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Intuition, Tarot, and Ritual Tradition with Deborah Lipp · Coffee & Divination

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  when you make it all psychological you are devaluing the psychic this isn't really reading the future or reading the unknown it's just therapeutic it's it's devaluing the psychic and I think that makes it feel safe for people people don't like to put their money where their mouth is and it's another way of nurturing the psychic child is is seeing a pattern of success if you don't make predictions you'll never be wrong so make the prediction take the risk that gives you a pattern of success god the fool is right in the deck have you Learned nothing you know welcome to coffee and divination a podcast about the arts of obtaining hidden knowledge in changing times join me Joanna Ferrar to chat with experts from around the world on tarot runes geomancy and the many ways divination can help us navigate and plan our paths ahead welcome back today I am so excited to have Deborah Lip a very prolific author and wonderful teacher within the pagan community on the show before we get into this conversation a bit of housekeeping I have several other classes appearances and quite a number of events coming up in the next few months so you can check out coffee and divination.com or find me on Instagram for all of those details so for today's wonderful episode I'm happy to welcome Deborah Lip who I'm sure many of my listeners are familiar with as she is a witch high priestess tarot reader and teacher who's been practicing for more than 40 years she became a Gardnerian witch and high priestess in the 80s and over the decades she has written extensively about ritual and magical practice as well as divination her many books include The Elements of Ritual The Way of Four Tarot Interactions a favorite of mine bending the binary and her latest book roadmap by Moonlight a guide to Wicca for life there is a lot of those topics from her books that we cover in this conversation including the idea of what it means to be psychic how we interact with tarot as an art form tradition versus innovation and how we learn to recognize the differences between intuitive hits and our own projections as well as of course what has changed within the magical community to make us all more inclusive and better understanding of the true natures of polarity underlying alchemy and many other of the ancient arts I really enjoyed Deborah's way of speaking about these topics so grab your coffee and I hope you enjoy so it is my pleasure and my honor to have Debra Lip on the show today and she is someone whose works I've admired for many years and it is gonna be a great conversation to have and to share with everyone so thank you so much for being on today well thank you very much for having me we have a traditional first question here on the show which is about your background with divination so the question is what was your first interaction with or experience with divination so that doesn't necessarily mean you practicing it it could be like a family member that had you know an interest in tarot or somebody who was really into astrology or you started playing with cards when you were in school or else you had none of that and started much much later when you ask the question I realized that like when I was 10 or 12 or 13 or something my mother gave me a little one of those witches tarot decks that is playing cards with a witch on the cover and you you know what I'm talking about right yeah yeah um and I tried to learn it and I didn't have any relationship to it but I also grew up in a card playing family there are playing cards all the time in the lip household we play gin rummy we play hearts we play solitaire we play double solitaire there is an infinite amount of card playing in my family and so when I encountered tarot cards for real skipping that childhood deck that didn't work for me um it felt right it felt right in my hands I felt oh this is this is me you know because the combination of doing something witchy and having cards that I could hold and deal and shuffle and you know I shuffle some people don't um I have one student who grew up in Nevada so um shuffling is a big deal right mm hmm yes I I had gone to my very first uh wicked circle so I had been seeking witchcraft for years at that point and failing to find it and I found a group and I was I think 20 and I was in a very horrific marriage that I had just ended and so I I go to my first circle and I was just like it did not take there was not a breaking in period I was in you know and so after the circle the High Priestess pulls out a tarot deck and is doing readings and she does a reading for me and you know I'm looking at my marriage in this reading and and I'm like well what about him my my uh soon to be ex husband and she pulls one card from the reading and lays another reading over it which was a very cool technique which I continue to use and um then she picked up the deck and handed it to me and said now you read me and it was a tooth deck and I was like so I don't know what I'm doing and I'm scared but it was a tooth deck which means it all has little names on it which is very helpful um for a young beginner and and that was it I was hooked I was hooked forever I got myself a couple of I got myself a a a writer Wayne Smith and a a Eden Gray and I made flash cards and I memorized and I was off to the races you know but that was that that now you read me I'll I can still see it you know I can still see that moment that is quite a being thrown in moment certainly um and that was before so you were saying that then you did the memorization afterwards that was clearly before you had any memorized or you know preconceived notions of any of those cards yeah I did the memorization afterwards the the fact that it was a a traditional toast deck you know of a Frieda Harris toast deck with with the the names on the cards is actually a great guide