Reflections on Patrick Valenza´s book: The Deviant Moon Tarot

 

The below images are from the beautiful book on “The Deviant Moon Tarot”, by artist Patrick Valenza.

Look at nature! All nature loafs, while Man alone works for a living!

From: The DruidCraft Tarot

The Fool in the Tarot game is a return to childhood. My concept of The Peter Pan Project builds on this. And this is again connected to philosophy. Poetry, storytelling and philosophy melt together. If we take Wordsworth´s poem, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood", we can see how deeply imbued it is with a kind of natural Platonism. The poem begins with the famous lines:

Saint Lucy´s Day in the Mines of Thingbæk

The witch from Rold Forest, Dannie Druehyld.

From my Forest Diary:

December 9, 2019

I met Dannie Druehyld in her workshop, which is situated near the entrance to The Mines of Thingbæk (situated in Rold Forest, Denmark).

One Thousand Roads to Mecca

Bird Brain, by Lori Field

I was sitting in an old garden

in the Medina of Tangier.

Oh Birds, Let My Thoughts Follow You

“Hare in April”, by Catherine Hyde (the painting is from her book: The Hare and the Moon – A Calendar of Paintings)

It is morning

and I´m sitting in my chair.

The night has left

an imprint in my mind

of the moon´s mirror.

How to Heal Our Disconnection From Nature

Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter

In her elegiac essay "Into the Woods " poet and scholar Ruth Padel writes:

"What would Robin Hood have made of Country Life's recent excavation into the fantasies of British 7-to-14-year-olds concerning the wild life and wild places of their native land? Two thirds had no idea where acorns come from, most had never heard of gamekeepers (do they mug people or protect the Pokemons?), and most believed there were elephants and lions running round the English countryside. A third did not know why you had to keep gates shut -- was it to keep the elephants in (or was some joker taking the piss just then?), or stop cows 'sitting on cars,' upsetting the countryside's most vital beast -- the traffic?

The Connection Between Shamanic Healing and Creative Unfoldment (essay)

Epona, by Susan Seddon-Boulet

...

The Wound is the Place Where the Light Enters You

Rumi

…

In this essay I will present my ideas of the connection between shamanic healing and creative unfoldment. It is something I make aware of in my philosophical counseling practice, which I combine with forest therapy.

Seiðr Shamanism and the Art of Song Healing

Merlin, by Alan Lee

In Part One of this article, My Life as a Vagabond, I described how I began to use alcohol in order to calm down my kundalini symptoms. In Aalborg, in Denmark, and on vagabonding trips around the world, I actually lived more or less like a "Dharma Bum" for 10 years. The alcohol abuse ended with a liver disease, hospitalization, and a near-death experience.

Keepers of the Stories

Art by Kelly Louise Judd

Have you heard about the Keepers of the Stories?

On a Storyteller´s Night

The Star Fishers, by Jeanie Tomanek

"A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation. Even in silence we are living our stories."

Ben Okri (in Birds of Heaven)

You are lying in bed. You are ill with the modern illness, stress. The doctor has prescribed some pills. It is a summer night. The window is open. Outside is the garden. The curtains are moving.

The Quest for The Tangled Roots of Our Forests and Fairy Tales

"He Too Saw the Image in the Water" by Kay Nielsen (Kay Nielsen spend his last years in poverty since nobody was interested in his works)

In Gossip from the Forest: The Tangled Roots of Our Forests and Fairy Tales, Sara Maitland writes:

"I believe that the great stretches of forests in northern Europe, with their constant seasonal changes, their restricted views, their astonish biological diversity, their secret gifts and perils and the knowledge that you have to go through them to get anywhere else, created the themes and ethics of the fairy tales we know best. There are secrets, hidden identities, cunning disguises; there are rhythms of change like the changes of the seasons; there are characters, both human and animal, whose assistance can be earned or spurned; and there is -- over and over again -- the journey or quest, which leads first to knowledge and then to happiness. The forest is the place of trial in fairy stories, both dangerous and exciting. Coming to terms with the forest, surviving its terrors, utilising its gifts and gaining its help is the way to 'happy ever after.'”

Children, Wildlife, and the Art of Shapeshifting

Birdbrain, by Lori Field

Long ago the trees thought they were people.

Long ago the mountains thought they were people.
Long ago the animals thought they were people.
Someday they will say, long ago the humans thought
they were people.

Native storyteller Johnny Moses

In his novel, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, J.M. Barrie writes:

Storytelling as a Spiritual Exercise

by Carme Magem

In fact, it is only his body that lives and has its residence in the state; his soul, however, holds all this to be puny and meaningless, and contemptuously wanders all over the place, “under the earth,” as Pindar says, and measuring whatever is on its surface, and “above the heavens,” observing the stars, and in general thoroughly investigating the nature of everything that is, but without lowering itself to the level of any of the objects in its vicinity.

Plato, Theactetus, 173c (this is Plato´s description of the philosopher, which, probably with roots in facts, sounds like a description of a shaman. Philosopher in this sense, simply means what the word means: a lover of wisdom. But it also depicts the exercise of a storyteller. Modern philosophers are so removed from this, that it only is the name they have in common). 

Primordial Meditation and the Philosophical Diary

You have travelled through a dark forest for a long time. You are a wanderer who are on a quest after the secret of life. You enter an old Inn filled with mystical books. One of them catches your eyes. It is wrapped in leather and covered with dust. You open it. It is filled with blank pages. It is the book of yourself, it is the book with the history of your soul. But you must write it yourself. It is your philosophical diary. 

Counseling in the Mythic Forest of Rold

In the mythic woods of Rold Forest, far away from the artificial Matrix Conspiracy of the modern world, I offer Philosophical Counseling to people who are in a process of awakening from The Matrix Conspiracy, and its underlying occult structure, The Godgame; people who can become members of the resistance, people who can become "Countermatrix Hackers", or "Countermatrix Agents". 

Philosophy, Storytelling and Shamanic Healing

The Arabian Nights illustrated by Charles Folkard

The Thousand and One Night is not something which had died. It is a book so vast that it is not necessary to have read it, for it is a part of our memory – and also, now, a part of tonight.

Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights.

Philosophical counseling is about healing the Soul of Man. Therefore you can also call it spiritual healing. The essence of spiritual healing, in my context, is to discover, and especially, accept, your true creative calling in life. If you do this you will experience the enchantment of being helped by the spirits. The first step in this direction is help to become a life artist. All in all, I call my help guided primordial meditation, a return to the Source of consciousness, which again is a return to the Source of nature.

Witchcraft, Shamanism and Storytelling

The Storyteller, by Josephine Wall

Mother Earth is a concept which witches and shamans are working with. They feel at home on Mother Earth. To get into the philosophy of Mother Earth it would be a good idea to read literature on witches and shamans. A good beginning for studying witches is Erica Jong´s wonderful book Witches. In this book you will find a lot of references to further reading on the subject, as for example Margot Adler´s book Drawing Down the Moon, and Margaret Murray´s The Witch-cult in Western Europe and The God of the Witches.