A Night Religion
Loving
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. Love is so important.
Specifically. The cards tell me that the gods are really, really interested in how we treat our loved ones.
They explained love to me. They say love is a living being. And love is a gift. You don’t decide to fall in love, not for-real fall in love. Love comes out of the universe and is suddenly in your life. The gods of love seem to decide who, where and when.
When you have a romantic relationship with another person, it’s like a little piece of love comes and is with you when you’re together. This drop of love is like a smaller spirit, or fractal, of love. They said the best way to imagine this living creature is to think about it like it’s a plant. Think about a cute little tree growing in a pot. 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.
The cards have told me that 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 test us. Usually 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. 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 we do.
They don’t like to see those relationships where people takes all their problems out on their partner. Instead of treating that person the best, they treat the person they’re intimate with the worst. They feel comfortable with that person, and maybe have them in a position, and they feel they can treat their partner how ever they want. This is the worst transgression, especially if the relationship is with a truly dependent person. Abuse in relationships is totally disrespectful to love. If you can’t treat that gift right, why should they give you anything?
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.
Their message is never one of just kindness across the board for everyone. Yes, that would be ideal. But they seem to accept that that isn’t human nature. 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, that is something to have that no external event can take away from you. Sometimes in life, that’s all you 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’s not 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 little blue candle light in the Otherworld. 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.
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 it’s 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, you basically have a guardian with you. Love can be powerful and 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. 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. And you won’t have so many tokens in your little box to procure pleasantries for the 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. The thing about the underworld is there’s no lies. There’s total clarity and free will in the time between lives.
There is something else that I am just starting to cotton onto. I’ve seen it in the cards a few times… It doesn’t seem like many entities can go between the Otherworld and our world. We go back and forth. But we don’t really have control of that. Death is one who can. And I think Mercury is another. In any case, it seems like sometimes Someone is there to watch us.
It’s not all the time. Death is the messenger, and he is a guide. But I think also one of his jobs is to observe us. He just steps into the world and stands in the corner, and he watches what we do.
I think this accounts for life’s sometimes strange differentiation of effect. Sometimes you can try and try to do something, or get something done, and it’s like trying to move a mountain. It just won’t go. Other times, you do/say one little thing, and your life does a 180, and then a 360? It’s strange. Did you ever say something and your voice unexpectedly rang out? We say the word and they hear it. Our lives starts to change from that moment on.
Watch what you say to your family. Sometimes the things you say can come to life in unexpected ways.
It does make sense. How can they trust and work with us if our fellows can’t?
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. I’m not sure of the why all and whereas of this, I just know that they seem to think it’s very important and they bring it up constantly. The gods love love.
Our culture is fixated on romance, which even seems to take the place of love. Romance claims to be about the most important love of all, “true love” and to depict the most desirable event in life, the swooping 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. Sung poems of tragic courtly love were wildly popular, as was the cult of Christian mother-goddess Mary. The Black Plague put an end to all this pretty nonsense, but it never really went away.
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 personally haven’t seen much interest in romance from the cards I draw. 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. So what do we do with THE love theme when the gods only in seem interested in the long-term of the relationship, or how to do the happily ever after? Such a persistent theme must have some importance.
I think all this romantic love 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 exercise choice.
Venus is the planet traditionally associated with love. Love stories, myths and tales typify the process of choosing. I think the Planet Venus in our charts describes how we go about making our choices in life.
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 literalized 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.
It’s the same root problem. Adolescents trying to make life choices and everyone around them is just freaking out because they’re doing it. Hahaha.
I need more samples in my study, but it seems to me that phenomenon of “first love” involves the Sun and Moon alot more than other kinds of relationships, or later romantic relationships. It seems like I see these special first romances having the couple sharing signs in the Lights. My first love’s Moon was in the opposite sign as mine, and his Sun was in the opposite sign as mine. I’ve seen where the one is a Libra Sun and the other a Libra Moon, or same but in Gemini.
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. Must be the names, we need more appealing names for these concepts… anyways. 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. Hence the mirroring in the signs of the Sun and Moon in these young couples.
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 defiantly a theme throughout adult lives. These young relationships, if they happen, are important learning experiences that help us choose our 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.
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 twelve 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 partners and their place in the world.
This 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.”
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 nightmares. But it seems we can’t even stay in relationships that we entered into with good intentions if that special, extra something isn’t there. 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.
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. I don’t have much time for youtube, but I do like her videos for learning new astrology.
