Real Sky Astrology Forecast for Winter Solstice-imbolc

The waning crescent moon in Libra at winter solstice allowed us to linger on our own shadow for a moment before releasing the past and allowing our hearts to lighten moving forward and reaching into the void for something exciting fresh and new.
On Saturday December 24th the New Moon will be in real sky Sagittarius the sign of the two headed hero/ villain wearing both the head of Horus the savior god and Set his vilified uncle meaning the ridiculousness of politics will continue on with it's strange polarized cartoon characters of the past year or so. The new moon's merge with Pluto the planet that reminds us about what HAS to happen let's us know that all this theater is happening for a reason. We the people can not stand by idly anymore this is our moment to make real change in the way things are run. This activity is squaring Uranus and yes it is taking up our free time . But these Pluto square Uranus moments are always present when fascist regimes try to take power. The last time this happened Hitler tried to take over Europe and yes it is that big now.
You folks born between 1963 and 1971 with Uranus and Pluto conjunct this is your moment, you are the generation whose "will" is being tested you may have never taken a stand before you may have kept the peace and never been a "cause" person but if you don't act you will not like the taste of the future.
Jupiter in real sky Aries is trining this new moon/Pluto conjunction, the new beginning that has to happen... we are expressing and defining who we are in a big way and it is going to feel good to finally take a stand. This is what they talk about when they say fighting for your freedom.
All this defining of the self you've been ruminating over inside is about to come to the surface as Jupiter in Aries goes direct on December 25th. Perhaps for the first time ever families may see eye to eye on politics during this holiday season.

As Mercury moves from Ophuichus/Serpentarius the healer to Sagittarius the warrior sometime in the night between January 7th and January 8th our thoughts move from healing and transformation to how to fight for that healing and transformation. We are suddenly thinking about action plans this is boosted by the energy of the full moon in Gemini on the 9th. As we think about all the great people we are partnered with and find the strength for standing up for ourselves.

The full moon in Gemini opposes the Sagittarius sun and this means solidarity will face off with the crazy asshats in power.

As Venus moves into Aquarius on late Friday the 13th of January we get a lucky sneak peek at the beauty of the Aquarian Age. We will know what is beautiful .

As the sun moves into Capricorn later in January we will see we've won a battle in a larger war and the uphill climb will stretch out before us we will use what we learned and who we've aligned with in the past year to move upward in the work that is ahead.
As people expand their ideas about who they are. We can expect the joy to come from doing hard work that is self motivated. Expect inspiration from miraculous new ideas and innovation as creative minds meet creative minds in the months ahead.

