Enjoy Jordan Hoggard’s fun and depthful exploration of the Death card utilizing a mindset he generated for Schiffer Publication’s 2010 release of “Tarot in the Land of Mystereum: An Imagination Primer”, available at The Tarot Garden and on Amazon and bookstores everywhere. The Land of Mystereum is composed of a 192-page Imagination Primer + retooled Mystereum Tarot deck to emancipate the personalities inherent in Tarot cards and inspire you to further discover natural components of your imagination that you can personally develop and utilize in powerfully actionable ways throughout your everyday life.  It has Tarot speak, each card in their own voice, to enhance YOUR Tarot voice through dialogue and stories expressed by the cards.

Throughout this presentation keep in mind that if your intuition ever feels a little off, or whacked, or having gone missing, it is suggested to simply let it rest.  Simply, let it rest.  Simply listen and surf and swim with your eyes and ears rather than concerning yourself that your intuition feels off.  Maybe it simply rests in your logic.  In this case let your mind and logic flow. Maybe it is transforming.  You may be pleasantly surprised.  Rest is a death of sorts, a rejuvenation time, especially utilizing the way of The Land of Mystereum.  Death is also outright.  Finishes.  Completions.  Death is the mother of memory, and the fertilizer for dreams.

So, let’s get The Death card to come alive for you and play with Death Mystereum-style!  Here we go!

Visualize leaves falling from a tree.  Focus on a single leaf and follow it all the way to the ground in your mind.  Tis is SO not like trying to kiss a promise. What does it do there once on the ground?  Over time it will decompose.  Think of the concept of decomposing.  Something losing its form.  Something moving back into a formless state.

Now raise your mental focus back to the falling leaves as you begin to notice the tree.  As you begin to un-focus on the leaves, keep a soft awareness of their falling.  Begin to clearly see the tree.  From where you are focus in on the tree.

Smile into the tree as you sense how each and every leaf softly and simply pop-drops off the tree to begin its journey towards becoming nourishment.  As each leaf softly begins to fall, begins this part of its journey, feel how the tree is invigorated as it sheds each tiny little scale of a leaf, like each tiny little chaff shell from wheat in the wind.

Now, enhance your focus on the tree as a life force.  Feel the leaves lost, the leaves shed.  Feel how they strengthen the tree.  Feel how things lost strengthen the clarity and energy of your own focus.

Let’s add a bit more depth and spice here.  The Black Crucible of The Magician!  What is that, The Black Crucible of The Magician?

Closing your eyes visualize the big bowl of your night sky as a huge, black crucible, an immense forming-vessel.  And then, visualize a shooting star to cross this black bowl of your night sky.  Allow The Magician to magically remember the 1st spark of inspiration that crosses your imagination, and the rejuvenating death of its disappearance.  Remember the 1st spark of an idea.  Visualize that shooting star AS the 1st spark of an idea.  Slow its instantaneous coming and going down as you watch it slowly cross your night sky.  Watch it and smile.  Imagine it again.  Now, as you begin to imagine it again, slow down your big bowl of night sky that is around it and watch the whole scene as the shooting star appears and slowly, slowly moves across your big bowl of night sky slowly. Slowly.  Slowly.  And, it is gone again, going through a cycle of life, a cycle of death.  Run slowly through that again as you count to 9.  Remember the shooting star as it plays slowly in long-form each time you have an idea.  Remember this slow-form of your idea to gear into ITS mode of cycles before you jump in and write it down.   Adjust to the pace and rhythm of you idea.  Slowly gear into it as you steer yourself to jot down the remembrance in its own particular ways, with its own, personal, identifying qualities.

Think of something you struggle with or identify a challenge you enjoy.  As you open your eyes, no need to stay Tarot-related here, open your eyes and jot down an idea that came to you, any idea.  Really begin to express the particular core of this idea, a primary connective tissue of its influence, its essence.

This idea will be your topic to explore the Death card in a Land of Mystereum way with direct and Actionable Imagination as a tool.  We will utilize a 3-card Treasure of Tuning over the Stones Tarot spread and The Treasure of Turning Over the Stones methods of Tarot reading here.  This is a session to further and clearly illuminate multiple ways to utilize the change of the Death card for transformation and regeneration WHILE you are experiencing the change. This is a way to enhance your view and feeling-sense of the Death card to further experience interactivity in your Tarot sessions with yourself and with clients, an also to utilize the nourishing qualities of Tarot in your everyday life.

