TRAINING PROTOCOL
I only teach this, at most, twice a year.
This training is for those who want to work professionally, in one of several ways, and not for self-exploration.
ADVANCED TAROT | THE VOYAGE OF PROPHECY teaches the serious student to foretell the future, and provides my knowledge, as a practitioner of over forty years who does not advertise. This training rewilds the magical and mystical narrative of tarot and we, the prophets, are overdue to do likewise, because language defines a culture and the common language of tarot is replete with intolerably religious iconography, hierarchy, and ignorance of the queer, weird, suburban, isolated, wanton, mellow and witch.
THE VOYAGE OF PROPHESY
People, like every species, are travellers through life, in a body, ship-like, on an adventure-voyage to the portal of death—the only truly absolute destination. Without a Wayshower: a Seer, without the elder who has learned the maps and who can advise of treacherous shallows, bergs and submerged reefs of cruelty and lovelessness, and who is courageous enough to say what they see, the psychic muscle is flaccid and tame.
ADVANCED TAROT | THE VOYAGE OF PROPHECY is a relearning of the journey of destiny through word and image. It guides the seer to anarchy and honesty. It offers a choice to wildly and wilfully reject the story created for us, not by us, by an outmoded, colonialist, bigoted, ecologically ignorant and heteronormative domination.
WHO LEARNS?
This training is not for everyone. It is for the travellers, healers, poets, strippers, seekers-after-something, the wounded, indigenous law-holders, the outlaws and the gutsy. I didn’t know how much I needed your reflection, and through that, that I could be better at what I do, and who I am.
ORALITY
I’ll explain, a little further down the page, the WHY of orality and mind mappining/training. So, if you are interested in really fortelling the future–in taking upon yourself this extraordinary skill and responsibility, keep reading. Otherwise, thanks for visiting.
MIND MAPPING
It is not that easy. I teach without reference to notes. I do not provide a book list. The training is to be learned by rote and we first must break certain trains of thought and expectations. To do this you will learn, over the first few weeks, ways of rewilding and rethinking what you may have come to anticipate as the language of tarot.
You will have homework. Every week. That is the difficult part of this. And you won’t get to ‘play’ at learning. What does that mean?
NOT LIGHTLY
I have had students tell me that, when they eventually open the box of cards, that tthe cards want to “play” with them. This is rubbish. It is also a lie. Tarot is predictive. It is not oracular and, until oh, maybe forty years of working with people opposite you, it won’t provide advice either. It tells you WHAT WILL HAPPEN. What the individual does with that information, the choices they make in response to the event, well, as far as I have ever been able to ascertain, that is their business, not ours.
Tarot is NOT the cards. Each individual anyone/thing has been some form of manifestation or other since the theoretical Big Bang, or that seemingly ‘first’ singularity that sent light instantly throughout the multiverses in fractals of photons, most of which are beyond the capacity of the human eye to discern. Matter is following in an exponentially expanding universe GO HERE FOR QUICKY INJECTION OF TERMINOLOGY. And. As nothing does not exist, nothing, therefore, comes from nothing. In other words, we have always been.
13.7 BILLION YEARS AGO, IN A GALAXY NOT SO FAR AWAY
You, I, bees, bacteria, salmon, mountains, alpha centauri, your mother and your house have always been, in some form of matter or other. When you consider this, you also are required to contemplate how related you are to a pack of cards made of a forest and coated in a fine sheen of ink and plastic. Related. In Advanced TArot | The Voyage of Prophecy, I explain that when a person shuffles, thheir DNA–their genetic code–becomes enmeshed with the images created from the mind and experience of someone long dead but, like a virtuoso pianist playing Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Opus. 18, one cannot look at the keys. The knowledge of rhythm, harmony and progression is in the mind. And we do NOT know what mind is. It is not the brain It is not consciousness. It is not even necessarily connected to self. Jung could have/did call it the “collective unconscious” but I dispute this as the philosophy developed by Jung seems to indicate humanity only. And tarot neither species-differentiates, nor does it limit itself to the human recognition of world events only.
PREDICTION
Once you learn to steer this ship you will travel for the remainder of your life and people will seek you out. For hope. From curiosity. To be warned. To understand what seems incomprehensible because of peer pressure, advertising (I include religion under this banner) and downright societal bullshit. It can discuss genital warts as easily as it will predict death, tell of volcanic ash clouds downing all flights, every economic collapse and the murder of each person ny a serial killer. It can’t stop a wife being beaten but it will tell of it, words from a complete stranger, and that alone can widen the eyes of the client as they realize the experience was/is destiny and that they have a choice about how to run or whether to fight in the courts.
FAILURE
Two things.
ONE:
Because this work can be daunting I do not endorse those who do not learn what is taught. As such, the second-last week of training requires the apprentice to discuss what has been taught from day 1 (each day’s training is approximately 5 hours in duration). There is much to remember but… fact… those who have remembered have a furure with this work. Why? How?
