MAPS: Chapter 6
View the CHAPTER 6 Character MAP
Place yourself on the READER MAP . . .
where in the world is the Ash Girl on its quest?
Wheel of Wholeness, Tree of Life, The Ten of Disks, and Gift Cycles
The Wheel of Wholeness maps the (re)evolution to the new aeon at a macro level, and the (re)evolution of each human at the micro. The key to where (and who) we are in it is in the underlying mathematics through which we have learned to discern and describe the natural order of things . . . we tend to call those number-driven ways of knowing Sacred Geometry and Numerology when we are sitting at the metaphysical table.
Asmeret was the one to show me how to lay the cards in this way. I was on a five day silent writing retreat on a beautiful snowy day in January, 2016 when this scene (you just read in Chapter 6) was written. As I wrote Asmeret laying the cards in the Wheel, I stopped, pushed back all of the furniture in my borrowed condo living room, and did as she did. (I also felt compelled to take a black sharpie and mark out all of the word labels on the minor arcana, but that is another story.)
Until then, after more than fifteen years studying and reading this deck, I had not felt I had a holistic grip on the Tarot. And then I did.
This wheel feels like the hidden organizing structure—the Tarot’s original design.
I am sure I am not the first to lay the cards in this way, but I felt the thrill of unearthing an ancient world like the archeologist who found the lost city of Pompeii or Einstein’s sigh as he first wrote E = mc2 at the end of miles of numbers, letters, and lines he felt to his core added up to something profound simple and pure.
There is a whole narrative story of the wheel’s progression and many ways to read the Wheel Tarot Map, depending on what your guides need you to know. These I am scribing in another book and you, dear readers, will be the first to have access to all of that!
FOR NOW, take in the beauty of the Wheel. FEEL its order and the khaos at its center. Follow along in your mind’s eye (with soft focus) as hidden hands spin the wheel for Asmeret, calling up the memories she needs to re-story before she can Descend | Ascend — remember her true name and nature and take her place in the new story of the worlds.
Ten of Disks | Frieda Harris
Kabbalah Tree of Life | Lon Milo Duquette
“The princess stooped down, awkwardly clutching their rounded belly, and counted the coins—nineteen (where there should be twenty, or none).
Asmeret’s mind reeled back: Her belly swollen with the child of the ghost—joy and anguish; the missing coin pinched between the sharp fingernails of the fortuneteller—hope and terror.”
“The purpose of a life is to discover your true nature and gifts; the journey of a life is to give those gifts away. That is what keeps all life in balance. If you don’t discover your nature and gifts, you grow weak, dispirited. If you hoard your gifts, cling to them out of fear or greed, they turn to dust in your fists.”
“You have been sharing your gifts all of your life, but your mind won’t let you see it, and so you are stuck where you are, between ending and beginning, with all of the coins still clenched in your fists.
Princess Asmeret gathered the coins in their hands. They were mere disks of wood in most hands these days, in the Age of Forgetting, but now the princess understood the part the coins played. They were reminders from the Mother of Mothers to move our gifts. Storyteller, huntress, mother . . . Asmeret’s mind stopped the list. Hestia had said that when your gifts were shared fully in a moment, without expectation of payment or barter or thanks, the story of the worlds moves toward balance and truth. A wooden coin given freely turns to gold in the receiver’s hands.”
“It’s time, Asmeret. You are stuck (she hadn’t said dying, but they both thought it), and now you have a small window to rectify that. To spin the wheel and face who and what you truly are and finally choose to follow the path written for you in the cards, or . . .”
“Or what?” But she knew.
Holding their hand over the hole, one wooden coin tumbled toward the sea and the mouth of some unseen, gurgling beast. Wind moaned through the uppermost branches of Tree. The firestone crackled and spit.”
Despite the story Daniat told the girl, Asmeret knew in her heart that she had been the one to save her mother’s life and that of her brother. She had the power to make life out of death.
Asmeret had known this when she was born, when she’d had the strength to draw her brother and mother from the zero place back to this life. The baby born under the plume of ash knew who and what she was at that moment, then forgot.
In the water, far below, the wooden disk turned to gold.
