Thoth: Crowcallsthenight reads for Charlie Brown

[Crowcallsthenight]

Hey! Charlie Brown
I am honoured to be reading for you

[Charlie Brown]

Thanks. I still need a day or two to come up with a question, but I wanted to check in so that you knew that I saw this.

[Charlie Brown]

Alright, This either an easy question or a hard question. It will make feedback a little tricky, probably, because its so speculative.

How can I most effectively engender positive change in the world?

[Crowcallsthenight]

Sorry to take so long to reply, we had all been struck down with the flu
Hopefully, I should be able to write it all down by tonight 🕊

[Charlie Brown]

No worries, no rush. I hope you and yours are feeling better.

[Crowcallsthenight]

Here goes;

How can Charlie Brown most effectively engender postive change in the world?


The significator is the five of disks, 'worry'

My first impression of this card is there is a lot going on but no clear way through. A condensed energy, spiralling within it self. A cauldron left to simmer.
My little booklet defines 'its natural meaning' as 'intelligence applied to labour' The trouble seems to lay in searching for focus, a tangible way to ease the pressures of HOW... Possibly a result of the world being such a broad church, how to positively affect something so vast and inherently dualistic. For every life, there is death; for every light, a shadow
And so, this is the focus of the matter: the Priestess, who so intimately harnesses what lies within intuition, in the ability to connect oppositional balances that serve to enrich life. Are her gifts, of patience and meditation, being used as a conduit of inner wisdom? What answers are brewing inside of you? What do you know that can be used to direct the forces at work in the five of disks?
Is there someone in your life, perhaps insightful and certainly cutting, who inspires your imagination? Who subtly forces you to question and consider. .? Or is it your own fierce intellect (qos), your own capacity for disection and analysis - uncoupled from preconceptions - where you hold the key to understanding how to work in harness with a need to transform and flow (10c). This is the wisdom of water in abundance; always seeking for new expression, casting itself wide and trying for every option. Always seeking the way

To me, it feels as if you will engender the most positive change by sharing what you know. That you have a lot to offer in terms of good counsel and emotional depth and warmth

[Charlie Brown]

- uncoupled from preconceptions - where you hold the key to understanding how to work in harness with a need to transform and flow (10c). This is the wisdom of water in abundance; always seeking for new expression, casting itself wide and trying for every option. Always seeking the way

To me, it feels as if you will engender the most positive change by sharing what you know. That you have a lot to offer in terms of good counsel and emotional depth and warmth

Thanks for the reading.

My first impression of this card is there is a lot going on but no clear way through. A condensed energy, spiralling within it self. A cauldron left to simmer.

You aren't wrong. "Worry" certainly expressed where I'm at these days. That Five of Disks is right on point. The Five of the earth suit is one of those cards that is very hard for me to break away from the RWS sense of. Maybe it's more specifically that, unlike most of the pentacles I, for some reason, have a hard time interpreting the card outside of money matters, which isn't quite right here, as you agree. Since you yourself referenced the book, I thought I'd look up a little Thoth perspective too. This delineation was helpful:

The Five of Disks finds itself in the changing movements of Geburah, but this is not the wellbalanced change of the Two of Disks, but an imbalanced, disruptive change, the effect of the 5 breaking up the stability of the 4, destroying its structure and balance.

So the Five of Disks represents a material crisis, which can also be a crisis in home and profession, an illness or injury, anything that disturbs or destroys the material, peaceful security of the Four.

There is not much to find when looking for the bright sight of the card, nevertheless it is a fact that every burning of a forest results in many little sprouts that appear afterwards, having the most fertile ground in the ashes. But of course, the old forest doesn't need to burn down completely - the card can also talk of the worry that it might do so just because it burns somewhere in the near.

https://www.corax.com/tarot/cards/disks-5.html

So, if nothing else, we've got a good starting place I think.

Looking further into the reading, my sense is that the cards are well-drawn but it's tricky for me to understand how they're all working together.

And so, this is the focus of the matter: the Priestess, who so intimately harnesses what lies within intuition, in the ability to connect oppositional balances that serve to enrich life. Are her gifts, of patience and meditation, being used as a conduit of inner wisdom? What answers are brewing inside of you? What do you know that can be used to direct the forces at work in the five of disks?

So, if I'm getting you, HP is referencing my inner life. That a solution/answer is going to be unlocked rather than found. Looking at the other cards, the thing you said that makes the most sense to me is connecting oppositional balances. That seems to also work really well with this particular spread.

Is there someone in your life, perhaps insightful and certainly cutting, who inspires your imagination? Who subtly forces you to question and consider. .? Or is it your own fierce intellect (qos), your own capacity for disection and analysis

I would think that I'm QoS. I often pick that as a significator when choosing via personality qualities rather than astrology or appearance. I can over-analyze, get caught up in my head, and create my own storm clouds from gaming out too many bad scenarios.

where you hold the key to understanding how to work in harness with a need to transform and flow (10c). This is the wisdom of water in abundance; always seeking for new expression, casting itself wide and trying for every option. Always seeking the way

That seems very non-QoS or, at least, non my energy as the QoS. That's why I think that what you said about the Priestess connecting oppositional energy is what makes this reading pop.

