narrow range of ages regardless of inclination or practical maturity…so we can all complain of the ball and chain later like it’s some kind of rite of passage!?”
I value art and card based divination. I value witchcraft… I value the power and embodiment that witchcraft and paganism have helped me teach myself. At some point I may talk explicitly about how my devotion to the Morrígan plays a role in this. But I do not value exclusively ‘sanitised’ imagery, absence of physical diversity, rigid gender essentialism and so on. People of course do their shadow work and come to terms with different worldviews at difference paces and on their own journeys… Tarot meanings and symbolism must reflect that if it really is to be ‘the book of life’.
Is the tarot capable? Only as capable as we think we are…
