Tarot and You ~ Sage Lee
I don’t know about you, but when I have a fight with my partner or less-than-stellar sex, my first move isn’t to consult my tarot deck - but after this episode, that might change.
In this week’s unfiltered conversation, wizard and relationship coach Sage Lee pulls back the curtain on the power tarot has to reveal the true challenges between you, love, and good sex.
Tune in to learn how to use the power of tarot to identify our relationship or sexual blockages, facilitate inner healing, and integrate our awesome masculine and feminine energies. We’ll even give you an inside look at a tarot deck Sage Lee designed specifically for this purpose - The Sage Tarot.
Take a look at one of the cards here.
Join us to discuss:
how tarot actually works and its surprising applications in business and life
bringing magic back into your life
the different forms of love
integrating our masculine and feminine using the tarot
why it’s important to integrate and develop our masculine and feminine - regardless of your gender identification
how and why Sage designed The Sage Tarot
improving your sex life and relationships through tarot
falling in love with yourself
Connect with Sage Lee:
Website: theschoolforwizards.com
Instagram: instagram.com/sageleelove
Twitter: twitter.com/brandmystic
Get your copy of The Sage Tarot: https://theschoolforwizards.com/sage-tarot-2/
Connect with Deborah:
Website: https://www.deborahkat.com/
Email: deborahtantrakat@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/deborah.tantrakat
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TantraKat
In our commitment accessibility, help make this podcast more accessible to those who are hearing impaired or those who like to read rather than listen to podcasts.
The transcription is far from perfect, and in some cases quite amusing. As we grow edited transcripts are on the list in the meantime please enjoy. Otter.Ai
Welcome to this better sex podcast. I am Deborah Kat, the host, where we have unfiltered conversations about sex, romance, life, and having a better life and better sex.
I am so excited to have my friend Sage Lee join me today. So he is an award winning artist, a wizard, an entrepreneur, he's created the sage tarot deck. The depth took almost seven years to make and is effectively a primer for studying the invisible world. The sage taro draws on ancient paintings, sculptures, multiple spiritual traditions and sages own inner guidance. The deck is available at the School of wizards the business division. So what else I want you to know about sage is that the school of Wizards is dedicated to bringing magic back into the world. The personal division is dedicated to bringing magic into our personal lives. And the business division is here to bring back the principles of magic into the workplace into business practices. The School of wizards wants to create more empowerment for people everywhere to become aware of their miraculous powers and to be able to use them. So that's the official story. What I know sages that he is one of the most generous people I know in his time and in His wisdom. We've known each other for several years and lots of different ways as business colleagues, as magic practitioners. And that's why I wanted sage to join me today. Because as Valentine's Day comes around, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be to be a lover. And that got me to thinking about different kinds of love relationships. And the Tarot deck has a card for those who aren't familiar. Oh, the lovers. And so I invited sage to come and talk about the lovers card, and all that that means so welcome, sage.
Thanks, Deborah. And before we get started, I want to just make sure that people know that if they Google or type in the School of wizards, they're going to get a weird Well, maybe it's not so weird, but it's a it's a it's not me. It's a it's a psychology site, and they do apparently pretty excellent workshops for psychologists. But that is not the school for wizards which is, which is my site. And the Tarot deck is available actually there on that site. Should anyone after our conversation want to grab a copy of it?
We'll put some we'll put pictures and the website information in the show notes.
Awesome.
So what can you tell us about actually why don't you start with telling us a little bit about the Tarot.