for a beginner and that that is a nice at a nice entry point even though the tooth deck can be very complex shall we say for some people who are beginning but yeah I have had actually a few people who are now professional readers and authors that started with the tooth deck um as their sort of dive in and it is such a such an incredibly dense and powerful deck so you as you said you had no breaking in period you were in the moment that you found uh you know traditional Wicca so for listeners who may be encountering your work for the first time you have written extensively about the craft what would you say outside of you know you you were searching for it when you first dove in what were the the elements of Wicca and witchcraft that you think pulled you in first what was what was that sort of like spark so the two things that I had experienced prior to coming in was that my body had magic in it like I knew that I had had some experiences and you know I grew up in the seventies there were drugs involved you know but like my girlfriend and I would get stoned and we would manipulate energy with our hands and it was so powerful and I think um it it could freak you out but it also just made me so motivated like oh it made me hungry like what do I do with this now that I know I have it and the other thing was um you know having a sort of resonant experience with nature and deity when I was a teenager we lived out in the woods in the book Berkshires and those mountains are very alive and very female and I had always had a spiritual life like my mother says from the time I was three that there was that like larger world that I was aware of I was driven away from from Judaism by feminism you know um and I'm very involved in Judaism now but but when I was young the limited role that I was taught belong to women was a real problem for me you know I always say if they had had female rabbis when I was growing up my whole life could have been different you know in the 70s I had the uh very first issue of miss magazine I was learning about feminism as a child and it was important to me and there wasn't a place for me that I understood in patriarchal religion so I had that seeking energy happening from my early teens and um then I was taking a walk in the woods and I just felt it and from the day that I felt it I started worshipping the goddess you know by myself thinking I was the only one in the world who was doing this as I started to discover that there were other people doing this I started seeking it and as a teenager that wasn't very effective um and then I got a boyfriend who was terrified of witchcraft and demanded that I stop and instead of dumping him I married him when I realized I was ready to leave him um I bought my first book which was Drawing Down the moon by Margot Adler and being a native of northern New Jersey I used to listen to Margot on the radio because she had a local show on WBAI in New York um so I felt very comfortable buying that book because I was very weirded out by a lot of the spooky occult stuff but that was my entry the the uh first two editions of Drawing Down the moon had addresses in the back you could write to and that was my beginning yeah that is that is a a really great book and I was a central New Jersey young witch so yes the New Jersey connections are strong and it is it is interesting to see how various books and people that we encounter end up kind of allowing us to find our own way over time and I of course can still remember the the first books that I that I found and that were sort of my touchstones as I was getting started and you have just recently put out another book you have many books that we will discuss will I think I'm up to 13 you're up to 13 okay I did not count but yes I I think that's the current count well that's a great number so um so Roadmap Roadmap by Moonlight is a book that is built around if I were to describe it building a sustainable practice and it's meant to be very sort of accessible so can you can you talk to us a little bit about you know what went into or why did you feel inspired to write this particular book as your 13th or close to that whatever number it is yeah look it's sitting right here so when I wrote my first book
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  every book out there was Wicca 1: 01 I mean like other than the title and the cover illustration they were all the same hi here's what Wicca is here's what it isn't we're not Satanists three fold law harm none eight holidays full moon we're done end of book acknowledgements you know like they were all the same and that drove me crazy um so I wrote elements of ritual to get into
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  what's Wicca 2: 02 like like Dive Deep but that was over 20 years ago and what has changed is no one is writing a useful introductory book and it's like the the elevator pitches don't you want a book on Wicca that doesn't misgender you everybody is who is buying beginner books and beginner books have an important place and I don't I don't want to put down beginners everybody begins but every every beginner book that is a that is sells well was written in the 90s people are still buying Buckland's Big Blue and Wicca for the a guide for the Solitary Practitioner and there I Scott Cunningham was a very close friend there is nothing wrong with that book except it is extraordinarily dated and Scott has passed away and cannot update it so there it's time for something that is modern and current and real talk and real talk means talking to people with what their concerns are today there is a huge concern today about what is the difference between witchcraft and Wicca that concern did not exist 20 years ago they were considered synonymous in the majority of cases and nobody cared and that's just not true anymore I also feel that I have been Wiccan for over 40 years and I do have something to say about how making this is a sustainable practice and the truth is you can do anything for