Spirit of Change (Upheaval)
Card XXIII Revealed
What if we could see
the Spirit of Change
as it worked?
Tendrils drilling
at soils we thought solid,
Dust rising
in the heat of this toil.
From the Creation of Earth,
to the field’s most recent plough,
we are robbed of words once again
of who, what, where, when, why
Left only with
“How…?”
The image of this stone has always intrigued me. Perplexed me. Challenged me. My father called it “Creation of Earth.” I have also called it “Upheaval.” As I write this today, I call it the Spirit of Change. What do you see in this stone?
No matter the particularities, the creative forces in this image are incredibly powerful. One feels the chaos, but also the directed purpose of the forms it depicts. This is a billion year-old stone, seemingly inanimate, but the movement and hard work expressed is undeniable. Whatever had existed before is undergoing transformation, perhaps a destruction, before it can enter a new phase.
It would say “pardon our dust” except there are no apologies here. Midjourney (/describe) sees in this stone a similarity to the work of John Martin, an English painter of the Romantic period who deviated noticeably from the “pretty” interests of the Victorian era. With painting titles such as The Great Day of his Wrath and The Last Judgement, this stone now has me wondering if it has parallels to the Tarot’s Judgement card, Wheel of Fortune or even Death.
In the stone image itself, a Sphinx seems to oversee the great transformation in the upper right corner. She symbolizes the forces of the unconscious and her riddles may be the only kind of sense on loan. The forms of faces begin to emerge, a premonition of the new life that is to come.
In many world creation myths, the world began in Chaos. The Egyptian god Atum spat out the earliest gods. Mbombo of the Kuba people vomited up the sun, moon and stars. In Andean mythology there was a “primeval cataclysm.”
First starts to the creation of the world, or humans, don’t always pan out well and angry gods sweep them away in torrents in order to try again. For instance, the Incan creator God, Viracocha, created people in the dark and when they disobeyed, destroyed them in a flood or turned them to stone. Sometimes I wonder if all that was created, are reflected in these billion year old stones.
One thing is for sure, we humans seem to once again be in a period of great upheaval.
Wars have been on the rise since the early 2000s, with the middleeast and Ukraine burning particularly close right now in our hearts and minds. We’re seeing upheaval in the atmosphere of the election with outrageous statements and assassination attempts. At the school I work at, we have engaged in special trainings to prepare for the inevitable odd behaviors, sensitivities and possible protests that lay ahead. Dual hurricanes have hit the east coast with extraordinary casualties - even the meterologists are experiencing an upheaval of emotion:
To take a look at the before and after photographs of these places hit by war and storm is to see a literalized version of Upheaval. It is as if things are being pulled up by the roots to be examined. When you pull a thing up by its roots it may be destroyed, it may also be transplanted in a new place. Some ideas we have planted in the past need to be pulled out, others brought back and grown. What is a weed and what is a soil-nourishing crop?
Ploughing, which has been around for about 13 millenia, is the process of breaking soil to aerate it and uproot weeds. It is often done in the Fall so that uprooted vegetation can decompose while ground temperatures are still warm. Fresh nutrients from beneath the top layer can be brought to the surface for a more fertile ground for the creation of, well, new plants.
New life is grown from the destruction and decomposition of the old. Maybe this time of year with its harvests, skulls and multi-cultural celebrations around death and ancestors highlights this stone’s message of the necessary Spirit of Change.
This is not a sweeping spiritual bypass that can find the good in any wrong-doing, and the silver linings within war. Make no mistake about it, the Spirit of Change is a profoundly messy and often painful ordeal. It breaks apart who we thought we were, tears from us those we love most, and breaks new ground waiting below the ground we knew.
It’s not a cry that you can hear at night
It’s not someone who has seen the light
It’s a cold and broken Hallelujah
~Leonard Cohen
A client of mine once saw within this stone the image of her mother working in a field, back-breaking work. It brought back to her how hard her mother had toiled to raise her, sewing seeds that would help create the woman she had now grown to be. This gave bittersweet meaning to the work she had before her, which was to now care for her mother with dementia.
It is odd…
that creativity still has a flowery connotation in our culture. It is still not considered serious work. It is seen as something soft, done joyously or even indulgently. Make no mistake about it, creation can be all those things, as well as a gut-wrenching mess, the breathing of dust and the splatter of blood that burns. It hurts, it excavates, it cuts up the collage of existence and makes something new, with or without glue.
Divination:
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