Well, I will I would love to tell you a little bit about the Tarot and I would also love to, to sort of give you my kind of working definition of love and in it really this is borrowed from a book of, of poetry, Urdu poetry, that was collected by an editor named Aijaz Ahmad. And, and he he he says this about the poet who is Marisa gol Gallen. He says God believes, and I'm going to try and remember this quote, I might not quote it exactly, but you'll get the gist of it. He says, that, all of life is seen in in relation to love and that this poetry that he writes is of love, not about love, but of love because he believes that love is the basic human relation and everything is seen in terms of this relation ship, even if those terms are terms of failure. So, I to believe that love is the is the you is the main human relation and, and Rumi you know another mystic poet, you know, believes that love is quality that comes from the Divine and not not from people. So that's, that's an interesting thing. So on Valentine's Day right despite its sort of odd history, I always think of what it actually means to love and to be loved and, and I think of that in terms of not just individuals, which is a kind of localized love but of Divine Love, which, of course, the lovers card is about. So the Tarot has a long history, I'm not going to bore you with the whole history, but, but let's just say that, you know, one of the first extant complete decks was, was the Marseille deck and there were some other sort of partial decks or some beautiful pictures that were done in Italy, that were apparently part of it, and maybe there are a bunch of decks that we that never have survived, but the Marseille deck from France is one of the early ones and and that is a very popular tarot deck and then in the 19th century there were a bunch of people who were studying Kabbalah and who redrew these archetypes of the Tarot in terms of a sort of metaphysical education and, and that those are the ones that we that we see today. My deck was based on in part on the Rider Waite deck, which is the sort of classic kind of copyright free and I'm doing air quotes with my fingers, copyright free deck. And and then I was also reading from Lady lady Frieda Harrison Alister Crowley's deck called the Fosse deck, or the to hoody deck depending on which teacher you listened to. And I created my deck because suddenly, I had these two decks that were extremely powerful in their symbology. And I found that I suddenly couldn't read from either deck. And since reading the Tarot was the reason that I got into it in the first place. I had to create my own deck in order to be able to be a functional tarot reader reader again.
What would you say that? So excuse me, people have, you know, want tarot readings for many different reasons. And, you know, different people do it different ways. And I'm curious if you want to say a little bit about your process.
Well, I will say that anyone who gets a Tarot reading to try and get the future is going to be unsatisfied, because the future is difficult to predict, because, well, the future and and what the Tarot most fabulously does, you know, it's it's kit can be used as a, as a teaching tool for metaphysical education and the Major Arcana or the, you know, 2122, rather, trump cards from zero to 21 represent that journey, and kind of in order. And then there are other cards in the deck, but those are in the original game of terace, which the Tarot came from the those cards were called trump cards. And there was, it's a fairly simple game with a set of rules about you know, laying down cards, and then whoever has the trump card or the highest card takes that set of cards and then you count up your score at the end. Now, in terms of your question, how does a Tarot session happen? Well, a reader is very familiar with all the the symbols in the deck, some readers read very intuitively, I use that kind of combination intuitive reading, combined with the knowledge that I have about the cards, but the the and I've never read a never read to read for somebody who says, oh, that's all wrong, or that doesn't make any sense. For some reason, the teros zeroes in on exactly what your issue is and gives you advice and we're presents possible choices for you to make possible understandings from the past and new insights for the present. And then that's how that's how it functionally happens. In terms of what's really going on, why does the perfect card show up? Why does the Insight happen? It's a controversy that's been going on for 100 years more, you know, how to how does it work? So effectively? No one's really sure. And there's a whole bunch of theories out there, but let's just say it seems like magic. And as they say, magic is just technology that we don't understand yet.
Right? So people come to you for inspiration, in lots of different ways, but oftentimes, around their business, and I love that you allow for the technology that we don't understand quite yet. To be part of that. Um,
say that one more time.
Sure. So I was just saying that I know that, you know, part of the way that you use the Tarot is for inspiration for people who are, you know, feeling stuck around business around all sorts of different things. And I just was commenting that I really enjoy the fact that you are willing to allow, in fact, not just willing, but you, you know, use this technology that we don't quite understand yet. As part of our, as part of the process as part of the way to look at the bigger picture, be inspired?
