A Night Religion
Loving
I’ve been reading tarot for over thirty years. I began learning to read them as a teen, so I have lived my adult life alongside this complex system of divination. I have learned to communicate with an Otherworld of spirits. Over time, this has changed my belief system, and I have learned a beautiful pagan religion from working with the tarot.
I have learned that the thing the spirit world most values, is love.
Time and time again, the cards have told me that one of the most important things in this life is how we treat the people close to us. This is fact is the main message I have gotten in my thirty years of reading cards. Being loving is so important.
Specifically. The cards tell me that the gods are really, really interested in how we treat our loved ones. How we treat the people closest to us is the most important way we are judged throughout our life.
They explained love to me. They say Love is a feeling, but it is also a living being. This is a constant paradox of the divine, that these emotions can sincerely be a part of our being, and at the same time, a conscious being who is a higher power.
When you have a close relationship with another person, a little piece of Love comes and is with you when you’re together. This drop of love is like a smaller spirit, or a fractal, of love. The best way to imagine this living creature is to think about it like it’s a nice little plant. Think about a cute little tree growing in a pot. This is your bit of love that has come to be in your life, and the two people in the relationship tend the tree together.
You have to take good care of the little tree, or it will die.
Every time you’re mean to the one you love, you’re ripping the leaves off the little plant, breaking the branches. Love is tough, and it can heal, but if you cause too much damage, too many times, the little plant will die. If you don’t feed it some water and food at least once in awhile, it will dry up and be gone. Don’t scream at your loved ones because you had a bad day. If you mess up, apologize.
If both partners work together to care for the tree, it will grow, and become strong and good.
My tarot cards tell me that the gods are extremely interested in our relationships. The gods are so interested in how we treat our loved ones, that they spend considerable time and effort, arranging situations in our lives to bring us together with certain people. They bring us each other as a gift, but also as a test. And they do excel at this type of manipulation. It fascinates me to see the amount of effort the universe seems to put into our lives.
The most important times in our lives are the worst times in our lives. There are multiple reasons for the trying times in our lives, but definitely one to them is to see how we will treat our partners and families when the chips are down. The powers-that-be learn a lot about us from studying us in our relationships.
They are really, really unimpressed when we take our frustrations out on our loved ones. In fact it seems they’re waiting around to see if that’s what we will do.
They don’t like to see those relationships where people takes all their problems out on their partner. Instead of treating their loved one the best, they treat the person they’re intimate with the worst of all. They feel comfortable with that person, and feel comfortable taking their feelings out on their partner, because they feel safe with them. They feel they can treat their partner how ever they want, and it doesn’t matter, because they already have the person. Well, I think it actually does. Hurting someone because you can is the worst of transgressions. Abuse in relationships is totally disrespectful to Love and Love is a power of its own.
If you can’t treat that gift right, why should they give you anything? How can the universe trust you, if the person you’re supposed to be closest to can’t trust you? How can They work with you?
They say, whatever else you’ve done in your life, you can immediately begin making it better by being kind to the people you’re closest to. Learn from your mistakes, you will be rewarded for doing so. Close relationships are important gifts.
The pagan god’s message isn’t one of just kindness across the board for everyone from everyone. The divine would be super impressed with that, but they seem to accept that that isn’t human nature at this time. They have shown me that they are most concerned with our intimate relationships. I think because the casual relationships are pretty random. In contrast there is a high amount of effort put into bringing together love matches and child-parent relationships. Pre-life planning, and multiple life lines and family lines have to be carefully draped together. These are on-going stories that the powers-that-be are highly invested in, and interested in.
It is better, should you receive the gift of this little tree of love, to respect it and try to care for it. It can grow into a mighty tree that will bring stability and strength to your life over time. If you are kind to your loved ones, and they are kind to you, you build that perfect rust into your life. That is something to have that no external event can take away from you. Even if your loved one is taken from you, you can look back with contentment knowing you were as good as you could be for them, and you made their life better. Sometimes in life, that’s all you will have.
They say Love is old. I don’t know if it’s a god, or one of the forces that make up the Universe. But because it is original, and archetypal, it is not completely of our world. For Love to be here it needs places to manifest in our world. Every place where people love and care for each other is a place for love to be present here on earth. They say they can see the homes where love is present from the Underworld, they look like little blue candle lights.
