Teleidoscope

Sun, Dec 31, 2006

Power 4: Shaman (Twilight)

Posted at 10:20 pm MST to Net of Mirrors

Alternate Image Izanagi returning from the halls of death pursued by 8 thunder serpents.

Interpretation He is the Dreamer, the wise man, the horned hunter of souls: Odin and Herne, the Autumn God of the West. Hunter and Deer, sacrificer and sacrificed for wisdom's sake, rider of the world tree. He wanders as he wills among the abodes of the living and the dead and the Powers, and not as others journey, and his own dwelling place is hidden, but he may serve as a guide, or a rescuer.

Reversal Wisdom is sought and not found. The gates between the worlds are locked. Neither a guide nor a rescue is available.

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Key 8 of Wood: Completion of the Wood, Completion of Consciousness (Bright)

Posted at 10:19 pm MST to Net of Mirrors

Alternate Image A thicket of branches. If you look closely, the branches make the shapes of deer and wolves and other forest creatures

Interpretation All of the forests are part of the Forest, all of the small ecological niches are meshes of the web of Life. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The deer and wolves keep the Forest healthy.

Reversal

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Wed, Dec 27, 2006

Gate 8: Already accomplished [I Ching 63](Twilight)

Posted at 10:37 pm MST to Net of Mirrors

Alternate Image A mechanical bird in a cage with a spring sticking out.

Interpretation When you stop, you die. You cannot have perfection, only growth or decay, so what looks like an ending or stopping place is preparation for the next stage.
Fire illuminating the abyss. Chaos and change always lie in wait.

Reversal Be careful of the flaws in supposed perfection, and wary of a search for stasis.

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Key 8 Flames: Fellowship with Men, Community, Sameness with People [I Ching 13] (Twilight)

Posted at 10:37 pm MST to Net of Mirrors

Alternate Image Dancers with very different costumes in a circle dance.

Interpretation Alliance with outsiders, not just close kin. Look for the commonalities, not the differences in people and things: all people laugh and weep.
The light supports the heavens. Understanding supports creativity.

Reversal Misunderstandings and divisions. Disruptions of alliances.

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Key 9 of Storms: Seeress in the Storm -- The Librarian (Bright)

Posted at 10:36 pm MST to Net of Mirrors

Alternate Image A woman holding a book or scroll stands beside a rack of other books or scrolls.

Interpretation The importance of Knowledge for its own sake. The Librarian: as a scholar she gathers knowledge, as a curator she preserves it.

Reversal Needed information is hidden or lost.

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Tue, Dec 26, 2006

Key 3 Flames: Stable Fire, Stable Action (Bright)

Posted at 10:14 pm MST to Net of Mirrors

Alternate Image A person (with back to the viewer, or face obscured) juggles 3 stars while balanced on one toe on a rock or mountain peak. The stars have faint comet tails to make their motions mor apparent.

Interpretation Three points can define an ellipse. The sun and stars burn and move forever, in their spirograph orbits. Motive, means and opportunity all are present, permitting deeds that may be famous or infamous. The dance continues.

Reversal Erratic actions. The fires gutter and flare. Things are being dropped.

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Gate 23: Rebirth (Bright)

Posted at 10:13 pm MST to Net of Mirrors

Alternate Image A landscape with a boundary. One side of the boundary is a twilight moss garden, the other sunbaked gravel, like a Zen garden. A humanoid figure congeals from smoke at the boundary.

Interpretation This mirror reflects a time of resurrection and transformation. The kali yuga when a cycle ends and a new and different one begins, an old world ends and a new one is born. The spirit finds its proper place in the new realm. The energy here is not unlike the Judgment in the Tarot.

Reversal A refusal to progress. A cycle that is stuck. Or an inability to find the correct path.

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Fri, Nov 10, 2006

Key Ace of the Storm: Thunderbird [I Ching 51, The Arousing] (Twilight)

Posted at 9:21 pm MST to Net of Mirrors

Alternate ImageThe Garuda, divine warrior, enemy of serpents, herald

InterpretationThe shock of alarm, or of laughter, that provides the energy to accomplish great things. The "Eureka" moment of understanding that changes everything.

From the I Ching: Thunder over thunder. A sudden impulse to accomplishment.

Reversal A word or idea that distracts, scatters energy, prevents progress. Dust devils and bewilderment.

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Tue, Oct 31, 2006

A Halloween layout

Posted at 7:58 pm MST to Net of Mirrors

Water, Storms and Gates. Interesting.

This has icons for the cards, with the html for the layout automatically generated by my program. The output still needs a fair amount of work. Putting the cards in the right locations related to each other would obviously be helpful. (I'm going to try something sneaky with tables in the CGI code).