Real Sky Astrology New Moon September 26th, 2011

The first day of the four days of New moon starts today in Leo. By tomorrow the moon will conjunct the sun in Virgo. This new moon as well as this month's full moon in Pisces will intensify the hard aspects of Pluto in Sagittarius and Uranus in Pisces. In case you were wondering where all the fascist political polarities were coming from this is the culprit. Repeatedly in history when Pluto and Uranus are squared you have trouble with Hitler types. The last time Pluto and Uranus squared this was the result. However these aspects are in different signs this time and will play out differently. Pluto the stuff that has to happen is in Sagittarius the sign of the hero/villain when you have villains like Scott Walker/Rick Perry/Michele Bachman /the Koch Bros and other the big corporations, Big Religion and Wall Street who have revealed the shadow government that seemed unprovable during the time between 1963-1971 when Pluto and Uranus were in conjunction in Leo. This was a time when these guys were able to "work their will". If your old enough you remember the kind of BS people swallowed the magic bullet that killed Kennedy found intact on a gurney and all the rest. The Warren Commissions findings... no coincidence that Gerald Ford was on that commission and later became president. So the kids born with the aspect of Uranus and Pluto conjunct in Leo between 1963-1971 will have the hardest time during our current aspect. They were young impressionable kids, too young to remember the fight to get out of Vietnam and too young to remember the Kennedy assassinations. They were impacted by and probably inspired by the Reagan years being a child in those years was likely better that being a young adult. They were likely impacted negatively by the first Gulf war maybe even suffering their first loses of loved ones here, thus stimulating a natural hatred and fear of middle eastern types this was a well placed "theater war".
So now this thing will play out. We can see there was a plan we can see the players...Uranus the planet of freedom and eccentricity is in Pisces and wants to play out the theme of the Piscean Age. If you look back over the last 2000 years you see a lot of big establishment controlling the masses with fear and controlled information. Looking at the symbol of Pisces from the ceiling of Denderah you see the symbolism of this very phenomenon, the symbol is illustrated as a man with two fish on two lines the fish are at right angles to each other. The fisherman is holding these fish square to each other and in the end he's the one who will benefit from this catch. The fisherman has baited his hook and he has two polarized fish on his line. In ancient Egypt the fish is the symbol of the physical body it's the non-spiritual self the part that rots Sethian in nature. In the ancient Egyptian after life the first test of the soul was to escape baboons with fishing nets because they would catch the souls who were only physical beings, the souls who were spiritually asleep and who were not savvy enough to realize they could trick and convince the baboons that they too were fishermen and move on to the next test.
So from this we can see the game at play. The folks who got rich selling a better mouse trap see the masses as fools/ fish.( The saying
like shooting fish in a barrel comes to mind ) We made them rich and now they don't want to pay their fair share of the taxes to keep our country viable. We the people mean nothing to them we are only there as consumers to fill their pockets with gold ...that's the game. And in the end they likely know they should pay ...they are the ones who are always on the wrong side of history they don't care they will try to get away with whatever they can it's just a game to them.
So now it's up to the good people born between 1963-1971 with Pluto and Uranus conjunct in Leo to play this thing out to work their will, to see clearer, to see what they believe. Its going to be the hardest on these folks because they missed the summer of love they, missed the fight for woman's rights and racial equality. They got pumped full of rhetoric about dirty hippies and the dangers of all that free love and HIV and pretty much missed all the progress. They were raised on the 70's disaster movies with unhappy endings and some were pumped full of revelations and self hate from church. At a time when schools were changing into everyone is gifted and talented and being dumbed down, they were handed the threats of Y2K and those threats were right on time and the Twin Towers soon followed to prove bad stuff happens.

And now we've hit this strange moment when it seems like the whole system has gone crazy. But the thing is this the people who have taken power are the very ones who are most afraid most damaged and who are the least creative. They've hoarded all the wealth because they think this is what is valuable. Gold and diamonds and numbers in a bank, patents and oil and all. They've sold us a culture of convenience and gluttony, from fast food to throw away dishes to plastic grass but none of this has been very satisfying because it's based on the ideals of a small mentally damaged few. This generation has the chance to begin again to rethink, research, reclaim and redo live in harmony with nature explore the multiverse that is unfolding before our eyes. We get to decide we get to change the future we get to throw away the parts we don't like the parts that come from fear and not from love. We each have a dream inside of us each of us know what our passion was before life got us running in another direction. I ask this question to people a lot and I'm going to ask you now. If you could do whatever you wanted what would it be?
.....
It's new moon!!! NOW IS the time to start something that makes your heart sing. Get to it.

Ruminating on Lammas and the Fundamentalist Attacks on the Goddess Columbia

I woke this morning from a dream about being chased by a tall dark haired ex-husband who was a cop. I was being accused of murder. When he caught me he tried to pull me down between heavy slabs of ever diminishing stone. At the last minute I kicked him and ran. He would not follow me down the hills but would pursue me on up hill climbs. Running down hill was easier so I ran down hill as much as possible. I came to a group of people having a parade and tried to lose him by blending in with the crowd. I saw a group of women lining up against a wall for a meeting they were nuns and catholic lay women I sat quietly blending in with them. Suddenly the man showed up I slid under the table and whispered to the nun who had been sitting next to me..." he's my abusive ex husband don't let him find me." As she whispered to the other women in this line to protect me the farther down the line the message went the less likely it seemed these women would keep me safe. Just as my position was compromised I woke up.

Sitting with my husband Peter we analyzed the dream together picking apart it's symbolism. I felt strongly that the dream had to do with the fundamentalist Christians holding prayer vigils against the goddess Columbia. He asked me what my ex husband represented and I told him, mainstream America NASCAR and fundamentalist Lutherans who were forbidden to belong to lodges. This fit my suspicions about the dream being about the goddess Columbia.