Love needs a place to be to be here.
Because of their longer time scale, the gods watch as the little blue lights flicker into being, and then die out. Our human loves stories are as ephemeral as the flowers, and sometimes the Gods want to help preserve it a little longer. It is beautiful for them to see, it makes a pretty song and a sweet essence that they linger over, the way we would a beautiful garden. Caring for the love in your life stabilizes your life and preserves the good in it. Love attracts the forces of preservation.
That is another thing that they have told me about love. Because it is eternal in and of itself, because it’s almost an element of its own, it has an unknown power in our world. If you have created a place for love in life, and you have the force with you when you are with your loved ones, it creates the effect of having a guardian. Love can be powerful and is corrosive and it can eat through problems that might stop up your life.
They have told me that love is the gold of the underworld. It is one of the few things you can take with you.
When you take love seriously, and take good care of the people you’re with, you build up credit in the afterlife. If you treat the people They gave you shitty, then the gods will remember that when it’s time to decide what gifts to send you into the world with next time. They’ll take you less seriously, be more impatient and less thoughtful with you.You just won’t be as valuable to them. And you won’t have so many tokens in your little box to procure good symmetries for the next life ahead. Obversely, if you were sweet to your family, they will be more likely to enjoy their time with you, and spend more time selecting the perfect things for your next life and finding you little extras. It’s your choice. There will never be any coercion from the gods or the Universe regarding our choices, our consciousness possesses complete free will in how it choses to conduct itself.
They really, really want us to love each other, and treat each other well. If we can’t do that, the least we can do is to pretty much leave each other alone. We need to leave space for others to love in their own way. Know that the gods think it’s very important for us to be good to each other and they bring it up constantly. The gods love love.
Our culture is fixated on romance, which even seems to take the place of ordinary love. Romance claims to be about the most important love of all, “true love” and to depict the most desirable event in life, that swooping feeling of falling in love, two people at the same time for each other. Some historian even say that Western European culture invented romance, while other historians say those first historians are jerks. In our culture the “cult” of romance began in the late 11th century with the troubadours and trobairitz in southern Europe. It’s worth noting, if you’re interested in astrology, that in the year 1200 Pluto in Cancer was trine Neptune in Pisces. Cosmic love magic was in the air. In southern Europe poems of tragic courtly love were wildly popular and were sung in the streets. The cult the cult of Christian mother-goddess Mary exploded in popularity. In the north myths and fairytales combined with christian mythology to create romantic tales about saintly knights rescuing bewitched fair maidens from creepy old castles in the woods. The The Black Plague put an end to all this pretty nonsense, but it never really went away, and romance continues to be a popular theme.
This romantic theme must be important. So many people have put so much time and energy into these ideas for such a long time.
I’m at the age when me and most of my friends are long settled into relationships. Certainly when we were younger the cards were more full of romance, or the torture that came from all that. And honestly, I always thought all that dating and roses shit was all fake, preferring simply to fall out of a tree and land on a boy.
The gods seem to emphasis how we treat people in ordinary situations. What’s most important to them is how we treat the people close to us when the chips are down. So what’s this whole romance love theme?
I think all this romance business is actually depicting the archetype of choice. That could be why these stories frequently feature adolescents or late adolescence, because that is the time in our lives when we first begin to really exercise choice. After all, choosing our partners is one of the most impactful things we do in life. How we go about doing this says alot about how we make choices in general.
The Lovers card in the older tarot decks traditionally depict four figures. Many modern decks only show three, the two Lovers and an angel or celebrating object. I think these cards have literalize the symbolism here, and made The Lovers card more about partnering. The very Christian society that gave rise to tarot (16th century) saw romantic love in a very negative light. This card seems to depict the dueling desires in the young man. His heart tempts him to the young girl, but the matronly women reminds that society expects him to come take his place, and leave his choice of partner to his wiser elders.
There is a useful concept in Jungian thought that doesn’t seem to be as popular as it deserves. Jung introduce or uncovered the ideas of anima and animus. Jung proposed that there was in each of our psyches powerful and potent creatures of the opposite sex. He names the main parts of the psyche thus the ego, the shadow, the animus/anima and the various fields of unconsciousness. He claimed that each of us have this person of the opposite sex inside of us, and that figure is full of magic and able to motivate us very much, though we might not be aware of it.