five years you can do anything for five years you can have a hobby that you like for five years I spent probably five years making beaded jewelry I don't really do it anymore you can do anything for a short period of time and then wander away how do you make this last so I have a lot of spots in the book where I like well here how I started how it's going you know um this is what I used to do this is what I do now this is how it's changed in 40 years for me in my personal practice so I also people don't buy as many books as they used to so I wanted to make a big fat look at the size of that thing I wanted to make a big fat book um so that people could buy fewer books that they had one that they could go to as the resource I'm never gonna say I'm the only it's the only book cause I love books and I don't think there's ever an only book I I wanted it to be resourceful for people on tight budgets that so there there are charts about herbs and gems and numbers as well as ritual scripts as well as philosophy and theology so that you don't have to have six books to even get started cause people don't have that budget anymore yeah that that is is very true that the accessibility is also in in terms of making sure that people can find what it is that they reliably need to actually do the thing and not just sit there going well now I have some ideas but I don't really have a script so I'll have to go look for that or look for a book on that so there's guidance there's not just scripts there's also guidance on how to change scripts like I will put two scripts side by side and I will say look how I changed this piece and this is what you could do and I also really am conscious of expense so here's herbs here's cheap herbs that you can easily get you know here's magical tools here's which ones you should get first and the ones you can do without if you can't afford I I try to be really respectful of the fact that people live in the real world I I have some questions that tie into divination from that but I will I will wait a sec before we go there cause I think the other the other piece that you're you're touching on is changes and you have been a Gardnerian high priestess you know for many years now and therefore that is that is a form of the occult that is obviously extremely traditional and has the the beauty of the origins of so many of our traditions and so I was curious how you view that interplay you've touched on you know suggesting changes for people and adaptations so can you talk to us a little bit about how you think about when something needs to change and when something should remain because it is traditional that's a great question I love that question there's I I I have for many years used the analogy of music right you can just improvise you can play classical music note for note the same as it was written and still have that classical music express the musician and you know which musician is doing it and you can also have jazz in which you build in in which you play the melody and you play the harmony and you build in sections for improv I love jazz wicker you know I love I I think there's always room for for improv but I think we do our best when we know what we're improvising on you know your scales you know your melody you know the song before you improvise I try also to approach my tradition with humility like before I decide whether or not to throw something away I do it and I do it more than once and I explore what it's like to do it before I throw it away and I explore what it means to me to do it and not do it and there are things that I will throw away I also will work on reinterpret and reframing things because a tradition is it's a warm blanket it's a safe space it's grounding you know and and some of that is just personality I'm a Taurus you know I like things to be solid and real and traditional and that's just I like that it's comfort food and then and I get power from it and I don't need other people to do that you know I don't think I'm better than other people for having that but it means something to me so I work within that I don't feel confined by it I think there was times when I was younger when I did feel confined by it and I really did explore walking away from the tradition but it ended up being the right place for me I'm not sure if you're aware but I'm a professional classical violinist and I have I did not know that oh yes well that's amazing that's what I do outside of this and I also have a lot of friends who are professional jazz musicians and folk musicians of many different types and we have had very similar discussions about exactly that so I I could not agree more so one of the things that I I'm especially appreciate that you that you bring up is the humility of that because there is a certain amount of time there's also a patience factor of having the humility to to wait and try a thing even if it's a little uncomfortable or you don't completely understand it but through the act of sincerely trying it I mean you already brought up like you can do anything for five years well you can try some of these things that have worked for other people and you know have that that humility and that Grace to learn from it I had a teacher who emphasized periodically imitating you would try as best as you could to imitate you know a great violinist like Heifetz or something and but you'd only do it for a short period and then through that imitation you would learn a lot of things technically Musically and you learn about yourself too because then of course you break out of it you're never gonna be an imitation anyway but it is that humility to say what can I learn through either you know following very strictly something or imitating somebody else and you you actually learn from that it's not about you know denigrating yourself or putting yourself and your ingenuity away completely it's just learning for a period and that's really beautiful so so thank you for for that when it comes to the way that you've seen