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1. June 2011 by admin.

Psychic Readings by Kathleen

In the past few years my passion for women’s spirituality and the feminine journey to enlightenment has really gained traction on the Victorian woman, the accompanying growth spurt of spiritualism and what is now commonly referred to as “New Age” movement.  The secret mystical society called The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is the group credited for the mass dissemination of the 20^th Century Tarot.  This 19^th century secret society marked the first time men and women worked together as equals in ceremonies whose purpose it was to test, purify, and exalt the individual’s spiritual nature to facilitate a unity with their Guardian Angel.  While the HIS-tory of the Hermetic Order is well documented making several of its male members famous, (Yeats for example),  their female counterparts remain obscure.  Shocking when you consider what they accomplished for the status of women.  Even within the sufferage movement, these women of magic were glanced over in HER-story books.  Spirituality and women remains one of the last arenas to be integrated into the advancement of women’s equality. The feminine journey to enlightenment is not the same path as the masculine but that doesn’t mean it isn’t as valid, challenging and sacred.

The Victorian women of magic did not accept the roles and boundaries defined for them by family circumstances and societal expectations.  They remade themselves after their own magical images and helped to remake their world.  They belonged to the timeless legacy of the priestesses, sibyls, and healers who throughout HER-story have been the adept midwives of the psyche.  These women inspired themselves and others to transcend the limitations of their contemporary cultural prejudices.  In the Golden Dawn mythos, everything can be used to further the Great Work which was the awareness and integration of the whole Self - from the sublime to the beast within.  The personal dark aspects, or so-called evil elements, were named the qlliphoth.  When mastered and harnessed in place, the qliphoth served one as, “a mighty steed, a powerful beast upon which to ride wherever one wanted to go” (represented by the Strength card in the Tarot).  Later of course this would be re-named in Jungian psychology as shadow work.  Jung believed that to shine the light of consciousness into our darkest shadowy natures was the single most vital process to spiritual awakening, wholeness and personal power.  Shadow integration also represented a vital moral function whereby consciousness of our own personal shadows would also remove a slice of darkness from the collective shadow.  Collective shadow being the modern equivalent for Devil and evil. These magician women became the receptors for the collective shadow of oppression towards women.  They were viewed and discussed as if they were sexual deviants bereft of wisdom and creativity!

Four central archetypal images accompanied the Victorian female magician:  the Angel, the Demon, the Old Maid, and the Fallen Woman. Women could only exist as spiritual extremes, such as the Virgin or the Whore, the Saint or the Sinner, Madonna or Lilith, Angel or Serpent; she must be either divine or demonic.  This is why as you study our spiritual and magician fore-Mothers you must be vigilant in recognizing the author’s biases.

Our modern spiritual inspiration has been profoundly shaped and guided by these extraordinary, Victorian female magicians. We often forget the ways in which our freedom of expression, choices, and independence were due to victories hard won through the sacrifices of our ancestors - especially the women!   The political and cultural realities of our own time thus took substance from the experience of outcast women of former times such as the women of the Golden Dawn.  Pamela Coleman Smith’s experience highlights the appalling creative negation of these uniquely gifted women.  She left a critical legacy to all magicians through her Tarot deck drawing detailed vignettes of the meanings of the Minor Arcana.  The deck painted by Pamela was given the title of the Rider-Waite (Rider being the publisher and Waite being a wealthy, high ranking Mason).  Pamela’s name wasn’t even mentioned until the late seventies as the illustrator/interpreter of what has become the most widely used Tarot deck in the world. She worked tirelessly for years painting this deck without compensation or even recognition, passing to spirit years later, a poverty stricken social outcast.

If your spiritual journey takes you down the path of the anthropology of the sacred, don’t forget to explore the foundations laid down by our Magical fore-Mothers.  It will keep your perspective balanced, fluid and heart-centred.

 Tarot Reading DVD’s

My DVD set of my Introduction and Intermediate Tarot Workshops is now available for purchase.  If you would like to order the Introductory, Intermediate or the set click here.  This is not a mass produced product - as the orders come in we burn the DVD and get it in the mail as soon as possible.

Quote:

“She used the word Yachad as a password and invoked a serpent to lead her to the Adytum of Isis.  When the snake appeared, she made it yawn.  Entering its mouth, she went down some steps until she came to the Book of Thoth.  She tipped up a stone to reveal revolving steps going farther down to a room with five alcoves.  Each recess contained a different object:  a rolled papyrus, a loaf of bread, liquids for drinking, garments to wear, and vessels of oil.  She returned a second time, bringing offerings to the five shrines and received in return a ruby and the red wine of life.  She could either let the wine “fall with generation” (ferment) or “be exalted into yellow flame of the intelligible life” (be distilled).  She also received a secret name-with ineffable power over the material body-written on the papyrus role.  The loaf of bread had an aureole around it “like soft white feathers gently buffeting the body-solidifying it.”  The garments included an Egyptian headdress called the nemyss with a Uraeus serpent and fifteen yards of kilted and twisted white robe.  Finally she was given instruction about how to enter the sanctuary when she next returned.  Florence might have used such visions in the Sphere Group, containing as they did specific ritual instructions and important symbols and techniques. But her group was under suspicion, and her “astral unions” with her guides called evil.”

Women of the Golden Dawn:  Rebels and Priestesses by Mary K. Greer 1995

Please feel welcome to forward this blog to anyone who is interested in my work.
Blessings Kathleen

519-513-9457 in downtown Kitchener

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