Historically and hysterically, the overlap between passing centuries has usually been rife with chaos and anxiety. During these transition times one can witness the soothsayers, diviners, psychics and visionaries stepping forth to hawk their various doomsday scenarios and utopian futures. Amidst the growing uncertainty of the current millennial overlap, a veritable flood of psychological maps and metaphysical models, books, teachers and oracles riddle a collective consciousness on the brink of a nervous breakdown, while offering a cornucopia of spiritual guidance for restabilizing our world view(s). As more people pass through these exotic belief systems and esoteric mystical codes, some of us discover how certain externally imposed maps and models have the effect of buffering us from the very guidance we seek in the first place.
Of these buffers, many come disguised as still another form of disembodied spirituality, suggesting that the source of spiritual authority exists outside ourselves- out of body, in a host of channeled entities, crystals, angels, cults, organized and disorganized religions, UFOs, moms & dads, governments, IBM, CBS, FBI, LSD, and ten thousand other sources.
This tendency to project the spiritual outside of ourselves is not our fault but a deeply ingrained socio-religious conditioning inherited from ages past. There is no point in feeling guilty about it or judging others too harshly for their ignorance. Yet, if we are to adjust and change this habit we must become completely responsible for recognizing the way it negates our capacity for validating our present realities and the personal registration of those states.
How often have you heard yourself, or someone else, exclaim during an incredulous yet very real moment: "I can't believe this is happening to me?" Why is the most difficult thing for people to believe the very thing that is happening to them? Because it exists and existence does not require our belief or understanding to happen; it just is. We don't usually register the state or condition we are in; that habit must be learned. This turns the prospect of spiritual autonomy into an uphill battle; yet, the struggle itself is essential for self realization and not mere understanding. We are truly giants who have been raised as dwarves; it's time to reclaim our innate spiritual authority.
Redefining the Facts of Your Life
Once these conditioned responses are recognized, the task at hand is fairly simple yet requires your total integrity to work. First, you must be ready to defuse those archaic, obsolete cultural ideations wrapped around the facts of your life, so you can experience these facts more directly and come to your own conclusions about what they mean. The spiritual facts of your life might include intelligence, love, security, language, creativity, work, transformation, friendships and whatever issues need redefining before they can align with your direct experience rather than consensus reality hand-me-downs. It's in this iconoclastic spirit that the following ideas, principles and techniques for designing your own oracle are presented.
Images are just images until you change one that is attached to an important area of your psyche. The entire course of your life can change with it and that is how magic works. Many people would never dream of designing a tarot deck or an oracle, yet how truly magical it might be to divine the unknown with cards custom designed to your own personal vision and the symbology that is its voice. For simplicity's sake, let "oracle" cards differ from "tarot" by their lack of externally imposed ordering principles such as major & minor arcana, four suits and numerology. You do not need Tarot experience to design a deck of oracle cards, in other words. If you know the Tarot, then you might be in the position to rethink those archetypes in terms more personally relevant to the life you are now living; you could design a new Tarot.
Neuro comes from the Greek "nerve," referring to the most basic unit of biological intelligence: the neuron. The trinary function of the neuron is to absorb, store and transmit information and/or energy. This might be as innate a definition for intelligence as we can know. We'll use it to test other definitions. Real, live intelligence finds expression through our talents for intuitive osmosis (absorption), personal interpretation (storage) and the communication skills (transmission) connecting us to the world. Nobody can ever know how intelligent you actually are until you can communicate what you've absorbed and interpreted for yourself. One way of dramatizing this process is through designing a deck of cards expressing how you absorb, interpret and transmit the spiritual facts of your life, according to your own Central Neural (the word "nervous" gets on my nerves) System.
The Workbench and the Research
A Neuro-Tarot is a symbolic device for tracking images in the psyche and the world around us, for finding and creating more imaginative connections between vertical (heavens above, soul within, earth below) and horizontal (the world around us) realms. I've discovered three basic methods for constructing a Neuro-Tarot:
Each approach works well enough depending on the degree of available energy, artistic talent, and time. To convey the fundamentals, this article will only explore the cut-and-paste collage method of designing a Neuro-Tarot; perhaps the illustrators among us will catch on soon enough and start drawing their own cards.
