From the Street Magi's Guide

I read somewhere once that man lives guided by symbols. Manipulate the symbols and you manipulate the man.

This is a true thing.

We are all guided by symbols. We think in pictures. (Even though there are many who SWEAR up and down we don’t) Images flicker through our lives.  If I say “Yellow Cabinet” to you, you aren’t going to parse the words first. Your mind will construct an image of a yellow cabinet FIRST. It may be fleeting, but your mind needs the picture before it can slap the word on it.  If I say, Britney Spears to you. You aren’t going to parse the individual letters. You’ll see an image of Britney’s face, (Or in some rare case, imagine her music first.)  It’s the way we are all wired.

I knew a guy once who read Tarot. He’s an Atheist and a skeptic. (Don’t ask. I have weird friends. You probably have weird friends too.)   He says that for him, reading Tarot is a psychological and tactical exercise. We share many Jungian archetypes in common. I mean globally there are certain elements of our psychological make-up that are entirely universal to us, as a race. Gather enough of these sorts of symbols in one place and you will normally have a useable and workable system of major and minor arcana for a good tarot deck.  So, as he puts it, all you really have to do is shuffle the cards enough to get an even statistical distribution (Normally, about seven times.) and then you can lay out the cards in a pattern that may help you see problems from new angles and in new lights.  While my atheist friend totally rejects the idea that larger voices speak through the reader, he does admit that often the subconscious mind knows more information than the conscious mind does. This enables a person to know things without necessarily knowing how you know.  My Atheist Friend is also a little on the fence for the notion that people unconsciously manipulate probabilities.  He’s done enough tarot to know that occasionally freaky things happen. But he doesn’t want to reject probability science as inalterably fucked.

   In any case. He asserts that when reading Tarot for another person that their perceptual filter is more important than his own. While the cards have certain meanings and keywords for him, the meanings and keywords that the Querent attach to the various cards are the ones that matter.

He likens the process to a bit of spelunking in a great dark cave. The act of reading tarot is like squeaking like a bat in order to get an idea of the size and shape of one’s subconscious.  Tangly metaphor or no,  He looks at it as a mean of discovering what you already knew anyway, but didn’t know you knew.  And that, all by itself can be a useful thing.

Symbols have many uses in arcane work. They can help to focus attention.  They can help to concretize the normally fluid, and ephemeral thought forms.  They are useful in artificing work to bend natural resonances to a specific effect. They can be used to sign documents and warn other magi as to whose turf they about to step on. They can evoke singular and strings of images for the remembering of long texts. Images as text (such as in heiroglyphs or other symbolic languages) can be used to do many of things at the same time. Add in potential steganography, and you have hard to break codes.

It is a true thing.

Manipulate the symbol and you manipulate the man.

Take a moment to scribe two names on a piece of cloth. Tie each end with something taken from those persons and then rend the cloth in twain in front of both and the sight of it will reverberate in their subconscious minds until they are driven apart.

Fire an empty gun at a photo of a person you wish ill on. Fire it 11 times for 11 days and that person will suffer. maybe even die. The picture and the weapon are what focus the baneful energies. (I don’t recommend that you do that sort of thing. The Three-fold law ain't got a lot of wiggle room.)