Tag: Christian mysticism

Temperance, Tarot and the Longing for Wholeness

Yesterday, I updated my Temperance article on Angelorum. This morning, I began to understand more clearly why this Arcanum matters so much to me.

My name adds up to 14 in the numerological system I use. XIV Temperance has therefore felt personal for a long time. But there is a difference between recognising yourself in a card and allowing it to show you something you would rather keep covered.

The word that surfaced this morning was wholeness.

It arrived through prayer, a restless night, St Jerome and a chapter of Agrippa. A fairly typical collection of companions for my mind, admittedly.

The Hunger Beneath the Reading

Last night, I lay awake longing to feel the Lord’s presence. I wanted intimacy with God, and I couldn’t feel it.

I understand that dryness is part of prayer. The absence of a felt response does not necessarily mean that nothing is happening. But knowing this didn’t remove the hunger. If anything, the quiet made me more aware of how starved of Presence I felt.

Reading Brother Lawrence had helped me put words to what I wanted. Yet there I was, recognising how often I had tried to feed that longing with more book learning. Another idea. Another correspondence. Another piece of the great puzzle.

Books have given me a great deal. Still, I was asking them to satisfy a hunger that required prayer and relationship.

Eventually, I fell asleep again. After several nights of tossing and turning, I finally had a decent night’s sleep. Perhaps that was the gift available to me: rest. Perhaps the Lord knew that my tired mind wouldn’t be able to handle His presence.

Meeting St Jerome in the Morning

When I woke, I read about St Jerome in Saints of the Isles. It is 30 September, his feast day.

His account of being accused in a dream of following Cicero rather than Christ landed rather close to home. In his letter to Eustochium, Jerome describes loving classical literature while finding the style of Scripture unappealing. The experience occurred during a severe illness, and he understood it as a call to change.

I recognised the kind of accusation my own mind might produce. Had I loved magic, miracles and mystery more than God Himself?

That question deserved an honest hearing. But after praying, something more precise surfaced.

The gifts had made me feel special. They had helped compensate for the lack of a healthy, secure sense of self. I had looked for things to dress myself in so that I would appear whole in the eyes of others.

I was naked like Adam and Eve, grabbing at the first fig leaf I could find that suited my inclinations.

The Gifts and the Fig Leaves

That recognition changed the question for me.

I could see how spiritual gifts, knowledge and experience had become part of the clothing I wore. They offered an identity. They gave me something to point to when I struggled to feel that I was enough.

My AuDHD mind naturally becomes deeply absorbed in the things that fascinate it through cognitive immersion. Symbolism, Tarot, magic and the mysteries have occupied an enormous part of my inner life. In many Christian circles, that fascination made me suspect. Had my special interest been science, I doubt it would have provoked the same response.

I am not trying to make every interest or practice of mine exempt from discernment. I am trying to understand what happens when an already wounded person hears that the way their mind reaches towards wonder is itself a reason for rejection.

It becomes difficult to separate a question about something you do from a verdict on what you are.

Richard Rohr’s Falling Upwards has helped me approach this with more honesty. Prayer brought it into focus this morning. Beneath my need to feel special was a need for wholeness, and for the security of being loved without having to display my spiritual credentials.

Agrippa, the Hebrew Letters and Psalm 119

Alongside Jerome, I was reading Book II, Chapter XV of Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia: the numbers above 12.

What struck me was how much of the chapter drew on Scripture. Agrippa’s discussion of 22 connects the number with the fullness of wisdom and the 22 Hebrew letters. My mind naturally went to the 22 Major Arcana.

Meanwhile, the reading accompanying Jerome in my saints book came from the Mem and Nun sections of Psalm 119.

Mem begins with love of God’s law and meditation upon it. Nun opens with the familiar image of God’s word as a lamp for the feet and a light for the path. Reading those passages, I found myself contemplating the Tarot correspondences again.

These belong to different traditions. In the Golden Dawn system associated with RWS, Temperance corresponds to Samekh. In the Continental sequence by Papus, it corresponds to Nun, the 14th Hebrew letter. The Tarot associations are a later interpretative layer, rather than the original meaning of the Psalm.

