Perhaps Dion Fortune’s definition is the most quoted: magic is changing consciousness in conformity with will. Will is intention, choice, conscious determination; it is goal-setting and task lists; it is knowing the desired destination. When we know where we want to go, we can confidently step onto the express rather than suffering through the stuttering stops and starts of the local. Magic simplifies and streamlines our life. Magic lets us take control.

The ritual work in the ceremonial magic tradition is structured around the idea of taking the active role in the creation of our reality. Every specified movement, precise gesture and clearly enunciated word reminds us of the value of purpose. But daily repetition of these highly willful acts can get too yang for me, and then I yearn for the solace of surrender. I stop creating myself and offer myself up to be created. I long to receive the Divine.

The root of the word kabbalah means to receive. Many ceremonial rituals are designed around kabbalistic symbolism. Like the Hierophant in the tarot deck, all of our dogmatically designed and perfectly performed rituals are only shells – empty structures waiting to be filled with the inspiration of the creative spark. But how do we open the door to the Divine?

When our will is to receive, our rituals take on new meaning. We no longer visualize the occult symbols drawn in air, we bask in their ethereal light. We no longer walk the specified path, we enter the flowing current. We no longer vibrate the names of power, the words form us. When our will is to receive, we unite the yang of heaven and the yin of earth, and in that creative conjunction we are reborn as divine beings.

Like the Hierophant teaches us, repetition is the key to receiving the influx of the sacred into our profane, earth-bound rituals. When I first began exploring ritual magic on my own about four years ago, I started doing the Middle Pillar, a ritual based on the five spheres that comprise the central column of the kabbalistic Tree of Life. I remember heaving a sigh and thinking, I don’t want to have to vibrate each god name four times. It takes so much energy. It’s exhausting. Can’t I do each one just once? And at times I’d do it once, at times I’d dutifully count to four, and once in a while I’d lose count, then stumble on to the next name wondering if I’d done it right.

The ritual worked its magic on me despite my ineptitude, and I felt the energy centers in my body begin to glow. I began to experience the astonishing joy of Divine Love through the activation of the heart center at Tiphareth. And since it had done its job, the ritual slowly fell by the wayside, and I stopped feeling the duty of having to forcefully vibrate those god names.

In March of this year, I was initiated into the degree associated with the element air – symbolic of thoughts, breath, and words – and the planet the Moon – reflective and receptive. Within two weeks, I became friends with someone who specialized in Sanskrit mantra meditation and we meditated together several times. During that time, a Reiki group of which I had been a member for a couple years started offering sessions in which we would chant each of the four Reiki mantras for ten or fifteen minutes apiece. These experiences re-ignited my passion for the repetition of the god names of the Middle Pillar, and I renewed my practice of this ritual, but with a much different focus. My goal now was to lose myself in the emptiness of repetition. Using a timer, I would spend ten minutes on each of the five god names. A far cry from dragging my heels at having to say the names four times! I had discovered how to receive the energy of the words of power.

One day recently during meditation I received the message, “you are a child of God.” “Really,” I said, a little put off, “Is that really what you mean?” “No,” came the answer, “you are the Logos.” “That’s cool,” I said, “but I don’t think that’s right either.” “You are a word of God.” came the response. Yes, I thought. That’s exactly right.

Yesterday, with the Sun in Virgo – rhythm, repetition, the handmaid of the Lord – and the receptive, reflective Moon in Pisces – meditation, intuition, the fish in the flow of the current – I suddenly was inspired to create a mala, a Buddhist meditation tool similar to a Christian rosary. The mala consists of 108 beads – the number of divine names in Hinduism – and is used to count repetitions of mantras. Malas can be made in ¼ size (27 beads), ½ size (54 beads) or full size, and a meditation session consists of one or more rounds of repeating the mantra while your fingers count off the beads. Yesterday I did four rounds of 108 repetitions of Om Namah Shivaya. Four rounds seemed like the right amount of time for this beginner to shift to the receptive state – to bliss out on the Om and slowly remember the remaining syllables; to have no other experience but simple awareness of the mantra; to become one with the words.

Today I’m going to do the Middle Pillar with the mala. I wonder if 108 repetitions of each name will be enough to lose control?

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Joy Vernon is a Certified Professional Tarot Reader in Denver, Colorado. Her specialty is the Empyrean Key Intuitive Coaching, which combines tarot, astrology and Reiki to help her clients align themselves with their higher purpose. To schedule an appointment, please visit JoyVernon.com.

© 2010 by Joy Vernon

My friend’s concept of the vessel, closed at the bottom, creates a different metaphor. Her image suggests an experience of being filled up from above, containing that energy and eventually overflowing with it. I think this is also a beautiful metaphor, but this is not how I feel when I’m doing Reiki. The energy pours into me, flowing out through my hands, feet, eyes, heart, and I am connected both above and below. To me, being connected and open to the earth is what stimulates the flow of energy.

