Tag: faith

Bits of Fun

Holiday Tarot Readings!

CassMorrisWrites

IMG_2502I had so much fun doing single-card tarot readings on twitter the other night that I’ve decided to expand the practice and perhaps get a little extra gift-buying money from it!

I’m offering tarot readings for $5 to $15, depending on the reading. Simply use this form to tell me which reading you want, what deck you’d like me to use, and if there’s any particular question or topic you have in mind, and I’ll send you a PDF with a picture of the reading and a write-up interpreting the cards in their positions. For an extra $5, I’ll record myself doing the reading and send you the video. Payments will go through Paypal!

You can order a reading for yourself or for someone else. Heck, I’ll read for fictional characters if you want me to. 😉 Let’s have some fun!

Readings on Offer

Past-Present-Future ($5): What it says on the tin. Three cards, one representing an aspect of the past that’s currently influencing you, one representing where you are now, and one representing where you might be headed or where you might want to aim your efforts.

Five Card Draw ($8): Five cards that I’ll let tell me their story. It might be a central figure or situation with four influences; it might be a decision and its repercussions; it might be a sequential story.

Solstice Reading ($10): A seven-card spread themed around the turning of the year, looking at what you need to release, what you need to nurture, what should lay fallow in the dark season, what might bring you light, what you might give or receive, and a look at aspirations for the coming year.

Celtic Cross ($15): A ten-card spread that gives a comprehensive view of your current situation in life, looking at past influences, future possibilities, what might be blocking or inhibiting you, where you could look for help, and what sort of outcome you might want to aim for.

Standard disclaimer: Tarot readings are for entertainment purposes only and should not be taken as any sort of guarantee as to what will happen in your future. I think of them as meditative and therapeutic — a way of focusing your energy and reflecting on your life and the people and situations in it.

My Decks:

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  • The Shadowscapes deck is my current favorite. The art is gorgeous; the deck itself can be a bit cheeky.
  • The Celtic Dragon deck is one I used for a long time. I find its art highly evocative. It has an unusual variation in that it associates Swords with Fire and Wands with Air, instead of the other way around as is typical.
  • The Steampunk deck tends to be pragmatic and a bit blunt.
  • The Goddess Oracle tends to be gentler; its Major Arcana cards associate to various deities, so there’s a lot to read into there.
  • The Medieval Scapini deck is the most traditional deck that I own; I find it useful for focusing energy.

Interested? Fill out this form!

General

“What don’t die can’t live. What don’t live can’t change. What don’t change can’t learn.”

CassMorrisWrites

I told one of my best friends earlier today, I feel like we’ve lost an Elder. He agreed.

It doesn’t much matter what “we” I’m talking about there. We, writers. We, readers. We, lovers of fantasy. We, admirers of satire. We, thinking observers of this mad world we inhabit. We, humans, who feel and dream and want.

Sir TerrySir Terry Pratchett wasn’t just a superb novelist and an incisive satirist — He was a writer-philosopher who shaped an incredible part of my worldview. His passing was not unexpected, given his long struggle, but it’s still heartbreaking. And, as Neil Gaiman noted in the last thing he wrote about his friend, back last fall, it’s also enraging. It makes you want to scream against the essential unfairness of the universe.

But, of course, he had a lot to say about precisely that.

Pratchett’s books can speak to nearly everyone — everyone willing to open up a bit and listen, I think, and they tend to eviscerate precisely the sort of people who won’t — and, like all great works, I think you get something slightly different out of them depending on who you come to them as. Personally, I come to them as an educated woman (hence a lot of affinity for Susan: “Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on”) and as a pagan (it should come as absolutely no surprise that the Witches of Lancre are my favorite sub-series). A pagan, moreover, who’s cobbled her faith together out of the scraps of a dozen others, her own inclinations, and the works of modern philosophers like Terry Pratchett.

The thing is, when you tell people that you’ve constructed part of your faith out of fantasy novels, they do tend to react like you’re a bit daft. I think this is foolish for two reasons. The first is that “fantasy novel” is often just a matter of where you’re standing, and (setting aside entirely the once-prominent faiths that we now dismiss as mythology, which we categorize as a subset of, yes, fantasy) a large chunk of the world now bases its beliefs on a book that contains, among other things, prophecies, angels, demi-gods, chimaeras, magic staves, necromancy, and a dragon. So. Y’know. Judge not.

The other is that it’s just silly to dismiss brilliant thought simply because of the cover it’s wrapped in or the shelf it sits on. The mirror that Pratchett held up to our nature might have been thieved from a funhouse, but that just gave him more license to show us ourselves writ large: our triumphs and our failures, our absurdities and our poignancy. I challenge anyone to read Hogfather without finding themselves deeply considering what it is to be human, what fundamental element of our imaginative capacity separates us from other beasts. I challenge anyone to read Witches Abroad without thinking about self-determination and the importance, and the dangers, of writing your own story. And by all means, try to get through Small Gods without questioning everything you’ve been taught about religion in general.

Pratchett was Shakespearean in many ways, but, as someone pointed out earlier today, one of them was you can express cosmic truths, you can fillet open the heart of humanity and lay bare its secrets, and still be hilariously funny at the same time.

Discworld1

He said so much and so well about belief, about imagination, about the magic we make in our own heads, about the power of words. Of course those words seeped into my own philosophy, my own ideas on faith and what makes life as a human worth living.

On Twitter this morning, Connor remarked that nearly everyone he knows has not just a favorite Pratchett book, but a favorite Pratchett character — more than a favorite, a near-avatar, someone who resonated with them in a special way, someone they saw themselves in, glories and flaws together. I told him that if I grow into one-tenth of someone who’s midway between Esme and Gytha, I’ll have done well.

But if I grow into a writer with one-tenth the incisiveness, one-tenth the felicity of expression, one-tenth the soul of Terry Pratchett — if I can somehow touch the tiniest fraction of the people he’s reached and will continue to reach through his brilliant words — well, that would be more than I feel fair to ask for in this lifetime.

Thank you, Sir. May you find the peace of your choosing on the other side of those black sands.