The goddess Columbia was the goddess of the illuminati I didn't know this until just yesterday when I looked her up. I thought it was strange that these fundamentalists would be going after a goddess of the illuminati since the Bush family was rumored to have ties to this group... So in my mind they seemed to be infighting against their own elite. They were also exposing proof that the founding fathers were not creating a so called "Christian Nation" but were in fact creating a well thought out democracy based on the principles of the constructs of their fraternal secret societies of Europe as well as the governing rules of local indigenous peoples. Blending the ideals of these nations was a lovely combination in it's purest sense if you can disregard Europe's misogyny and slavery.

So I saw the assault on Columbia and the statue of Liberty not so much an attack on paganism but on fraternal orders and constitutional America because as a practicing pagan they had not attacked or even scratched the surface of my core beliefs, as I saw it secret societies and fraternal orders had always missed the core ideas of the divine feminine and as long as women were barred from these orders their symbols and so called secrets would remain hollow, lifeless, mysterious and without practicality or reality.

As we analyzed the dream more the idea that this ex-husband would not follow me if I ran down hill reminded me of the distain and fear these fundamentalists have for the underworld this their hell to be feared as the place of the condemned and damned...this is clearly the place where we as pagans can seek refuge and protection.

I saw the row of nuns as a symbol of my own Catholic roots after I left Catholicism I could see that the goddess of ancient times had been kept safe within this religion although like the dream as the message was passed down the line her safety became less assured.

It was my ex-husband's religion that taught me what parts of the oldest pagan religions had been saved thru Catholicism because the parts that the Protestants had stripped away were the parts that faintly held onto this light. And now it would seem the extreme right was waging another holy war against sacred geometry, natural order and any form of goddess.

This all seems timely as we pagans celebrate Lammas first harvest of three harvest festivals. First harvest marks the harvest of the grain. It is a cross quarter day which means this holiday marks the day between summer solstice (the longest day) and Autumnal Equinox(second harvest) Their are 8 of these solar holidays that celebrate the seasonal changes in the pagan calendar. At Lammas also known as Lughnasad the days begin to show signs of becoming shorter and the wheat fields are cut down. The first new grain is ground into the first fresh flour of the season bread is baked and shared with community. This holiday is also known as the "least", this would have been the time of having the least in a time when communities were dependent on their own crops to sustain them throughout the entire year. This rings true especially because grains were actually a last resort food for the our most ancient ancestors. Dietary experts who study diseases like celiac disease and allergies to glutton will tell you the human stomach was never made to eat grasses. Bread was the ancient world's processed food and was eaten in times of famine and strife. 8000 year old grinding stones found in the shrinking savannas of what is now the western deserts of Egypt will attest to this fact. This is what brought a fully developed black culture to the shores of the Nile thousands of years earlier than mainstream keepers of history would like us to believe mainly just to maintain a biblical reality that supports certain ethnicities over others. But science and genetics supports a black African beginning. Perhaps this also explains the desperate power grab of this GOP political movement against reelecting our first black president, the assault on worker's rights, education, science and an obscure little goddess holding a torch named Columbia.

All I can say to these people is Dudes black magic returns 3 fold...just sayin'

Some personal thoughts on Synarchy, the hysteria of Apocalypse and the right Wing Agenda

Last month I started painting the High Priestess after having a dream that told me I needed to use the sleeping goddess again as well as Nut (Egyptian sky goddess) and that somehow Nut was connected to the zodiac sign from the 10 sign zodiac. In this 10 sign zodiac Virgo Libra and Scorpio/Serpentarius were all combined into one long goddess ...this felt right but I needed more info so I did a Google search. In the search I found a site called watch.pair.com I found the reference I needed regarding the zodiac sign and started pouring over the writings on this page which were full of accurate occult references and yet steeped with an anti gay anti matriarch, pro patriarch fundamentalist Christian bias. I shared the site with my husband Peter and at first was having a hard time finding who had written this. We searched and found the name Barbara Aho. Peter thought he read about her before. I mentioned her to my friend Angie because she is a member of the Parliament of World Religions and is well connected to leadership in this area if Barbara Aho was someone in a position of leadership Angie would know her..Angie thought she was connected to the guy who wrote the Left Behind series off the top of her head at the spur of the moment. I kept searching for a bio for this woman as well as any credentials and or affiliations but found nothing about her personally, no pictures only that she was some how part of a group working on synarchy a World Religion...that was somehow connected with a world bank ideology. She was clearly using occult sources to promote her fundamentalist agenda. Barbara Aho even quoted Blavatsky ,Crowley and the golden dawn to make her point. And always referencing back to the bible chapter and verse. Other articles she had written included articles on the John Birch society and she named names and criticized people involved in government siting agendas from the 1950's thru present day including bloodlines and other minutia. She is clearly pro patriarch pro Christian anti-matriarch anti-gay...chapter and verse gal who is well researched.