Three symbols are learned in the second level of Reiki. Symbol 1 is a symbol for earth. Symbol 2 is a symbol for sky. Reiki teaches us that our first duty is to connect to the earth, to be grounded, perhaps even practical. The first symbol is called the power symbol, and it is enlightening to recognize that the power of spirituality comes not from the spiritual energy itself, but from our ability to ground that energy, to give it a way to flow into the earth. The energy is not filling up the practitioner, the energy is filling the earth; the practitioner is only the channel, like a hollow bamboo reed.

The second Reiki symbol also means love, the glowing feeling of being connected. The sky loves the earth, but as in all legendary romances, greater forces separate the two. We are the unsuspecting helper who brings together these attracted opposites, and we heal in their loving embrace.

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The contemplation of the traditional Japanese poetic form waka is one method of Reiki meditation. The waka is a short form consisting of 31 syllables, often divided 5, 7, 5, 7, 7. In the spirit of the Reiki meditation, but not following the traditional form, I offer up this original poem.

Bamboo flute

Breath fills hollow reed

Plays spirit

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Joy Vernon is a Reiki Master Teacher in Denver, Colorado. She is trained in both the Traditional Japanese Usui Reiki Ryôhô and the Western-influenced Usui Tibetan traditions of Reiki. To schedule an appointment, please visit JoyVernon.com.

© 2010 by Joy Vernon

In what way can a tarot reading be healing? When I’m reading tarot for myself or for clients, one thing I try to do is dig deeper than insight. There are layers to a reading. First we encounter the literal truth of what is going on in the client’s life, sometimes with a slight refraction towards the past or future. Then there is practical advice on how to achieve the outcome that’s best for all involved. Below that is the insight as to what caused the situation and how it can be maintained or transmuted depending on the client’s wants and needs. This insight level begins the foray into healing, as awareness — the result of insight — is the primary prescription for restoring a shattered sense of self.

But true soul-level healing can arise when the reader continues on to the layer of highest expression. By giving voice to the unassailable inspiration of these cards, whatever stories they may have already told, we shed the light of Divine Unity on the shards of self, and fractured parts reflect the perfect whole. Each and every card in the deck has its highest expression, its own glimmer of godhead, and the tarot healer can speak this spiritual vibration directly to the heart of the client. This technique is not “making the best of what we’ve got,” nor is it “wishful thinking” — neither of these levels of interpretation, the first generally quite helpful, the second usually distracting, will connect the reader or the client with the healing energy. Only when the client feels energized, motivated, empowered, courageous, and fully inspired have you found the healing frequency.

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Joy Vernon is a Certified Professional Tarot Reader in Denver, Colorado. To schedule an appointment, please visit JoyVernon.com.

© 2010 by Joy Vernon

I had to think about that one. I converse fluently in the symbols of both tarot and kabbalah. But what I actually am is a Ceremonial Magician. You could have guessed a long time ago. What young child revels in intoning long prayers in dead languages, insists that religious services be spoken in archaic dialects, and scoffs when a choirgirl passes out from the smog of incense? Only a Ceremonial Magician in training.

One of the primary goals of the Ceremonial Magician is to gain the knowledge and conversation of her Holy Guardian Angel, or HGA as we say familiarly. The HGA is a fancy way of referring to your “higher self” or the part of you that most fully and truthfully expresses your purpose in this world. In order to connect with the HGA, tools such as kabbalah, tarot, astrology, alchemy, and so on are studied and applied.

If I had to provide a gloss for these tools, I would say that kabbalah teaches you to understand the Divine, astrology teaches you to understand yourself, alchemy teaches you to transform one into the other, and tarot is the language that we use to communicate these conscious intentions to our subconscious.

To me, kabbalah and tarot, alchemy and astrology, Reiki, writing, sewing, twisting wire, all are implements to, perhaps awkwardly, chisel away at ourselves, trying to find and release that eternal perfection, knowing that “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends/Rough-hew them how we will.”

Kabbalah is a symbolic system that describes the process of manifestation. The other tools in our toolbox: tarot, astrology, alchemy, tend to be used primarily in the realm of the mind or of the emotions. How many times have we laid out a tarot spread and without translating it into words at all, just experienced it—gut punch or caress—as an emotional affect? Some people think they’ve reached the pinnacle of reading when it becomes that easy for them. But what happens when we end our process there is we leave it all in Yesod, the astral level—we quit the yacht race as Dion Fortune would say—and we don’t use the tarot to actually make a change in ourselves. “I use the tarot to gain insight” almost all of us say. I’m challenging people to use the tarot to make real life changes in themselves, which takes it to a whole new level. How can you manifest your next reading? What can you do to take that insight or that emotion and give it shape and form in the real world?