For me, that meeting of texts opened a question about how knowledge becomes something we live. A lamp is useful because it helps us take the next step.

Temperance and the Work of Becoming Whole

After yesterday’s writing, the angel with the two vessels feels especially relevant.

There is movement in this image. Something is being poured, received and brought into relationship. I recognise my own unfinished work there: learning how my intellect, imagination, woundedness and longing for God can belong within one life.

I have spent a great deal of time acquiring things with which to clothe myself. Temperance gives me an image for attending to what those things are doing within me. How much space do they occupy? What do they nourish? What am I asking them to make up for?

My connection with Arcanum XIV makes this reflection personal. It doesn’t provide a finished explanation of who I am. If anything, it helps me stay with the work that remains.

This also gives me a different perspective on my Tarot practice. The cards can offer images through which I recognise my motives and bring difficult questions into prayer. I want to pay attention to whether my work with them helps me become more honest, more loving and more present.

That leaves plenty to discern. I don’t need to settle every question this morning.

What Creature Did God Make Me to Be?

I will keep reading Agrippa. His philosophical fumblings feel familiar. I suspect the Richard Rohr book I am listening to will not be my last, either.

But prayer and meditation need room in my life that another book cannot fill. The simple message of Brother Lawrence helped me recognise what I have been longing for all along: presence and intimacy with God.

I wonder what will happen to my inclinations as I become less dependent on them to establish my worth. Which interests will deepen? Which will loosen their hold? What might I be able to give when I am less concerned with how the giving makes me appear?

The question I want to carry into prayer is this:

Where will my inclination lead me when I allow God to show me what creature He made me to be?

I have no complete answer. This morning, I can at least recognise the hunger, and turn towards Him with it.

Prayer

Mother Mary, please pray for me as I learn to bring my whole self before God. You know my longing for Him, and the wounded places I have tried to cover.

Help me trust that I am loved before I have anything to show for myself. Pray that my gifts and interests may find their proper place, and that I may have the courage to release whatever keeps me from your Son.

Hold me in your Immaculate Heart when I am afraid to be seen as I am. Teach me your openness to God, your willingness to ponder, and your readiness to answer Him.

May I grow into the creature He made me to be, with room in my heart to receive His presence and love.

Amen.

2026-09-30
Ceremonial Magic and Christianity: How Magic Led Me Back to the Rosary

The relationship between ceremonial magic and Christianity is complicated, particularly when you’ve spent years exploring both from the inside.

Something rather unexpected has happened lately.

I’m losing interest in ceremonial magic.

I realised just how true this was when I opened Facebook after a mostly sleepless night and the first thing in my feed was a meme:

Nobody:
Ceremonial Magicians: I’m going to make this way harder than it needs to be.

I laughed.

Because after spending more time praying the Rosary lately, that is increasingly how ceremonial magic feels to me.

Not worthless and certainly not something I regret studying.

Just… incredibly complicated.

The irony is that ceremonial magic is partly responsible for bringing me back to the much simpler faith I’m rediscovering now.

And today, on the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, that feels especially significant.

I Needed a Practice

For a long time, my spirituality was rich in ideas.

Decades of study have taken me through Tarot, astrology, magic, mysticism, witchcraft, Qabalah and various esoteric traditions. Devotional practices have come and gone along the way.

Something changed when I began taking ceremonial magic seriously, though.

It made me realise that I needed a practice.

There is an enormous difference between having spiritual beliefs and having a disciplined daily spiritual practice.

A practice asks something of you. You get up and do it whether or not you feel particularly spiritual that morning. Words and gestures are repeated. Attention is trained. The whole person is deliberately oriented towards something beyond the ordinary concerns of the day.

Eventually, the practice begins to shape the practitioner.

Ceremonial magic taught me that.

My exploration of Iamblichus and theurgy had already begun shifting my attention away from magical results and towards the question of what spiritual practice is ultimately meant to accomplish.

Exploring theurgy made me realise that reading another book about spirituality wasn’t necessarily going to take me where I wanted to go.

At some point, you have to stop reading about the path and actually walk it.

