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Dear reader,

Ideas come seeded in a singular word. Or as a discrete note, that like a bird, wants to find its flock to partake in the murmuration of melody. So no matter where I move I make sure to place the altar where, on bended knee, I read my cards every morning to be before a window, so I can watch for feathers that might fall from the sky.

At my last apartment it seemed like the crows were keeping watch of me rather than the other way around. Anytime I looked up a black bird wasn’t flying too far away. But every once in a while a hummingbird would catch its reflection in the glass right before me, right as I cut my cards, as if interested to see if there’s any nectar in the sublime narrative generating in the divinatory moment.

And now, back again in my hometown, I’m fortunate to find a bird nest perched in the patio awning my bedroom opens out toward. Mammalian reproduction has always been miraculous. This bird nest outside my bedroom window is opening a particular valence pointing towards the blood red egg of resurrection, the regenerative power of love.

This blood-love alchemy takes its time for we all have a sad story that cuts too deep: mothers who disdain their daughters, daddies that were really dragons with false-hearts, then ensnared by two-faced friends who left ‘em for dead. Stories that haunt us till we’re crazy or ones that made you too tough and not enough brave.

As tender is the child thrust into the primordial horrors of the human: all the heinous forms of abuse, all the wars of genocide, every theft of self, all the mounting grief of collective abandonment; how many have to simultaneously survive parental authoritarianism; a cold neglect compounding into the trauma of cumulative relational impoverishment? Engulfed by horror, dread and a terrifying sorrow, our young souls are fraught with the complex nonsense of tyrannical hate internalized. With the unceasing massacre of innocents, the spirit of this child is split from her affects, cast out into the private darkness of the unconscious. Lost inside is a ruined child that can’t cope with a violated innocence.

The trauma a human experiences differs in nature and severity but certain structures of a wounded psyche form a recognizable pattern.

Tarot so often takes stock of what makes psychic survival possible. The Nine of Wands, pictured above, is a particularly prescient out-picturing of the paradox of an archetypal self-care system1, with its host of daimonic images that arise in response to trauma. Donald Kalsched has long told us of how the developing psyche of a child fragments into syzygy upon the impact of trauma, one part an ego regressed into a vulnerable young, innocent child, and another that is precociously progressed, rigid, and primarily preoccupied with protecting the personal spirit from further violation.2 Each become polarized in its own extreme.

A heart closes to tuck a folded sweet child between the ribs. Curled up so tightly somewhere inside that the evil monsters outside will no more notice the winsome baby, nor try to devour her whole.

These defenses differ from the ones that genuinely operate as a form of self-care because the traumatic inner caretaker inevitably persecutes the regressed psyche, keeping it shamefully hidden to personify the psyche’s dissociation. These aren’t defenses any more but a maximum security penitentiary. This system operates outside of conscious awareness or control.

You can tell by the set of the shoulders on this soldier with a head wound, the psyche has become a battleground. Inner warfare floods the world with fear but he soldiers on. Its an easy cue to the psychoanalytic of it all. This wounded ego is rather a narcissistic self injury. Standing ever vigilant, excessively defensive in front of nine wands forming what Waite calls a “palisade”:

Something is seriously at stake here. Indebted with the weight of childhood trauma in this fragile, impermanent world, this boy has become mean, standoffish, twisted all up in worry.

If we work with Waite and the coherent correspondence system fully established by his cohort we will tie this card to the second face of Sagittarius, a decan that the Picatrix signifies by timoris, ploratus, dolorum, el timendi semper de suo corpore, fright, loss, lamentations, grief, misery, troubles, fear for the body.5

These themes reverberate across Kalsched’s system in which one, in a state of hyperarousal, defends against real and perceived threats. The card frames the wands as a symbol of fortitude, but this fortress entraps the figure in a psychic isolation, constrained and closed to the sacred core of a vital aliveness, cut off from feeling, hidden from healing.

As the Moon rules this decan it is relevant and revelatory to stitch in understandings of the process by which a child develops an ego. Edward Edinger in Ego and Archetype, states that as infants we all start off identified with the Godhead or Self (Jung’s term for “the totality of the conscious and unconscious psyche [that] transcends our visions”). Slowly this identification is, and must be, dissolved and humanized.  Edinger imagines this process as an inflation-deflation cycle, with the image of the Self projected onto the parent by the child, for the child to then violate and rebel against this identification, leading to ego-Self alienation, then repaired by reunion with an open-hearted parent. Slowly in this waxing-waning lunar cycle, an ego-Self axis develops.6

A healthy psyche, as well as a healthy relationship to the numinous depends upon this development. In Edinger’s model, trauma is when ego-Self alienation is left in disrepair. Then the ego’s identification with the Self will not be dissolved and some form of narcissistic pathology is produced. In the ubiquity of trauma, these adults feel child-like in their depths, full of archaic untransformed affects that are an absolute burden to carry all alone. Those that are unbearable lead to dissociation, defended by the archetypal forces Kalsched calls the self-care system. What would otherwise be healthy regulatory energies have hypertrophied. As horribly self-destructive as these trauma-linked defenses are, they intend to care-take, extending the body’s immune system. But these defenses that form themselves in response to trauma becomes much more violent and destructive than an introjected abuser. The imago has been infected, turned an explosive, militant and estranged father into a brutal beast that is more than wolf than man.

Do you really want a demon defending you? As cursed as we are by colonialism, white supremacy, racial capitalism, the inner evil of our psyche’s own dissociated trauma is just as grueling to exorcise. Trauma tricks the psyche’s system of self-care into one of self-destruction. Suffering isn’t being alleviated but perpetuated. The inner world is now a nightmare with nonstop persecution. Nothing is needed now more than a therapeutic intervention.

This child with sad feelings suppressed in the Four of Cups has become repressed and unconscious in the Nine of Wands, and both cards tell us trauma is primarily an injury in the capacity to feel. They are drugged, passed out in the basement at the bottom of the stairs in the dark at midnight. But they are still there. They can still wake, still grow.

Until the talking bird wakes him from his captivity, this terrorized soul is stuck between heaven and hell, surrounded by Angels that any moment can unmask their demonic darkness. The hard human world is destined to turn back to dust. Space, time, history, morality bind experience and expectation. To survive we seek sanctuary in the spiritual though it should be unequivocally stated that trauma creates a spiritual crisis, compounded by cultural, historic trauma.

Card readers trace the fault lines in the geographies of self marked by overlapping and often contradictory cultural locations that leave us dwelling in the cracks between worlds. The power of a red spirituality is that its images are erotic, working out a metanoia of psychic resilience when we walk in and through the frames that are doors to many several worlds. It has no trouble pursuing deep healing by probing an open wound.

Pain persevered takes an anonymous spark of divinity, schooling its intelligence till it becomes a soul possessed a sense of self.