traditions change you as a obviously with the the work that you've done as a gardener and high priestess you've been very much a part of conversations on how these these traditions are melting and growing and you wrote a beautiful book on the elements of what it you know bending binary and at times when people will look at Wicca or more traditional forms of craft and even I think this plays into some elements of tarot symbolism and astrology too there is this um emphasis on the binary and that can be especially in the modern day very difficult and also confusing for people if we misinterpret that I think to believe that we are excluding people from conversations and it has been used to exclude people at times so can you maybe just touch on like why you wrote bending the binary which I'm so glad you did I'm sure many of my listeners are and what that is really about it's interesting when I wrote bending the binary I talked a lot about how polarity is just one of many energies in the universe and I was taught that it was like the energy and kind of I did so much work with polarity energy that by the time bending the binary was published I'm sort of back to it's the energy it's the source energy of the universe it's the Big Bang right it's where we all start from but what I wanted to do it took me 10 years to write this book by putting it down and bringing it back and putting it down and bringing it back and not really understanding what what it was I needed to say and I wrote a little book called uh The Beginner's Guide to the occult and I wrote it on commission um and I was asked to include a chapter on alchemy which was something I didn't know anything about the chapter was basically done by the time I understood alchemy and then went back and rewrote it but I mean I I think it's just really valuable to do a beginner's like you know complete dummy's guide to to alchemy cause it took a lot I mean alchemy is purposely meant to be inaccessible there's a term for that in alchemy but our understanding of polarity begins in alchemy so as I as that I finally broke through in that chapter um I suddenly understood what polarity was and all of a sudden I went and immediately as soon as I finished the Beginner's Guide of the book the uh to the occult started writing bending the binary I will tell you a story about about alchemy real quickly which I think is very interesting to your um audience because I pull in Rachel Pollock so I'm looking at the um solvomet coagula in alchemy and and it's dissolve and bring together it's just it's break apart and bring back together so what you're supposed to do in alchemy for beginners who know nothing about it is you take your elements and you break them into your compon into their component parts you take something it could be a metal it could be an herb it could be your soul you take something apart and you figure out what all the pieces are and once you have it all separated and that's what you're doing in a laboratory right you're separating all these pieces and once you have them all separated you figure out which ones are essential and which ones are garbage and you throw the garbage away and you bring it back together so I'm reading that and I'm like that's transition that's gender transition is what that is I have very close people in my life including my daughter who are trans and that's the process they describe so I emailed Rachel Pollack who is the person who in addition to being a great tarot author and a genius and and my hero um she also introduced the first ever trans comic book character and that character was named Coagula and so I wrote to her and I said as I'm learning about alchemy it seems to me that Solva Coagula is transition is that why you named a trans character Coagula and she wrote back and from memory this is very close to an exact quote she said it was a long time ago I don't remember why I chose that name but what you said is perfect so let's just say yes so I I'm still fangirling it was like what three years ago four years ago I'm still losing it polarity is solve a coagula you the component pieces are polar to each other and then come back together so it's a fundamentally queer process and people's understanding of polarity is so stupid I mean forgive me but it is so dumb like it's there's boys and there's girls and they're polar that's it that's what you got it's so deep and so complex and so powerful and what a lot of people in Wicca have done for decades is sort of say OK we have a gender balanced circle and therefore there is polarity OK now we're done honestly that works if you are have a consciousness that gender is the polarity that you're working and you keep that energy balanced and you do a few minor things in ritual to keep that energy balanced that generates a sort of polar thrum in the ritual like subconscious to everything else you're doing and does empower the ritual I I think I tell the story in bending the binary um of having a non binary gender fluid member of my coven halfway through ritual decided to switch genders was was doing he's male assigned at birth he uses all pronouns so he's okay with me using he halfway through rituals switched to functioning as a priestess instead of a priest and one of the things we do to be gender inclusive in my coven is we talk about priests and priestesses not men and women halfway through he switched from priest to priestess and we all went wow the energy in here changed that was all he did there wasn't a a event that happened and we all felt it so there is something to just leaving your poles there and letting them do their business but it's simplistic it's not inclusive and there's so much more you could do and there's so much power to be had and and nobody has explored it and when I look on my shelf I find no books exploring this topic in any meaningful way I find writers saying um gender polarity is not inclusive throw it away which gender polarity and polarity are not synonyms gender polarity is a subset like even that isn't