- CHAPTER 6 | THE ASH GIRL
These excerpts describe one layer of metaphoric meaning of the coins pictured on the 10 of Disks (and other cards). I will let these words speak for themselves in The Ash Girl, but perhaps its time to share three of the sources that informed my understanding of the coins in the hands of the Princess of Disks, which took me years to gather and see (even now, not so clearly)!
One, the Tree of Life in the Kabbalistic tradition as shown in the Figure 21. by Lon Milo DuQuette (I added the lines to show the abyss). The Princess of Disks and the The Ten of Disks live in the lowest world, Malkuth. To ‘go down to go up’ (to the palace above the Abyss—where one’s divine self is) one casts all of one’s accumulated ‘wealth’ away and leaps into nothingness—completing a cycle.
Two, the passing of wooden coins that turn to gold is an old fairytale meme the essentially shows up when someone on a noble quest (to their higher self) has nothing, only a wooden coin that is worthless (or a bit of bread), and gives it away humbly and in good faith that something good will come back to them, someday, and their needs will be taken care of on the path. When the recipient of the wooden coin receives the gift they typically offer the traveler an object or advice that seems to have nothing to do with what is needed next. It is simply all that they have and feel compelled to give. Inevitably whatever that was (a hunk of meat, some old beans, “go North”) comes into play in a big way when least expected.
Three, Lewis Hyde, a great thinker and writer (winner of a MacArthur Genius Award ) describes this in much more complete and concrete terms in his book, The Gift. The short version (though DO READ THE BOOK) is the role of Gift Rings that bind a community to one another and to the larger ecosystem in which they participate . . . nature, of course.
A simple example is the North American First Nations tribes in the Pacific North who depend on salmon for much of their essential life needs. Nature gives them the gift of abundant salmon and when they have taken what they need (and only what they need) they ritually give back a portion of their catch to the source in gratitude and to ‘re-stock’ the future abundance.
In a more complex structure Hyde describes the Gift Rings in an archipelago of islands where simple cowry shell necklaces and beads (worthless in market value) are given freely in a ritual gesture to the next person in their ‘ring’ (on another island). The receiver ‘moves the gift’ by offering the person next in the ring more or other shells and beads, all in good faith that they are ‘sewing’ into the wholeness and will always reap what they need. This ritual builds a bond of mutual responsibility, care, and intimacy that commerce cannot. Notably, Hyde also cites societies in which the person with the LEAST material wealth is the most respected and revered because they have used only what they need and have given everything else away that has come to their hands.
Now back to the Ten of Disks and the Princess. An old saying comes to mind. “You can’t take it with you.”
Remember that the Princess and the 10 of Disks are the lowest cards in the Tarot and so they also hold the accumulated experiences, emotions, desires, dreams, talents, knowledge, passions as they face the abyss. To have given all that you have, to have lived all that you are meant to live, to LOVE the experience of life itself and offer that to the world with humble grace and gratitude—to hold it as sacred—that is the The Gift.
Tell the story of you as both flawed and divine and watch the darkness become the light.
Hyena Woman by A’Lis Bly
I made this collage as a part of my Narrative re-storying practice, inviting an identity and sense of belonging that had been lying dormant within me since about age nine when I abandoned playing in the woods with my little black dog and my imaginary blackbird.
Africa. Tree. A black bird and a dog.
The woman on the left is from a photograph taken at dawn in the African bush the morning of my encounter with the hyena. Kathy had been up with me on that 2am watch, on the other side of camp tracking the movements of several hyenas circling our camp when I stepped into the black hole behind the jeeps that had been parked to make a wall between the row of sleeping bags and the open bush. I stood still for a minute, eyes adjusting to the new kind of dark, when the hyena appeared. I don’t know if it had been there all along or silently approached where I stood. She drew up as tall as me, eye-to-eye. Only a moment until my westernized brain hollered HYYYYAAA straight in her face and she ran.
Three hours later, Kathy brushed past me on her way to that spot, quietly called me Hyena Woman and moved on. I heard it as more than the teasing honorific, I heard it as ritual.
You may recognize the Princess of Disks germinating in the womb of the tree, a boabab—the species many African nations honor as their Tree of Life. This image of a boabab was one I reproduced from a museum collection of photos taken by a European expedition to the continent in the early twentieth century.
The Ash Girl is some essential re-storying of me into Hyena Woman.
I try to be worthy of this strange gift.
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