Going to Port Lligat

With care I shuffled, cut to the left, accepted both the top and the bottom cards. The top was a repeat. http://deedee-salvadordali.blogspot.com/2010/03/nueve-de-copas.html -- the discomforting display of fortune. Indeed. Separately, plans began today to visit Salvador Dali's home.

The bottom card was Diez de Espadas, the Ten of Swords, in Tarot Universal Dali vernacular it is Vincenzo Camuccii's "Death of Julius Caesar."

The assassination a result, paraphrasing Wikipedia, of a conspiracy among 40 Roman senators. Caesar had recently been declared dictator perpetuo by the Senate, which left some senators fearing Caesar's ambition would overthrow the Senate in favor of a tyranny. The assassination led to a civil war that replaced the Republic with the Roman Empire.

Seeking a gentler path ... easing up on that violent image, the number ten always marks some ending -- in all the suits. And thus always foretells of a beginning.

Seeking a gentler path ... in the traditional decks ten swords pierce a man's back. Overkill, says Rachel Pollack, a meaning echoed by many. "The very extremity gives us a clue to release from the turmoil," she writes in "Complete Illustrated Guide to Tarot."

But she writes of the obvious in "Salvador Dali Tarot" -- she writes of "betrayal ... treason against friendship as well as social order."

Seeking a gentler path there Rachel Pollack also writes of the birds flying above the scene. She says they "relieve the violence."

Comment: Plans continue to visit Salvador Dali's home.

Siete de Oros y Cuatro de Espadas

The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David (1793) -- revived by Baudelaire, who wrote in 1846, "This painting is as cruel as nature but it has the fragrance of ideals."

We will ultimately get to that assassination. For now, note: we have entered the Sign of Salvador Dali and Dee Dee Dali: the Zodiac Sign of Taurus the Bull began April 19.


According to the quirky, 1915, The Zodiac and its Mysteries A Study of Planetary Influences Upon the Physical, Mental and Moral Nature of Mankind, by Prof. A.F. Seward, ancient Jews considered Taurus the leader of the Zodiacal signs, Greek mythology credits Taurus with carrying Europa to her nation, ancient Chinese called Taurus the 'Golden Ox'.

Although a bull, Taurus is a feminine sign in the House of Venus.


Preparing as the Earth moved into this ancient and androgynous Sign of Taurus, for the regular posting of the Dee Dee & Salvador Dali exploration, a Muse of Mine selected Siete de Oros:


Again. The second time barely more than a full moon ago she also randomly selected the Seven of Coins from Tarot Universal Dali. (http://deedee-salvadordali.blogspot.com/2010/03/siete-de-oros.html).

This is what she wants from Dee Dee Dali: Traditional readings of the Seven of Pentacles offer three paths: Satisfaction; Disappointment; and Overcommitment. Look at the Seven Coins as Money.

You are not satisfied. You want Dee Dee and Salvador Dali to tell which one is the path to Wealth.

Unnecessary. You know which path is yours. That is the point. You know. You know because while paths are widely divergent, all readings of Pentacles (no matter by which name this suit is called: Coins, Oros or Diamonds) this is the suit of Money and all that implies.

Where is wealth?
The question returns over and over to this Dee Dee & Salvador Dali blog.

Here is something else, if you will not select which path: You can choose for yourself.

Where is wealth?

Did you know, when you Selected another card, that you can choose which path? Did you know when you rustled all 78 cards of Tarot Universal Dali back and forth through your hands, that you could choose? Did you know that when you selected the very seriously frightening

-- Cuatro de Espadas --

-- Four of Swords --

and then you spoke its connection to the Marquis de Sade.
Indeed.

Tarot Universal Dali delivers The Death of Marat -- Marat in a swoon instead of repose offered by the traditional decks. But it is more convoluted than that. Unlike David, who revered Marat as a martyr of the French Revolution, Magician Dali wends a snake from the revolutionary's hand, the hand that seemingly penned the page David filled in 1793 with words of largess and forgiveness.

The Marquis de Sade joined up with Marat in 1963 in The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, a German play by Peter Weiss. Typically shortened to Marat/Sade, it is a play within a play. Just as occurred within Sade's own his life, he is directing his fellow inmates in a play with philosophical asides to Marat.

Oh my, my, my, my, my.

The convolutions. The play within a play. The random repeat of the Seven of Pentacles. This Cuartro de Espadas itself "parodies" the traditional Smith/Rider's deck, says Rachel Pollack in Salvador Dali's Tarot.

"Fours," Pollack explains the traditional card in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, "relate to stabilization; for the unhappy Swords this translates as rest or even just retreat. The image shows not death but withdrawal."

But of the parody,she writes in 1985, "The violence of life overwhelms the courage of the man struggling for social change ... terror destroying idealism."

NO. I reject this. I turn from the passive state of Swords: Sorrow and Unhappiness. Turn, if we must -- this Muse of Mine selected this card -- to the active state of Swords, the Suit of Struggle and Animosity. Consider these latter states the products of greed and envy. Of wealth. Of course. It is always Oros.