out there as information why is that it's just like this void when no everybody talks about it it's like the weather everybody talks about it nobody does anything about it somebody had to write a book about it so I did I think that it's also a the fault of sort of a flattening cause I think that's what you're touching on it's it's like a flattening of what is an incredibly deep philosophical concept into something where it's like boy girl uh past that I got nothing um haha and there's the the the levels of what we mean by polarity and what philosophically that's about is is far more um than there there are very significant and important discussions happening in society around that but it's also from a magical and occult perspective as you're bringing up like with alchemy like the transform the transformation of elements and the the nature of active and receptive or solar and lunar and like all these different forces are a lot more complex than even just thinking about what we're talking about when it comes to human bodies and people's associations so but it it sort of stops there and that's I think why everyone is not comfortable kind of going beyond that because it's it's not something that we're really that familiar with hence alchemy not being uh that well understood or discussed a little bit more so in occult circles but you know it's complex it's a difficult topic alchemy is a difficult topic I I mean you also can't talk about binary uh polarity as a as a philosophy unless you talk about Kabbalah and um so I don't expect my readers to be Kabbalists but we do have to explore Kabbalah if we're going to talk in any meaningful way about how our current philosophy of polarity developed but flattening is the right word it's like the you know and to use a bunch of buzzwords because we have brilliant brilliant early 20th century late 19th century occultists who absolutely understood what polarity was but flattened it because of homophobia because of gender essentialism and those are the buzzwords and now I'm woke but you you have somebody like Dion Fortune literally saying that queer magic is more powerful it's just a shame that gayness is so disgusting otherwise you could do it like that's not an exact quote but I I quote the passage exactly in bending the binary and I'm not far away that's it she really says that anybody who has worked with polarity in any kind of serious way understands that polarity is an illusion it's a separation that you create magically in order to express that they come back together and are truly one that's what the middle pillar is right then your homophobia gets in the way yes indeed because everyone is a product of their time and there's all sorts of layers of what people's sort of uh what they're they're taking in and then what assumptions they make based on what they've been taught and taken in but ultimately it is kind of what we do with that material and what what our journey towards the better holistic version of these concepts is which I think often times is what was intended in the the more the more mystical sides of things but we're we're flawed human beings and so it's very difficult for us and I love I love practicing a traditional polarity way and there's nothing wrong with that but when you start looking at polarity and the way that people use it to be oppressive there's there's a desire to throw out the baby with the bath water yeah yeah and so a lot of I wrote bending the binary to separate the baby from the bath water absolutely and I'm it's maybe the book I'm proudest of I have two books that are my favorite tarot interactions and bending the binary I I I don't tell the other books you know well and that's so that is very very important I think they they related a lot of ways because one of the things that you stress so much in the tarot book is relationships and I could not agree more that so much of divination particularly if we're gonna you know talk about tarot and other sort of like visual mediums like that is about looking at how the cards are interrelating with one another and to understand those relationships um you know an understanding of the different forces and powers sometimes binaries and other you know triplicities and all sorts of other things that are embedded into those images is very important so if we don't interrogate the the binaries if we don't interrogate what some of our concepts are for these things uh we might be at a disadvantage when we try to so with uh tarot interactions like I mentioned you are you are talking about the interactions between cards can you talk to us a little bit about what you what you are thinking of when you think about cards interacting with one another well there's all sorts of different interactions the one I start talking about is pattern you can you can just look at frequency and statistics of a of a reading before you even look at the cards so before I I'm not even looking at at what the cards are and I'm laying out a reading I did a reading the other day and I think there were eight cards in the reading and six of them were major arcana and I actually crunched numbers in the book and talked to people about what the statistical likelihood of such a thing is so if you if you have all of one suit or it's all court cards um you know something about this reading before you actually look at what the individual cards are that's a that's an interaction that's a a relationship that the cards have to one another you can't if you read each card separately you're not gonna see that and um and a lot of people who get stuck who pick up the tarot and aren't able to really progress deeply um where they're stuck is they're reading one card at a time uh Eden Gray which was my first book and remains one of my favorites talks a little bit about um this queen is facing that queen or this queen is facing away from that queen I will tend to have a favorite deck for a couple of years and then switch to another deck I usually do like a wait smith in the middle as a