This festival is all about "Lovers" of many kinds, human, natural, spiritual, conceptual -- all those connections which bring us growth, fertility, and joy. And of course, that sometimes means we choose to connect with the Other--the person, or idea, or attitude, or cause, that might actually not be our own way of Being at all, but with whom we know we can create a successful and transcendent Whole with the Union of Opposites. And so today's Hop is going to be an exercise in uniting Tarot "oppositions"... Let's see what we end up with.
I think one of the major ways to evoke the energies of the Union of Opposites is to use the numerological method of discovering what are called "cognate opposites". Take one of the cards of the Major Arcana, and look at its number in your deck. Subtract that number from 78, reduce your answer to its lowest numerological form, and you have the philosophical opposition of your original card. For example: The Devil is traditionally number 13. 78-13=11. And 11 is "Strength"-- which is the tool needed to counter the machinations of the Devil, who represents bondage of the Self to that which harms the Self. The Devil cannot be defeated by fighting, because the fight is internal, and usually the more we exert violent opposition to the temptation, the more we are acting in the way the temptation leads us to do. But the more we cultivate the quiet Strength of holding the jaws of the lion closed, simply refusing to permit ourselves to fall into the morass of the Devil, the better we become at discovering what IS our own Strength, and what we need to do in order to make ourselves better able to do and become what is in harmony with our High Self, not with our baser impulses. And yet--speaking of the Union of Opposites... would we have been able to come to this realization without the Devil's machinations combined with the power of our inner Strength? Probably not.
Here's another example: Take the Hierophant, number 5. Subtract 5 from 78, and you get 73. Reduced numerologically, this is a 10, and gives us the Wheel of Fortune. So--here's a Union of Opposites for you; the opposition of the quiet teaching of the Hierophant, who takes things step by step in a logical manner to lead us to a reasoned and useful conclusion...and the random and chaotic turn of Fortune's Wheel, where we cling to the rim and don't have any idea where we are going to end up. BUT--if we do not have the chaos of the Wheel, we will never know where we are going to need to apply the teachings of the Hierophant; and if we never listen to the logic and philosophies and arcane knowledge of our multitude of teachers, we will never learn that the actual position we need to occupy to ride Fortune's Wheel is directly in the center, the vantage point from which each human being sees the You-niverse.
So--try the math of the cognate opposites, and see what you come up with. Whatever you begin with, the Union of Opposites is going to be your best way to a positive outcome. And as you Hop through the many entries in this Blog Hop, see all of them as a Union of many perspectives on one deep truth...And Blessings of Bealteine to you all!