Death indicates that you yourself, alive, that you ARE The Phoenix!  Life and death are the same thing here really, or, one thing, a life-and-death.

Visualize Death as a winter garden, a place where things rest to renew.  Sense the winter garden in the space between each and every moment you experience. Visualize a winter garden space between each moment that infuses the moments you feel flux, feel the rest for rejuvenation of the winter garden.  Feel the rests.  Sense the pauses.  Feel the spaces between moments.  Feel the rests, the little deaths in pauses that prepare you, prepare you AS Phoenix for continual renewal, to keep you refreshed during change.  This is as continuous as the body’s chaff of dead skin flaking off.

Not such an attractive image there? You are right! Death can have a putrid quality.  But, like wheat, feel the chaff, the chaff blown off, the chaff blown off dead in the wind.  As the chaff disappears see and feel only the wheat reveals!  Your dead skin flaking off as an unattractive image?  Sense and feel the amazingly attractive image of YOU continually revealed!  Feel yourself here AS The Phoenix!  Experience the Death card from life, with you AS The Phoenix!

Now, let’s take this interactive quality further.  I suggest to close your eyes again, but I simply suggest that.  You do what you feel best.

Visualize leaves falling.   Visualize a tree in the background.

Still the tree blurred in the background.  Still it. Make it motionless.

Begin to focus on the tree.  As each leaf hits the ground in its Morticia-style love of death, the tree focused in your mind, feel each leaf kiss the ground,

feel each leaf kiss the ground to return, to nourish, your tree.

As each leaf falls from your tree feel the tree subtle things live more brightly,

feel your tree subtly live larger moment by moment, moment by moment it expands as each leaf leaves the tree, as each leaf kisses the ground.

There can be a Morticia-style kind of death-love that nourishes your tree here.  Take several deep breaths, several deep breaths, and subtly, leaving the tree in your mind, come back to the room.

I would like a short period of silence for you here.  Settle in.  Let sound die to thicken the living rue of silence.  Count to 9 in your mind slowly.

This presentation is primarily visualizations to bringing images to mind as I feel Tarot is about visual story, about images and their influences.  Here images can catalyze and emphasize your ideas, creativity, and intuition as the 4-charactered voice of imagination, the 4-charactered voice of imagination where the 4th character is the space between idea and creativity and intuition that brings the 3 into relationship.  Listen and fully sense this 4-charactered approach of imagination’s voice as simply one of the many ways to enhance the actionable and effective qualities of your imagination.

Now, here is a GRAND image for experiencing the magical and imaginative qualities of death:

A caterpillar sees the end of the world in a flower, where a Master envisions, dreams a butterfly sipping the nectar.  Walk-talk-see-feel yourself to travel as a caterpillar.  Maybe you feel there is something in a caterpillar of one of your ideas that you must do.  Do you encase the idea in a chrysalis?  Are you able to let the idea you fall asleep in its caterpillar life, let it sleep in the psychic winter garden of this chrysalis? Your idea may fall asleep to your life, and what of when it awakens transformed?!  This is about Death as a letting go where you are able to respect the variety of timing and cycles that most naturally nourish any particular idea as you transform it to provide the most effective influence from its naturalized identity.

To truly let go of your idea as the caterpillar does in the chrysalis, your idea can literally liquefy inside the chrysalis as it transforms to its new, natural state.  To truly let go like a caterpillar does in totality, your idea can liquefy to awaken in new form. . . with wings even!

You see, a caterpillar doesn’t go on a diet, lose some legs, and grow some wings.  A caterpillar literally liquefies into a primordial soup in its case, its vessel, its chrysalis that operates as its personal self-made womb, an alchemical life-crucible of its own making to liquefy within and throughout so that it may naturally reconstitute! It may naturally reconstitute as a butterfly!  Hear that?  How cool!  The caterpillar soup reCONSTITUTES, reconstitutes to beCOME a butterfly! How cool is THAT?!

