THE GIANT COSMIC WEDGIE:

Or, Why Pretend Bad Stuff Doesn’t Happen

In the Wonderful World of Paganism?

I was reading Harshaw Cain’s review of Teen Goddess by Catherine Wishart (Llewellyn Books) in NewWitch (Issue #6, pg. 73), and was both amused and disturbed by his remark: “she’s taken optimism to the point where it’s a mental disorder.” Harshaw’s pithy assessment provoked a flood of memories and feelings to rise to the surface of my mind. As a tarotist and astrologer for over 30 years, I have encountered more than my share of tarot readers who feel it is their duty to remind us lesser mortals that we’re in deep doo-doo, ethically speaking, should we so much as mention the darker parts of life during a reading. While astrologers have been around this ethical block for decades, the newly coagulating tarot community is in the throes of a feeding frenzy about the ethics of acceptable content for a reading.

Let’s get real here! Life has deep, dark and yucky parts. People get sick, they die, they have painful break-ups, lose children and pets, fail tests, get fired from their jobs, and have really, really bad hair days. There is no spell or magickal incantation that is going to exempt any of us out of these sharp corners of kismet that I like to call “Cosmic Wedgies.” These kinds of events and situations are a very real and incredibly important aspect of life. Trying to edit death and disaster out of readings is like pretending the Augean Stables never had muck on the floor.

The tale of Hercules cleaning the Augean Stables as one of his famous Labors is roughly three thousand years old. It was the ancient storyteller’s way of saying “shit happens, and it’s real and smelly and has to be cleaned up by some poor chump.” It happened then, and it happens now, thousands of years notwithstanding. There is no reason to suspect anyone is going to have a perfectly muck-free life. That muck on the floor IS the lesson plan, the very substance that compels us to become more compassionate, more human, and more evolved. The muck, in its unadulterated form, makes us aware of our moral and emotional fibers, and is quite possibly the most direct path to discovering the contents of one’s psyche. As above, so below: if you’ve got to clean the stables that are your external life, you probably need to clear some of the muck out of your inner self as well.

One of the piles of muck on my floor was a malignant melanoma. I always knew that having surgery for cancer was not fun. But I did not fully appreciate how very bad having surgery was until my skin cancer was removed. After the experience, it came to me that having surgery for cancer was a great big lesson in having compassion for others with that experience. It did not magically transform it into a good personal experience, but learning this specific kind of compassion was a good thing. You just cannot fully relate until it happens to you, and pretending you can is the worst sort of obnoxious pomposity.

Witches and various assorted pagans cannot exclude death and disaster from their world view, either. These burgeoning religions are in their infancy, so simply don’t have an abundant liturgical body to draw from when confronting the harsher sides of life. For those who would like a pagan view of death and dying, The Pagan Book of Living and Dying: Practical Rituals, Prayers and Blessings, by StarHawk and M. Macha NightMare, treats this subject from an alternative standpoint. Susan York, a Unitarian Universalist minister, offers a wide-spectrum view of death rituals in Remembering Well: Rituals for Celebrating Life and Mourning Death. But most authors of seasonal ceremonial liturgies gloss over the subject of death, or omit it entirely. (Newsflash: this is an opportunity to ardent Scorpio or Pluto types to write their own books on death and dying from a pagan perspective to extend the literature in this subject.)

Perhaps the sheer lack of literature and conversation about Cosmic Wedgies from a pagan standpoint is the reason that there are so many fluff-meisters writing books that white-wash the more difficult aspects of life, as well as the deities that embody these experiences. This is a significant problem! Back during the cataclysmic eclipse cycle in the summer of 1999, three members of my coven (including me) lost pets within days of each other. Two of these pets were black cats. The whole coven went on a hunt to find an appropriate ceremony for a group grieving ritual, and it took a suspiciously long time to find one that we could re-write to fit the tragic multiple pet death situation. Those of us who had lost pets were enormously comforted by the ceremony, as it gave us a forum for weeping our hearts out for our lost little loved ones. I’ve also had a tough time finding rituals to comfort people who are ending relationships and marriages. There’s a real gap here begging for exploration, and it’s reasonable to suspect that once pagan authors start tackling this area that the prevalence of the insanely cheerful will diminish.

Likewise, readers of various oracles and astrological forecasters have to find a way to talk about Cosmic Wedgies in a sensitive, sensible, and realistic manner. I’ve seen death or illness in a horoscope or a tarot spread time and again. It simply isn’t avoidable after a reader has been in the business for any length of time. How can a reader pretend that a client’s world is perfect and fluffy when their mother is dying of cancer? If a reader told me my world was perfect and fluffy while my parent was dying, I’d want my money back, and would have to fight down the urge to poke them with a pin to see if it deflated any of their fluffy puffiness.

