What is the best way for me to direct my artistic creativity over the next few months?
I use the word artistic in a very broad sense, not just in relation to visual art.
The brief this month was to use a specially designed 3 card spread called the House of the Guiding Star. This immediately made me think of the House of the Rising Sun, the rock classic worldwide hit for a group called The Animals - which almost becomes relevant. The House of the Guiding Star was inspired by the three little cards shown below using the Flornoy Noblet. The reading itself uses the Flornoy Dodal.
The first thing I notice is how the word "Lenormand" is insinuating its way into the tarot World. The three card sentence in forward narrative mode seems to say: tension dissolves completely.
If you try to start from the start, like the Fool, and work your way up methodically brick by brick, it will fail miserably. You can get locked into a bind like the woman and the lion if you start at the beginning. The way forward is to start from the end and/or at a remove, looking downward, like the guiding star, or askance, like the figure in the centre of the World card, and just letting things fall.
The word "maison" in the central card, and the recurrence of the word "house", suggests there may be a domestic component to your creativity. That may refer to the subject matter of your art, or the three cards may be illustrating that in order to preserve the necessary time and energy to create (World), you need to struggle to maintain peace and quiet (Strength) and deal with minor domestic crises (Tower). Even the Chariot looks like a tiny house. The lion's breast, the bolt of lightning, and the wreath of victory are all made of the same light-blue material. F.P.Le Trange, printed sideways on the Strength and World cards is a Customs stamp from 1701. The abbreviation is short for, "Faites Pour L'etrangers", "For Export Only". Profits from the sale of exported decks at this time were exempt from tax.
Customs are accepted ways of doing things, so perhaps the two figures on the Strength and World cards are both attempting to look past the customary and clear the ground for something new and strange.
If we take the figure on the World card to be your nascent creative work, perhaps we should look at it from a few different angles to discover the best way for you to direct your artistic creativity. The bull, lion, eagle, human correspond to the four fixed astrological signs: Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius, which are associated respectively with the astrological houses 2, 5, 8, 11. Shuffling and laying a card in each of these houses produces:
Hermit in 2nd house: bringing your product to market is a lonely business.
Empress in 5th house: for someone with your level of energy it is not enjoyable to sit still for long periods. Regular physical exercise will benefit your work.
Devil in 8th house: this is perhaps an unfortunate card to appear in the 8th house. Distractions are a constant temptation. Eagle wings can turn into bat wings.
Judgement in 11th house: this house is usually associated with friendship. Like the angel with the trumpet you should not be shy about trying out your work on friends. Either that or you should go through your desk drawers and resuscitate some long-dead projects to examine their potential for new life.
When we lay out the 4 house cards in a narrative line to get a final piece of advice we are told: experience is the mother of bad judgement. This is a new spread and the advice it gives is to "make it new".