But that discovery led to another question.

Practice in Service of What?

Once the need for practice became clear, another question followed naturally.

What was that practice actually for?

That changed everything.

When I drilled down into what spiritual practice meant for me, it only made sense within a Christian context.

Spiritual power for its own sake doesn’t particularly interest me. Neither does accumulating increasingly sophisticated magical techniques.

What I wanted was transformation.

Sanctification.

An intimate relationship with God.

I wanted whatever gifts and abilities I possess to become useful in relieving suffering and serving something infinitely greater than myself.

Once I admitted that, Christianity stopped looking like merely the religion I’d left behind.

It started looking like home.

And home, as it turns out, already had practices.

Then I Started Praying the Rosary

This is where I could hear the family of Saints giggling.

After studying elaborate systems of ceremonial ritual, there I was with a string of beads, saying prayers Christians have been repeating for centuries.

And something clicked.

Much of what I’d discovered I needed from ritual was already there.

Repetition. Sacred speech. Physical gesture. Contemplative imagery. Scripture. Rhythm. Discipline. Intention. Intercession.

There is a clear beginning and ending. The mysteries give the imagination somewhere to go, allowing us to enter sacred events contemplatively rather than merely thinking about them.

Yet one difference matters to me more than all the others.

There is relationship.

Rather than manipulating an elaborate symbolic architecture in the hope of achieving a particular spiritual state, I’m praying.

More specifically, I’m contemplating the life of Christ in the company of his Mother.

That has changed something in me.

Our Lady of Sorrows and the Wounded Heart

Today is 15 September, the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows.

I’ve also recently begun praying the Chaplet of the Seven Sorrows, and perhaps that is part of why all of this is coming into focus now.

Our Lady of Sorrows presents a very different model of spiritual power.

Mary doesn’t conquer suffering.

She remains.

Simeon’s prophecy tells her that a sword will pierce her own soul. She flees with her child into Egypt, loses him in Jerusalem, encounters him carrying the Cross and ultimately stands at Calvary watching her Son die.

Then she holds his body.

There is nothing passive about this kind of presence.

Anyone who has accompanied someone through suffering knows how much courage it can require simply to remain when there is nothing left to fix.

And perhaps this is where my understanding of spiritual practice has changed most radically.

The question is becoming less about what spiritual power I can acquire and more about becoming someone who doesn’t look away from suffering.

How can the spiritual tools I’ve spent my life studying help rather than merely fascinate?

How can my work alleviate suffering, restore hope, offer companionship or help another person recognise the presence of Divine grace in the middle of a difficult life?

Our Lady of Sorrows gives me an answer that requires surprisingly little equipment.

Stay.

Love.

Pray.

Simplicity on the Other Side of Complexity

I don’t think I could have arrived here by simply telling myself years ago that I ought to pray the Rosary.

Perhaps I needed the complexity first.

Ceremonial magic taught me through experience why ritual matters. Sacred space, intentionality, symbolism, disciplined attention and repetition stopped being abstract concepts. Most importantly, I learned the difference between occasionally doing something spiritual and maintaining a practice.

Having learned all of that, I’ve discovered something rather wonderful.

I might not need most of the machinery.

Give me the Rosary, Scripture, and a candle to light for somebody who is suffering.

Give me Tarot when I need to become quiet enough to listen.

That may actually be enough.

There is something wonderfully reassuring about a spiritual practice that doesn’t constantly require upgrading. Nobody is about to release Rosary 2.0 with seventeen additional correspondences and an advanced grade system.

Tomorrow, the task will simply be to pray again.

Then do it the following day.

The practice remains simple while, God willing, the person practising it changes.

What Happens to Magic?

None of this means everything I’ve spent years studying now belongs in the bin.

Far from it.

Mysticism, esotericism and the Western Mystery Tradition still fascinate me. Tarot certainly isn’t going anywhere. Neither is my interest in the philosophical questions underneath magic.

What has changed is my understanding of what I want these things to accomplish.

Recently, I arrived at two very simple definitions:

The purpose of theurgy is sanctification.

The purpose of magic is to dispense Divine grace into the world.