Well, and I think the way that it works for business, is the same way that it works for any question that you have in your personal life, because we know what we know. And we don't know what we don't know. And the Tarot actually takes us down a path that we might not have ever thought of before. And so for business problems, that just require a business coach, you can find anybody to do to do that. You know, your marketing is effective, you're getting the wrong people into your sales process, whatever. But if you have a problem in your business, that's absolutely intractable, right, you've tried everything that you consciously know to work through it sometimes it's important to get something just a complete wildcard that will provide insight in a way that you've never thought of before same thing for any kind of question business or not.
Right which brings us to love let
yes Love is the great our overarching relation and all and all everything is seen in terms of love even if those terms of our of terms of failure,
right and I love you know speaking of love one of my one of my favorite things that you ever you know reflected back to me is how how business how everything we do is is really a way that we love out and I'm probably not getting that quite right but this is the way that I think of it is that you know there's this there's nothing we do is without some version of desire and or love those two pieces go together you know desire and love go together but not always the way people expect them to because you know there are different forms of love and you know there's there's arrows and then there is a gap Bay and you know a gap a being what we're talking about with Spirit love where it's like it's a bigger love arrows being the love is that the more erotic one or is that the more companionable one
i arrows I believe is erotic love and got a copy as it is love for oh now I'm confused like one of them is love of the many for the one and the other is love for the one of the one for the many. But I that's not my specialty area is like the whole the all that Greek stuff. Yeah, I know you've got other experts that are way better than it at that than me But what I I'm so fascinated by and when I designed this card I was so fascinated by is that there are some decks that for the lovers, they're just two characters. But the the three decks that I've already mentioned, the Rider Waite deck and the Marseille deck and, and my deck, there are at least three characters on that card. And on the Marseille Deck, there are four. So So, and always one of those characters is something that's above you know, so in the Marseille deck, it's Cupid Who's firing an arrow down at the, at the, at the three characters that are down there. And there is a man in between two women, one woman, by some accounts looks a little older, the the other woman looks a little younger. And, you know, there's a lot to be said about, you know, well is this about that moment in time when one walks away from familial love into, you know, intimate love with a with a partner, right? And what's the process involved with that? Then there is the Rider Waite deck, which, which shares this in common with the sage tarot deck? In that, you know, the angel. Gabrielle is above the two characters, right? The man on the left and the woman on the right. And if you are looking from the, from their perspective, like if you put yourself in them, the man is on the really on the right, and the woman is on the left, if you're kind of in that scene. And, and, you know, Gabriela is the angel of healing right now, um, my deck is really more than anything about the reconciliation or relationship between the masculine and the feminine within each of us. Right, so, so every person on the planet has this, you know, this set of external genitalia, which are, in some ways, according to the way my brain works, kind of irrelevant, in a way. And I know, this is like, very sort of opposite of the way that Tantra thinks about it. Because it's like, Matt, men are representations of the masculine and women are representations of the feminine. But really, the action for our lifetime, I think, is to, is to reconcile those things together, right, no matter what your junk looks like.