cleanse it's like it's like a palate cleanser um I mean I currently have I think three or four decks in active rotation that I'm using every time I read you know but three years from now it'll be three or four different decks so I spent and when I was younger I had fewer tarot decks they cost money um I spent a couple of years reading with a deck called Sacred Rose and Sacred Rose is a beautiful deck um very painterly and um it was really it was something I picked up in the 80s it was before the real explosion of independent tarot and it was unusual to find a deck with so much individuality and I loved it I I remember I saw it advertised the Empress was pregnant and I thought that was so like enormously pregnant and I thought that was so beautiful and I'd never seen anything like that before and I bought the deck I read with it for a couple of years all of the paintings are full face portraits so when I I I had a um tragedy in my life that I had seen in the cards and so I put down the cards for a couple years and then when I picked the cards back up again I didn't I didn't pick up Sacred Rose again I picked up uh probably rider weight Smith you know the angles exploded because I had for years not had angles in my deck I had everybody was facing forward and all of a sudden everybody was doing this and they're looking at each other and it was like this conversation that they were having with one another and some of it is that I've studied art and you look at the way a painting flows look at a look at a Picasso and look at the movement who's looking where what the angles are saying what is the direction of of eye contact so if you do a a spread and and it's a 10 card spread or a four card spread doesn't matter and you don't just look at it as four cards that are indeed interacting with each other but you look at it as a painting and that the angles in that painting are directing your eye into a spot and telling you what your point of view should be all the cards are looking at that guy what is that guy now read that card as if it's the most important card cause all the other cards think it is and that experience of of not having those ankles and then having them I fail at non human decks they're very trendy and it is a way of bypassing gender and race and age and ability and I get why people want to do that but I need those those faces those people their their angles their body language I need that and and a lot of what I understand in interaction comes from that that relationship of it to art and sort of seeing the angles and the relationships between what's happening on the cards to the the larger picture of the reading I think is is a beautiful way of explaining that you also talk in the book um a little bit about making sure that you do not um ignore the psychic child that wants to come forward for in interpretive you know purposes and also to give you information and I I really appreciate how you talk about the importance of letting them speak do you think you could just touch on that a little bit oh absolutely thank you um yeah every every time I write a book I try to develop class work out of that book so that you know I can travel and do a little talk and the one I usually do based on tarot interactions is how to become psychic um also if I'm doing an a presentation a low tech presentation I don't need a Powerpoint whereas if I'm doing something on the cards I need a Powerpoint um I'm very practical it's important so we block ourselves from being psychic we people are my premise here is that we are all naturally psychic and that something stopped it um and usually I mean there's a lot of reasons to stop it one is your parents say no you didn't know that don't say that um one is maybe you grew up in a very dysfunctional family and knowing things is too painful so if you are aware that mommy hits daddy or daddy hits mommy then that then knowing becomes a threat and that's another reason why we might suppress our psychic abilities and finally we have secrets we all have secrets we all walk around basically don't show me yours and I won't show you mine if I open myself to read you I must open myself to be readable opening is is generic in that way so if you don't do that inner work of opening your your abilities are blocked the psychic child in you it's like that that it it's I did a lot of that inner child work in the 90s it was very trendy that and it's very powerful work and your inner child is I mean I can visualize a little girl hiding in a corner in a closed door windowless room you know there is a part of you that has been locked away that was threatened and especially for those of us who grew up in difficult families that felt threatened and went and hid and you can do healing work with that inner child and that is a beautiful psychological thing similarly you have a psychic inner child you have an inner psychic that got suppressed as a child and is hiding from you and you have to be really nice to it and welcoming to it and not tell it it's wrong if you tell it it's wrong it'll go away so you're doing a reading and you're doing a reading for somebody you know and you know that she's happily married you see her with her her husband and they're so happy together and they're lovely together and they're like your model marriage and you do you pull two cards and you've got the lovers in reverse and justice and you know that this is divorce court and your mind says divorce court and you say no no no that can't be go away and the inner child goes whoops OK you don't want to hear from me I'm used to being suppressed I'm gonna go back to the corner but if you say this looks like divorce court even though it shocks me to say this the inner child says oh you're listening to me I will tell you more about it and what you need to do is trust the voice if you trust the voice that voice might have something to tell you and if you don't it will be hurt and go away yes so it is that blending of as as you put it early in the the interview that you