Those definitions have consequences.

If lighting a candle for someone, praying a Psalm and offering the Rosary for their intention accomplishes what I’m actually trying to do, another layer of ceremonial complexity needs a reason for being there.

Sometimes there may be one.

Sometimes there may not.

Increasingly, I’m comfortable with that.

Ceremonial Magic Did Its Job

This is why I don’t want to tell this story as I tried ceremonial magic and eventually realised Christianity was better.

That isn’t what happened.

In fact, I’ve written before about how studying the Western Mystery Tradition unexpectedly brought me back towards Christ. What I hadn’t yet realised was where that homecoming would lead next.

Ceremonial magic confronted me with a question:

What would happen if I stopped treating spirituality primarily as something to study and made it something I practised every day?

Following that question brought me somewhere I wasn’t expecting.

Back to Christ and Mama.

Back to prayer.

And, strangely enough, back to practices much older and simpler than those that prompted the journey.

There is a tendency when our spiritual direction changes to reinterpret the previous stage as a mistake. We want a clean conversion narrative with an obvious Before and After.

I’m increasingly suspicious of those narratives.

Sometimes a path does exactly what it needed to do before you leave it.

Perhaps ceremonial magic was never going to be my spiritual home.

But it taught me that I needed one.

Today, Our Lady of Sorrows adds something else to that lesson. Spiritual practice isn’t primarily about how much esoteric knowledge I can accumulate or how elaborate a ritual I can perform.

At the foot of the Cross, all of that suddenly looks rather small.

Mary simply stands there.

She loves and suffers with.

She remains faithful.

Perhaps that’s why the Rosary is making so much sense to me now. Its simplicity isn’t an absence of depth. The depth comes from returning to the same mysteries until they begin changing the person who returns to them.

Ceremonial magic taught me to practise.

The Rosary is teaching me why.

And sometimes the long way round really does bring us home.

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2026-09-15
The Alex Reads Tarot Controversy Took Me Back to 2017

I wasn’t planning to write about the Alex (formerly) Reads Tarot controversy again.

Like many people, I’d been watching it from a distance. I had no desire to add another opinion to an already overflowing internet.

Then I came across this post by Kelly-Ann Maddox.

As I read her words, I wasn’t thinking about Alex.

I was thinking about Doreen Virtue.

More specifically, I was thinking about the woman I was when Doreen announced her conversion to Evangelical Christianity in 2017.

The memories came flooding back before I’d even finished reading. I suddenly realised I hadn’t made peace with that chapter of my own life as much as I’d believed.

When Doreen Virtue first announced her conversion to Evangelical Christianity, I respected her right to change her beliefs. After all, I knew from my own life that spiritual journeys can take unexpected turns. What I struggled with was what came afterwards.

Renouncing tarot soon became denouncing it. Oracle cards, angels, crystals and many of the spiritual practices she had once taught were no longer presented as simply no longer being for her. They were increasingly described as spiritually dangerous or demonic. As former students questioned her dramatic change of direction, many felt they weren’t just being disagreed with—they were being told they had been deceived, were under demonic influence, or were serving the enemy.

That changed everything.

Like many people who had benefited from Doreen’s work, I felt betrayed. Not because she’d become an Evangelical Christian, but because it seemed as though she had rewritten the story of everyone who had walked alongside her.

I reacted badly.

I wrote articles criticising Doreen. They became some of the most successful posts I’d ever published. At the time, I thought I was defending my community. Looking back, I can see that I was also feeding an outrage cycle that ultimately did none of us any good—least of all me.

At the time, those articles felt justified. They were widely shared, they sparked discussion and, if I’m honest, I enjoyed the validation. It felt good to know other people agreed with me. Every comment, every share and every spike in traffic convinced me I was on the right side of the argument.

But there was another side to that success that I couldn’t see at the time.

The more I wrote about what Doreen was doing wrong, the less attention I paid to my own spiritual life. My energy became entangled with someone else’s journey. Instead of asking where the Divine was leading me, I became preoccupied with where Doreen had gone wrong.