Yes, I love that. So what I really here is, is talking about what isn't what is internal, versus what is external, meaning that like, you know, we have these energies, that that are that, that we need to reconcile within. And, and I'll let you continue,
well, you know, go all the way back to the sort of the origins of, you know, psychotherapy, and, you know, young, you know, Carl Jung, who was a student of Freud. You know, for him, the male had of female part within them called the Anima. And the women had a male part with him within them called the Animus. And the, and that was just as important a part of the psyche, as the, as the part that ego identifies with, right? So, so the only reason that the feminine is forefront from a psychological perspective, like let's just forget about Genk for a moment, and say that if you are identified as, as a female, or perhaps you're identified is somewhere on the spectrum in between it, it actually doesn't matter there is there is stuff that needs to reconcile within you, right? There are aspects of yourself that need to be loved, recognized, and most most people who are heterosexual and you know, gendered. cisgendered is is the correct term right? They are in a body that matches their perceived gender and their and they have either an anima or an Animus. And the the important soul work I think we have to do on this plane is to actually accept integrate and, and love those parts which we do not openly identify with with our ego. And in dreams, we often see you know that these roles of masculine and feminine in those kind of situations being really important dreams because they show up as you know, okay, this thing is happening, I don't know what it's about, you know, the, the feminine is either seductive or terrifying or whatever, for for men in the masculine can be seductive or terrifying for women. And really, what's happening intra psychically, is that there's stuff being like worked out. Right. So, in my card, you know, the, the man has the sun in his hand, the woman has a moon in her hand, right? So these are sort of classic Adam and Eve style figures. And, and the sun energy is sort of seen as masculine. You know, in, in many traditions throughout the world of the moon energy is considered feminine, you know, often the moon in certain traditions is called grandmother, right? Or, and then the father sky, right. And, you know, and so you have this sort of reconciliation, possible between the sun in the moon, right. And also in the very center of the card is the orphic egg and forget for the moment about the orphic tradition, let's just say that the orphic egg is the egg in which Dionysus was birthed from, right. And
diagnosis being the God of
well, that well, he is the, the, the trickster. often known as Hermes, right? He's the personification of light. And he's also the God of alcohol and spirits, by the way. So you know, have a glass of wine on Valentine's Day, you're honoring Dionysus. Um, so the orphic religion believe that the universe was born from this silver egg, right, and the very first thing out of this egg was Dionysus, right? The personification of light. And, and the, the angel, Gabrielle is actually bedecked in the red robes of Dionysus in this card, and what is not super clear, and I want you to be able to, to view this. So you know, you can just look on the, the, the place where you're listening to this podcast, and there should be an image of at least my card and perhaps the other two cards, if we can do that without violating copyright. And you'll see that there is a collection of triangles behind the the couple right. And, and that is the center part. It's not the entire Sri Yantra. But it is the triangles that are inside the SRI entre and and the SRI entre is as sort of the the upper ones are representing Shiva, the bottom ones are representing renting Roger swara or Parvati and they rep they are representatives in the Hindu religion of masculine and feminine divine, certainly not the only ones. But in in this case, it's Shiva and Rajat Shuara swash Rajiv Shah, Raja Swati or Parvati. I usually just say Parvati because it's easier for me to pronounce. In addition The astrological symbol for this card is Gemini. Right? And Gemini is the astrological sign of the twins. And if you can think of the masculine and feminine within you or within each of us in the traditional sense you know, it's the twins the masculine and feminine twins. And most astrologers refer to these twins as the male twins, Castor and Pollux, which are actually also stars up in the sky. But Katherine Pollock's were actually part of two sets of twins. And so there was brother and sister caster and Clyde M nestra. And they were the human children of King 10 darious. And then Helen of Troy and Pollux were the children of the Greek god Zeus witches, I'm sure why all that trouble happened around Helen of Troy, talk about a lover, right, you know, to have a person right, a woman who was the center of war, warring Greek city states for many, many years, is, you know, is phenomenal, right. And together these, these four twins, these two sets of twins represent the axis of masculine, feminine, human and divine right. So there was a set of human twins, masculine, feminine, there was a set of divine twins, masculine and feminine. So you can see them on this on this grid, now, you probably have a question or two for me at this point.
I do well, so I just want to go back a couple things really caught my attention. And one of them was this idea of so love being the integration of our masculine and feminine. And so we do that within ourself. And then then we come to a partner to integrate, again, differently. But what what my what caught my eye was, or my ear was the idea that you mentioned that. Gabrielle the angel Gabrielle was the the angel of healing. And so I'm wondering if you can talk about love and healing?