Then exactly a month ago more pieces of a puzzle started to emerge... I had a dream about my college professor John Boatman who died last June...it was the day after his birthday so I was not surprised to see him in my dream... He was the one who was responsible for cracking my mind open and getting me to trust my dreams and abilities more than 30 years ago...Anyway...in the dream he was teaching at my husband Peter's school. I was bringing him a TV to use in his class room. As I walked into his room I saw a painting there. The painting was shaped like a megis shell. And in the painting there was a woman with a walking stick facing away from the viewer looking toward a bright sun within the sun was a megis shell. I knew right away this was part of the story of the Anishnabe people who were led to WI by the megis shell. I thought the message was for Peggy since Peter and I knew the story. So I searched for a site who had the old story on it. I found this http://www.thinkaboutit.com/native/seven_fires_prophecies_of_the_an.htm I read it out loud to Peter and then the 7th prophecy started to talk about Mackinaw. This triggered me to remember that a fundamentalist group from Mackinaw calling themselves Mackinaw were the people who were requesting the emails of UW-Madison professors (John Boatman was a UW professor intersting dream symbol)...These (Mackinaw) people wanted any and all private emails that contained the name (rogue governor Scott) Walker and/or(Rachel) Maddow in there emails. And wondered if the message from the dream was trying to get me to see a connection between the people attacking professors and requesting their emails were perhaps somehow connected to this faceless Barbara Aho and her world religion. Were these people utilizing and co-opting sacred power sites...like in the dark ages when people built churches on top of Pagan Temples sites. Somehow connecting the un-American policies being inflicted on key campaign swing states Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida and others where Republican governors were elected who on issues of creating jobs are now attacking worker's rights and the waging economic war with the middle class. It would seem a bigger agenda was unfolding but I could and still can not wrap my mind around what their objective is besides purely wanting to get rid of Barack Obama in 2012 and covet power.



Barbara Aho was the first fundamentalist I had run across who was ever willing to use occult sources and science to further a very conservative right wing religious agenda. Until The Horizon Project was brought to my attention. I started watching it with an open mind but the first thing that bothered me was the narrator pronounced the "Big Picture" as the Big 'Pitcher' and then he didn't name any of the world experts who gathered to answer the big questions of why we are here and why there are big gaps in our history.



But I listened on...In episode 2&3 I found some really bad science warning that our gaps in history are because of a magnetic shifts and implying that the shifting coastlines were due to polar reversals and not because oceans rose and fell due to the ice age...their reasoning doesn't speak at all about global temperature changes and periods of glaciation when large amounts of ocean water were encased in the ice caps allowing for populations to build near the now submerged coastal lines.



In another quick Google search it's easy to find that according to the real paleomagnetists, the most recent magnetic pole reversal appears to have occurred some 730,000 years ago blowing their theory of a 10,000 BC a pole shift out of the water...



The narrator on the video continues in a whispering voice like he's letting you in on a secret...as he describes the effects of the polar reversal... weakened gravity...sloshing oceans and the whole earth spinning and physically turning upside down in space...giving the impression that people could float right off the surface of the earth...(sounding like that "ascension into heaven as predicted in Revelations yet?)



Finally In Episode 5 we meet our expert Dr. Agnew Dr (Brooks) Agnew...no first name this given until much later..A quick Google search informs me that Dr. Brooks Agnew is a BlogTalk Radio host who had a talk show called Exotica Radio which was changed to "Off Planet Radio" April 17, 2011. I start to smell the Rapture agenda. Agnew giving his scientific rhetoric... starts talking about our solar system"...cycling around the galactic equinox"...??? Around...? This doesn't sound like the proper wording to me. Maybe they should have said the Mayan calendar shows when we will cross the "galactic elliptic" maybe and start a new age.the Mayan dates "August 11 3011BC-December 21,2011". seem to coincide with the timing of the patriarchal era and if this ends and considering the politics of the extreme right wing I think we are hearing the death rattle...And I'm cheering on the sidelines for it.