Preliminary research for this project involves locating and obtaining the following raw materials: numerous copies of your favorite magazines, especially those with the greatest variety of font sizes and styles alongside the most gorgeous illustrations and photos. In the service of Art, you will mutilate and destroy these magazines by cutting out choice words and images to form the basis of your deck of cards. (Note: collage art bypasses copyright law when the combination of separate images creates an entirely new work of visual art: yours.)
To complete your oracle kit, you'll need a hundred or so blank index cards, glue sticks, scissors, felt-tip pen, and plenty of scratch paper.
What makes an oracle deck work? An effective Neuro-Tarot depends on the integrity of your self knowledge- your willingness to completely expose yourself to yourself. Self honesty ranks a lot higher than artistic talent when you're creating a divination device. When is the best time to design a deck of oracle cards? Whenever your Central Neural System is active; when you're not too sure about who you are or what everything means. This happens often enough in a state of openness and uncertainty, and more so when you're slightly unstable or in trouble: hot water, emotional catastrophe, psychological disaster, personal shambles, etc... when your life literally feels like it's "in pieces" and when you'd do anything to feel whole again. I think it's only fair to say that you don't have to be in a desperate situation to design a deck of oracle cards; you can just as well create one based on your wonderfully calm and untroubled life.
When the Personal Becomes Universal
When you decide to begin, start naming the most meaningful pieces of your life. Whether it's the shards of shattered dreams or a list of your top twenty reasons for getting out of bed in the morning, name your facts. If they connect with people you have feelings for: name the feelings. Define those fragments that are strictly personal to you. Start imagining cards that act like windows to new experiences. Look at this process as a kind of hands-on, primitive film editing project in which you are director, producer and cast. Define all your various experiences in your own words. The "right" word is the one that means something to you and/or refers to the specific states that mean something to you. Now, get those scissors and magazines. Start cutting out pictures that jump out at you. Then, cut those words out that mean something to you. Choose some neutral words, as well. Cut out hundreds of words and create a word pool.
There's a power to naming. It assists the formation of a private language while serving as a mouthpiece for more universal archetypes. The term "archetype", as used here, refers to invisible forces of nature illuminating deep memory patterns of the species' past, present and future mythos. Tarot cards can act like symbolic mirrors for reflecting the development of collective mythologies: the universal stories living through our individual lives that express our connections with changing cultural zeitgeists, as well as more far-reaching interspecies transmutations.
The key, I think, is to keep your work personal. If you try to focus on too grand a scale, you run the risk of losing power and going bland. Designing these cards requires total integrity. By committing to what is most personally meaningful to you and your life right now, you have a much better chance at breaking through to more universal ground. Have faith; with faith and patience, anyone can persist and succeed. If you have doubt, make a "doubt" card. It's your life, remember? Make cards that express darker, frightening elements within your psyche alongside the brighter, more cheerful aspects of your totality. By combining strong positives and negatives, your deck will tend to ring with more truth and authenticity. The more personal you get with your deck when you're designing it, the more personal your deck will get with you when you play with it later.
Images + Words x Imagination = Archetypes
Back to the workbench. Scissors in hand, hunt down those magazine images and photos triggering an instant resonance in you, positive or negative. You don't have to know why these images touch and move you, as long as they do. Trust your absorbing, intuitive intelligence on this one. Next, look for those pictures that somehow remind you of your past, your present, and your desired and potential futures. These images will help instill a sense of chronological and emotional time throughout your deck, an important attribute for the divination of timing and maybe, prediction. Look for colors and designs that encourage visual contrast and variety. Create a deck full of surprises and its cards will continue to alter the expected for you. Another visual technique is "background/foreground." Find images that make perfect backdrops for ideas you wish to highlight up front. This method brings a dramatic element into play. Try experimenting with the collage technique of juxtaposing dissonant images in one card to form new visions, new ways of seeing things.
How many pictures are enough? Too many are usually enough. Create an image pool in front of you opposite the word pool (I find it most convenient to work on the floor). Now: get a sense of whether the images should be on the left or the right side in front of you; this decision will help fine-tune your intuition for the experimental task ahead. This idea stems from the left brain/right brain theory which suggests that the right (more intuitive) hemisphere of the brain "thinks" in pictures, and the left (more analytical) in words; once again, trust your own intuition as to where you put the image pool. Now you've got all the raw materials you'll need right in front of you: words and images. To create your own archetypes, begin applying your imagination to the process of combining words and images in ways that communicate personal visions that have the most meaning for you. The faculty of imagination cannot be underestimated in bringing your cards to life and infusing it with the magic of dreams. Create worlds your soul would inhabit.