Looking back with nearly a decade of hindsight, I no longer believe that was healthy. In fact, I think it played no small part in my own religious trauma resurfacing. I was convinced I was resisting spiritual abuse. In reality, that level of entanglement has a habit of rebounding on us.

Which brings me back to Kelly-Ann’s post.

Reading it, I didn’t feel the urge to argue with her. Nor did I feel the urge to defend Alex.

What I felt instead was grief.

Because I recognised something painfully familiar: the heartbreak that ripples through a community when someone whose work has mattered to us changes direction so dramatically that it feels like they’ve rejected not only a practice, but the people who shared it with them.

I don’t think my biggest mistake was criticising Doreen Virtue. I still believe some of what she said after her conversion caused genuine harm, especially to people already carrying religious trauma. My mistake was believing that answering outrage with more outrage could somehow make things better.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been immersed in Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy. One idea keeps confronting me. Agrippa has very little patience for dialectics. He regards dialectics as one of the great traps of the fallen intellect. We become so busy proving ourselves right that we forget to seek the One who is Truth.

That has left me with an uncomfortable question.

What if the need to be right is itself part of the problem?

Looking back at 2017, I can see how easily I was drawn into it. I wasn’t seeking understanding. I was building a case. Every new statement from Doreen became another exhibit. Every article strengthened my position. Every surge in traffic convinced me I was fighting the good fight.

But where was the Good in any of it?

What troubles me is how readily we reach for the courtroom instead of the Upper Room.

We gather evidence. We assemble arguments. We decide who is orthodox, who is deceived, who belongs and who doesn’t. Then we congratulate ourselves for standing on the right side.

Yet when I read the Gospels, I see something altogether different. Yeshua challenged people—sometimes with astonishing directness—but His aim was never to win an argument. His purpose was always restoration. Even His strongest rebukes were invitations to repentance, not performances for a crowd.

I can’t help wondering how differently these conversations might unfold if more of us asked a different question.

Not, “How do I prove I’m right?”

But, “How do I respond in a way that brings restoration to this situation?”

That’s the question I wish I’d been asking in 2017.

It’s also the question I hope I’ll still be asking when the next controversy comes along.

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2026-07-28
3 July 2026 – Crossroads Devotion & Divination: Psalm Magic in Daily Practice
Even though I no longer see the Bible as the inerrant Word of God, I adore the Psalms.

For me, the Psalms are pure magic. They quiet the mind, open the heart and help align my thoughts with the Highest Good. They are prayers, poems, spells, songs and meditations all at once. Whether we approach them as Scripture, sacred poetry or practical mysticism, they have an extraordinary way of speaking directly to our needs.

I usually begin with a simple prayer:

“Show me the Psalm that will serve the Highest Good today.”

Then I use a random number generator.

That may sound strange, but I’ve found that when I admit I don’t know what I need, Providence usually knows better than I do.

Once I have the number, I turn to Anna Riva’s Powers of the Psalms. Her book gives a traditional magical application for each Psalm, helping me understand the current I am about to work with. Only then do I go to my altar, light a candle, open my Bible and begin praying and meditating with the Psalm.

This morning, the random number was 72.

Anna Riva associates Psalm 72 with attracting prosperity and success, so I had a sense of the magical current before I even began reading and knew which colour candle to use. I chose green for abundance. It just happens to be Friday (ruled by Venus), a perfect day for attracting abundance. I couldn’t have orchestrated it better myself.

The Psalm

(King James Version – Public Domain)

Psalm 72

Give the king thy judgments, O God, and thy righteousness unto the king’s son.

2 He shall judge thy people with righteousness, and thy poor with judgment.

3 The mountains shall bring peace to the people, and the little hills, by righteousness.

4 He shall judge the poor of the people, he shall save the children of the needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor.

5 They shall fear thee as long as the sun and moon endure, throughout all generations.

6 He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth.

7 In his days shall the righteous flourish; and abundance of peace so long as the moon endureth.

8 He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.

9 They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him; and his enemies shall lick the dust.

10 The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall bring presents: the kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts.