Poor Baudelaire, he hadn't near enough Oros, but I prefer his take.
And as with Marat, let alone David and Dali, he, too, lives on.
"This painting is as cruel as nature but it has the fragrance of ideals."
Dear, dear Baudelaire, I do prefer your take.
To struggle, even if not stabilize, in the fragrance of ideals.

DIABLO! DIABLO! DIABLO! La Emperatriz

Winter IS over:




Step away from those Knaves of Winter.
In the spirit of El Diablo say,
To Hell with this Random Life,
To Hell with Regrets -- only Winter in another form.
Choose The Empress.
Who else would ever be The Empress in My Life?

Who else ever could?
The Empress is the Sacred Number Three in Tarot.

The trinity; the male and female into the whole;
man, woman, child; the completed circle of life. The Empress (III) follows the High Priestess (II) but precedes both the Emperor (IV) and High Priest (V). The Empress is important.

For Tarot Universal Dali
La Emperatriz is Gaia
Who else would ever be The Magician's Empress?Who else could?

No more Comment.
Choice.
La Emperatriz climbs from the fecundity of Mother Earth, her power symbolized in her Scepter. And religion itself is small compared; look in her left hand.
It looks nearly like the fuse on a cartoon bomb.
Rachel Pollack sees Delacroix's Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi in the card.

Salvador Dali created Tarot Universal Dali for Gaia who was far more than his Muse, some say she was the owner of his soul. Tarot Universal Dali does not show Gaia expiring. Gaia emerges from the primeval muck of our deepest soul.

CHOOSE: Be your own Empress, be for Yourself the Sacred three which is the Whole, incorporate your whole; your self with your soul. This is not Random Life anymore. Look at Gaia and see your power. Winter is Over. You are climbing from fecundity into spring. Bloom. Burst forth.

Ocho de Copas

The Eight of Cups. That slippery element, water, is the element of the Cups. The Eight of Cups universally seen as the slipperiness of leave-taking, a moving away, a card representing the leaving of much behind.

Universal Tarot Dali takes of Gustave Courbet -- a sensualist whose erotic paintings were not publicly shown for more than a century after his death in 1877.


In Tarot Universal Dali The Magician surrounds his centerpiece with insects and darkness. Courbet has him lead a pig. Of lesser wealth than others in the painting, but still the farmer had some wealth in the pig.

It is wealth, success, stability that the traditional Eight of Cups suggests is left behind when this card appears.



What is to be made of this?

And where has Tarot Universal Dali placed this farmer of Courbet's? The distance landscape -- is the farmer thinking it or is it real? -- looks like a Dali landscape.

Comment: Nothing is real.

El Diablo

The Devil cut itself from the full Tarot Universal Dali deck this Good Friday morning. Already such a difficult dual messaged card from The Magician Dali. This is not the Devil. Who is this?

In any other deck this Hermaphrodite of a Devil would represent The Fool, the card that launches the Major Arcana. Traditionally
The Fool marks a beginning, perhaps naive but willing to skip into the great unknown, The Future. The Fool is assembling.

The Devil is a dissembling force as traditionally shown in the Rider Deck. Tarot Universal Dali instead layers meanings over meanings to provide an exit from a dissembling existence.

That would be just like The Magician Salvador Dali to find an exit from Hell. Hell it would be if even all sensual pleasures stood but lost were the spiritual, mystical and uplifting. It would be as if trapped in a cave without light, without hope even faith that there is greater Life than the physical world. Does The Magician today to extol us to roll the rock from our path?

Gala's Grail A Dali Codex by Kora Silver http://www.myspace.com/korasilver explores a search for the deeper meanings of Dali's life and work. Her investigations continuously guide this DeeDee & Salvador search for meaning. She highlights The Magician's quote, "The day that people begin to study my works seriously, they will see that my painting is like an iceberg of which only a tenth of its volume is visible."

The Devil as a symbol, suggests Rachel Pollack in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom projects the "view that nothing exist beyond the world of the senses." But Tarot Universal Dali, Pollack notes, "can lead to a different view. To reach enlightenment we must first pass through darkness."

For the depiction upon Tarot Universal Dali's El Diablo, Silver credits ancient Greek sculptor Polycletus who established the proportions deemed the physical ideal of perfection. This hermaphrodite? Does she confuse the polycletus butterfly with the monarch at the end of the Devil's staff? Surely not. Silver's work is far beyond such oversight. It is rather The Devil at work, misleading us, over and over again.

Search further:

The Devil is card XV of the Major Arcana -- 15, which is reduced to 1+5, sending a reader to the 6th card, VI of the Major Arcana, The Lovers. For readers of Tarot Universal Dali from El Diablo to Los Enamorados. Here is the Polycletus butterfly, cloaking Neptune from Jan Gossaert's "Neptune and Amphitrite."