Arrange words and images together in ways that express the way you see the world. By staying committed to the personal, you will eventually break through to universal conditions almost anyone can relate to. Since this may not happen right away, expect certain cards to remain more subjective and esoteric, while others become more immediately accessible to minds outside your own.
More Tools for the Oracle's Toolbox
Become more specific about your creative responses to inevitable issues like sex, death and taxes. You may pass through a kind of initiation wherein doors open to the gallery of your multidimensional psyche. Inside, you'll find all the great masterpieces to inspire you: Mom and Dad, Passion, Power, Love, Art, Friendship, Revelation, Failure, Faith, Death, Morality, Fear, Recognition, Imprisonment, Commitment, Freedom, Family, Education, Money, Magic, the Earth and "the ten thousand things"... all of which are potential Tarot cards disguised as everyday experiences. By crystallizing each of these in your cards, you engage an exercise in values; you risk taking a stand on important issues. By putting yourself on the line, you can uncover greater portions of your psyche and also clean out what you are unwilling to claim.
Trim the pictures so they fit on the index cards; then, glue them down. Watch your story unfold as each card comes to life. After cutting and pasting, frame each card with a dark felt-tip pen. Glue the word onto the card, wherever appropriate, to communicate your insight. If a card speaks for itself without a word, leave it off for now; maybe it won't need a word. Naming and/or numbering cards is a traditional device for ordering random, mixed-up cards. You decide how much "order" you want to impose. Numbering each card instills an ordering principle; it "arranges" your chaos. To produce your own creation myth, delineate stages of evolution as you see it by assigning a number to each phase (each card) of your transformative process. (The traditional Tarot does this with much success.)
As you continue combining terms and pictures, watch for configurations that surprise you by offering a new insight into an old memory or a bird's-eye view on a previously banal issue. Watch how visual composition can act on your point of view. Above all, look for moments: condensed visual feasts for the inner and outer eye. Moments- snapshots of eternity, close-ups of your inner life. To fortify the resilience of each card, you may want to paste two index cards together; a colored card makes a nice reverse side. To extend the life span of your completed deck, contact a printer that offers lamination services (the plastic cover enveloping restaurant menus) and laminate your cards. This will also make them easier to deal.
On Testing the Oracle
The simplest and (sometimes) most effective form of self-divination is to hold the deck of cards in your hands while concentrating on a quandary; after focusing on it, pick a card. Notice your immediate response before you get to thinking about it. A quandary, by the way, is not a simple "yes" or "no" question; it may be an unresolvable issue. Then why ask? Answers aren't everything. The cards you pick may shift your perspective around, allowing you to think differently about the initial concern. Greg Hill (author of Principia Discordia), shared the following "Discordian spread" with me after seeing my first Neuro-Tarot. Deal five cards, face down. Pick 1 card each to represent: 1) the present time, 2) your aspiration, and 3) your personal struggle. Now, select two cards (4 & 5) representing a pair of opposites that serve to unify the whole and to expose two contrary elements of the #1 card. (There is no center to this spread.) Another use I developed is a form of cosmic poker I call five-card catma (for the uninformed, catma is the opposite of dogma). This game needs at least two players to work.
The object of Five-card Catma is to display the most imaginative creation myth in the room, using only five cards to tell your story of how the universe came into being. As with poker, someone deals five cards to each player. After receiving their initial five cards, each player can discard as many as three cards to risk obtaining a better hand. When all hands are fixed and it is time to show, each player narrates his/her creation myth utilizing their cards to animate the story. Players can also fold and forfeit the game to watch. Those who play it out do so until one creation myth stands out as "the best." This could be a funny, somber, erotic, oppressive or totally banal story; the nature of the myth seems incidental to its truth factor. As strange as this may sound, there's never been any question about which story has ever won as long as I've played this game. I don't claim to understand how this works; I attribute it, in part, to the mystery of the cards and maybe, the game itself.
ANTERO ALLI is the author of THE VERTICAL ORACLE (with cards by Sylvie Pickering), ANGEL TECH, ASTROLOGIK & other books. He now lives in the pacific northwest. E-mail him at anteros@speakeasy.org, or visit his web site at http://www.paratheatrical.com
[Home Page | Other Articles in This Issue | FAQ | Local Resources]