The last 3 episodes are all Brooks Agnew...he's the only named "expert" in the entire series. They go on to how known prophets have been predicting a cataclysm for this year, Revelations, Nostradamus, Edgar Casey and the Mayan Calendar...But never once mentions the second coming...he doesn't have to he knows the indoctrinated will automatically imply it and not saying it keeps him pseudo-credible...(but not really.)



But wait it gets better according to The Horizon Project the beginning of the Aquarian Age also starts on December 21st,2011...This is off by about 3 degrees from perfect alignments...the precession moves about one degree every 72 years ...the midheaven line between Ophuichus and Sagitarius is December 18th. Perfect solstice is Dec 21st. The zodiac will still take another 200 years or so to make this perfect alignment but it will continue to precess and will only hold that perfection for 72 years before Ophuichus (Serpentarius) will end on December 22nd a day after winter solstice...the zodiac was meant to be lunar...it's a wheel on it's own...the solstices and equinoxes change dates every appox. 30,000 or 40,000 years or so...but the seasons stay in line with solar wheel. The very ancient people kept track of millennia using precession. The Egyptians allowed the star calendar to slide out of sync with the seasonal calendar. They could have reconciled the solar and lunar calendar but chose not to for the reason of keeping track of long stretches of time.



I guess what bothers me so much is they are using hard won ideas to promote a shallow right wing fundamentalist mono culture agenda and just like the Nazi Agenda who used the cross quarter days and old pagan holidays to peek interest and rally it's people... The teachings became tainted by their association with them... My work which is all inclusive and based on good science, permaculture and green philosophies is also using the ideas of precession and lost history...I feel they are soiling this information and co-opting it... And I am damned angry about it!!!... so instead of running away from my power which is, standing for nature, balance and truth I've decided to speak up! ;)

The journey to the Journey into Egypt Tarot

In light of the recent upheaval over precession in astrology I thought it was time to tell my own experiences on this matter. Since I am right in the middle of creating a tarot deck based on just this subject. It would seem that 1/13/11 will be known as the day people stopped talking about the controversy of politics and started freaking out about the fact they are no longer the sun sign they thought they were.

My day started innocently enough designing the Moon card for my new deck I started looking up information on Ophiuchus the thirteenth sign. A few minutes later my friend Jade sent me a link,Recent Renewed Interest in the Zodiac by Bill Duvendack on Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 10:02am. Synchronicity! It was exactly what I needed when I needed it. I was thrilled but this is fairly common in my life and it doesn't freak me out.

The truth is this sort of thing happens to me quite a bit and it made me decide to post the events that led up to my discovery of precession and my decision to create a new tarot deck based on this phenomenon. And here are the details leading up to the Journey into Egypt Tarot a work in progress...

The most important thing about this new deck is the archetype in relationship to the placement on the wheel of the year, the relationship to placement colors, changes or deepens the usual meaning of the card.
The goal is to try to experience the spirit of ancient Egyptian that still exists today. Keeping in mind the people of ancient Egypt viewed the external world as a reflection of the internal world. By this premise if we change our state of mind we change our environment.
I can’t help but wonder if in this time of great change if we couldn’t benefit from reconnecting to the earth and each other. And if a unique look back at a mysterious nature religion may help us get to know ourselves a little better.