Well, the the root word for the, the root of the word heal is hole, right? So healing really is just simply to make hole. And if you think about if you if you think about and let me let me just Can I take a little detour and talk about, you know, gender just for a second because I think once we start talking about masculine, feminine, then we want to understand what's meant by gender and I definitely by gender, I do not mean you know, sis, Gen, male female, right? Some people have other ways of perceiving their own gender, gender, right, some are some people are Two Spirit people were, you know, they have clear identification with both the masculine and feminine and, and, and so they're not identifying either with the masculine or the feminine, and they just have a different, you know, kind of work to do but really, it's the same because there is this thing and maybe, maybe the masculine and feminine when they were born was already integrated into a great degree for them and, and this is not part of the soul work that they need to do in this lifetime. I have always been really appreciative of all genders, and I don't you know, I because in the divine world, you know, gender is is a thing that that it that is represented by genitals, or used to be seen as represented by genitals on the earth plane. But there are things on the divine plane that we that are beyond our Ken right. There are these kind of polarities, right? The the ultra masculine polarity and the ultra feminine polarity, but we are kind of on the earth plane we're kind of in the middle. So in an ideal world, the masculine and feminine would be seen as equal. And, and both are valued. And as we know, we more or less live in a patriarchal society where the feminine is often sometimes it is, but the feminine is often not honored to the degree that it should be.
And when it is honored, it's honored in a let me put you on a pedestal and put you under glass versus more of a honoring daily man, a mundane honoring of of substance.
Yes. And so if we're, you know, kind of back in this cisgendered heterosexual world, which isn't, you know, which is an okay world to be in, it's just one of many worlds, then if, if a man hates women, if a heterosexual man hates women, then it's likely that there could be some hatred of the feminine within him, right. And so, so truly being able to love women, if you're a man and male identified, could have to do with, you know, loving the feminine that is within you. And I think that the new generation right now, the word, the two new, right, the millennials and Gen Z are, I think, much more sophisticated than previous generations were about this. Because there is an there's an understanding that there is a, that there is all sorts of stuff in there. And that our job, you know, maybe there's not an realization of this, but I'm observing, it feels like there really is that there's a lot of stuff going on in there. And that some of that reconciliation work has has been done, either when they came in or very early on, in their life. So many times people are using the external man or woman to work out their internal struggles. And believe me, that's kind of a recipe for disaster in a relationship, right? Because what's really going on is something inside you. And what really, what really seems to be going on is, you know, I'm in love with a bitch I can't stand or, you know, my husband is an asshole. Right? And, and that may very well be true, right?
That sounds like this super polarized version. It's like, you know, I, I'm in love with that, that, that version that is so so polarized, so so far away from me, that I can point the finger.
Yeah. And, and really as, as they say, in the community, you know, if you pointed somebody you got three fingers pointing back at you. So, you know, looking inside, is it's not where everything everything is but it's where everything most things are.
Yeah, so I'm curious with with your tarot card, can you tell us a little bit about your process and creating it?
Oh, wow, that is a very, you know, in some ways, it was a very intuitive process. So, so Okay, let's just take the lovers card, for instance. So, I knew that I wanted the, the card to be about and more clearly and obviously, about the, the relationship between the masculine and feminine. And I was looking through kind of all world belief systems and religions to, to figure that out, right to, to come to some understanding about how that shows up and in in for most of the cards, I would have this knowledge of tarot decks that had been created before and mostly the ones I was familiar with were the the Thoth deck and the and the Rider Waite deck. And I would, I would look at what the story was behind the card, what the metaphysical information was supposed to be and then I would just go out and collect symbols from the web, you know, so like a whole bunch of different things. Have the orphic egg and, you know, then I would go okay, well, I want a male and a female and a court, what are some sort of statues or representatives of the, you know of the form that I can use to do that. And then for all the angels, it's like, well, some of the angels were just drawn freehand, and this angel was actually based on a painting, and I think that the, the original character here may have been Gabrielle but it also might have been us Cupid. And I'm, I can't remember the original, you know, kind of drawing that I did from the, from the painting. And, and then I will, what I'll usually do is like load the symbols up into the card, you know, seeing if I can make it into a coherent whole. And in some cases, the, the cards end up with symbols taken out of them. And I think I've got a publication where I've, I have these two figures, you know, they're the same figure, but one has been colored black and one's been colored white, to indicate this kind of great polarity between the masculine and feminine, but didn't introduce a couple extra characters on the card, it didn't feel right. And so I ended up taking them out. And so we ended up with the final card having just the angel, the two characters holding the sun in the moon and the orphic egg in in the middle. So so it really was a an intuitive process that was kind of governed by a bunch of knowledge that I had in the first place. But but it was kind of done in a dream state mostly.
