April tarot reading
The Eight of Swords, and the reversed Page of Wands as critical reluctance, discernment, and Hernan Diaz's TRUST
There’s a character in the first third of Hernan Diaz’ Trust that has elucidated my reluctance to tread ever deeper into the realms of spiritual esotericism.
The man is wise and kind, a respected intellectual, if a little shabby about the elbows, a little too beholden to his wife’s family money to smooth out and over life’s embodied edges while he pursues “the passions of the mind.” (In this way, he is nearly every successful American academic ever, regardless of gender.) When the man publishes two volumes of political philosophy that do not garner him the kind of acclaim he thinks is his due, he turns away from his academic post to focus what he perceives to be his unappreciated intellectual talents on the educational development of his daughter.
His daughter—smart, intense, curious—loves him as both parent and best friend, teacher and interlocutor.
“Embittered by the perfect silence that met his work, he turned to his young daughter and took her schooling in his hands,” Diaz writes of Mr. Brevoort and the five-year-old Helen, going on to describe the development of Helen’s studies under her father’s tutelage as initially brilliant, happy, and exciting until Mr. Brevoort’s descent into esotericism changes everything:
In his effort to widen his syllabus, Mr. Brevoort’s capricious research methods led him to defunct scientific theories, derelict philosophical edifices, and impious theological dogmas … Mr. Brevoort was delighted at the elegant ease with which Helen, at age seven or eight, solved recondite algebraic problems and could give detailed exegeses of a number of biblical passages. She was also asked to keep meticulous dream journals, which they parsed with numerological fervor, looking for ciphered missives from the angels.
Some of Mr. Brevoort’s former joy had wilted in the shadow of his newfound passion for theology. Still, for as long as she could, Helen carried on with the good-humored spirit of their previous years (28-29).
But eventually, in order to deal with the burden of her father’s growing obsession with occulted spiritual patterns—Swedenborgian mathematics, qabalistic interpretations of the Old Testament, alchemical doctrine—as well as the way he begins to treat her neither as daughter or pupil so much as an object of study, Helen begins to fabricate the dream reports she dutifully gives her father, using her own intellect as a buffer from the overwhelming grief of watching her father sink into what she feels can only be madness: “She was being displaced by dogmas and creeds that a few years before would have been the object of their shared ridicule and served as inspiration for their absurd tales. It was sad enough to see her father drift away, but it was crushing to find her respect for his intellectual worth vanish with him” (34).
I read this first part of Trust with not a small amount of apprehension and knowing—the book came to me in the last year I spent as a professor before the university pulled weight with an old residency rule, ending my contract as I struggled to recover from a long winter of chemotherapy. In many ways, I was, like Mr. Brevoort, embittered by what I perceived to be a lack of ethics and care from an institution that purported to pride itself on its commitment to justice, not to mention I felt entirely freaked out by the loss of a dependable salary, benefits, and a career that I had spent the last eight years of my life in training for. But in other ways, I was tentatively excited. My occult practice had pulled me through addiction, mental illness, pregnancy and the challenges of being postpartum during a global pandemic, cancer and cancer recurrence, debt and my husband’s depression. Perhaps the loss of the job was an opportunity in shifting focus. Perhaps I could combine my trainings in occult as well as mainstream philosophy to offer therapeutic and intellectual guidance for people navigating their own versions of life’s shifting sands.
It’s been a year now, since this has been my main gig. Some weeks it feels beautiful and important. It feels like it’s working when I get to the end of the month having been able to pay the bills as well as watch clients begin to change the troubling or stuck contours of their lives into sites of possibility and agency, seeing through the trap-door that is the supposed fixity of a self. Other weeks—recent weeks—this work feels like trouble all its own, it feels like Mr. Brevoort’s descent into dissociative madness, as I feel pulled into texts as a way to avoid the personal and impersonal difficulties of life. As I watch, too, with trepidation at how easily occult practice gets misused; obsessions with planetary alignments and magical doctrine become ways of justifying bad behavior, myopic self-interest. Synchronicity and intuition become detached from either spiritual or intellectual grounding and put in service, instead, “of some soft viciousness, posses[sion] by a vague desire to do harm,” as Diaz writes of Helen’s privileged boredom in the face of her father’s madness and the eventual eruption of World War II.
“This isn’t what we’re supposed to be doing,” I want to say, when I see people turning their friends and acquaintances into objects of study, based on a little tarot reading here, an understanding of eclipse energy there, an engagement with cognitive behavior therapy over here. “We’re going to lose the love we have in our lives,” I want to say, “based on a capricious delight in spirituality that we’re only using in the service of self-interest.” Of course I have to say these things to myself, too, when I feel the urge to use The Chariot as justification for ruthlessness on one day, my Venus return as an excuse to indulge in fantasies of self-grandeur on another.