did memorization you know of of what meanings were and are in you know the the decks that we primarily are basing you know newer decks off of as well as the classic rider Waite Smith itself but then there is that very important component piece of allowing the that child to be psychic and to know what form of the justice card or what form of the lovers reversed is that um without squashing it and saying go away I have we have more important business to do or I'm not going to listen to you there's an infinite number of meanings in the card even if you memorize and look some teachers say memorize and some people teachers say don't look in the book I'm a memorized person and I think that I get power from that because then I know what to fall back on it helps the struggling psychic to come out for me uh huh yeah like if I if I recite the book meaning that's the words that let the psychic child interject in my language but so for example I never saw in Rider Waite uh the bunny in the Queen of Pentacles until I read 78 degrees of wisdom and Rachel Pollock pointed it out there's a bunny so who knows yeah so awesome so there's just an infinite amount of stuff you can see in in a deck there's a there's um a a deck from the 70s called Morgan Greer which um I don't think is available anymore but everybody had it back in the day and it has no borders my friend likes to read it because she likes to see the cards blend together so she likes to read with Morgan Greer so what you see and how you see it you you know what you what you see is gonna be infinite even if you've memorized meanings and what you pick out in that moment what part of that card is meaningful is justice a cosmic principle or does it mean you're going to court is the lovers sex or romance or a choice these are all classic classic readings that you you don't have to be psychic to pull from a book so how do you decide well you're being psychic when you're making those decisions whether you think you're being psychic or not so go with it and and I say the word psychic on purpose to be provocative because one of the things that keeps you from being psychic is the belief that nobody's really psychic so we use more polite words like intuitive intuitive is psychic without the spookiness so I'm going full bore spooky because that provocativeness shakes loose the inhibition from from saying that you really do know things and also that gives you a sort of direction the way I think of it is like a vocabulary so if you want to be able to speak you need to learn some vocabulary in a new language and therefore the memorization part or at least the learning of some system is the vocabulary that then you're gonna be able to speak with but then it's this it's the psychic part that needs to do the actual forming of the sentences well the memorization so some people like let's take meditation for an example and yeah I talk a little bit about the grammar of of tarot in the book like what's the verb here what's the noun here what's just like an adjective illustrating it find the action but like to talk about meditation you talk about some people are just going to go blank and some people need like I use like complex mantras or visualizations sometimes because it's how you respond to there's either going out or going in is the way I tell you you can just go out into the blankness what are we gonna do with our monkey brain what are we gonna do with the chatter we're either gonna silence it or we're gonna keep it busy right there's the memorization and then there's a pure psychic I'm a keep it busy person in my meditation so I'm a meta memorization person in my tarot it's the same thing am I just going um inward into the psychic or am I sort of distracting myself with a bunch of stuff that that that tricks me into being there and then you can do that with meditation you can do that with trance you can do that with the tarot you can do that with you know other obviously other divination systems people will tend towards one type of system or another I mean if you're that inward in your abilities maybe tarot isn't right for you maybe you should go straight to scrying you know because I don't have that skill I need the stuff and also in what you're talking about there's also a certain uh discernment that's needed in order to prevent readings from turning into sort of a psychotherapy of just analysis of only the querent the person asking where sometimes there is and I I've had this when when talking to friends where they're confused about which of the cards are just their internal process and which is about other people or about the situation so can you maybe talk a little bit about how you think of that in reading well some of it is is using a a spread that tells you that mm hmm some of it again when you make it all psychological you are devaluing the psychic this isn't this isn't really reading the future or reading the unknown it's just therapeutic it's it's devaluing the psychic and I think that makes it feel safe for people people don't like to put their money where their mouth is and it's another way of nurturing the psychic child is is seeing a pattern of success if you don't make predictions you'll never be wrong so make the prediction take the risk that gives you a pattern of success god the fool is right in the deck have you Learned nothing you know like a classic Celtic Cross says this is your environment stop putting your psychology there it says it's other people but also um I have taken to using a pendulum with my tarot so if I really can't tell which of these two things is is me and which is my you know another person I will just take use a pull out a pendulum over the card sometimes you ask a question and it gives you a lot of really good information about the question but it doesn't tell you what to do you still don't know if the answer was yes or no I love the information is it yes or no and I'll just bring the pendulum into the into the card reading and that sort of companion um divination I find