Four of Cups/The Magician reversed. Yep, Four of Cups pretty much sums up how I feel today. I am tired. Physically tired and mentally tired. I think today I need to take a break from soul searching, but I do need to remember how much Water was indicated in my cards from yesterday. This lethargy may have something to do with all that “wetness” and its heavy contraction. The Magician in an upright position corresponds with Air (hot/separates and wet/adapts), Mercury (reason, intelligence, orderliness) and the Hebrew letter Beth (house; builder). The Magician is able to use his skills and talents to “tame” the elements and their effects for his own purposes. The card may be reversed, but it is there, and so are these abilities. When the time is right, I will need to tap into them, no matter how difficult this may seem.

My Thoth card is the Ten of Wands. “Oppression” Fire has done its work too well, and there is no fuel remaining to offer new ideas. Government has turned to tyranny because there is no Balance.

My Legacy card is the Seven of Coins. LOL, I guess even my day of lethargy is to have a purpose. I am being told that this pause is important for two reasons. First, I need to determine if the harvest is ripe. If I begin to take the fruits of my labors too early, they will not be complete; if I wait too long, they will begin to rot and decay. Second, I need to acknowledge the need for patience. I cannot hurry the ripening process, I can only enable it to happen.

My 6-digit number for today is 7. This number tells of the beginning of movement away from the vertical and horizontal balance of the number 6 and the early stages of the degeneration of that balance. I need to remember that this degeneration is not necessarily a bad thing. Challenges bring growth, after all.

Well, my Tarot cards yesterday were mostly water, and guess what? It has been raining, hard, since last night. LOL, I always forget to look for the literal meanings of the cards.

I have done some initial research on the four stages of alchemic psychology (and most of what I have read so far acknowledges “citrinatis” as a stage on its own), nigredo, albedo, citrinitas or citrinatis, and rubedo. While together they represent a complete cycle, I need to look at them individually, first. And so, I will first tackle the nigredo, since I think this is the phase I am dealing with right now. The following two paragraphs are harvested from several separate Wikipedia pages.

Nigredo, or blackness, in alchemy means putrefaction or decomposition. The alchemists believed that as a first step in the pathway to the philosopher's stone, all alchemical ingredients had to be cleansed and cooked extensively to a uniform black matter. In psychology, Carl Jung interpreted nigredo as a moment of maximum despair, that is a prerequisite to personal development. Further steps of the alchemical opus are albedo (whiteness), citrinitas (yellowness) and rubedo (redness).

The shadow is an unconscious complex defined as the repressed, suppressed or disowned qualities of the conscious self. According to Jung, the human being deals with the reality of the shadow in four ways: denial, projection, integration and/or transmutation. According to analytical psychology, a person's shadow may have both constructive and destructive aspects. In its more destructive aspects, the shadow can represent those things which people do not accept about themselves. For instance, the shadow of someone who identifies as being kind may be harsh or unkind. Conversely, the shadow of a person who is brutal may be gentle. In its more constructive aspects, a person's shadow may represent hidden positive qualities. This has been referred to as the “gold in the shadow.” Jung emphasized the importance of being aware of shadow material and incorporating it into conscious awareness in order to avoid projecting shadow qualities on others. The shadow in dreams is often represented by dark figures of the same gender as the dreamer.

After reading these two paragraphs and allowing them to digest a bit, I realized two things. First, no matter how intensely uncomfortable and tortuous a Dark Night becomes, unless we consciously experience the suffering and understand its source as well as its sensations, we will not glean the benefits from that suffering. This means that unless we sooner or later pick apart the scabs and probe the infection completely, we will never find the splinter that is its cause. Yep, we can get rid of the infection on the surface, but it will surely return, and possibly worse than before because we have become accustomed to the discomfort associated with the infection, and so won’t notice its return until it has entrenched itself and become more difficult to dislodge. Everything must be examined and purged, not just the “usual suspects,” and using the metaphor presented, this means that we can’t just dig out the splinter, but we must also address the path the splinter took to arrive at its deep resting place.

This is hard work, especially if it is done in a solitary fashion. We don’t want to face our shadow because in the end, we will find the worst parts of ourselves hidden in our shadows, and we don’t want to acknowledge those traits, so we avoid even thinking about them. But we will not be able to move on to the next step until each segment of our psyche is examined in detail, tested harshly, and the judged as worthy of continuing, or needing to be burned away. Bug, we talked about this last night, and I believe it is the most important thing to remember about the nigredo.

The second thing I realized is that our shadow does not have to consist of only dangerous traits. The key is to remember the concept of Balance. Offering a periodic escape valve to, say, an addiction to those plastic tubs of prepared cake icing (LOL, moi? Addicted to cake icing??), might make it easier to resist their lure on most occasions. If I have trouble standing up for myself, I don’t need to do a 100% turnaround and become a despot; I just need to choose my moments to make my stand. This will allow my Younger Self to feel important instead of neglected, and then next time she might be more amenable to standing down.

*sigh* Well, now I know why it is called a Great Work. This is not a quick and easy task.

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