In this full-moon moment, in this post-election moment, Maya Angelou’s voice echoed in my ear:

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

In these last stanzas of Still I Rise, the poet shows herself unbowed despite those who would shoot, cut, and kill her with their words, their eyes, their hate. She is not only unbowed, she is gifted; the ancestors push her upward with their dreams and hopes.

She rises with gifts delivered out of Death.

This moonth we, too, have been invited to be buoyed by the gifts of Death. The lunar cycle that began on November 1 set us on the path of Death, challenging us to move through a passage of a grief-filled 5 of Cups.

On November 5th, the US Election Day, cups were spilled and shattered. We are still in the sea and slosh and slap of that day’s flooding from the fallen cups.

So many of us are seeking ways to steady ourselves in the turbulence—yes, more turbulence; we’ve had so much over the past few years! As a lover of the moon and its cycles, I raise my sights to the full moon (exact on Friday, the 15th, at 4:28 pm ET, time zone converter), looking for some guidance. 

The Hierophant, through its association with the full moon moment, appears, bringing an encounter between Death and this wisdom teacher: the keeper of traditions, guide for rituals, leader of religious/spiritual institutions.

This lineup of Death coming upon the Hierophant reminds me of a Wisdom Reading I did in 2016 with Rachel Pollack, one of the Tarot community’s most beloved Hierophants. Rachel would no doubt reject the connection to an exalted, dogmatic leader, but she embraced the alternate name for this archetype: Teacher. Yes, Rachel is the Tarot community’s beloved Teacher and despite her being among the dead she still gifts us with guidance to help us rise.

I had the privilege of studying one-on-one with Rachel at the time she was creating The Raziel Tarot with Robert Place. As a deck inspired by Jewish mysticism, stories, and midrash (teachings that interpret and elaborate on the Torah), The Raziel is a perfect deck for doing Wisdom Readings, a practice introduced by Rachel of asking the cards spiritual or philosophical questions not just personal ones.

So, we asked: What is the difference between Fate, Destiny, and Fortune? And The Raziel responded ….

Our Fate is Death. 

Death is the simple, shared truth of every individual life.

In the ionic Rider Waite Smith image, we are reminded that death takes the humble and the powerful in equal measure. Even the king will face death.

The Raziel image of Moses supported by the Angel of Death offers not a different message but does add a layer of meaning that invites us to develop a relationship with Death.

I saw counsel in this card to not make Death our enemy because we will always lose. But, while we would be unwise to make Death our enemy, we don’t know Death well enough to make It our friend. We know our friends so we can be familiar with them. We won’t know Death until we cross Its threshold. Moses’ attitude in this image shows a way to make that crossing: by paying attention to the unknown coming so that It can be given a proper greeting.

Death does not just happen to individuals but also to institutions, ideals, ways of operating, alignments of groups. We are in a(nother) Death moment in the United States so the counsel to pay attention to the unknown coming applies to us collectively.

Meanwhile, our Destiny is to stand before something greater than ourselves. 

In this card of Destiny, Aaron as the first High Priest (The Raziel’s version of the Hierophant) is shown along the Ark of the Covenant, which was created from instructions given by God to hold the 10 Commandments, the Divine law. The Ark becomes a physical representation of God’s presence and the High Priests play a special role in tending this treasure.

The Hebrews gave God a name that could not be spoken to recognize God’s greatness beyond measure. Other traditions have given the Divine evocative names: Ra, Shining Ones, Qian Yin, Aphrodite, Green Man, Jesus, Spider Woman. Each culture reaches toward its own naming of what is unnamable. And as we humans strive to find that name to call out to, we also connect with practices, places, or objects that help us meet and stand in relationship with something of the Greater Than in our individual lives.  Not everyone believes in a Deity, but the forces of that natural world are awesome, too, and in the end we all stand before Death. Like Aaron before the Ark, our Destiny is to stand before something greater than ourselves.

And our Fortune? The Tower

The bursting flames of this image show us Fortune as chaos.

With chaos as a central feature of Fortune, this card is a wakeup call for our ego-protecting selves with the reminder: we are not in control. The writer Annie Dillard says it this way: “We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any of the switches at all.” When we fall into such a sleep Fortune wakes us.

The Raziel image depicts the wake-up calls that came to the Israelites when their temple was destroyed not just once but twice (586 BCE and 70 CE). And each destruction was connected to a period of exile. The human and physical destruction was enormous. Descriptors such as chaos and tragedy are not exaggerations for these historical events.

A people do not emerge from such an experience unchanged. In religious life, the rabbis, who were the teachers, became the spiritual leaders replacing the High Priests after the second destruction. This shift led to an emphasis on study of the Torah and Jewish law rather than Temple high ritual and political governance.  Midrash, which are stories told by rabbis to fill in the gaps of the Torah, became a lively practice and gifted the world with a rich wisdom tradition.

This closer-to-the-people tradition includes stories to help move through times of chaos and destruction as well as practices to pay attention as we move into the unknown.

To summarize, The Raziel says 

Our fate is Death.

Our Destiny is to stand before something greater than ourselves.

And our Fortune is not ours at all, but the interaction, collision, and alignment of forces and events beyond our control.

It is a reading that we did 8 years ago—the original reading is here—but feels so aligned with the current moment. We live in circles not in lines.

So, what might come next? Because of the gift of the Tarot’s dynamic nature, I can extend the reading of 8 years ago into today and I did by asking:

What can we do to still work toward liberation in this time of chaos? 