very very powerful but but you really should a trust that you're allowed to not just be psychological and be use a spread that guides you yeah and and you also emphasize something which I I think is really important which is that there are elements to doing this work with particularly with tarot or other you know visual forms like that where you can examine just what the suit is or you know just numbers and things of that nature without having to go straight to do I remember what each of the meanings for each of these cards are and that that's a lot of the the power is first looking at that and then if you're putting that together with knowing the meanings of the cards and then maybe also adding in pendulum if you get confused and stuck on some parts you have a much more complex system um and it's also not that difficult to do because I think it's Camelia Ellis who says like you know one is a little 10 is a lot we all we all kind of know the basics of what numbers mean and you know and you can just one is alone two is a partnership I mean most most numerology is kind of logical earlier we talked about tradition in witchcraft and and the way that it creates a grounding for you and then you can improvise within it if you've memorized all the cards like you've done the work you've done your flashcards you've done your study and you are grounded and you're in the middle of a reading and you suddenly don't remember what a card means that's happening for a reason you don't need the traditional meaning of that card in that moment now you'll never get there if you hadn't memorized in the first place but if you are a person who knows your cards and all of a sudden your mind goes blank on that card in that reading at that moment that's your psychic child saying hey don't read that that the you make that point of the the absences are important too so that's another form of like the absence being a very important piece of information I've I've had readings where people came to me and asked me about their love life and there wasn't a single cup uh cup you know what maybe you need to focus on other things like cause the cards are haha they they often times will give us what we need sometimes beyond what the the asked question is that I mean I that that's how I wrote my first book I got a reading and I was in a tragic on again off again relationship that went on being on again and off again for another several years after that but I I was getting a reading about the relationship and it made no sense and you're talking about stuff that has nothing to do with this relationship and I'm like wait a minute I'm also trying to write a book and what this reading says makes perfect sense and is step by step instructions of how to write this book elements of ritual was done in nine months from that day well that's that's that's a really beautiful thing so as we as we kind of come closer to the end of of this conversation I wanted to I like to leave room for a question I sometimes ask which is is there any piece of advice or perhaps it's just like a thing that you find yourself repeating a lot to people or things that is advice you've been repeating to yourself more something that you might want to leave people with that you're thinking about a lot right now my father was a terrible person but he repeated often a piece of advice which I love and live with all the time which I think is some of the best advice you'll ever hear if you are winning all the time at poker you're not betting enough oh yeah bet higher bet more take more risks be willing to lose be willing to fail and then get back in the game we are too safe we're too safe in our magic we're too safe in our ritual we're too safe in our in our psychic work risk more bet higher I love that that is that is fantastic advice yeah I don't wanna add anything to that we'll let that be as it is uh so where can people find you you have many books are there other things that you want to tell people about that you are working on or any projects that you have coming up or stuff oh I I um I will be at Changing Times Changing Worlds in November Cool I will probably be back at convocation next February um I I can be had I travel I give good lecture this is fun and I have a website which is really I really struggle to maintain so it's Debra lip dot com but it's sort of out of date I have I'm easy to find on Amazon I have a lot of books out I am I have a roadmap by Moonlight came out uh this past February so it's a new book I have another one coming out next March which I don't even think is in pre release yet but if you're interested in the topic of psychic and magical wellness that's my next book and I'm writing another book now so 27 and 28 are booked you know um but I'm on Facebook I'm on Instagram most of Instagram is pictures of my cats but I do from time to time make important announcements about my books and you know um I I my website does list many of the workshops that I offer I should update it with some of the new ones so if you're interested in doing any of that or you just wanna buy my books I'm all over Amazon I also have a bookshop site so I my most of my books are linked on my website to my bookshop bookshop is a website that sells you books from independent booksellers so you can you can actually choose your local store or if you don't have an independent bookseller near you but you want to support independent booksellers and you don't want to support Jeff Bezos and Amazon you can buy books on bookshop I'm available on Amazon I get that many people use Amazon I use Amazon but if you want to support your independent booksellers I'm also on bookshop and I encourage it yes I will put those links the bookshop links down below it is very important and so thank you very much I I hope that I will we will be talking again when your next book is out so that we can talk more about those topics so oh it'll be fun this has been a great a great morning thank you so much for having me well thank you for being for being here