The Travelers Tarot: Part 8
Because arent you sick of watching empires burn ?
Greetings beloved:
We continue to explore my cartomancy set, and I have an update on pre-orders. I will be ordering my bulk order this September, and I thank you for your patience and support. That means I expect orders to either be in your home or on their way to your home by mid-September. Thank you for helping me create enough inventory and stock to get to the next stage, and hopefully, an artist to rethink some of the images a bit before distribution.
Welcome to the next part of the Travelers Tarot. The Witnesses.
If you don’t remember, the cards are meant to tell you if you are in the right place, at the right time, for the right reason. They are deck for warriors of synchronicity, surfers of psychedelics, and indosyncratic. Those of us who know being in the “right place” isn’t just a matter of space, but can also be a matter of the right place sometimes. It’s a deck that knows time isn’t progressive, but cyclic. That it isn’t a curse to re-live the stories of elevated ancestors, heroes, nephilim, and orisha of the past, it’s where true power and the inheritance lie for the seeker.
The full explanation is here: First post.
But basically it’s the story of 36 messenger beings walking through 7 worlds using their road of choice to get to them: Earth.
12 are the voices of the Creator. 24 are witnesses that, no matter their nature, testify that the 12, when gathered, are the collective voice of who they call: She Who Left the Throne.1
Or the Creator. The Deck follows their stories and journey as they care for the worlds, peoples, stories, and duties they encounter. The Witnesses are much more varied in intent than The Voices.
In fact, you get the sense that maybe they aren’t on anyone’s side but their own.
We start with The Seamstress and the Tear in the Night.
The Seamstress once wandered the forest as a child. She was doing what all little ones do once they can take off fast enough to turn a trail corner or brooks turn faster than their parents can reach. The Seamstress was doing this the last day she remembers seeing her Mom. She turned a corner only she saw, down a path only open to her when she came upon great messengers dipping their wings in a cooling brook.
She sat down quietly in awe at this sight and listened to the two converse. As she listened, she started to understand their strange dialect slowly. Each word was a chorus of music, each sentence a symphony, until she rose in ecstasy, unable to contain herself, she started to dance the dance of dead gods and messenger spirits. She was in the state for many days until she woke up to the ministrations of the messengers. When she awoke, she could only remember parts of the music, the endless song that was the Creator’s secret language.
She arose from that place healed and holding the secrets of adornment, pigment, clothing, makeup, seduction, and dance as an expression of the Creator’s power and beauty. She taught these secrets to the cunning woman of her time and gave out golden needles and threads to all who apprenticed under her. With these gifts, her first apprentices can call forth the seamstress to this day, and some claim such as we can. After many years of teaching, sewing, dancing, and stitching together the great stories, ceremonies, and rites of humanity into costumes and roles to be worn, and then thrown off, she has now retired to the forest. There she spends her time adorning the night sky, stitching in wonders we may never reach, and holes in spacetime that the creator peeks through from her new home.
If the seamstress comes up in a reading, are you ready to be stitched into your crew, your coven, your ìle? Are you using all your wiles? Are you being cunning? The seamstress is all the sacred gifts associated with the divine femme, not for the eyes of patriarchy, but for the power of you. Your liberation. Your freedom. Are you willing to seduce, dress for, prep a costume, create a sacred ballroom, or dance your way to revolution? Because you might have to. If paired with both her voice and sibling witness, but she arrives first in the reading: prepare for great mysteries to be imparted and entrusted to you. They are the witness of The Herald, and sewed his glowing robes that shift the peoples and lands he passes from the bits of light she was able to collect from tearing, restitching, or patching the night sky with stars, planets, and wonder.
The Tear in the Night is the guardian spirit of those moments of misfortune that reveal. The Tear in the Night is much older than his sister, The Seamstress. You see, he was there from the first time she learned the Sacred but Forbidden Songs of the Creator. Now he mostly sits in the shadows under feet, awaiting scraps of the cosmos to be discarded. He was there when she sewed the light that guides The Herald’s way. The Tear in the Night was there at the first dawn, you see, bringing light across the cosmos, from world to world, particularly worlds like Earth that stand at the crossroads of so many.
Born of consequence, or perhaps just the one who bears those consequences to us. The Tear in the Night is the rip in the veil of our realities, he is the great historic ruptures, the moments where our entire ontological worlds are flipped upside down. He is the consequence of opening the doors of perception too fast, of running from the esoteric or astral world heedlessly and recklessly. He is the imperfection one can only see when you “perfect” an art. Sorcery, sculpting, writing, divination, painting, becoming human, playing the banjo, parenting, DJing.
No matter the art, medium, or people it touches, once one feels competent at anything, one mostly just sees the places one is falling short. Just like life.
This is also why he is the Patron Saint of Crisis, Trauma Transmutation, and Healing
The Tear in the Night is composed of the ragged edges of those nights searching your innerverse for art, or pleasure, or in true spiritual seeking. Every world that has ever been ripped into by us or our technology. Think of him as the hole in the veil that lets you know there is light on the other side. The issue that made you leave the abusive, or one sideded un unreciprocal relationship. The curb you tripped on, hurrying to work at a job you were way past the expiration date, so you quit.
The Tear in the Night is all the nasty, unsettled, and mostly unresolved hurts that lead us to say- Enough is enough.
When was the last time you thanked the mischievous spirit that popped a tire and made you miss the date with that creep? Did you go back and thank the drink you spilled on a “friend” by accident and revealed their true character? Why would you? Like a snake shedding its skin, we change, grow, and move on. The Tear in the Night is the guardian spirit of those moments of misfortune that reveal, and the one who collects the scraps of our unfinished work we leave behind us, following us with a growing bundle. That’s his power, and the key to living with him in relative peace.
If the Tear in the Night comes up in a reading, are you spiritually bypassing something or someone? Does your journey have unintended consequences? Are you ready to deal with them? When this card comes up, it isn’t demanding or even telling you about something your body doesn’t know. This card it’s an opportunity, an invitation to look at the collected pile of scraps of broken mantles, covenants, promises, and loves, the very fabric of our lives. When paired with his Voice, The Herald, and The Seamstress, his sister, he helps complete the picture of the spiritual trials and journeys we must take. How they are often started in light and glory, reflected upon in the dark mostly by women, and the most torn places in the fabric of our stories are hardly ever healed from. They are often in the form of little ones, things, and hurts following right behind us.
Still playing with this name. It is usually a variation of She who Birthed us and Moved On, or She who is so Alone.