It slide-emerges out of the chrysalis it made as it cracks it like a snake with egg-tooth from its egg as the NOW butterfly swells.  It unfurling-its-wet-wings emerges as, more than meets the eye as it wings unfurl as if larger than possible from that tiny chrysalis, its skin shedded like a snake, its skin not missed.  Let one of your ideas crack-hatch here as it emerges from the forming life-crucible of your own making.  Experience this emergence as Death, in an awakening!  The chrysalis can crack open and with wet and folded wings the butterfly slowly stretches to unfold and unfurl its new “LEGS” like a cat waking from a nap.  Its legs to get around are now wings!  And, where did the other legs go?  Interesting, that butterflies taste with their feet.  Cracking the vessel of its chrysalis, the butterfly literally broke the mold . . . and I would venture to guess when a butterfly sees a catterpillar, it might just think, “What’s that pretty crawly thing?”  Like a pond turning over, I gather that the butterfly remembers the caterpillar only in its newfound fertility and flight as a way of life.

The butterfly broke the mold to emerge slowly. . .as a butterfly!  Notice a smile as its wet and folded wings unfurl?

Not as chaff to be blown off by the wind, the butterfly leaves the chrysalis, having broke the mold as it emerged, to fly ON the wind!  To raise into the winds of change as it flies!  And, once you can fly, flight becomes a way of life so says the butterfly!  The Phoenix flies!  Your ideas can fly as you unfurl your arms and you slowly wake to the room! Fly back right here!

So, here I will simply make some statements for reflection, for dreaming of flight.

Force is not necessary to change.  Forces are, but change may be effortless on your part.  Maybe.  Massage this like clay.  Throw a mind-pot on your imagination’s potter’s wheel.

Be comfortable with the not-knowing like the caterpillar who knows there is something that simply has to be accomplished. Accomplishment = meaning that occurs AS action here.  The not-knowing?  What is that really?  It means that meanings and reasons occur IN your actions rather than in explanation.  Meaning occurs in the act.  Meaning occurs AS the act, infusing it throughout.

Meaning.  Reason.  Meaning and reason IN action!  Think of the not-knowing as your personal path to enhance your ability to be attached to one thing.  You do not need to be attached to life.  As the comedian Lazy Boy says with a big laugh, “Have fun and do your thing.  None of us are getting out alive.”  So, what is this one thing to be attached to?  Death takes care of your outcomes?  More than that natural feature.  That feels rather uninspiring.  Explore simply being attached to one thing.  Explore being attached to being pleasantly surprised, often.  Be attached to being pleasantly surprised daily!  Lose the trip-ups.  Spread your wings and lift your legs, glide right over them . . . and maybe even begin doing so naturally, unaware of them, eyes on the flower, eyes on the prize.

The way I look at death in this way is this.  The older I get, the more comfortable and happy I get. Frank Lloyd Wright put it this way, “The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.”

So, for Death I have presented you with:

the not-knowing and the chrysalis

You as Phoenix and your ideas as leaves

Ideas as a tree.  Feet as taste buds of earthly connection.

As you are here alive, I see death, as in the Death card, as this totality of transformation. Transformation, then, is a way to open up, to break the mold.  Transformation is a way to open portals of discovery in ways like a caterpillar that becomes a butterfly, your ideas that become more than you never dreamed as you garden them to naturalize over time and cycles and seasons.

So, lastly before I share aspread, I hope there have been inspiring moments for you throughout this presentation, and that there have been and will continue to be inspiring moments in each of your lives that emerge from chrysalises, each chrysalis to be posited in lineage, as it is forgotten into flight.

So, in the final moment here of my presentation, as I die it to completion, I will touch on grief from a Death card perspective.  We each grieve differently, and we each grieve differently each time.  So, each time you draw the Death card take a moment to silently let the chaff and the falling leaves disappear to reveal the wheat and the tree and the Phoenix as they present themselves in your reading.  To reveal lineage forgotten into the treasure that is flight.  Literally, sense fully to get at what is emerging, and what emerges rather than what is falling away.

And, in big ole chaff and falling leaves ways, think about any marked disruption in a life.  Yours.  Somebody else.  The life of an idea.  It may not be that their life is truly falling apart.  That may be caterpillar thought.  It may be that their life falls together for the first time, and feels different, even alien to the previous.  Like comparing a caterpillar to a butterfly.

spoken in a 1st person voice of Death like in The Land of Mystereum, to literally and really let the cards speak:

Death.