At the end of Helen and Mr. Brevoort’s story, we find the utter destruction of love and moral relationship as the result of a once-kind, once-smart man’s habitual, earnest, and belligerent misapplication of spiritual interest. Mr. Brevoort himself becomes unable to speak or write, unable to dress himself, so far past elbow patches and academic scruffiness that he is removed from his family and placed in a sanatorium, sunk so deeply into his own delirium that the man who once penned books of political philosophy as “a public service” can offer nothing of use to a world torn apart by war and genocide.
Helen’s story, though, is in many ways worse, a particularly American kind of debaseness as she joins the trauma she suffers over losing her father with her intellectual capacity and upper-class birth to engineer her own ruthless, violent, and manipulative climb to the heights of economic power in the Depression-era United States. What began as a loving, if eccentric relationship based around the “passions of the mind” ends in the proliferation of death, inequity, and illness on the mass scale of the mid-20th century. And this is just the first story of a book that contains three—each, in different genres and stylistic modes, interrogating the ways in which faith, money, and self-interest combine and dissolve and combine again, against the backdrop of the United States’ most fanatical occult belief, most expansive magical working: that money is not only real but divine.
I read Trust as an exhortation for critical reluctance as the appropriate approach to any spiritual, magical, or occult system. (and I want to be clear in saying that I believe that secular materialism and capitalism are two such systems, it just happens that we’ve by and large bought into them over many of the others at present moment). Spiritual doctrine should be inspiring us to participate in the world with an understanding that it is divine grace that allows us to do so. To change, to love, to grow, to be better, get quiet, stand up, try harder, give in, give out. Spiritual practice “points at the Moon,” as an indication of the ineffable, sure, but it’s also a reminder to look up, to see, to be in loving concert with reality as it unfolds around us, even—especially—when that reality is scary or oppressive, shrouded or unjust.
The Herbcrafter Tarot cards for April also insist on the import of critical reluctance and spiritual discernment. A stone wall and fence surrounds a wild and overgrown licorice plant that needs cutting and tending, an Eight of Air call for taking responsibility for one’s thoughts as much as it is for walking out through the mind’s rickety gates. The reversed Hija of Fire (which corresponds to the Page of Wands in the Waite-Smith deck) cautions against the capriciousness of the beginner’s mind—it’s fun to distract ourselves from the anxieties of suffering, change, and personality with the magic tricks of tarot, astrology, therapy, the internet, fill-in-the-blank, but these do more for us when we use them as pathways for connection, truth, and clear-sightedness.
“God is pressure,” Dion Fortune wrote in the Mystical Qabalah, a book she published around the same time as our fictional Mr. Brevoort would have begun his unraveling. Perhaps he read it; perhaps he relied so heavily on it to distract himself from his crumbling marriage, the growing fascism in Germany, his own professional discontent that he entirely missed its wisdom: “God is pressure,” Fortune writes, meaning that if we relate to spirituality only to endlessly agitate or promote our own desires, we will reduce our selves, our hearts, our minds, and our realities, into smaller and smaller pieces, until finally, unable to bear the weight of so many, so little, so much—too much we say in therapy, too much—we explode.
Wishing you the critical powers of reluctance, discernment, and love this month.
Below are bibliomantic tarotscopes for April, using Hernan Diaz’s Trust, a book I keep close at hand whenever I feel my relationship to truth, knowledge, and god becoming a little parasitic, too capricious and insular. The way I do bibliomancy is to use the divined quotes as a provocation to stir up some feeling, or some argument within myself. It’s not about whether I agree with these assertions, it’s more about what does it point me toward that I might need to understand, to develop understanding around? My own suggestions for the month follow the Trust quote. Read for your rising sign, though some of you have mentioned getting a lot out of reading all of the scopes as insight into each house of your natal chart that is ruled by that zodiacal sign.
Aries Rising: “Rather than containing Mrs. Rask’s free-flowing rants and redirecting them into the realm of normalcy (or gagging her with sedatives), he said, he wished to encourage her monologues. She could not stop talking because she could not stop trying to explain her illness—and her desire to understand her illness was, to a large extent, the illness itself” (103). April is a month of monologuing for you, dear Aries, not as illness itself so much as in the vein of shitty first drafts, renewing your dedication to journaling or morning pages, and spring cleaning at home as a way of creating space for serendipity, luck, surprise. On April 20, you experience a breakthrough with what has seemed like an entrenched financial issue. Your recent experiences of caretaking and community engagement become the foundation for creative accomplishment.