The Raziel replied: The Moon

I sighed upon seeing this card. While I love the Moon in decks that emphasize aspects of creativity and cultivating intuition, The Raziel lifts up—what is really an older meaning of this Major Arcana—the danger of the moon’s shifting light.

We immediately perceive the danger in the beasts guarding the way forward, Rachel says they represent “that ‘animal nature’ that we must accept yet overcome in order to fully experience our humanity.” She identifies them as the demons Samael and Lilith.

Both Samael and Lilith have a rich tradition of stories told about them (you may know Lilith as the first challenger of the patriarchy), but Rachel focuses on a myth about them from medieval Jewish mysticism in which a rabbi no longer able to tolerate the world’s suffering decides to undertake a dangerous ritual to force the coming of the Messiah.

One of the rules of the ritual is that once it is begun no food can be touched until it ends, but as the ritual is climaxing with shaking ground and flashing light, two emaciated dogs appear. Thinking the ritual could not be stopped at this point, the rabbi threw them some scraps of food. The dogs transformed into the demons Samael and Lilith and have been with us ever since.

The rabbi was distracted from his task, the ritual failed, and the rabbi, too, paid a price: He was half eaten and became a demon himself.

Rachel’s midrash from this story sent to us from her out of Death is:

You are in a perilous situation in which you must stay on the path.

Despite the danger of the moment, we must still hold dreams of liberation in our hearts so if you’ve been …

… working for a multi-racial democracy, you must stay on the path

… being a friend to immigrants, you must stay on the path

… advancing feminist values, you must stay on the path

… celebrating the diversity of sexual and gender expression, you must stay on the path

… organizing for economic, social, and racial justice, you must stay on the path

… defending librarians, you must stay on the path

… saying no to genocide, you must stay on the path

… raising children with values of love, acceptance and respect, you must keep on the path

… creating art that connects us to beauty, you must stay on the path

… writing poems of love, despair, resilience, the broken open world, you must stay on the path

… being a witchy weaver of spells, you must stay on the path

… loving the Goddesses in private and in public, you must stay on the path

And as we are daring to walk, to run, to dance—and sometimes to crawl—along the path and even though it is sometimes dark, we will sense others around us. We will reach out to them. We will gather more and more of the path walkers together.

And as we gather our fears will be lighter because there will be more of us lifting. And we will know that there are more of us than there are demons. In fact, there might be Liliths who may not be demons at all, but people we could not see clearly who were looking for a change that really, too, is the path we, the majority, want to be on.

I had a final question for the Raziel: If we stay on the path together, where can we go?

We received a card unique to The Raziel: 23. The Tree of Life

This is the card of life energy, wholeness, and healing. Yes, we will be rewarded for staying on the path.

Rachel writes of this image:

The Kabbalah’s Tree of Life takes the form we see here on the card. We have mentioned the idea that it has to contain ten Sefirot because the Sefer Yetsirah says God created the world with ten numbers, not nine and not eleven. If there was only nine, then the tenth Sefirah, at the bottom, the one that represents our daily lives, would be permanently disconnected from all the spiritual levels above it. The tenth Sefirah reminds us that even if we believe that our ordinary existence, with all its problems and joys, has nothing to do with the kind of mystical energies described in the sacred books and the Tarot-everything is connected.

Everything is connected. Reminds me of what Stephanie Fox, Director of Jewish Voice for Peace, said the day after the election: “Whatever we are in for, we are in it together.”

I am grateful to be on this moonlit path together with you. I may not see you, but I sense you and all our fellow seekers and it gives me strength.

To encourage a revelation on these themes as we continue journeying through this moonthly cycle, you are invited to one, some, or all of these practices:

• Moon bathe by sitting or lying under a window or outside on the ground. Let go of your thoughts and soak in the light.
• Take out any reading or your reflections from the new moon and look at them in a new light. How does your understanding of the cards shift now that time has passed and light has shifted? (If you haven’t done a reading yet, no problem, just do it now under the light of the full moon. You can try the one from the new moon.)
• Bring out your Death and Hierophant cards from your Tarot deck and connect them to your new moon reading / reflections. You could place/imagine these cards on either side of your reading or above and below, and then look at how they add meaning into the story your original cards offered you.
• Reflect on questions such as: What ancestor might have helpful support to offer you for these times? How might you tune into this ancestor? If they could speak to you this moonth, what might they say? What path have you been on? How can you keep on the path? Who do you want to gather around you to help you travel on the path? You could, of course, pull cards as responses to any of these questions. You may want to engage in Visio Divina to find the layers of wisdom within the cards.

When you are done, remember to offer gratitude for what you have received. Consider what gift you now want to return to the world. Pulling a card for guidance on the gift is always a fine thing to do. In the coming weeks and before the moon returns to dark around November 27th offer your gift to the world.

***

Note: We in the Tarot community had to share Rachel with many other communities because she couldn’t be defined by one passion. She became an icon of the trans community and created the first and only (so far) trans-super hero, Coagula. Here is an article with some great Rachel quotes and references about her trans activism. This week is Transgender Awareness Week so a good time to stand up for trans rights and educate ourselves about what that entails. Trans people are one of the groups most vilified by the Trump campaign. We must push back against such hate and be preparing ourselves for how to up our solidarity actions. Today is a good day to identify your local LGBTQ+ rights organization. This CNN article also includes many links to national groups.