Home

I wrote before about the dreams I've been having, the songs that follow a string of multiples nights of these dreams, and the feeling that Home is communicating something to me. After writing about it, it occurred to me to put the word "home" through the ToA gematria and see what that adds to things.

The number I got is 23. "Of course it is," I thought. After all, 23 is a special number for me. A lot of the things that make it a special number are tied to home. So before I went any further with this, just the number itself stood out. But let's see what I get with that number from the ToA cards.

I started with card 23...the obvious one to start with.

Mystically Magnetised

Invoking A Quantum Gateway

This sounds right up my alley! But it's not really enough for me to truly start feeling like things either do or don't line up, so I also decided to look at cards 2 and 3.

Card 2: 

A Trail Of Sailing Stars

An Aura By The Rim

Card 3:

The Key To The Gate

Primal Dark Wonders

Card 2 just feels right to me here. That feeling of home being a part of me that I can't touch again... My words aren't really the best way to express it. The words on the card are better. The feelings the card brings up match well with how I already feel about home.

Card 3 immediately got my attention because Card 23 speaks of "invoking a quantum gateway", and now here's "The Key to The Gate"! Not only are these cards going well with each other, but keys are very significant to me on a deeply personal level.

Since I split a double digit number into its individual digits, I also decided to see what I get if I simply reduce the number by adding the digits. Any Discordian can tell you that turns 23 into 5.

Card 5:

In The Sign Of The Double-Snake

Rising Through A Willed Trance

I'm not sure about this one. The top line isn't registering with me as having meaning. Not yet, anyway. The bottom line, though, I immediately thought of as being about these things being communicated to me through dreams.  I almost ignored this card, except that bottom line lingers with me, and tossing this out really wasn't going to work after what I did next.

Since this is all about home, and cartomancy is one of my skills that is a very "me" thing, I decided to pull out a deck of oracle cards that I connected with because of home. I never really liked oracle cards much before getting the Southern Gothic Oracle deck. I just didn't connect with them like I did with tarot. This deck is so much "home" to me, though, that it has very special meaning for me. I figured I'd pull out the cards with the same numbers and see if things work together from different systems. I was prepared to be disappointed, but...well, I was not disappointed.

Card 23 gives me the message of The Cicada, which is all about the necessity of changing and growing.

Cards 2 (Pair of Shoes: coupling - partnership) and 3 (The Salamander: infinity - re-invention) seem to speak of that bond I have with home and the need to re-invent, or rebuild, myself. Maybe even the need to bond with a different place.

Once I pulled out Card 5, I wasn't going to be able to ignore the ToA Card 5. I'm not just picking and choosing what I like best.

The Raccoon, teaching curiosity and independence. And the art shows the raccoon in the tree that is its home. At this point, I was thinking, "Okay, okay...I get the point!" I was also so pleasantly surprised by this working that I decided to pull out another deck from a different system.

The ToA deck and Southern Gothic Oracle deck are different systems because most oracle decks are their own system. They're made by different creators for different reasons. Until you start getting into things like Lenormand decks, anyway, but I'm really talking here about oracle decks that stand on their own. Bringing tarot into this, though, was where I really thought this wouldn't work. I decided to use the Major Arcana. Trying to decide which Minor Arcana suits to use was going to lead to overthinking it all, and I already had to decide how to handle there not being a twenty-third card even in the Major Arcana. This worked across two different oracle decks, but tarot is designed to be more structured with the meanings, and figuring out how to handle the numbers didn't seem like it would be much different from just pulling out random cards. I had to see what would happen, though.

The number 23 could be split up a lot of ways, but I decided looking at 20 + 3 and 10 + 13 would be simple ways to do it. But which pair? This was all a test at this point, so I decided to look at both and find out what happens. I pulled out my Wildwood Tarot deck and started looking for the cards.

Card 20 is The Great Bear, and wow! Just alone, that's already speaking of home on a greater level! That's the whole "processing what the soul learned from the physical experience of life" kind of "returning home". Add to that Card 3, The Green Woman. A very maternal figure who will welcome you to help yourself to nourishment from her cauldron. It's really best, though, that you know yourself and be prepared to accept whatever it is about yourself that nourishment magnifies and gives strength to. Yeah...this is fitting with the message.

But let's also try cards 10 and 13...

The Wheel and The Journey. Of course. Given what it was that resulted in my leaving  home, The Journey being in the spot that is usually known as Death in most tarot decks takes on a very personal meaning for me here. Both pairs of numbers I chose to substitute 23 fit into all of this on levels I couldn't have expected.

I wasn't going to stop there. Even though I already looked at how The Green Woman fits into all of this, I needed to see what happens when cards 2 and 3 are together. Card 2 is The Seer, and that fits me receiving this information through dreams, songs, and divination. If the Seer is seeing what The Green Woman wants her to know...yeah, this practically explains itself.

What about Card 5? This is what throws things off, right?

Actually...no. There's a good chance I would have read this as being about the connection of my ancestors and home, or how home is its own kind of ancestor. But my grandmother was in that last dream. In many ways, my relationship with my grandmother has always been very similar to what The Ancestor represents in this card, and if I had to guess which ancestor might show up and guide me in this way, she would be first on the list.

I'm going to have to try doing this with other things. Seeing how it all goes together across different systems... it's a lot for me to think about. Not just because of what it all says about these dreams and how I understand them (helpful information, and the whole reason this started), but because I've never tried using my cards this way before. I want to study what happens consistently with this.