32 Episodes
A DESIRE IS A PRAYER
dans la même chambre un désir est une prière
ENTER THE DRAGON PART II
I heard his voice on the water
ENTER THE DRAGON
The King of Vessels rules over the domain of the soul
DEATH AS A DOOR TO THE BEYOND
"In the beginning there was a wild horse, and that horse was man…”
ALL THE THINGS I'VE KILLED
~ Absolution ~ Desire ~ Destruction ~
A Letter on Devotion
And a short story about a rare breed of Eagles. Find me here.
April: Algorithms, Rejection & Wunderkammer
Notes on collecting and rejecting things.
Art & The Resistance To Loss
The last tarot offering for Inner Demons: The Stories We Tell Ourselves series is now up (cries in Tagalog). I talk about the psychological significance of the crucifixion, cheese, Symbolist painter Fernand Knopff, style icon Carmella from the Sopranos and more. Two years ago, when I started Inner Demons, I wanted for the first time, in my writing, to somewhat, coherently, explore isolation, love, relationships, sexual identity, success, failure, gratitude, nature, the seasons, and the joys and struggles of a creative life.
A Mythical Potion For Sorrow
This month, I cleave into loneliness, shame and meaning. I fall into the mythical waters once inhabited by the Greek Goddess Circe. Her voyage to claim and feel her body plunged me from the rabid waters of immortality into the unpredictable, visceral, but ultimately life granting currents of mortality. Circe’s tale is one of bitter jealousy, loneliness and growth
The Hermit Spins The Wheel
This month I visit an old grave, the site where this personal, but collectively shared exploration through tarot, philosophy, psychology and art began. I excavate repressive patterns rooted in insecurity, denial and outdated coping skills. I talk about obsession, ghosting and being haunted. I also examine the Twilight sagas relation to power, love and the slippery fish that we are determined to hook to our rods, control.
A Fragmented Meditation On The Three Of Pentacles
In between reading somewhat basic bitch books, that feel so satisfying, a pending funeral, a bloody long trip in Barcelona and ripping up half my garden, I managed to write July's Tarot Offering. It's on the negativity schema. It's a bunch of fragments, loose ends and whatever else was knocking about in my head in such a weird but morbidly hopeful passage of time. The cover art is from @jondix, who is a real live puppeteer of alternate universes. And was gifted to me years ago with a pack of gothic tarot cards at a tattoo convention. It was a moment of kindess that struck me by surprise and I love that kind of shit, stuff happening to you that you didn't plan or expect. Ottessa Moshfegh has written that 'pain is not the only touchstone to growth.'
Tarot Offering: Approval Seeking Schema
There are countless studies that will dip into the scientific statistics to what being attractive gets you in this world, this isn’t one of them, because it’s been said and I think deep down, we know what it costs to feel ugly...I didn’t want this to be about one race being the winner, because I refuse to feed that narrative and I think despite there always being instances to prove it, there are also many that challenge it. It’s all really just us wanting to be loved, isn’t it?
Tarot Offering: Have You Ever Drunk Silence?
This month’s Offering approaches themes of rejection, compulsion, love and self-sacrifice. There’s an unfathomable amount of the latter going on in the world right now… So I’ll be swimming in the waters of meaning and beauty too. I tunnel into what creators give up to pursue their art, and what many of us can give up for love, work and grief. I also briefly go into the artists meaning behind March’s cover art, @jenowt… Who is very rad and beautiful. Thank you Jenzie.
Tarot Offering: "Who In The World Am I?"
This offering marks a year of me freewheeling-career wise and going it alone as a freelance writer and Tarot reader. It’s been a crazy trip, sprinkled with moments of dread, doubt and wonder. I listened to the Twin Peaks theme tune on a loop for ten hours whilst writing about the subjugation schema, and entered the dreams of Roman Emperor Maxen, whilst also caressing David Lynch's theories on dream souls, it was a good time. In Twin Peaks, Agent Cooper says, something that has stuck with me, especially in relation to this months schema, subjugation: “What I want and what I need are too different things.”
Tarot Offering: Emptiness, Control & Goddess Kali
This month I want to set science free, whilst exploring a deeper relationship to our beliefs by thawing-out-the-cold-a-bit, and talk about the sun; as well the Hindu Goddess of destruction and rebirth, Kali. I will also be burrowing into patterns of insufficient-self control, through Jeff Vandermeer’s book, Annihilation.
Tarot Offering: The Deepest & Most Lasting Pleasure
A killer take on The Whore of Babylon for December’s Tarot Offering podcast cover art; from the haunting + hypnotic @taticompton. The representation of the ‘diabolical’ female figure, as an image to project all our self-destructive fears onto; is buried within the symbol of a woman clutching her golden cup, drunk on the blood of saints, riding a beast with seven heads and ten horns… Scholars will tell you she represents the Pagan Roman Empire or maybe Jerusalem. That she symbolises the abandonment of our noble energies in place of meaningless, short lived thrills. And so, the addictive cycle both feeds and eats itself…“First a man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes the man.” (The Devil.) While Babylon has been described as an evil place, I also see a person, a company and ideologies, with an insatiable hunger for domination. The true revelation of her story, is that all the wine, all the meaningless fornications, all the great towers built to touch the skies of heaven and converse with God, rot in the hands of those that lust for materials and fake spirituality, to elevate their status to godlike proportions. This dilutes our real connection to others, body, mind and soul. And I hate that science makes me feel idiotic to use such romantic but apt language to describe what beauty is and has always been… The process of sharing and creating value with others. Science struggles to translate what a soul or the sacred is into its language. But that doesn’t mean we’re off the hook of taking care of those parts.
