MAPS: Chapter 7
View the CHAPTER 7 Character MAP
Place yourself on the READER MAP . . .
where in the world is the Ash Girl on its quest?
A Hermit’s Quest | An Eritrean War | Tarot Symbolism Galore
You Thoth Tarot readers may already have visions of Asmeret as a bit of The Hermit dancing in you heads. And you are right.
The rest of you are crying,
“Wait! I thought Asmeret was the Princess of Disks?!?”
She is, and more. By prophecy (and geography) Asmeret is the Princess of Disks. According to the story of the ascent | descent on the Tree of Life, once Asmeret calls up the mountain to her Prince, she would ascend to the throne of the Queen of Disks (then down she goes again) BUT she is apparently (from all anyone in the story can tell) destined for the highest throne, that of the High Priestess.
So HOW do we get Hermit? (Aside from the fact that they both wear a red cape and have little black dogs?) You KNOW how I love to unpack things in 3s . . .
Astrologic aspects of the Thoth Tarot: the major arcana cards each have a corresponding celestial/astrologic body associated with it. IX | HERMIT is VIRGO, which is the astrologic sign of Mutable Earth (representing the universal transformative power of purifying the body and healing others). The Hermit card actually occupies two places on the Wheel of Wholeness: Next after VIII | ADJUSTMENT (Athena) on the rim of the wheel AND right where the Prince and Princess of Earth point to 0 | FOOL and XXI | UNIVERSE (the beginning and end) on the spoke of the Suit of Disks. Both the Hermit and the Princess of Disks go down into the Abyss to reach the Light. The Hermit is also the ultimate UNIFIER, as those with this archetype have the driving need and the gift of going down into the middle and underworlds seeking answers to the biggest questions of who and what we truly are. Then they carry the answers (they sacrificed so much to harvest) to the willing and ready to be illuminated.
The autobiographical aspects of The Ash Girl: I knew from the first lines that I wrote (which you haven’t actually read yet!) that Asmeret was me in some way—a lost part of myself that needed to be found and reclaimed. It took me a SHOCKINGLY longer amount of time to recognize Tree, Raven and the little black dog as echoes of my own childhood, and longer yet to connect my own astrologic aspects (VIRGO) and my tarot soul symbol (HERMIT) to the girl in this story who never fit in and seemed destined for something neither she nor anyone around her could understand.
Okay to make three we are going to the symbology on ATU IX. I didn’t WRITE Asmeret to mirror the Hermit card but as Tree told me this story and I shaped it into something vaguely coherent, there was this girl wearing a red lion’s cloak who falls into deep feverish dreams filled with goddesses and beasts, with a little black dog who is half of her heart at her heels as they plunge through the tall grasses of Africa on some kind of quest that they didn’t ask for but cannot escape. A quest that has something to do with the beginnings and endings of our known world (the ‘orphic’ egg wrapped in Snake).
ATU IX | THE HERMIT | VIRGO | MUTABLE EARTH
TAROT SYMBOLOGY GALORE
Since we are on the subject of Tarot Symbology, this chapter is CHOCK FULL of subtle and direct references to certain cards in the minor arcana. The minor arcana cards (the 4 suits) represent states of being in our human experience and are ever-shifting moment to moment. Below are a few excerpts and the corresponding card (which I noticed after the novel was written). I will let you practice your interpretive skills and see what additional insights this gives you into The Ash Girl (and PLEASE let me know what other correspondences that you see!)
3 | SWORDS
“Dehab took the baby and put him to her breast where he suckled so hard she bit into her lip. The infant fell into a rhythm, plucking long dormant strings. Like a lute or a harp, she vibrated and shivered and moaned a song both utterly sorrowful and full of bliss.”
CHAPTER 7 | THE ASH GIRL
4 | DISKS
“Asmeret sat on the bird’s back and they flew until up was down and they were soaring far, far below ground. They landed on an island of ash—a citadel surrounded by a moat where four rivers circled together and a fire burned blue and white in the courtyard.”
CHAPTER 7 | THE ASH GIRL
ACE | DISKS
“Deep crevasses made concentric rings from the outer edges to the center of the plateau. The surface was rough and milky white in some place, smooth and clear as glass in others.
A tree stump, Asmeret whispered. The pillar had been a tree—cut down at a very old age it would appear from the growth rings, and had been in this chamber so long after it fell that the stump had petrified—turned from wood into mineral.”
CHAPTER 7 | THE ASH GIRL
QUEEN | DISKS
“Though underground, lush trees grew up in groves, less like forest than oasis, fronds wavering in the heat. Bright flowers dripped from vines—birds fluttered overhead and twittered sweetly so that the thunder faded into the background. I was surprised that I could even imagine a place such as this in my dreams!”
CHAPTER 7 | THE ASH GIRL
QUEEN | CUPS
“I caught glimpses of you through the reeds that lined the river’s edge. Great white herons stood serenely unaware of their perfect reflections. When the silvery fish breached nearby, their reflections wavered and rippled for a moment, but the birds remained still. I thought how this was like us when we dream, another life rippling out underneath our motionless bodies, our mirror selves flipping with the silvery fish.”
CHAPTER 7 | THE ASH GIRL
AN ERITREAN WAR
“A lot was happening in our country after the war in the north. Secret meetings about independence. He (Anbessa) was often gone for weeks at a time, sometimes months. From one war to another, Asmeret said, it’s all we know. She thought of the guns stockpiled in Arsema and Aman’s shed.”
When Cate, from my writing group, read enough of the draft to see Anbessa was off at a war she assumed it was Eritrea’s War for Independence, not World War II. Fair enough! At its core, the Goddesses are waging their own war on war as humans have come to wage it, causing much more than loss of life—war ravages the body of our collective conscience and does serious damage to our shared, finite global ecosystem. And so while I didn’t write a book about Eritrea’s war or World War II, one should read the story in full awareness of the context and how living life in a war zone might affect one’s entire life experience, psyche, and soul. Most people reading this will have been inundated with images of WWII all of their lives, but most will know nothing and have seen nothing of Eritrea’s war for their independence, not from British or Italian rule, but from their African neighbor Ethiopia, which coveted Eritrea’s coastline and ports.
Images of Eritrean citizens turned guerrilla fighters from The Ash Girl Pinterest Boards. A whole generation lost their parents to a mountain bastion where young men and women holed up and fought for years during the first war for independence in the 1960s. The people of this country started organizing quietly as early as 1952 when the UN made Eritrea a federal component of Ethiopia. For a fine piece of journalism that reads like a novel about this terrible period in Eritrea’s history, I owe a great debt to and recommend “I Didn’t Do It For You,” by Michela Wrong.
While I couldn’t hope, and didn’t try, to create a historical account of Eritrea, its landscape, or its people in The Ash Girl, my research led me to develop a deep long distance love and empathy for this country filled with the descendants of ancient Kings and Queens who needed no one (least of all the Italians or Brits) to rule them in any way. And just when they could have been free from European occupation, their own closest kin opened fire for those most ancient of motivations . . . money and power.
WHAT’S NEXT?
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