So to if I get you then, I think that what you're reading says is that the answer will reveal itself when I can find a way to harness my QoS energy in a way that will be emotionally constructive rather than damaging, as is customary for me.

[Charlie Brown]

I was thinking more about your reading and wanted to play around with it in my head a bit more. Here's where I'm at right now.

I hope this doesn't seem like I'm trying to 're-read' your reading. I feel like this is based pretty solidly in what you brought to the table. Applying a couple more of the astrological/qabbalistic "filters" endemic to the Thoth system seems to elaborate your main points. I also tried some different ideas about how the spread is meant to be interpreted. Maybe it's because I don't know much Qabballah, but I found this spread kind of vague and trick and hard to work with. I wasn't partiuclarly comfortable when I had to use it for my own reading this month.

I was thinking a little more about the relationship between the Queen of Swords and the 10 of Cups. I looked up a couple of more sites too. I don't do a ton with astrology and next to nothing with Qabballah in my readings, so, when I do read Thoth, it's nice to try to pick up a little something extra. So, I saw an entry that pointed out that the 10 of Cups can be a happy card, as I think we're both want to default to, but that it can also signify an excess of any emotion. Graphically, then, those bottom three cards are a very good representation of my general headspace as of late: a lot of worry buffeted by my over-thinking (qos) and excessive emotional reactions (10 Cups). As we search for an answer to my question, we climb up the tree and get to the Priestess who, as you said, can create a better balance out of this situation.

If we take the 10 of Cups to represent negative emotions and remember that it's place in the spread is under the "wisdom" header, then I'm right to be worried about the things I'm worried about. The Queen in the "understanding" spot suggests that my mental models that are causing me such distress are probably more accurate than not.

The thing that unsettled me a little bit about my first look at your reading was the idea, that may have come totally from me, that the HP at the top was leading to this dysfunctional mental/emotional split. But if we look at that as the start and then try to climb the tree, things look different. After all, if I'm asking to change the world, I need to get up high to have a world's eye view.

In addition to balancing, you said that the Priestess relationship to knowledge was important. That's why you said that I should share what I know. But that was when we're reading downwards on the tree. If we're reading upwards, then maybe I don't need to teach so much as I need to learn. Without getting all deep into my personal problems, I've got a metric ton of bad feelings (10C) and have been gaming out disaster scenarios in my head (QoS). While 5 of Disks is probably not the most positive space for me to be in. The 10 and Queens placement on the tree of life suggest that maybe I'm not wrong. So, instead of staying on the level where I'm at (5D) I need to climb up a level and learn how to actively confront these things.

I'd feel better about this if it were maybe the chariot or similar rather that the seemingly more passive HP, but if I need to know more before I can do it does make sense. I did have a reading recently that said that further education would help get me out of my current paralysis.

Thank you again for a thoughtful reading that provoked a lot of thought. Again, I hope that this came across more like collaboration and freewheeling rather me trying to correct you or overwrite your work. Neither of us are very experienced with Thoth, so I thought trying some different ways to look at those cards would be useful for both of us.

[Crowcallsthenight]

I love your feedback
Your point on thinking of the tree in terms of where you are headed, up or down? These ideas are new enough that I find them a little confusing to interpret in context, so thank you for drawing my attention there
I see the Priestess as a sort of gate keeper to wisdom, guarding the space between knowledge and expression. Her ability to keep a secret or expect you to take up the task of finding your own truth strikes me as a very queen of swords trait and then to be in partnership with intuitive, feeling, disruptive water. A ten! Completion and renewal. To be all things, and none of them, simultaneously! Who else but the Priestess to expect this of her handmaidens? What other duality to hold such a powerful intention? Be persistent enough. Engaging. Curious. Unrelenting! We are on a quest for the world!
What you describe of your inner conflicts sounds like a training ground for someone to have developed some muscles for empathy, that lovely and gruelling ability to connect the intellect and the imagination with the feeling of being in someone elses shoes. Without the Ten beside her, how would the Queen ever come to know the whole of the heart that beats inside? How would the ten learn to focus all that emotion and feeling without the discipline and logic required to wield a sword with devastating effect? Elemental conflicts added for checking strength and testing of tenacity. .. I don't know about you but I'm feeling like that is how a Priestess might begin. A few branches down
A long time ago I used to long for the ten of cups in a reading but, as a love too much and lose the same survivor, I've come to understand how destructive it can be. In my minds eye, the five of disks is the unstable banks of the river, the ten of cups is flood waters looking for release and the queen is the storm pushing for direction, wanting to make the first break through; working together to change the shape of what was, into what could be.
Am I wrong to see this as the perfect placement for a Priestess? Someone who can take a certain detached control of all the aspects of creation and destruction, and be the floodgates. Knowing when, and how much or less. Learning and Teaching!