What Is It You Fear? - November 2021 Tarot Offering
The High Priestess Meets Justice: A Cataclysmic Journey Through The Waters Of The Unconscious. This project in particular looks through the artefacts our desires leave behind… Pushing through bone, stone, blood and cum... To find something that a word like sacred, could only begin to describe. (The Lovers). Links.
The Myth of Love: October 2021 Tarot Offering
I have been looking into the effect of the idea of romantic love as a profound Western expression and burrowed deeper to find its marks on our collective psychological and behavioural history. Romantic love is a whole psychological package… with beliefs, rules and expectations… This month I talk about blood, love and free will. HUGE THANK YOU TO @el_ojo_peludo aka Tono Camunas, for this months covert art. I am happy to look at this painting everyday.
Tarot Offering: When Love Feels Like A Chainsaw
September's 2021 Tarot Offering from Rachel Okna. Featuring cover art from some artists that I love. This month is from the master, Ichibay. July - October 2021 episodes will be foraging through narratives and digging into Autonomy, Identity & Performance Needs, through a bloodied schematic lens. Every month I pull some tarot cards and write and record an offering for the collective. I explore inextinguishable themes in our collective history, through the stories in us that will never die.
Tarot Offering: Notes on breaking curses
Thank you to the beauty, Tati Compton for the gorgeous, explosive cover art this month. A bit of dreamwork on both our parts went on with this, which inadvertently felt like a much looser way of creating things somehow... Less weight or something... To switch up from watery, emotional Cancer season to the fiery heart-wrenched depths of Leo this month... I thought I’d loosen things up and share a few extracts from my poetry ~ dream journal for August’s offering. I’d like to briefly open a portal into a dark pocket of human nature rotting and bulging, out of the seams of whatever creation is or means...Of love and pain returned to their senders … Writer, Ocean Vuong has said that the hardest task is to live only once. And that ‘if you must know maybe the body is only a question mark, that no answer could ever extinguish’... https://okna.squarespace.com/
Tarot Offering: Defectiveness & Shame
This month I've written a short tarot story meditation... If you want to go ahead and skip to the meditation part, just skip to about 10 minutes in... The sun rises higher, it starts to burn away, does a falcon hunt or just celebrate life? She asks you if you knew that hawks could breed all year? Surrounding her are an angel, an eagle, a bull and a lion. She seems familiar to you in a weird way as if in a dream you had followed her there before. You ask her name. She looks at you and carries on dancing in her floating oval wreath. She says, At the last farmhouse, there were seven gates to open and close, so you can either follow the track or cut across the fields, but the trail is so steep and at some points the merest whisper of a trail... And if you hear the sound of the wet hot rain clattering on the metal roof like a gunshot...
Tarot Offering: Emotional Deprivation
For June's tarot offering on emotional deprivation, I’ve written a short story, that gets into the ribcage of the most common, maladaptive schema... In a poem, Denise Riley says... 'There is nowhere further back than pure blue.' In nature, there is no death, just a reshuffling of atoms. It made me think of the concept of transindividualism... and I couldn’t resist a story that depicts The Tower as a body of flesh... A household of flesh... I also wanted to unpeel the sliding skin off wishes and shadows... A physical union between bodies is also a wish (The Lovers). Thank you to @arang_eleven for your mesmerising painting, that I've used for this month's cover art. I've been getting lost in this one for years. For tarot sessions and questions: racheloknatarot@gmail.com
Tarot Offering: Mistrust & Abuse
One of the stories I look at this month is the ancient Roman myth of King Saturn, the God of time, devouring his offspring. I dip my fingers in the waters of redemption and I weave through visions that press into the violations, perhaps, in an attempt to heal visceral wounds. In the Once and Future King, a gorgeous retelling of the Arthurian legend, T.H. White says: “Perhaps we all give the best of our hearts uncritically--to those who hardly think about us in return.” Thank you to my fellow Scorpion, @wyrdian.tattoos (who reminded me about seeing with the stomach) for this crazy painting inspired by one of Goya's most visceral pieces; Saturn devouring his son. To get monthly tarot offerings to your inbox and to book a tarot reading with me, drop me a line at racheloknatarot@gmail.com
Tarot Offering: Social Alienation & Rejection
For April’s Tarot Offering: Social Alienation and Rejection, I’ve dug into the iconic La Llorona myth and peered through the window of a few more stories. I'm Rachel, a writer, tarot reader, and history lover. Every month I pull some tarot cards and write and record an offering for the collective. I explore inextinguishable themes in our collective history, through the stories in us that will never die. Inner Demons is an eighteen-part series that explores psychological schemas in literature, film, folklore, and mythology. Listen if you're into demons that eat babies, violent women that can’t stop crying, and more lovely topics. https://okna.squarespace.com Thank you @rafeldelelande for painting something so sad and rad for this month’s cover art!!!
Tarot Offering: Abandonment & Instability
Abandonment and Instability, is the first piece of an 18-episode series, exploring early maladaptive psychological schemas. Every month, with the tarot cards, we'll be weaving in and out of film, literature, mythic legends, and a few gnarled-contorted folktales that have seeped into our psychology, our physiology, over deep time, through generations of oral and written submission.