I am the marriage of things that bridge, bridge by going somewhere else,

that go somewhere else, to marry each of us to the Other, always alive.

The Other always alive receives death with open arms to marry us here to live our celestial groove.

So, forgetting the leaf . . .for. . . .getting the tree.

Forgetting the caterpillar. . .for. . .getting the butterfly.

Forgetting the chaff. . .for. . .getting the wheat.

Forget your loss. . .for. . .getting the natural change and evolutions in your life.

Getting your life . . . You . . . Alive . . . Death is an ally

You . . . alive . . . Are your best ally!  You ARE THE PHOENIX!

The Phoenix is reincarnation incarnate . . .

and with that, I come to the epitaph of this presentation so it may rest in peace . . .

Death’s epitaph speaking to reincarnation:  I have been dying my whole life to get right HERE NOW, and always will be!  Ask me again tomorrow where I may be differently informed.        ~ The End ~

Thank you for your time.  I encourage you to feel your transformations and move and feel and think with the fresh new abilities your transformation awaken for you.  I encourage you to feel your transformations wise in time, experiencing them AS they happen, the meaning occurring in the act, and throughout their durations.  Feel your own wisdom inform your change DURING the change to work with it and enhance and refresh your fluidity.  I do not feel that transformations give you self-development homework to reason with to chew up your value and compost your dreams.  I see the patience of a butterfly in transformations. Can you be patient like the butterfly enjoying the scenery, noticing flowers and a natural draw to them?  A few wet flaps in the wind to get the good gist, and . . . flight!  May you always get your good gist.  Wet and new like a butterflies wings, may you in a few short flaps see your own flowers.  Thanks for your time!

Jupiter’s Blessings,

Jordan Hoggard

The Land of Mystereum

Spread Bonus sprouted for Death ~ 3-Card Treasure of the Stones spread:

to experience expectation and lineage and chrysalis in a card

to discover the treasure of the card’s flight under the chrysalis, under the stone. . the treasure of turning over the stones.

Shuffle your cards and once you feel your shuffling is at a place that resonates with you, your deck is in sync for your reading, hold your deck out over where you read, maybe 2 or 3 inches above it.

Drop a portion of the deck as one pile or stone as I call it.  Drop another next to it as a second stone.  And, a third.  Do this to make 3 mini-decks of stones.

~ Top of the 1st stone is Card 1: The chrysalis of your current idea or situation.

~ Top of the 2nd stone is Card 2: The chrysalis of what you need to know about your current idea or situation.

~ Top of the 3rd stone is Card 3: The chrysalis cracking card.  The card of breaking the mold.

Read your cards from those perspectives.  THEN!  Pick up the 1st stone and shake it all around to get the imaginary sand off of it.  And as you are rolling it and shaking shake shake shake holding on to it FLIP your hand to turn over the stone.  The bottom card is the treasure of the top card.  How does the treasure emerge from the top card like a butterfly emerges from its chrysalis?  Work these two cards to together.  Let the top card be lineage, be place, be the subject.  Let the the top card be informed by its treasure. Express how the bottom card can be the treasure of the top card.

~ Bottom of the 1st stone is Card 4: The treasure of your situation from Card 1.

~ Bottom of the 2nd stone is Card 5: The treasure that emerges from what you expected to need to know from Card 2.

~ Bottom of the 3rd stone is Card 6: The treasure of the magic carpet of flight that emerges from Card 3!

And, another version of this spread can be experienced at Donnaleigh’s wonderful Tarot site: http://divinewhispers.net/jordan.htm    Enjoy!

Thanks for reading!  I hope this provides valuable infusion for YOU to aspect and evolve and enhance your Tarot voice!

Jupiter’s Blessings,
Jordan

www.jordanhoggard.com

www.zazzle.com/mystereum

And, if you have made it this far, you are a real trooper!  So, here is another added bonus spread.  All I ask is that when the spread indicates for you to remove cards and make them disappear, do so like deadheading in a garden.  Cleanly snap ’em right off so the other flowers of cards can thrive.  Or as New Zealanders might say, Deedheeding, Man. Do kiwis use commas? ;-D

Death_As_The_Master_Gardener  (fyi: a Powerpoint doc, .ppt)