My journey back to Egypt and toward this new deck began with the completion of my third tarot deck a controversial deck based on full moon signs and cross-quarter days instead of the usual linear ordering MAAT was circular and cyclical in nature and it changed the ordering of the major arcana. The premier of this deck took me on a trip to Los Angeles, California in 2006 to present The MAAT Tarot at LATS (The Los Angeles Tarot Symposium). It was there that Mary Greer first mentioned to me a possible “Tarot Tour” to Egypt. I was interested and knew this would be the dream trip of a lifetime. My favorite author Normandi Ellis would be one of the co-facilitators and I had always wanted to meet her.
It eventually turned out that the dates of this trip coincided with my 49th birthday, this was a Saturn aspect for me and I knew everything I have done so far that is tarot related coincides with Saturn aspects. It seems to be part of my “karma” or at least is turning out to be my life’s work.
The first trip was just the beginning, as my tarot journeys would lead me to another tarot symposium and yet another serendipitous trip to Egypt. The second Egypt trip came about in an amazingly serendipitous way and it all started at BATS 2008 (Bay Area Tarot Symposium) when a woman named Norma came up to me after the panel discussion on the last day of the conference and said, "I have something to tell you and you have something to tell me but I don't know what it is..." My response was," well let's figure it out" Turned out she needed to know something about cross-quarter-days and full moons for the labyrinth she was creating and she told me I needed to read The Egypt Code by Robert Bauval... My thoughts were “if I ever see this book sometime I hope I remember to pick it up,” frankly I doubted I would find it anytime soon...
Since my husband Peter had never been to San Francisco we made plans to take a ride with Ferol Humphrey and a woman named Darlene both women had been on my first trip to Egypt. By the time I had finished talking to Norma, Ferol and Darlene missed us and left with Ruth Ann and Wald Amberstone to see Wald’s old haunts in Berkley. So Tracey Hoover (author of the companion book to my first deck Ancestral Path Tarot), Peter and I decided to go walking, we ended up at Field's book because Tracey said she saw my MAAT deck and book there and she wanted to show me. So just 20 minutes after Norma had told me about Bauval's book there I was at Fields Book Store and Bauval’s book was the first thing I saw. I purchased it right away. I looked through it that night and thought, “wow its pretty complicated,” and set it aside. A little over a month later I started reading it and really connected, I also realized this was the same guy who connected the three great pyramids of Giza to the stars in Orion’s belt way back in 1990’s. This idea really influenced my thinking about Orion and Osiris and later the Fool and Orion for the MAAT Tarot. Anyway part way through the book I had a bunch of questions and wondered if Robert was on Facebook. And he was!! And better still I could write him a message so I did. I introduced myself and told him about my work and asked him if he was ever going to be covering the Egyptian’s spiritual views about the moon as clearly the Egypt Code was singularly focused on alignments of Sirius, the Sun and other stars. I was surprised to hear back from him that very night and he responded that he would be doing an entire book on Egypt and the Moon at some later date. I joined his fan club and left it there a few days later he friended me. Being Robert’s friend now I could see his posts and I was one of the first people to see his invitation for 10 guest/visitors to see the 8000 year old stone circle in Egypt’s western desert an ancient site with possible ties to Egypt’s pharaonic culture...before I could think about it I responded asking about dates and prices. Thinking to myself “Can I do this?”
As it turned out yes I could and my second trip to Egypt would the door to tarot deck project #4. My diary post gives my full emotional reaction to the idea of precession...

Day Nine
Tuesday April 14th, 2009
Card of the Day
King of Wands
Leisurely day didn’t go to the Nubian Village and swam in the pool, got some sun, rested, read, and attended a lecture on star alignments and temples. The lecture turned out to be more of an ambush than a lecture. Robert Bauval made a point of letting us all know that “modern astrology was rubbish” knowing full well that I used astrology in my work he insisted I explain to him why astrologers still used the sky of 4th century. He went through each of our natal skies by plugging our birthdays into the computer program and showed us that clearly the sky had moved back a full 30 degrees a full sign, each of us had sun signs that had precessed to the previous sign. All the planets were in the same alignments with the same houses as our charts everything was just in the previous sign. I couldn’t tell him why I insisted that astrologers knew this but he would have none of it. I was angry and frustrated and I ended up walking out of the lecture rather than be subjected to more of his condescending abuse. I felt humiliated and sabotaged he could have presented his case in more sensitive less rude manner. It was a full day before I would speak to him and he set me aside and told me that the real time astrology works, that I should write about it that the world needed to know about this and that I would be at the cutting edge of something new if I was to speak up about it. I told him he was right but that he had a lousy way of presenting his material. I had to agree I was pretty upset with myself for not figuring this out on my own for not knowing or considering precession. My first thoughts were mainly how annoyed I was that MAAT Tarot is wrong based on this antiquated inaccurate sky...my second thoughts were I’m NOT doing another deck...
I was clearly angry but perhaps I was really angry at myself for not already knowing this.

