Today’s choice was the Tarot of Japanese Fairy Tales.
The illustrations are amazing, striking a nice balance of theme and meaning. One thing I really enjoyed was the fact that for the bigger tales they made them the minor arcana suits but they really thought about the meaning behind them.
For example, what would you make the tale of Princess Kaguya into? The less insightful would go “Wands!” because Bamboo hahaha. But instead the tale of Kaguya is told all through the suit of Cups, the suit of insight and sentimentality. Who was the one in the suit of Wands then? Momotaro, which is fitting for the suit of passion.
Today’s reading made me think about what the Temperance card means. Upright it obvious means what its name suggests: Balance, self-control, patience. But is imbalance really that bad? scales aren’t balanced by default, they’re going to lean on one side until you adjust the other.
I choose this reading because it aligns with the Four of Swords.
So on the whole the reading is roughly talking about realigning and recovering for a conflict ahead.
Maybe that’s just in reference to my sleep schedule because despite only having four hours of sleep I still only slept four hours.
Outside of this detail, today was pretty uneventful. In fact, if I had to describe the day it would be “day where I make appointments” because the bulk of it was me making appointments that I skipped before.
In fact, one alternative title for this post can be “Oh God it’s already Almost November” because one of the appointments is my 6 months checkup for my hair transplant back in May. Which brings the question of if I should have a second go around with that.
I think I’ll save money for it and when I have the amount I’ll decide if I wanna use it for that.
So to not leave this post as a short sub-300 words post… I did mention I was going through a book about the book of Enoch.
I often joked that Enoch was a sign that fanfic writers expanding hard on non-elaborated details of a story was as old as humanity itself. Turns out I got that wrong.
So for those that don’t know, in the western canon Enoch is the father of Methuselah (who I feel is more recognized in Spanish-speaking countries because of the idiom “más viejo que Matusalén”). And the bible just says that he “walked with God: and he was no more; for God took him”, basically God yoinked him body and all, which is a big deal because he only did that later with Jesus.
There is a whole series of books that detail what happened afterwards. Enoch outright becomes the angel Metatron in the process. And I always took it as the sort of thing where a sect of a religion really likes one detail and expands on it, but apparently The Book of Enoch might instead be missing context for the western canon.
Like for example, as it turns out, The Flood didn’t just happen because Sodom ang Ghomorra were being nasty and God was Done with everything. According to the book of Enoch what happened was that angels saw human women and went “hey why can’t we have that?” and started having human wives, and their offspring were the Nephilim, a race of powerful giants with angelic powers that didn’t get hungry yet ate everything. The angels also taught all of the forbidden slurs spells and ways to kill to people (including apparently unborn murder AKA an explanation for child mortality).
The angels responsible were punished but the damage was done and THAT’S when the Flood was decided.
There’s even a super interesting tangent about how the point of humans procreating is to further their history with their limited lives but angels are eternal and should have no need for that. So those angels became fallen and demons as a sort of “well if you’re so enamored with the earthly world, FINE now you can’t leave it”.
Let’s just… conveniently ignore the language that treats women as only existing for the purpose of pushing out babies, that’s not the point today.
And that made me think “OF COURSE Old Testament God looks so vengeful and irrational, we’re probably skipping a million chapters of context”. Is Apocryphal God still one vengeful motherfucker? Sure but at least you can find a more reasonable line of thinking that doesn’t follow the Paradise Lost reasoning of “He is the Ultimate Good, dude trust Him”.
Anyway, back to the original point. Apparently the book of Enoch even influenced the New Testament as a whole, and while some theories suggest it predates Genesis, at the very least it was very contemporary with it or influenced it.
So my fanfic joke no longer works with that. Luckily for me I still have the way that Gnostics saw how vague the bible was about Seth and Norea (Adam and Eve’s third son and first daughter) for that.
By the way, if the Lithuanian that went through every post yesterday is reading this, thank you for reading! Hope you had a good time and will come back later.