Celebrating Transformation At Mabon

Another Celebration

I love Tarot Bloghops. It’s always about celebrations. My first was about the Mid Summer Solstice. For goodness sakes, I didn’t even know how to spell “solstice”  then let alone understood what it meant.  However celebrating the rising sun on the longest day of the year was enough reason for me to write about its significance to me. The second one was about Lammas.  I thought Lammas was a cute, white animal. My research uncovered that it was a celebration of the harvest.  Honestly, anything to do with abundance, particularly an abundance of food, sounded like a good enough reason for me to write, and read the blogs of my fellow tarot blogging friends!  I’m now armed with even more yummy recipes waiting for a day I feel experimental in the kitchen. 

Now this Tarot Bloghop topic today, is about Mabon. And yes! It’s another celebration! As explained by the witty Jordan Hoggard at http://jordanhoggard.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/tarotmabonbloghopmystereum-mead-made/ Mabon is the celebration of the Autumn Equinox. It took its name from the mythical Welsh God Mabon who was abducted at 3-days old, and was found again by King Arthur, allowing him to be reborn into the light. I hope I got the story right as I am writing this in between ciders.

What Is Mabon?

Mabon is a celebration of the “crops that we have reaped”, allowing us to enjoy the bounty from the fruits of our labor. To this, I took it to mean that we should be celebrating the richness accumulated from our experiences, and from the lessons we have learnt. As it marks the start of the autumn season, it’s a celebration of the equal division between day and night, when we see impending dwindling sunlight followed by the changing colors of the leaves from a lush green to a hue of rust red and golden brown. Autumn is a season that is traditionally associated with change and transformation. It is a celebration of life and abundance when the family is nourished with the vegetables in the garden, and it is also a reminder of the reality of death when crops die after being harvested. It also marks the transition from the fulfilling warmth and vitality of summer to the dormant and hibernating state of winter. It's a time we give thanks for the wonderful bounty, while we think of letting go of the past and being nurtured by the lessons learnt.

The Significance Of Mabon To Me As A Roman Catholic

Mabon is a pagan festival of seasonal transformation and thanksgiving celebrated on 21 September. There are reasons for me as a Roman Catholic to celebrate the same.

On this same day, we Catholics too celebrate transformation in the form of the feast day of St Matthew and St Thomas of Villanova. The former was celebrated for his transformation from an abhorred tax collector for King Herod, to a revered saint and one of the 12 disciples of Jesus Christ. The latter was famous for transforming the notion of charity when he sought to obtain definitive and structural solutions to the problem of poverty, for example, giving work to the poor, thereby making charity bear fruit. St Thomas said, “Charity is not just giving, rather removing the need of those who receive charity and liberating them from it when possible.”

The inspirational stories of St Matthew and St Thomas of Villanova have a lot of significance to me, as my mindset, goals and ambition as an over-ambitious, aggressive, high-strung and materialistic corporate careerist had completely been transformed, when I became a certified professional tarot reader and numerologist. I remembered upon graduating from my advance tarot class, I shuffled my cards to assess where I was heading with a skill that I had never originally intended to acquire. I drew the Judgement card from my tarot deck which incidentally, is a card in tarot that speaks about transformation and change.

Judgement

The Judgement card forced me to be honest with myself about my life goals and inspired me to “answer the higher calling” of turning my passion for tarot reading into my life-long commitment to help hold my clients’ hands through challenging times. That had reawaken me to rediscover myself as I journeyed with my tarot cards to find inner peace and presented me with a purpose to help my clients and protégés do the same.

Little did I know that the messages behind that Judgement card was preparing me for the way tarot would completely transform my outlook in life. Running my tarot consultancy this year had been a life-transforming experience in itself. I was always very clear that tarot should never be used as a “fortune telling” tool. It was a tool used to tap into our subconscious minds, to uncover options within the querant’s situation that can help him or her make a sound decision in tackling the situation. I felt so fulfilled when I realized that I was doing something wonderful for my querants. I was not handing them a solution. Instead, I was helping them uncover options. Like St Thomas of Villanova said, “…liberating them from it when possible,” I felt that I was liberating some of my querants from a “stand-still” position driven by their perception that they were trapped by their issues, suspended momentarily in an act of self-sacrifice and surrender. Really, they didn't have to do so.

Transformation Tarot Spread

In recognition of Mabon, I designed a tarot spread recently with the intention to help a client who is in the throes of transformation. Below is an example of the spread designed for the question “What can I do to move on?”