By bringing our tarot practice into the material world, we are setting up a current, a channel for the Divine energy to find its way into our work. The channel we set today with simple acts of manifestation in the material world is like digging a canal that later will accept the flow from the Divine source into the storage reservoirs of our tarot work and our personal and spiritual growth. Once the canal has been dug, the water will flow of its own accord—but we need to take the initial step of breaking ground and setting the course.

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Joy Vernon is a Certified Professional Tarot Reader in Denver, Colorado. To schedule an appointment, please visit JoyVernon.com.

© 2009 by Joy Vernon

The technique I used in her reading is something I call “Backwards and Forwards.” I observed that the Wands and Swords suits move backwards through the  numbers–the 10 is the beginning of the suit and the suit process ends at 1. The Cups and Pentacles suits move forwards, starting with 1 and moving towards 10.  I discovered this through a combination of my meditative work with the cards, and specifically through my ongoing work with the kabbalistic Tetragrammaton and the permutation of the Divine Name, as well as through practical experience.

I noticed that when we get the 10 of Wands or 10 of Swords in a reading, often one of the most positive things we say is that the cycle is over, and that’s something to be thankful for. But something about that never quite felt right–the 10 of Wands does not seem to lead to the Ace of Cups, as it would if the cycle were over and the next cycle beginning, based on placing the pips in numerical and suit order (Ace through 10; Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles). But it does make sense for the 10 of Wands to lead to the 9: the sticks carried in the oppressive burden of the 10 can be used to create the protective wall of the 9, the strong boundaries of which guide the swift flying 8 to come to rest so that the valor of the 7 can be realized, and so on, using the traditional RWS imagery.

Using this technique, the good news in a reading when the 10 of Wands or 10 of Swords comes up is not so much that the querent is at the end of a cycle, but that although the querent may be in an uncomfortable place, we have a set of instructions for how to start from this place and take realistic, practical steps towards the ultimate goal of the suit. As we work down through the Wands, finding the stability of the four, stepping through what I consider to be the open door of the three, finding the sovereignty of  the two, and coming to rest at the generative spark of the Ace, we can now naturally find a receptive container for that spark in the Ace of Cups, and having learned dominion of ourselves, can begin working successfully in collaboration with another, and so on through the emotional and relationship-oriented suit of Cups.

The suits of Wands and Swords, both active, masculine suits, have a sense of movement to them. The 10 of Cups and 10 of Pentacles, the receptive, feminine suits, are comfortable places to rest; they do not call us to take action the way the Wands and Swords do. However, if one were to stay too long in the success of the 10 of Cups; if perhaps it were reversed and one started feeling indulgent with it, then certainly it’s possible that the depression of the 10 of Swords would result, moving us into our next suit, which we would then work through in reverse order.

The Ace of Swords and Ace of Pentacles match nicely too, whether you view them as sword and shield, or if you see in that pairing the flaming sword that turns before the gate to the Garden of Eden shown in the Ace of Pentacles. In many ways, it makes a great deal of story-telling sense to count down the suits of Wands, up the suit of Cups, down the suit of Swords, then up the suit of Pentacles, moving backwards and forwards through the pips.

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Joy Vernon is a Certified Professional Tarot Reader in Denver, Colorado. To schedule an appointment, please visit JoyVernon.com.

© 2009 by Joy Vernon

My first memory of the Six of Cups is from my Barbara Walker deck–first deck I ever got, back in 1991. That card, Childhood, showed an imposing and ominous nun dominating a group of small children. Powerful card. Not personally how I see it though. But I like the reminiscence of the title Childhood. The traditional composition shows a gentle innocence. The friendship of this card is distinguished from the more romantic Two of Cups, the more lighthearted and playful Three of Cups. There is a deep, memory-full offering of self in the image Pamela Colman Smith drew.

The esoteric title of the card is Pleasure and its astrological attribution is Sun in Scorpio. Odd that earlier today I randomly drew an online card, receiving the Three of Wands–my birthcard, Sun in Aries. A story develops. Two characters. A simple sharing.

I have four friends with Sun in Scorpio.  One of whom I’m quite close to. Two of whom support me passionately and with an embarrassing generosity of praise. Three of whom I feel an electric connection to. All of whom I want to get to know better.

Two children on a balcony. One leans over the edge, peering down to the city street below. One looks up wondrously and tugs the jacket of her friend. Each has a story to share.

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Joy Vernon is a Certified Professional Tarot Reader in Denver, Colorado. To schedule an appointment, please visit JoyVernon.com.

© 2009 by Joy Vernon