The young man with his shining image of a perfect young woman inside of him, and the young lady with her perfect boy.
It seems that when we come of that age, the anima/animus wakes up, and we seek this potent being in a member of the opposite sex, or project it onto them. We throw a glamour onto our boo, and then have a hard time perceiving the real person.
I believe that the ideals and processes involved in “romance” have more to do with the beginning of maturation, rather than choosing a life partner. All these lovers star-crossed are the young adult feeling the first tensions between the desires and the expectations of society, something that is definitely a theme throughout adult lives. These young relationships, if they happen, are important learning experiences that help us choose our later life partners, once we’re ready for that.
Because of the youth and inexperience of the partners, I don’t believe they fall into the same category as later relationships. Of course, we should always be kind to the ones we’re close to, but young people just aren’t as liable for their behavior as adults are. Young relationships are more about the young people exploring their own identities in civil society, rather than truly relating selflessly and responsibly to another person. These feelings are full of magic that is important for these young Selves stepping over the threshold of childhood and establishing themselves in the World. They are in the passage.
I try and help the young people in my life have perspective on their dating life. I remind them that they’re young, and it should be a fun time for them. They don’t have kids, and cars and houses and jobs, so their relationships should be lighthearted and exploratory. It shouldn’t be a burden. I feel bad for the ones that hook up at the age of sixteen and then start fighting like they’re married. Or people just out of high school who spend all their time watching movies with and guarding their partners on the couch. Go live! You can mate later, there’s plenty of time.
It truly seems like the time between the teens and the late 20’s is a time meant for us to explore and try things out, find things in the world meant for us, and have experiences. So we don’t have to take our earlier romances too seriously. You’re sad when you break up with your boyfriend when you’re seventeen. But you’re like a puppy. You don’t possess true emotions yet, and there’s always more treats to find in the grass…so you move along. It’s those relationships you have in your late twenties that really start to hit home. Usually in the mid-twenties, you enter into more serious, and longer relationships. These are when the break-ups really start to hurt. And these are the important relationship lessons that you take with you into your adult life. These are the boyfriends you talk to your husbands about, explaining all your bad choices, and the mutual bad behavior, and the things you learned. The sad reality for those that preach marriage before sex and encourage young marriage, is that these relationships have a much higher chance of breaking up than do ones begun by older children.
The Saturn return is a big important relationship time. Saturn returns to the degree it was at when you are born, and this is a huge deal it turns out. It seems like the first Saturn Return is a classic time for people to meet up with their life partners and find their place in the world.
The Saturn Return happens to every one of us sometime between the ages of 28 to 31. It is the time of choosing, when you start to feel life tugging at your sleeve. And even if you decide not to decide, it doesn’t matter a whit, you are now formed into an adult. Your adult life is going to take form not, with or without a partner, with or without a career. Now it’s time to do the work. Loving the people we’ve gathered around us is a very important part of that work.
Saturn isn’t traditionally thought of as a love planet. It’s defiantly not the romance planet. But Saturn is about responsibility and stability and that’s what it takes to make a safe place for an amazing love to be in your life. You have to be emotionally responsible and stable, and be able to accept the real truth about your loved ones, not seeing them through a misty veil of fantasy, or the glowing projections of adolescence. You need that wisdom you’ve gained to find a proper mate for yourself. For most of the people I know, their true love seems to be more of a surprise than anything else. “He wasn’t my type,” they exclaim, “but once I got to know him.”
It makes sense, The Saturn Return is about the first coalescence of life wisdom, and it takes maturity and experience to be able to recognize when you’re trying falling in love with someone, and you understand what you need from a partner.
A fun astrologer I like on youtube, Alyssa Sharpe has a video called Jupiter and Jupiter, Twin Flames, that has some really interesting content about how the planet Jupiter in your chart describes some of the attributes of your marriage partner.
Venus is the planet traditionally associated with love and romance.
Transits to the planet Venus in our charts can be times we reevaluate choices we made in the past or experience challenges to test the strength and vitality of our existing relationships. Transits to Venus can be implicated in the forming of important relationships, but it’s not a hard and fast rule that there must be Venus transits for a relationship to happen.
