Vicki Noble - Rituals and Practices with the Motherpeace Tarot

Rituals and Practices with the

MOTHERPEACE

Tarot

VICKI NOBLE

Bear & Company
Rochester, Vermont

This book is dedicated to the Little People

who showed up in such an active way

asking to be manifested through the original

Motherpeace images. May they continue

to exist in the invisible dimension of our

natural world, working away at their

divinely elemental task of sustaining life

on this dear planet. Blessed Be.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am forever grateful to Karen Vogel for our original creative collaboration on the Motherpeace tarot cards back in the late 1970s, and for our ongoing and mutually rewarding friendship and business partnership since then. Ive known Karen longer than almost anyone in my life, and she has participated actively in raising all three of my children. The Motherpeace images continue to inspire each of us to create new projects and make personal expressions that are informed by the same deep Mystery that transmitted itself through Motherpeace in the first place.

My heartfelt thanks to the Bogliasco Foundation for the fellowship I received, which allowed me to spend a month in Italy at the Liguria Study Center, where I was able to write the main body of this book. Besides providing me with near-perfect working conditions (my own studio, computer, supplies, E-mail, fax, wonderful staff and great Italian food!), the setting of the beautiful Villa dei Pini on the Italian Riviera, where I looked out at the Mediterranean Sea every day, was itself divinely inspiring. I felt blessed as I performed my private rituals on the balcony of my room overlooking the sea to be part of a long tradition of priestesses in the Old Religion of the Goddess that was so active for such a long time in that part of the world.

INTRODUCTION

This book is written specifically for womenthose who use the Motherpeace tarot cards, and those who might not have heard of them yet. A revolution has taken place in America and Europe that has largely escaped the notice of the mainstream (male-dominated) media and academic institutions. The Womens Spirituality movement, started in the 1970s, has grown into a broad-based grassroots movement of ordinary women exploring the concept of a female-centered religious life, including ancient and modern images of the feminine divine, in whose image we can begin to see ourselves as sacred. These women have shown a devout interest in opening their intuition, giving attention to their instinctual and body-based responses to life, and learning to fully embody the Shakti, or sacred female energies.

Since their first printing in 1981, the Motherpeace tarot cards have rippled out into the broader womens community in the United States and other countries, creating a small sensation in the area of tarot and the esoteric arts for women. Secretaries, social workers, teachers, therapists, and ministers are using them in their offices, schools, and corporations; luminaries like Gloria Steinem utilize Motherpeace cards as part of an eclectic spiritual path. Many traditional tarot decks designed by white men have alienated women because of their inherent sexist and racist assumptions and the negative attitudes that some of them expressed toward women. Like the womens movement that spawned it, Motherpeace is deliberately inclusive of diversity and purposely depicts people of color, older women, children, animals, and nonstereotypical images of men and women. Alice Walker, besides thanking us for making the cards in the introduction to one of her novels, tells stories about the cast doing Motherpeace readings between scenes while filming The Color Purple.

Since cocreating the Motherpeace images with Karen Vogel in the late 1970s, I have done thousands of readings with the cards, mostly for women and occasionally for men who want to know how to make better choices in their lives. I receive letters from Motherpeace users in places as far away as Japan, South Africa, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Argentina, and Chile. A young woman in the Czech Republic recently wrote to thank me for sending her a deck of cards and a book, calling my attention to Pragues famous Black Madonna and the citys amazing history of alchemists, magicians, and artists. Motherpeace functions worldwide as a shared visual language of the Goddess (to quote archaeologist Marija Gimbutas) that links women together globally across language and cultural barriers. Ive frequently been invited by Catholic nuns to speak and teach at the different retreat and educational centers they direct, and I was once made an honorary Sister of Notre Dame at a California retreat.

Not long ago I received a letter from a woman notifying me about a friend incarcerated in a mental institution after being convicted of a minor crime. When the patient requested to have a deck of Motherpeace cards, her request was at first denied by the chaplain as inappropriate for her; Bibles naturally were permitted. I wrote a letter to the institution, suggesting that it was rather archaic of them at the end of the twentieth century to treat as heresy a deck of tarot cards so widely appreciated by modern women all over the world. They eventually released their prohibition and let her use the cards.

Using the cards to ask for an oracle (a process called divination) allows us to align ourselves and our actions with a larger cosmic order. In modern times, people question whether or not such a deep and sacred structure actually exists, but the practice of divination assumes, as Demetra George puts it, belief in a Deity who is concerned with humanity and prepared to help. For those of us in the womens spirituality movement, that deity is female, as ancient as her images from the Paleolithic (30,000 B.C.E.) and as benevolent as Tibetan Tara or Chinese Quan Yin, whose epithet is She Who Hears the Cries of the World.

Demetra George and I have led groups of women on pilgrimages to Greece and Turkey. In her lectures to our groups, she has described natural divination as that which is intuitive, inspired, often takes the form of a visitation, and happens without an intermediary In my writing over the years and in this book, I describe various occasions in my life when I have experienced such direct visitations and prophetic pronouncements.

Natural divination was part of ancient womens religion and was no doubt often experienced while in collective states of frenzy or the orgiastic rituals often mentioned in the classical Greek histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, among others. Through womens ancient shamanic practices, spontaneous prophecy or fore-tellings of collective eventssuch as the visions of Cassandra of Troycame over women and forced them to speak the truth. This natural divination contrasts with the more formal responses in later times given by a priest or priestess (or nowadays a tarot reader) to a specific inquiry by a supplicant at a shrine or within the context of a ritual. Prophetesses (sybils, Bacchae, pythia, volvas, velas) in the earliest shrines experienced brief, abnormal states of mind in which they stepped outside themselves (ecstasis) through a divinely induced trance state while touched or filled with spirit (enthusiasmos), and they keened, sang, chanted, or otherwise poetically expressed their visions.

The most famous oracular center of this type was Delphi, where the Pythia gave her answers in a supposedly garbled form of speech that priests translated. At the height of its powers in the sixth century B.C.E., Delphi was the omphalos or oracular seat (the Pythia sat on a tripod) where everyone in the Mediterranean area came for guidance, both individual and governmental. Of the female sexuality implicit in the orgiastic trance state and its subsequent oracular speech, George points out that pythia were considered brides of Apollo, just as Christian nuns are later described as brides of Christ. And in this light, the second edition of