Episode 151: the High Priestess and the Vertical Lines of the Tarot

Tarot for the Wild Soul Episode 151: The High Priestess and the Vertical Lines of the Tarot Air Date: February 5, 2021 __ [Introduction] [0:00:00] (Instrumental intro music) [0:00:12] Hello and welcome back to Tarot for the Wild Soul podcast. I am your host, Lindsay Mack, and it is, as always, just such a huge joy, huge honor to be gathered with you in this virtual space. Thank you so much for being here. Oh my god. I feel like everything is just — continues to rise in pitch in terms of intensity and loss. And wow, is it an intense time to be in a body, to be alive on the planet right now. All this Aquarius energy, especially this Mercury retrograde in Aquarius is not — I don't want to say it's not helping, it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do (Lindsay Laughs) — but it is... it's extra. So I know all of you probably know this already, but I just always want to be that gentle voice in your ear, just letting you know if you can make things, if it's possible to make your current state even 10%. more comfortable, more sweet, more soft, whatever that means to you. I think everybody's experience with sweetness and softness is very different. Yeah, just to know that you're not alone in the intensity of these times. I see you. You know, I'm in it with you and I don't know anybody, no teacher, no space holder, who isn't going through this, too. You're not alone. So just loving on your body, your heart, your mind, all the intersections of you that make you you. [0:02:08] And your little ones — I was having a conversation with my teacher, Michelle, about just like, this is such a hard time for our inner children. They're over it, you know? There's a lot of really old wounding coming up. So it's little children, adults, and the inner children that all of us have, it's just — they're definitely, a lot of them, are reaching a kind of a breaking point. It's a totally new realm of inner self-parenting. And I don't have any answers. That's just to acknowledge that it's here. And really that is the gateway in which Tarot can do the most for us, with what's right here. Not what will be, not what might be, not what we might look to for the future, although, especially in these times (and really, we can say this since time immemorial), we've always looked to the future © All materials property of Lindsay Mack and Tarot for the Wild Soul when things are horrible and bleak in the now or when we're frustrated and bored with our lives. And egoically, we don't really want to deal with it. There's all different kinds of reasons to look to the future and we can take Tarot in that direction, but where it really shines, where it really will open and flower and start to talk to us, start to really show up as an anchor and an immensely supportive tool for whatever arises is in times quite like this. So, yeah, whether you feel drawn to work with your deck or not, it's always there for you, you know. So just loving on all of you. [0:03:56] I was so surprised — like this new podcast format that's been kind of unfolding since September is always such a delight for me because I never quite know what I'm going to be called to talk about. And so this was really fun, to get to explore a little bit of something that I actually don't always love to talk about, which is the vertical lines of the Major Arcana. So I'm really excited to talk about it over the next few weeks. Also I'm going to, for what it's worth — you can skip past this part — but I don't always like to talk about the vertical lines of the Major Arcana, one, because it's not really something that turns me on. It doesn't spark me. It doesn't make me super excited most of the time and I tend to speak about things on the spectrum of Tarot facilitation that really lights me up and that feels interesting to me. Now I like thinking about and meditating on the vertical lines of the Major Arcana — if you have no idea what I'm talking about there, I will clue you in — but one of the reasons that I'm a little bit turned off, most of the time when it comes to teaching about them, is because people really, really, really want to know what they are. And I don't know. (Lindsay Laughs) I don't know what they are. I don't think anybody really does. [0:05:27] I think that the vertical lines of the Major Arcana — so we have Rachel Pollack to look to for this because the way we start to visually think about the vertical lines of the Major Arcana is thanks to her three lines of the Majors ordering and her subsequent teaching of those three lines while removing The Fool. So we want to picture The Fool on top of a three layer cake and each of those layers are the seven cards related to each of the three lines of the Major Arcana. Those are the three, you know, if we were to look to Rachel Pollock's teachings, right - technically speaking, you can order the Major Arcana however you want. You know, you can have, five lines, you can have one, you can have no lines, it really doesn't matter. But it's a great way to look to them; I really like Rachel Pollock's concept there. So we're gonna just kind of honor that lineage within this and picture those three lines of seven, with The Fool as a little, like cherry, a little rose on top of the cake. So if you look at those three lines vertically, we have seven vertical lines of three cards. So instead of looking at the first horizontal line that runs from The Magician to The Chariot, the first vertical line runs from Magician to Strength (or Justice, depending on how you order your number Eight in Line Two), and The Devil. So that's our first vertical line of the Majors. [0:07:19] Our second is the one we're going to be exploring over the next three weeks — that's High Priestess, The Hermit, the Tower. © All materials property of Lindsay Mack and Tarot for the Wild Soul And on and on, it goes, right? Really, really fascinating, powerful, beautiful way to just kind of like shift the mind, shift the heart and think about how the Major Arcana blooms open in a new way when considered in these potent lines of three rather than seven, or rather than one big line. It is a really cool way of learning. But again, to kind of go back to my little caveat, I'm really... The difference, I think, with the horizontal lines of seven, and the vertical lines of three; the horizontal lines are linear. They're a road, they're a map. We're walking that map. So of course, the Tarot doesn't really fan out in such linear ways. We don't really walk from Magician to High Priestess, to Empress to Emperor — we move around, right? But the bones of that structure can be really, really helpful when we consider, you know, what does soul evolution look like? What is it when we move from, kind of, crawling to walking, you know, from walking to running. The Majors can help us. I think they're a guide for life and when we look at them through those three lines of seven, it's a tremendous teaching. Just beautiful. [0:09:04] But the vertical lines are different because they're taking you on a journey not outward, but inward. You have to start at the heart in that first card of three and you have to literally drop in and reflect: What is it to go on an inward journey, an inward path of evolution that takes me from the Empress to Wheel of Fortune to The Star. That's the third line, the third vertical line. What is that? What — who knows? We could have a discussion probably for the next month, easily, if we were all together. We'd all have something different to say. So I find with my students, and this is a completely human part of people, that they really want to know, like, the finite definition: What is this? What does this mean? And I don't really think that exists with the vertical lines. I just think it's a profound exploration where I'm often taken into realms that are much more spiralic, much more intuitive, much more potent, and that actually tend to serve as a much greater blueprint for me, personally, on soul work. So Tarot, again, for the way I teach, for Soul Tarot, in my perception and where that perception meets channeling, the Tarot is a profound mirror for where we grow those intersections between our soul, the infinite part of us, our deepest knowing and our ego, our mind’s stuff, our conditioning, our biases, our traumas.

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