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.
But planets or no planets, how we go ahead and treat theses people is entirely up to us in the moment, and is really, really important. If you can’t do anything else, be nice to your kids, they need you.
There’s no situation that can’t be improved by being kind to the ones your supposed to love. And if kindest isn’t possible, then maybe you should go. Save yourself for love another day.
One thing we often miss out on noticing or considering 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 given a portion of power that is ours to use and to safegaurd. They do like when we disresepct the gift of the self.
I have noticed that the most narcisstic 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 throw themselves right under the bus for soeone of the opposite sex, or for attention or love. Maybe after the Saturn Return, we get better at this too. Learn to be kind, 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 to.
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.
The 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, subtly part of us.
Speaking of the ancestors, there seems to be one that we all have in common. The Queen Mother of the Underworld. She is an old goddess, and I think one of the ones that was most firmly stomped out by the patriacarc, old testament religions. But She just keeps popping up, becuase She is real. The Mother is the one our souls go to when we die. There’s been as many ideas about death and the afterlife as there’s been cultures. But on very common theme is the Underworld, and that’s definatly one that western culture has lost to Christianity. Some believed, and I do too, that there is a welcoming mother goddess in the Underworld, and she is the one capable of loving every soul, no matter how crusty and misbegotten. I belive presents in our world through many goddesses worldwide, espeically merciful mother goddess types, such as the Catholic Mary, and Yuan Yin from asian culture, and of course Santa Meruete, who is the patron of theives and murders becuase of her love for all of her children. Unconditional love has to come from somewhere in the Universe, and the Queen Mother of the Dead is there for all of us.
She is coming into american culture now. The gods live in the images we love and share and collect as much as in our ideals or practives. My celtic ancestory is relflected with our perennial fasination with fairies, sprites, mist, knights, castles and swords. Santa Muerte is assocatied with sugar skulls and that particule style of painting faces in the semetrical black and white patterns reflecting a skull look. Tell me those things aren’t becoming more popular and common than they were ten years ago. It wasn’t around at all when I was a kid, and now it’s everywhere at Halloween. Holy Deth has come to be with us, and I submit that america’s premiere up and coming goddess stands for the love we’ll all inevitably meet when we finally go to our home in the other world. I think we need her!
If you’re without a loved one, please 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 lack of relationship seems to indicate a mild and suble sin, such as being too unbending, or secret arrogance or even just overthinking. Stay a bit primitive. 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. There’s always someone to need you. Make a good place in the world.
The cards tell me that loving connections and relationships are the gold of the Underworld.
Love is one of the few things you can take with you. The loving emotional connection is like some sort of quantum entanglement of the soul. As long as the love is strong, you will always be drawn together. I think relationships can last for thousands of years.
My friendships are the reason I personally believe in reincarnation. In my life I’ve been lucky enough to make amazing friends. When you meet someone and it just clicks, you’re so comfortable with them so soon… It’s like you’ve know them forever, you know them, you just understand how they are. I think I’ve been friends with some of my friends forever.
But the other thing is that being loving and caring towards your family and friends builds you good credit. The gods smile on that sort of behavior. The gods like for us to be trustworthy. They’re trying to work with us, and they need us to cooperate for things to work out. For example, if they have a soul that needs a certain kind of care, and they know that you are capable to providing that particular kind of care, and that you will do a full job, they can put that soul with you. These stories need to work. There’s places in the story too, for people who backstab, turn on dime and can’t hold even an ounce of negative feeling…but. They need people to build with.
The other thing about our partnering that the gods like is that we tend to advance spiritually when we’re together. We become better because we care for each other. If you hurt your partner, you feel bad, and then you try to understand what you did, and try and change yourself. We grow more fine together, if things are right.
And I wonder if some old myths and fairytales don’t reveal another form of enlightenment. Maybe romance really is magic.
All the old stories about old couples that loved each other so much that the gods turned them into a pair of trees, or an old pair of guardian dragons, or a pair of stars. The reward of eternity. Maybe that’s the European pagan version of enlightenment. If we’re SO good we can become cupbearers at the god’s parties and stay young and hot together forever in the OtherWorld.
And I’m starting to think that true love and romance can be a reward. I science editor named John Brockman is going around asking scientist, what is the one thing you believe but you can’t prove. They are called the Edge Questions. In 2005 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. I think that’s something that is arranged for you if you’ve been particularly awesome. True love is a gift from the gods.