11 Yea, all kings shall fall down before him: all nations shall serve him.

12 For he shall deliver the needy when he crieth; the poor also, and him that hath no helper.

13 He shall spare the poor and needy, and shall save the souls of the needy.

14 He shall redeem their soul from deceit and violence: and precious shall their blood be in his sight.

15 And he shall live, and to him shall be given of the gold of Sheba: prayer also shall be made for him continually; and daily shall he be praised.

16 There shall be an handful of corn in the earth upon the top of the mountains; the fruit thereof shall shake like Lebanon: and they of the city shall flourish like grass of the earth.

17 His name shall endure for ever: his name shall be continued as long as the sun: and men shall be blessed in him: all nations shall call him blessed.

18 Blessed be the Lord God, the God of Israel, who only doeth wondrous things.

19 And blessed be his glorious name for ever: and let the whole earth be filled with his glory; Amen, and Amen.

20 The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended.

The Temple at Lagina

After reading the Psalm, I pulled a card from the Oracle of the Hekatean Path.

The Temple at Lagina – Sacredness.

I smiled as soon as I saw it because the synchronicity couldn’t have been clearer.

The card reminded me that before we can effectively serve the Divine, we must learn to care for the temple through which we serve.

Our own bodies.

That has been a recurring lesson for me recently.

With a hip replacement on the horizon, improving my diet, prioritising sleep and building strength are no longer just health goals. They have become part of my spiritual practice.

Sometimes we imagine devotion as something dramatic or mystical.

More often, it looks remarkably ordinary.

Preparing nourishing food.

Going to bed on time.

Taking medication when needed.

Doing the physiotherapy exercises we’d rather avoid.

Accepting help.

Keeping promises to ourselves.

These seemingly mundane acts become sacred when we offer them consciously as part of our service to God.

The Temple at Lagina reminded me that holiness doesn’t begin somewhere “out there.”

It begins here.

In the body.

Why Psalm 72?

Many people know Psalm 72 as a royal Psalm celebrating righteous kingship.

I was introduced to it through Ariel Gatoga’s teaching on Psalm magic, where he presents it as a Psalm for prosperity and Divine provision.

His interpretation goes far beyond simply attracting money.

Instead, he invites us to recognise prosperity as our natural inheritance as children of the Divine.

That perspective resonates deeply with me.

Financial provision certainly matters, but so do health, opportunities, supportive friendships, wisdom, courage and the practical resources we need to fulfil our calling.

Psalm 72 speaks repeatedly about justice, protection, peace and abundance.

It reminds us that Divine provision doesn’t always arrive in the form we expect.

Sometimes it comes as healing.

Other times, as unexpected guidance.

And sometimes it arrives as the inner strength to keep going until the outer world catches up.

How I Work with Psalm Magic

My practice is simple, but if you would like to dive deeper into the history of Psalm Magic and different approaches, you can learn more in my article about Psalm Magic on angelorum.co.

I begin by reading the entire Psalm aloud without interruption.

Then I return to it slowly, verse by verse, allowing particular words or images to stand out.

Rather than analysing every line intellectually, I ask:

“What is this saying to my soul today?”

The symbols begin to speak.

A mountain becomes an elevated state of consciousness.

Rain becomes Divine blessing.

The oppressor becomes the fearful ego that insists there will never be enough.

The needy become the parts of myself still operating from old narratives of scarcity.

Each reading is slightly different because I am slightly different each day.

A Royal Inheritance

One of Ariel Gatoga’s most powerful teachings is the idea of adopting what he calls a Royal Identity.

Instead of approaching God as a beggar, we approach as beloved children.

That image echoes something deeply Christian.

We are invited to receive grace rather than earn it.

Prayer becomes less about convincing God to bless us and more about opening ourselves to blessings already prepared.

When Psalm 72 speaks of “the king’s son,” I hear an invitation to remember who we really are beneath all the stories of fear, lack and limitation.

Children of the King do not need to manipulate life into providing for them.

They learn to trust.

The Method I Learned

The approach I use comes from Ariel Gatoga’s teachings on Psalm Magic.

