I am neck deep in an exploration of the True Book’s Celtic Cross tarot card spread and realized I had skipped a step in this process, one necessary even to understand the cards I am learning about in their proper context. What is needed is a simple catalog of the tarot cards that appear in spreads in Troubled Blood. Two cards appear three times (Two of Cups and Lust) and two appear twice (Nine of Swords and the Hierophant).

As noted in the first post about the cards in the Celtic Cross spread, swords appear at the beginning, middle, and end of this spread; I should have mentioned then that the Nine of Swords, in addition to being the first card of Talbot’s Celtic Cross, is also the last card in the hidden spread on the ‘Babalon the Mother of Abominations’ page. They act as something of a ‘latch’ to Strike5 if you’re paying close attention to the cards

I’d note, too, that the readings with only two exceptions are trump cards (12), swords (4), or cups (5). There are no batons (‘wands’) and only two discs (‘pentacles’). We have archetypes in the trump cards, intelligence or thinking in swords, and “emotions, relationships, cleansing, and healing” with the cups. No surprises there with respect to Rowling’s themes for this series and her other work.

After the jump, then, a very brief listing with a few links to the True Book’s various tarot cards, both the clear-as-day and the hidden pictures. [Read more…]

David asked a challenging question here about Rowling’s views on abortion, a question that cannot be answered definitively by anyone but Rowling but which merits serious consideration by her serious readers:

Will we see JKR taking a moment to attend to Bethany and Ryan Bomberger’s new children’s book, She is She – and if so, in what terms? In a recent interview in the context of its release, Ryan Bomberger noted “I’m the 1% that’s used 100% of the time to justify abortion. I had a courageous birth mom who I’m forever grateful to, that even though she experienced the horror and the violence of rape, she did not make me a victim of the violence of abortion.”

This issue of rape and abortion is very much in the news in the United States, David, because Florida has a 15 week limit on legal abortions with no exemptions for rape, which scandalizes those who use the cause of less than 1% of abortions as justification for legalizing pre-natal infanticide in all cases for any reason. Florida’s legislature is considering a bill to lower that current limit to six weeks without removing the exemption. Texas is going even further in protecting the lives of the unborn. All that has infuriated the “pro-choice” contingent — and brought out the children of rape whose mothers chose not to make them the second victim of the rapist’s crime to testify for this protection of the defenseless unborn, however they were conceived. See here and here for voices like Bamberger’s.

Join me after the jump for a very brief review of Rowling’s position on this in her fiction and public statements. [Read more…]

Three days ago, I introduced the problem of the ten card Celtic Cross tarot spread in the ‘True Book’ embedded text of Troubled Blood. I shared there the hypothesis and premises of my argument about the pages of the ‘True Book’ as well as information about the accepted or received understanding of how to read this popular tarot card spread, with the broad meanings assigned to the positions of each card in that cross, circle, and staff lay-out. What follows here, a look at the first card in Talbot’s Celtic Cross, may not make much sense unless you are familiar with that material and the notes I wrote yesterday about the history of tarot decks.

Today I hope to discuss one of these cards, the Nine of Swords, what the Thoth guides (those we know Robin has and must assume Talbot did), Aleister Crowley, and the “traditional” Celtic Cross view say it means, as well as what Talbot, judging from his annotations on the page, thought of it. The goal is to identify the clues in this card and the others in the coming days that reveal to the discerning reader what question Talbot brought to the cards, what happened to Margot Bamborough, and what is going to be the outcome of any search for her. Join me after the jump for all that. [Read more…]

Three important take-aways from this video that I have confirmed in my study this week: [Read more…]

The run-up to the publication of Ink Black Heart last year coincided with the viva voce examinations for my PhD. The day of those exams, in fact, was the same day as the publication of Strike6. I passed the exams, glory to God, but the months and weeks before and after that event are something of a blurred memory; I eventually disappeared from this site post viva to complete the necessary thesis corrections which I was given six months to make. When I came out of my cave of semi-isolation at the beginning of this month, I tried to pick up where I’d left off in Rip Van Winkle fashion with a list of posts germinating in my head. Readers here obliged me by voting for their preferences.

The consensus pick was discussion of the Running Grave Elephant in the Chat Room, namely, the question of whether Strike7 is the seventh book of a seven book ring, the seventh book in a series of at least ten novels, or both somehow. I wrote up my thoughts on that last week.

The other topic to receive significant reader interest was the use of Tarot card spreads in Troubled Blood, specifically the Celtic Cross spread on page 248 and the embedded three card spreads in the True Book illustrations on 537, 632, and 774. I recalled I had written something about the Celtic Cross spread during my first reading of Troubled Blood and I had a vague memory of taking some notes about the True Book before my oral exams and both recollections turned out to be true.

Join me after the jump for a review of my hypothesis and premises with respect to reading the True Book and the Tarot card spreads in it as well as my introductory notes for interpretation of the Celtic Cross spread in Strike5. [Read more…]