Card 1 Magician: Self in Situation - . Assess where you are now & what is influencing your actions in the current situation (You may choose an appropriate significator representing you in the situation)

Card 2 - Reversed 6 of Pentacles: Identify Cause - What is the root cause of the negativity surrounding the situation/

Card 3 - 2 of Pentacles: Response – How have you responded to the cause of negativity in your current situation?

Card 4 - Reversed Page of Wands: Hopes and Fears - What are your hopes and fears pertaining to the current situation?

Card 5 - Hermit: Response – How have you responded to your hopes and fears pertaining to the current situation?

Card 6 - Reversed 5 of Wands: Change - What can you change about the current situation?

Card 7 - Queen of Cups: Commitment – What can you do to commit to making these changes?
The cards were positioned as shown below:                                


                                 Card 6

Card 2                                                       Card 4
                                 Card 1
                            (Significator)

Card 3                                                       Card 5

                                Card 7


My client has given me the permission to reproduce the high-level summary of the reading I did for her below, without any mention of her name and the name of her partner.

To give you a brief background, my client was going through a turbulent relationship that had seen her suffering years of verbal and mental abuse, infidelity, and volatility.

Significator – The Magician

As her life path number is a 1, I had decided to choose the Magician as her significator. She was indeed a resourceful person, very capable at work and had the ability to meander the volatility of her relationship with maturity and perseverance. When anyone meets this beautiful woman, they wouldn’t have figured out that she was undergoing a terrible time with her partner.

Cause Of The Issue And Her Response – Reversed 6 Of Pentacles And 2 of Pentacles

The root cause of the issue was that her partner was self-employed. Often he would not be able to make enough money to sustain their lifestyle, depending on my client to provide. Her role as the sole breadwinner may have caused him to feel increasingly insecure, and she also felt unappreciated and was beginning to feel that her commitment to the relationship seemed to be one-sided. As money is tight, she had been juggling financial commitments while balancing her priorities between his needs and her career. She was doing everything she could to hold the job down because she needed the money, and in so doing, her late nights at work exacerbated her partner’s insecurities.

Hope and Fears And Her Response – Reversed Page Of Wands And Hermit

The reversed page of wands was a manifestation of her genuine attempts to resolve her issues with her partner through various means from attempting to get a relationship counselor into the picture, to going on short “reconciliation” holidays together, to even threatening to leave him. However, each time, she was confronted by obstacles in the form of his refusal to see the counselor, or his numerous broken promises to her. She wanted to make it work between them, but feared that she had come to the end of the rope with this vicious cycle and was thinking of leaving him. The past few months had been a time of introspection for her as she re-evaluated her relationship goals, and she had been quite withdrawn, quietly seeking some solace on her own. However, this had perpetuated her actions of staying away from home and keeping very late nights at the office, her only place of refuge.

Changes Needed And Her Commitment To Change – Reversed 5 Of Wands And Queen of Cups

In the end, she acknowledged that there were changes necessary between them if they chose to continue with the relationship. The reversed 5 of wands suggested the fundamental differences in opinions about roles and responsibilities between them. One example of these differences is his typical old-fashioned Asian mentality that he had to be provider, and head of the household while she played the subservient and servile Asian spouse, taking a back seat and minding the home. When she discussed her wish to do what she could to save the relationship, the Queen of Cups advised her to maintain emotional control and continue to nurture the relationship with maturity, patience and compassion. The fights between them had escalated to just noise and shouting, and no one’s giving way, no one understands each other’s needs. She needed to govern the relationship with a measure of intuitive listening and calmness. She had to start rebuilding the emotional connectivity between them.

Conclusion
You see, I like celebrations. At my first taste of Mabon this year, I am celebrating it as a thanksgiving for the opportunity to be a catalyst in the positive transformation of my clients’ lives through my tarot cards. And I hope, like me, you will be as inspired by the spirit of Mabon, as you continue to read the blogs of my friends on this amazing Tarot Bloghop topic of Mabon. So do visit the next blog by the lovely Claire-Marie Le Normand at http://beautyhistorymagic.com/2012/09/22/light-to-dark-transformation.aspx    Should you encounter a broken link, the master bloghop list can be found at http://tarotwitchery.blogspot.com/2012/09/tarot-blog-hop-mabon-master-list.html



About The Writer:

The writer of this blog post is a marketeer by trade, and a tarot card reader by accident. She was awarded a Certified Professional Tarot Reader qualification from the Tarot Certification Board of America (TCBA) and was recently certified as a numerologist in Singapore. A member of the American Tarot Association (ATA) and the Tarot Association of the British Isles (TABI), she is also a reader for the Free Tarot Network and is a mentor for the ATA.

She can be contacted at www.facebook.com/SunGoddessTarot or www.sungoddesstarot.com