In summary, the practice involves:
- Reading the Psalm aloud in one sitting.
- Returning to it verse by verse to uncover symbolic meaning.
- Allowing limiting beliefs to come into awareness without judgement.
- Replacing thoughts of lack with the consciousness of Divine inheritance.
- Returning to the Psalm daily until a deep sense of peace and certainty naturally arises.
I have found this to be a surprisingly gentle practice.

Rather than trying to force manifestation, it gradually changes the way I see both myself and the world around me.

As my inner landscape shifts, life seems to respond in kind.

Trusting the Process

I don’t know which Psalm the random number generator will choose tomorrow.

That’s part of what makes the practice so beautiful.

Each morning begins with a simple act of surrender.

“Not my will, but Thy will be done.”

Sometimes the greatest act of faith isn’t knowing which prayer to choose.

It’s trusting that, when we genuinely ask for guidance, the right words have a way of finding us.

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2026-07-03
1 July 2026 – Crossroads Devotion & Divination: Asking Yeshua

The Question I Had Been Avoiding

During my morning quiet time, I pulled Aconite (Death) from the Oracle of the Hekatean Path. Meditating on the message, I realised I was standing at a crossroads where something indeed had to die.

For months now, I’ve been immersed in exploring what I have come to think of as my Christo-Hekatean path. My days have been filled with the Gospel of Philip, Jewish mysticism, Greek philosophy and modern writers such as Seren Bertrand and Sarah Iles-Johnston. Every new connection has sent me down another fascinating rabbit hole, and I’ve loved every minute of it.

Yet, despite all that study, one thought landed with uncomfortable clarity this morning.

I’d been asking everyone except Yeshua.

So I asked him.

I told him, as honestly as I knew how, that if this wasn’t a path he would walk with me, I would choose Hekate.

I don’t mean that as a rejection of Christ. Quite the opposite: it was my way of acknowledging that I can no longer deny the reality of what has happened through my relationship with Hekate. If following Christ required me to pretend that those experiences were false, then I wouldn’t do it.

I wanted the answer from him, not from another book or another expert.

What the Tarot Reflected

Only after praying did I lay out the Tarot de Marseille.

The 9 of Swords captured the mental agony of trying to get everything exactly right. Crossing it was the 10 of Batons, which felt like carrying far more than any one person could reasonably bear. It wasn’t simply my own uncertainty. It was centuries of theology, historical debate and the constant pressure to make sure every insight could be justified by someone else’s authority. It was the oppressive weight of feeling divided against myself.

The Queen of Batons appeared as the action card. She has represented Mary Magdalene for me for many years, so seeing her there made me smile. She doesn’t argue for her authority or apologise for it. She simply lives it.

The quint was Le Soleil.

For me, the Sun is Christ.

I smiled again.

That was my answer.

The near future cards were the 4 of Cups, the Page of Coins and the Ace of Cups. Rather than seeing four cups, I suddenly imagined the Page discovering four fountains from which to draw wisdom as he continues his journey. I’m still sitting with that image and suspect it has more to reveal over time.

What Aconite Was Really Asking to Die

Only afterwards did I understand why the day’s oracle card had been Aconite – Death.

The thing being asked to die wasn’t my love of study or my fascination with history. It was something much older.

Growing up, my father taught me that my will didn’t matter.

If I wanted to know what mattered, someone else had to tell me.

That pattern followed me into adulthood more faithfully than I realised.

Whenever something important happened spiritually, my instinct wasn’t to ask whether it rang true in prayer. It was to ask whether I could find an ancient source to validate it. If not an ancient source, then perhaps a respected scholar. If not a scholar, then at least someone who wasn’t a blogger but who had published a book.

The Resurrection

Looking back, I can see that I wasn’t really searching for theology.

I was searching for permission.

Permission to trust my own encounters with the Divine.

This morning, I stopped treating prayer as the beginning of the conversation and started treating it as the place where the conversation could end.

For me, that changed everything.

It’s not about the need to find the correct belief. That need kept me trapped in the 9 of Swords space. It’s about becoming whole, and this is where the Ace of Cups leads me.

Want to know what happened when I asked Mary Magdalene the same question? Read Mary Magdalene: Midwife of Souls on the Christo-Hekatean Path

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2026-07-01