A week after my return from Egypt I was back on a plane again and on my way to the Reader’s Studio "09 a huge tarot conference held in NJ. My nose was stuffy and by Friday of the conference I had laryngitis so bad I couldn’t talk. Sales were down due to the bad economy and due to the fact most people in attendance already had my deck. I was feeling run down and felt I needed to do something else for a while just paint about Egypt and forget about tarot...by the end of the trip my leg was seriously hurt out of no where. I thought I maybe pulled something coughing and lugging an 80-pound suitcase full of inventory around. Friends pulled a few cards for a quick diagnosis. The Ace of Coins, the 8 of Coins...their take was...”There are more important things than money...take ONE day off...” I knew I needed more days off than that. In the MAAT Tarot the Ace is all summer. By the time I got home I was forced to go on bed rest to stay off my leg that got much worse. I stayed home stayed in bed and finished writing The MAAT Book of Court cards, and started MAAT Book of Days 2010 all the while I had a niggling feeling in the back of my mind that haunted me...the sky I was using was wrong...it felt like a lie now.
By the week of Summer Solstice my husband Peter and I were on the road to PSG ( a Pagan Spirit Gathering in Missouri) where I would be doing a class and vending tarot decks. I met a woman named Lori Mann who came to my class she was a reader as well and we ended up swapping readings... Lori's reading for me ended up being a download about a Tarot deck that was like a puzzle...a two-hour download from psychic medium Lori Manns...I still didn’t realize it was a new deck she was talking about until I went to get a massage from my friend Jude Christiansen. It was the day before the solar eclipse in July 2009. I thought perhaps a massage would help to heal my bad leg it was also the first massage I had gotten in probably 6 years. That night after getting the massage I went to sleep and the floodgates opened. I saw an entire Egyptian tarot in the form of MAAT Tarot’s wheel of the year in all its full glory big paintings like a giant mural all fitting together all telling a story and all based on the real sky astrology Robert talked about. I woke up inspired but not sure I would do it. I talked about it on Facebook everyone was supportive and excited wanting me to do it. The face of the High Priest standing in front of Karnak temple was the clearest card from my dream. He seemed to beckon me on. Suddenly I was kind of inspired and later that day Peter said to me...”You’re going to do another deck...” my response was....”no I’m not.” The next day I started waking up with ideas I found myself thinking about correspondences again...I was going to do another deck.
By the time The Minnesota Area Tarot Symposium came at the end of July 2009 I was ready to announce the decision to make a new deck. And after Nancy Antenucci performed her journey of the Fool tarot interpretive dance I knew right away that I wanted her to dance this new tarot and that we would have a gallery show that would travel to different cities. I knew where I wanted to start. I felt the joy again I was excited I had a project that I could finally sink my teeth into.
Just before Mercury went retrograde in September. I got a call out of the blue from Kassandra Murray Niagara Ontario owner of the Mide Bistro. I was scheduled to do classes and show pictures we made plans the summer of 08 but I never had enough paintings to make it worth the trip. I saw her name come up on the cell. Her words where that she had a waking vision about doing something with the sabbats (cross quarter days) with paintings I had done...I laughed and told her what I was working on...Her vision was about the journey of the god through the underworld and the goddess joining him at Samhain. I knew right away this was the journey of Osiris and the trials of Isis bleeding through for all my cross quarter day cards. Kassandra had given me another big piece of the puzzle. The tarot puzzle Lori Mann had hinted about in her reading at Summer Solstice.
If my dream, the reading from Lori and the waking vision from Kassandra was not enough. My neighbor Laura Zastrow also came knocking on my door the last week of September. Her words, “Julie I had a dream about you and I need to know what is going on...I dreamed you did all these paintings and I was being shown all of them one after the other but so fast that I couldn’t get enough time to look at any of them closely...What are you working on?” I think my eyes got pretty big and we sat down for a visit and I told her the whole story....
And there you have it the whole introduction to the chain of events that brought me to creating yet another tarot deck. Does the world need another tarot deck? I guess it does.