Astrologers seem to have a hard time describing what Venus does in our astrology charts. They say that Venus describes love, pleasure and romance in our charts. I know plenty of people that don’t go around thinking about romance on a daily basis, yet Venus is one of the inner planets. The inner planets are important because they describe how the basic parts of our psyche operate. I think that the planet Venus describes our decision-making process. Maybe you have Venus in Aries, and you make your decisions hastily, maybe you have Saturn opposite Venus, and you either make the most irresponsible decision possible, or decide to totally sacrifice yourself, and can’t find a happy medium.
Planets or no planets, relationships are important how we treat the people close to us can make or break our life, perhaps even beyond death.
There’s no situation that can’t be improved by being kind to the ones your supposed to love. And if kindness isn’t possible, then maybe you should go. Save yourself for love another day.
One of the things the gods like about close loving relationships, is how they make us grow. It makes their job easier. The gods have to make us learn. When we’re in a close, loving relationship, we learn from each other. You will improve yourself over time, to treat you partner better, and to understand yourself better so you can be that good love.
Love is a gift.
For it to be real, it has to be wild, and it has to be offered to you by life. I know wild love coming out of the blue, with someone you would have never thought to pick, is some people’s nightmare. But it seems we can’t even stay in relationship that we entered into without good intentions. People get into relationships with each other under all kinds of pretexts, but they don’t seem to work. If that special, extra something isn’t there, it can be pretty hard to keep getting along day in and day out. Once you’ve been in a relationship after the love has left, you’ll never forget that feeling of living the wrong life.
I take this as my main proof that love is a living force of it’s own, outside of our control.
If you make a good decision in the first place, your relationships can last a long time, and it is much easier to treat you partner well if you’re with the right partner. Chose to have faith in Love’s wisdom.
There are different types of relationships that are important.
One thing we forget to consider seems to be our relationship with ourselves. This is an important relationship too. Many times we use, abuse and throw ourselves under the bus, and don’t even really notice. Our relationship with ourselves is important too. You are responsible for yourself as an entity. We are have within us strengths the world needs. We are each given a portion of power that is ours to use and to safeguard. They do like when we disrespect the gift of the Self.
I have noticed that the most narcissistic people, who seem to do everything they do to aggrandize themselves, are the ones who actually treat themselves the worst. They ruin their lives and make themselves miserable by destroying all their relationships and driving everyone who could have loved them away.
This is a relationship that can take time to develop, and you can fuck it up to. It seems this is a big part of the teenager years, just starting to get to know yourself, and young people are often very, very hard on themselves. They will frequently betray themselves for someone of the opposite sex, or their peers or for attention or love. If you have a young adult in your life, encourage them to have a good relationship with themselves.
Learn to be kind to yourself, and choose a good life for yourself. If you’re happy or at least can be happy sometimes, it’s much easier to treat the people in your life the way you really want.
Another important relationship I was unaware of is the ancestors. I’m just some white girl from the suburbs, I didn’t even know I had ancestors.
My tarot cards started talking about them. I would pull a card, and be puzzled. Why are all these dead people waving at me? The cards would be saying my ancestors, my family group, was happy with something I was doing. They were proud. I still have so many questions about this. I try and picture them, little old Irish ladies all bent over wiping off someone else’s kitchen counter everyday? The brick-hove carrying the bricks up the ladder on his back to built another layer of Philadelphia? The Jewish family escaping some shitty part of Europe and coming into the New York harbor on a big boat one fine morning? I don’t feel like they would approve of my modern self. But who knows? It’s something to consider. Maybe we all do have ancestors that are with us, and we can build on these relationships, and receive love and support from beyond the grave. Many traditions include pictures of elders or ancestors on alters. Others find their own ancestors troubling, and choose other groups of ancient people or persons to connect with as ancestors.
We also have some sort of relationship with the divine, whether we pick it up and do anything with it or not.
Marshal Shalins is the famous anthropologist who published the study saying that Paleolithic people actually had a chill life, and that surviving in the wild for humans took less hours and stress than your corporate job does. He wrote one last book before he died, called The New Science of the Enchanted Universe. He said that if we don’t believe in the gods, we’re just being snobby white colonist anthropologists. If you take the testimony of the whole human race, from forever, the gods are real.