Eventually there will be a push button on the Astral Trading Company website that will give you a nice layout with interpretation texts for the cards and locations, and do everything automatically.

See more ...

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Thu, Oct 26, 2006

Layouts 10/26/2006

Posted at 7:22 pm MDT to Net of Mirrors

Below the cut are two layouts of the Net of Mirrors generated by my little random-card-choosing program. This is just the raw output of two passes of the program, without interpretations.

At least they seem fairly hopeful. The second layout is especially interesting, with I Ching 1 (Yang) showing up in the direction of Yin.

Eventually, I'd like to have a page where you can click a button and have a layout generated with little icons of the cards in the correct locations, with links to the card texts.

But first I need to re-write the card texts.

And create mirror-card icons that are compact but meaningful.

See more ...

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Mon, Oct 23, 2006

Colors, Elements and Suits

Posted at 9:19 pm MDT to Net of Mirrors

The Suits of the Net of Mirrors are derived more from the Five Chinese Elements, which are traditionally viewed as transformational, than from the European elements, which are traditionally viewed as static. The European elements are present to some extent as echoes or overlays, with the overlay of swords/air/metal producing the suit of Storms (with additional relationships to electriticity, ideas, communications, computers, tools) and the overlay of spirit and wood producing the suit of the Woods (with relationships to living things and ecosystems, not carpentry).

Traditional "pure" colors are used for the suits in the original cards I laid out in the early 90s: Black for Metal, White for Wood, Red for Fire, Yellow for Earth, and Blue for Water, with gray overlays on the Twilight cards. The Storm cards were printed silver on black stock, and the other cards were printed in black on colored stock, with the Gates and Powers on off-white stock to help differentiate them from the Wood cards.

Properly speaking, there should be different symbolic colors for the Bright and Twilight aspects of the elements. I'm sure that Twilight Wood is green and the Twilight Storm is violet.

The Bright and Twilight Waters are approximately turquoise and indigo. I suspect those colors map better in Russian, but I never really got a good feel for how the two Russian words that are both translated 'blue' are applied to the visible world.

The red of Bright Flame is the pure red of fresh blood. I suspected at one time that the Twilight Flame (transitions and boundaries) might be a sort of burgundy, but I think I had the phase reversed: Twilight Flame is the red-orange of embers and bonfires.

Earth is ... hard to describe, partly because so much of the yellow part of the spectrum gets named as variants of brown in English. Neither shade is as lightweight as dandelion, nor as shiny and metallic as gold. Standard goldenrod printing stock is just about right for Bright Earth. I'm not sure what the color is for Twilight Earth. I suspect I'll know it when I see it.

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Fri, Oct 20, 2006

Titles of the Keys

Posted at 9:25 pm MDT to Net of Mirrors

Each suit of the Keys, or Minor Arcana, has 10 bright and 10 twilight images. The numbers are loosely mapped with the following themes.

• Ace -- The Essence or Beginning of the Element
• Two -- The Element in Balance
• Three -- The Element in Stability
• Four -- The Element Incomplete
• Five -- The Element Transformed
• Six -- The Element in Harmony
• Seven -- The Element in Diversity
• Eight -- The Element in Completion
• Nine -- The Element in the Abstract:
  • Bright -- Knowledge
  • Twilight -- Communication
• Ten -- The Element in the Concrete:
  • Bright -- Creation
  • Twilight -- Action

Note that the nines and tens double as the 'face' or 'court' cards (nines are female, tens are male for court card purposes). The twilight versions of the lower numbers are mapped to the 40 remaining I Ching hexagrams (24 are used in the Twilight Gates).

The full list of the old titles is below the cut.

See more ...

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Mon, Oct 16, 2006

Mirror Titles

Posted at 7:51 pm MDT to Net of Mirrors

There are three categories of Mirrors. The Powers and Gates are essentially the Major Arcana. And the Keys are the five suits of the Minor Arcana.

Stone: Yellow. The World of Form, The Center or Beginning of Things.
Water: Blue. The World of Perception, the East.
Storm (Air/Metal): Black. The World of Knowledge, the North.
Flame: Red. The World of Action, the South.
The Wood: White. The World of Consciousness, the West.

They are divided into two classes: Bright mirrors that reflect states and essences, and Twilight Mirrors that reflect boundaries and transitions.

The full list of the Powers and Gates appears after the cut.

See more ...

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Fri, Oct 13, 2006

Net of Mirrors Intro poem

Posted at 10:09 pm MDT to Net of Mirrors

Thought and action spark
Time's current through spirit glow --
Light and shadows dance
Within a net of mirrors
ripples on a moonlit stream.

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