So I'm curious, when when this card shows up in a reading, you know, what, what would be the advice or what would be the direction that you plead someone in?
Well, you know, what I usually say, when you draw this card, it means that you are either reflecting on the relationship between the masculine and feminine within you, as well is it as your relationship, your wholeness or your healing, to the Divine, right. And it might need that you need mean that you need to repair a relationship, make a tough choice about a relationship, pay more attention to the Divine movement toward wholeness, or healing, that is always present. And you can trust that on the divine plane healing is going to happen, no matter what occurs on the physical plane, you know, um, you know, healing is making hole, and sometimes making hole from the perspective of the person who is suffering, right, can look pretty bad, right? So, I'll give you an example. You know, so So, um, some someone is having a really tough time with their earthly relationship, or they've just had a divorce, and they feel completely alone in the world. And they, they come up with the lovers card. So, so what what the lovers card might mean in that situation is that it's like, either about unfinished business that they have with that partner that they have not yet quite separated from, or, in this absence of no thingness. What's left to to put your dissatisfaction and ire on if no partner is there, but the internal masculine or feminine right, and maybe that's required for your healing for your wholeness maybe what's required is that you come to terms with your relationship to that inner part of yourself instead of blaming somebody else,
right, right. Well, you know, as a as a relationship coach when it it's so fascinating to me, because as our society has this push that I often see where it's like, I just got out of this relationship. And now I'm online looking for the next one versus, you know, my my, my advice is always like, Okay, put a pause on that for for a while. And, you know, let's let's look at what's inside. Let's look at that part of you, that you are repeating, and that you're pushing out or that you're, that you're finding out the outside world to give you reflection back.
Yeah. Yeah, if you're falling in love with the same bad person over and over again, and just in different forums, you can be sure that the problem is inside, not outside. Oh
my goodness. Well, this has been super rich conversation. And I really really appreciate your your time and your energy and just the creation of the sage tarot deck is it's a unique deck and having having you read from it is is really a gift. And so I'm just gonna say that there is a link in the show notes to check out more about where you can have that experience from Sage. And, and then I just wanted to say, you know, if somebody got one thing out of our conversation here today, what would you want them to get?
I would say if you really want to be in love, be in love with yourself.
Okay, now I'm going to follow ask a follow up question. Okay. Fall in love with yourself?
Well, I think the the lovers card gives you an idea of that. You fall in love with yourself by actually looking at the masculine or feminine or hidden parts of yourself the shadow, in other words, as it comes, and go, can I love this? Right? Can I love this? About myself? You know, so often the things that we can't stand in others are the things that we can't stand in ourselves. So look inside and go, what's the thing that I hate the most about myself? And how is a way that I can love that. And, you know, for many of us, there's a ton of stuff we have to hate about ourselves. And so there's a lot of work to do, right. And the more we can love all parts of ourselves, the more we can love and forgive others who we are in relationship with.
Beautiful, thank you so much. So
you really enjoyed it.
Yay. So my guest has been sage, we had wizard at the School of wizards. The creator of the sagely tarot deck, and just business consultant extraordinare and artists and so many other things. But I'm just thank you so much for hopping on with me. And this was kind of an impromptu desire that I had to explore love and specifically, love in the unseen world through the Tarot. This has been the better sex podcast, where we have unfiltered conversations to support your sex in getting better and better. So please go ahead and hit the subscribe button and stay current with us so that we can have more of these conversations. Again, thank you so much sage. I so appreciate you.
The pleasure is mine. Thanks
Transcribed by https://otter.ai