Then Tarot Universal Dali rips apart Gossaert's lovers, yanking off their arms turning them from blended oil on a wooden panel into an image of an ancient Greek statue such as Polycletus left behind.






Comment: Let loose, let loose cries El Diablo. do not live posed even if in in perfect perfection of the physical. Do not accept temptation -- those pushing hands -- but tempt life yourself: Leap, test both taboos and doctrines to find your truth beyond the merely physical world. Let loose. Live fully. Reignite.

Winter Ends

This concludes the First Season of Dee Dee & Salvador Dali's exploration of Tarot Universal Dali based upon a card selected each week -- so far randomly. Next posting will open the Sign of Aries, the start of the Zodiac year.

This initial Winter Season opened in the waning Cusp of Capricorn with the callow Knight of Pentacles pursuing wealth. In the Sign of Aquarius -- first the Eight of Wands then the Two of Cups -- he struggles with the definitions of Victory and against Restraints.

Still in the Sign of Aquarius appears La Luna -- The Moon -- the power of the subconscious. It feels good slipping out of definitions an restraints into what lurks beneath.

As the Cusp of Pisces approaches Diane the Huntress on the Seven of Swords appears. Winter deepens, but still it seems a genuine victory to see such confidence arrive.


Short lived.


Opening Day of the Sign of Pisces. La Torre. Total destruction. The Go-Back-to-Start of the traditional Tarot symbolism. This is one of The Tower's messages: You Can't Have It All. This is the card that tells of false Idols. Of false Gods. This is the card where the you that is you is lost. Lost and gone forever. This is the card that makes us clutch at life in the face of absolute destruction. This is the card that demands Rebirth. This is the Phoenix.

Nicely followed with the gentle Sota de Bastos -- Batons yes, Wands more traditionally, but regardless they are wood and thus combustible -- Wands resentative Fire. Ignition. Yet the ignition brings next week the frightening Six of Swords with its promise -- soon to be broken -- of fair skies ahead.


Indeed. Days later Tarot Universal Dali's Seven of Coins arrives with Caravaggio's Mary Magdalen. The painting is of The Virgin who has died -- in contradiction to a recently changed church policy -- on Earth.


By now unusual coincidences are showing up in unusual places as this endeavor evolves. On the day Siete de Oro posts, the long-lost remains of Caravaggio are returned upon the 400th anniversary of his disappearance.

Only one card is left to draw in this First Winter of this Endeavor of Dee Dee & Salvador Dali. Pisces swims upstream as the selected card is turned: The World. The final card of the Major Arcana.

Auspicious. Even propitious in a traditional Tarot deck or in a classic read.

But all is always askew in Tarot Universal Dali. It is an important lesson The Magician offers. In this time when so very much is askew.

Comment: Might we come out of this winter and make askew The World's sad tradition? Might we use The Magician's optical opportunities to see the tears of blood locked out and retreating? Might we be able to focus on the tiny remains of innocence in Tarot Universal Dali's El Mundo? They are, after all, in the forefront.

Nueve de Copas

It is as though parents sit in judgment in this Tarot Universal Dali Nine of Cups. Indeed, there seems always to be a tinge a guilt in this card of compromise. It is the mixed message of accumulation as successful and indulgence as despicable.


Traditional decks, such as the Rider deck, show a man bursting with earthly bounty. Appearing in a read, representing yourself, of course this card can be embarrassing, disclosing an unfettered celebration of the earthly self and an indifference to the deeper life, the spiritual path, others' want.



Dali the Magician, the Transformational, chose "Circe (or Melissa)" painted ca 1520 by Dosso Dossi as the satisfied center of the Nine of Cups. She appears a transformation between bad and good.

JudithYarnall insisted in Transformations of Circe: The History of an Enchantress, that this painting of Dossi's is not Circe the enchantress, it is perhaps, at best, Melissa. But is possibly the much worse Alcina, the beautiful sorceress who seduces knights then tires of them and turns them to stones or into animals or plants. It is Melissa who changes them back. Magic worthy of a Magician is this Sorceress of Transformation.

What can be made of that? Today, in the waxing fullnes of Aires, the Prince of the Celestial Signs, there appears the fullness of the Nine of Cups, Nuevo de Copas. And within this Tarot Universal Dali there is even a tenth cup -- a chalice above the Sorceress and deeply embedded in the minds of the elders that surround the Sorceress.

Comment: Today's arrival of the Nine of Cups -- a cup of fullness and reward and pleasure -- both closes the Gregorian calendar's first quarter and opens what ancients believed the first of the Celestial year with Aires.

The struggle of parental/societal bonds and bondage continues past the close of the winter quarter and through this Nine of Cups into Spring -- this struggle with societal restraints presented itself as early as the movement from Aquarius into Pisces with Dos de Copas http://deedee-salvadordali.blogspot.com/2010/01/dos-de-copas.html. Now, still today the ectoplasmic images entomb the Sorceress.

Spring is the time to outgrow this.