Our relationship with the divine is a very powerful relationship. You’re leaving a lot of energy and connection on the table without having some personal way to connect with a divine being. I think we need to update our idea of the divine. Christianity has really turned off alot of people to organized religion. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have your own personal relationship with some divine force. That’s one of the main difference between paganism and christianity, is that in the pagan religion, it’s acceptable to have your own relationship with the divine forces of the universe, without intermediaries such as priests or pastors.
The idea of gods needing worship is outdated. It makes more sense to consider our connection with the divine as another type of relationship. A relationships with the gods or a god can be another avenue for love and support to enter your life.
I don’t think we need to worship them. I think it makes more sense to consider it relational. The divine can be anything you want it to be. And it will always love you and be there for you.
Outside of the divine, there is another force you can have a relationship with, and that is the life force itself. Some people seem to just hate life! They want to control it. Life has a mind of it’s own, and it can just slip through our fingers. The more we try and control it, the more it leaks away, until we’re in a dry harsh place, on a strange planet.
Life itself needs love. It is the precious force, scattered throughout our universe, looking for a place to blossom. It is sacred, and we should adore it’s preciousness.
If you’re currently without a loved one, please just consider it a phase. Of course you’re fabulous, you will meet your one at the proper time. If the one that’s right for you isn’t available, it’s better to wait until they are, then tangle up yourself and your life with pointless relationships. You want to be available when the proper one arrives.
Sometimes a persistent lack of relationship seems to indicate a mild and subtle sin, such as being too unbending, or a secret arrogance or even just overthinking. Maybe improving your relationship with yourself is the first step.
An excellent approach to the idea of love, or to make yourself receptive to love is a posture of humbleness and gratitude…. Love is a wonder.
If you don’t have someone to lavish your love on, get a pet or a plant for practice. There’s always someone to need you. Make a good place in the world.
And I wonder if some old myths and fairytales don’t reveal another form of enlightenment. Maybe romance really is magic.
Maybe the true gift, the happily ever after fairytale ending, is in the old stories about old couples that loved each other so much that the gods turned them into two trees, or a pair of dragons, or stars. The reward of eternity. Maybe that is the European pagan version of enlightenment. If we’re SO good to each other, we can become cupbearers at the god’s parties and stay young and hot together forever in the OtherWorld.
A science editor named John Brockman made a practice of picking a question each year, and asking scientist to answer it. They are called the Edge Questions. In 2005 Mr. Brockman asked scientists the question, what is one thing you believe in that you can’t prove? He asked psychologist David M. Buss this question, and this was his answer.
“I’ve spent two decades of my professional life studying human mating. In that time, I’ve documented phenomena ranging from what men and women desire in a mate to the most diabolical forms of sexual treachery. I’ve discovered the astonishingly creative ways in which men and women deceive and manipulate each other. I’ve studied mate poachers, obsessed stalkers, sexual predators, and spouse murderers. But throughout this exploration of the dark dimensions of human mating, I’ve remained unwavering in my belief in true love.
While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many—the mesmerizing attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, profound self-sacrifice, and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It’s difficult to define, eludes modern measurement, and seems scientifically wooly. But I know true love exists. I just can’t prove it.”
I think there’s a destiny magic element to falling in love, really falling in love. It’s so beautiful and terrifying, there’s nothing like it. When you get a chance to meet, under totally proper circumstance, someone you have instant emotional intimacy with, that is a magic gift. It’s an experience we receive as a gift from life. True love is a gift from the gods
Love can protect our souls from evil. When we love someone as best as we can, it creates an indivisible thread between us and our partners. A quantum entanglement of the heart lasts through time and chaos. This type of love gives us the ability to face everything life brings to us.
Love is power. Power isn’t something you hoard, or even command. Love is a force of it’s own, and more rightly we provide a place and a time for its power to act through us, than it does what we want. Provide a place for love to be, and let its power act on our world.
They can never take what we truly have.
Books!
The New Science Of The Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity Marshall Sahlins Princeton University Press 2023
Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives Michael Newton Llewellyn 1994
The Interpretation of Fairytales Marie-Louise Von Franz Shambhala 1996
Relating: An Astrological Guide To Living With Others On A Small Planet Liz Greene Weiser 1978
edge.org