Here’s a clue to handling this situation: most people know that either they have a problem, or someone near them has a problem when they sit down for a reading. You won’t be telling them anything new or surprising or shocking. The best approach is to mention that it’s clear from the cards, stars, or whatever, that the person is obviously confronting a difficult situation in whatever sphere of life is indicated. Let the client tell you a bit about it, if they are willing to discuss it.

If it is apparent that the death or disaster is in the future, and that the client may not be aware of an impending Cosmic Wedgie, then you have to be a good deal more careful and diplomatic. Gently present the information as a warning for the client. In a tarot reading for a young woman, the cards in the immediate future were terrifying, but the subsequent cards indicated that the situation would resolve quickly. So my prediction for this client was something along the lines of: “There is going to be a very difficult and scary situation in your immediate future, a situation that will seem very threatening, and you’re going to be upset. But don’t lose hope, because the cards indicate that the situation will be cleared up in three days.” A few weeks later, the young woman came back to tell me that a few days after the reading her father was kidnapped. But she had remembered my advice, kept her cool, and her father was returned in three days. The honest truth, carefully given, assisted this client in keeping her head on her shoulders throughout an intensely horrifying situation.

There are plenty of readers out there who might feel that I should have denied her that honest assessment of the cards in that reading. But to what end? Being honest and firm, but gentle, was the very best thing I could have done. Truth to tell, being honest is much harder than suppressing dark messages! In my personal ethical structure, I owe clients an honest assessment, with the proviso that the reading reflects my opinion of how their cards or chart should be interpreted. There are enough bad cards and malefic stars out there to keep my diplomatic skills well honed!

On the other hand, I’ve seen readers who go overboard in the opposite direction, predicting death and disaster at every opportunity, appropriate or not, and certainly not with any diplomatic savvy. This extreme is just as bad as the insanely cheerful variety and in some ways worse, because they make the rest of us readers look like total idiots by association. (At least the fluffies can be credited with trying to make the world a better place, even though their world view smacks of cringing cowardice.) Most of the readers in this category are taking wild guesses and shouldn’t be in the business in the first place. I can only hope that, over time, consumer education about getting readings permeates society enough so the lack of clientele willing to make themselves targets for these practitioners puts them out of business. Spotting these idiots is extremely easy; they’re usually the ones who brag that they’ve never cracked open a book, and who smugly announce they just have a “gift.” From my perspective, these wild guessers are at the top of my shit list because I’ve had to clean up their messes, and have spent countless hours counseling people who have been seriously wounded by their readings, some to the point of refusing to ever get another reading. Where are the public stocks when you need them?

The keys to acknowledging the dark sides of life are gentleness, compassion, and sympathy, and a willingness to expand understanding to include life’s Cosmic Wedgies. We cannot always have a first-hand experience of what another person might be going through, but we can understand that it isn’t fun for them. At the very least, we can offer them a prayer or a candle for peace or even a ritual for consolation (if we can find one). And if we are lucky, we might be able to help them find a way to learn from the experience, prepare for it, or accept and cope with it more successfully.

Once again, drawing from my embarrassingly copious past experiences, during a reading it was apparent that the client’s father was going to have a major surgery in the near future. When she told me the date of his coming surgery, I knew immediately that the planetary picture for that day was absolutely wretched. First I suggested that she request that her father change the date; and then added that if he refused to change the date, the prospects for the outcome of the surgery were grim, and most likely he wouldn’t survive it. We talked about her relationship with her father for a bit before the reading ended. A few months later, she came back to let me know that he refused to have the date changed, and died during the surgery. She was emphatic that the reading I had given her had helped her accept his death with much less emotional hardship. To her, that reading was a gift.

Cosmic Wedgies are a part of life – bad things happen, and we have to acknowledge them. Part of our experience of this life is the potential for choosing our attitudes toward these experiences, as well as choosing methods for coping with them. It is easy to relate to deities of light, love and abundance, but once in a while it is necessary to relate to the darker deities: Kali, Persephone and Hecate, Mars/Ares, Loki, Hella, Macha, Osiris, Hades/Pluto, Cronos/Saturn, et. al. These deities, divinely conceived in ancient civilizations, existed for a reason. People then had to face darkness and death, just as we do now. And in my opinion, it’s healthier for a pagan to keep their eye on these deities rather than to turn their back to them and pretend they don’t exist, or to somehow pretend that cheesy, regurgitated New Age goody-goody-ism will somehow pull their fangs or drain their venom. An entity positioned at one’s back has a perfect opportunity to kick the butt in front of them, and for a god or goddess with powers in the realm of life’s darkest corners, that target might be pretty hard to resist.