Week 10 is practical (trippy when we work over Zoom, so I prefer to teach small groups in person). I invite my own clients to receive a free session with each student. Interestingly I have seen the effects. Those who have not learned to converse with me on what has been taught aree left sitting with an empty space where a client should be, embarrassed and despairing, while those who learned have the lines of people who have murmured to others that this one, or this one, is creepily accurate.
TWO:
The work will change you. It will also train you over decades of altering world events. Who knew, in 1979, that the Ace of Swords with he Empress card would mean IVF? Who knew, when Empress again turned up (to one side of a central map) with the 10 of Swords and the Death card, that a women (or women, as was the case of Eurydice Dixon and several other women in 2018) was to be murdered? I recall being overwhelmed with curiosity when the man sitting opposite me had the 8 of pentacles with the page of cups and the Sun card. I recall saying “this doesn’t make sense unless you’re a catholic priest.” He was a Melbourne bishop. He had a private temple and had organised Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki, a cabbalist in what was onc an esoteric order called Servants of the Light, to facilitate workshops in Australia. As a seer of tarot ou will be taught how to stop he process from harmng you. Because it can. It is a huge load, and your language will needs alter to be neutral to cops, burlesque dancers, bankers, music producers, people on the edge of life and death and those who just want to know tat their kids’ll be okay because they have asbestosis and will be dea in a few months.
GRIMOIRE
When each class is over (and yes, you can take notes, but no you can’t record he training) you will be well-advantaged to transfer all of the day’s information tto a grimoire. This is a hand-covered book or a scrap book over which you can scribble and doodle when your brain hits the wall. Before you contact me and say WTF is chayoth-ha-qadesh again and what card is it on? and we have that hour’s conversation. The process of transferring data, by hand, into a paper book is a form of learning that will set the informattion into the rooms of memory. If it is not done–and your memory is not eidetic–you will become lost.
Every card, every meaning of every card, how they can be read like sentences, will be taught. Is it easy? No. The PLATEAU is discussed, which is where you’ll think you are rubbish (but life is settting the bar). You’ll be gutsy enough to tackle subjects like death and compost. To question existentialism subjects like are we merely another carbo-based lifeform or is there a patter; a purpose. We skim quantum physics because, like the fractals in the Medelbrot set each metaphorical ‘rabbit hole’ will lead to yet another, causing you to understand that you can’t preempt the number of stars in any sky, but that you can navigate by words and that word and image and person together are the neshamah, the ruach and the nephesh, but that, even though we use a certain language, we learn so much more and so much more expansively.
TURN OFF
Have I turned you off yet? It’s preferable for me to lay out a mere hint of what you will learn so you don’t come in with yoour muddy boots, clogged with ppreconceived ideas and dogmas. Because this subject–this skill– this WAY of using cards, is not easy and never will be. You’ll never possibly learn it all because in your lifetime so much will change. In society, concept, ideology and identity that it becomes entirely plausible to understand that dragons and unicorns once roamed the forests of Brocéliande, and that they either became extinct or evolved into monitor lizards and wild horses.
What you won’t do is be acceptable. Because this skill requires so much objectivity you won’t be able to read for yourself, your family, your friends. You’ll have no objectivity. You won’t be able to help yourself, when you lay out devil, death and tower, with a person of a particular astrological sun sign, but to worry. Freak out even. This skill will eventually sheen you in soe form of ammil that sets you apart from others. Be prepared to be lonely but know that you will also be so free it is eyewatering. That the so-called spirit world will advise you of out-of-the-blue information. That tarot can heal the most devastated grief. That you’ll be scorned by your family; by society. That you’ll learn a language of earth, sea, sky, ancestry, what time isn’t and to question everything, being prepared to change your mind. That talking for an hour is a form of listening. That NONE OF THIS is EVER about you.
BUSINESS
I teach you how to keeo profit and loss records. How to set up a website. All that business side of stuff, so you don’t fear being undone by your own illegality. Because, yes, we are occassionally considered charletains. But. let’s face it, so was Edison. Perhaps, also, so was da Vinci.
CHARGE
As the days towards the middle of the calendar year known, in the so-called West, heads towards midwinter/midsummer, I haven’t decided yet. It’s never much, as the work is your payment and I am not greedy. Teaching tarot is a geas and I have accepted long ago that I am never without work. I’m going to get you to pay up front, thoug, unless exceptional circumstances arise, or unless barter for best-quality food is what you can pay me in, or web design, or a bunch of antler beads. We’ll discuss this. Payment of money is still an easy option, so yes, you’ll pay me. It won’t cost you the equivalent of a university degree in philosophy, owever, and you will probably learn more. So, TBA even as I type this.
TIME
Due to the remaining oddity of a 5 day working week I usually do this training with you on either a saturday or a sunday. More on that soon. I have a client due in now (and yes, we train to work online, around the world, and you learn to do that also)