#constructed religion

[stagkingswife]

I’ve been thinking about posting/reposting some stuff about my personal self made religion. But you guys have to promise to be cool about it okay? Folks have been distinctly not cool in the past so I took as much of this stuff down as I could.

No trying to join my religion, no getting mad if I won’t privately provide additional information or confirm that you’ve been contacted by one of the entities that I worship. And definitely no “those are trickster spirits/you’re delusional!” I just want to have my little self made religion with my little unrecorded gods, and tell people about them because I think they’re neat.

[miochimochi]

First part of translating for me goes like this:

Subject Object Verb Link

The Creator stood upon the mountain and overlooked a frozen land. This is how it was in the beginning.

English is an SVO language which means that, typically, the subject comes before the verb which comes before the object. I don't know how to explain what each of these is as it's not as simple as agent-patient (the one doing the verb and the one being acted upon). We understand subject, object, and verb even if we can't entirely formulate the words to entirely explain them. "The dog bit me" and "I was bit by the dog" mean the same thing, the agent and patient are the same in both, but the subject and object switch.

SVO isn't the only word order either. We'll use the words "She hit me" in all word orders:

SOV: she me hit (Japanese)

SVO: she hit me (English)

VSO: hit she me (Irish)

VOS: hit me she (Fijian)

OVS: me hit she (Urarina)

OSV: me she hit (Warao)

I ordered these from most common to least common word order as well - and before going to Wikipedia for example languages! (Had SOV and SVO switched on the list initially though)

SOV accounts for almost half of the world's languages. But there's actually one other word order: free word order. This was the word order of Latin that would eventual be replaced in the Romance languages with groups preferring to use words in certain orders, most of them being SVO. The way that Latin did this is by markings that indicate what is what through a nominative-accusative system, one of the morphosyntactic alignment systems.

These systems are dependent on the syntactic relationship between various components of a sentence rather than placement of words within the sentence. The simplest system is the Dixon argument system:

(S)ole - the subject of a transitive verb

(A)gent - the subject of an intransitive verb

(P)atient - most times called the Object, but I like giving it more separation from word order, the object of a transitive verb

And the various alignments:

Nominative-Accusative - S=A ; P

Ergative-Absolutive - S=P ; A

Active-Stative - S¹=A ; S²=P

Austronesian Alignment - both S=A ; P and S=P ; A are true, people can choose to use either, although there are common triggers for each, working similar to voice in English

Direct Alignment - there is no distinction between S, A, or P, it's based on context clues

Tripartite Alignment - S, A, and P have their own separate cases

Transitive Alignment - A=P ; S

The most basic breakdown of the section chosen without any alteration to words to mark for anything is this:

Creator stand mountain overlook land-(frozen). This be beginning.

Marking them again for word position:

Creator stand mountain and overlook land-(frozen). This be beginning.

And now marking for argument:

Creator-A stand mountain-P and [Creator-S] overlook land-(frozen)-P. This-A be beginning-P.

Creator here is both the Sole and Agent in the same sentence since there's 2 verbs linked by an "and" which, in English, implies the subject being used again if no new subject is presented. Stand and Be are intransitive verbs where Overlook is transitive. Transitive verbs require an object for the subject to act upon where an intransitive verb can be acted upon by a subject without an object. You can say "I'm standing" and that's a complete sentence but you can't say "I'm overlooking" and have it be a compete sentence. "I'm standing" can take on an object with a preposition such as "on", but "I'm overlooking" always requires an object that is being overlooked and takes the object without the need for a preposition.

There's a few ways we can deal with the double argument:

Implied argument change - the subject is implied in the second part and so is the argument

Prepositional argument change - the preposition takes on the argument for the subject, so "and-S" would be its own separate thing from "and-A"

Repetition argument change - having to use the subject both times, changing only the argument

There's also other noun classes that can be used. For the nouns we have, we can go for a number of different possible cases (and this isn't an extensive list, just what would work here):

Creator : direct, ergative, nominative (not the intransitive case even though there's an intransitive verb because the preposition makes it grammatically act like a transitive verb and we could even make stand-on its own verb)

Mountain : absolutive, accusative, direct, locative, prepositional, superessive

Land : accusative

This : ergative, identical, nominative

Beginning : ablative, accusative

Could've missed some, but here we are. Thinking of cases, there's a hierarchy that languages typically follow, although breaking from these typicalities is typical of language as well. It's a general rule rather than a hard-set law.

nominative > accusative or ergative > genitive > dative > locative or prepositional > ablative and/or instrumental > others

Generally, if they're missing one of these, they are missing all after it. Such as, if there's no dative case, there likely isn't a locative, prepositional, ablative, instrumental, or others.

Verbs also have their own "classes" leading to what's called conjugation. Anything that changes a noun can even affect the verb form, such as having verb-a for a nominative and then verb-b for an accusative. The main ones to focus on first are gender, person, tense, and aspect.

Linguistically, gender has nothing to do with biology or psychology, although it's often tied to human biological genders (male and female). Could even look to a "spiritual gender" such as the concept of two-spirit in Amerindian cultures where one person has both a male and female soul and are, as a result, closer to the spiritual. That's why the culture building is an important part of language building. I imagine Mochian culture as having a belief in 3 souls: the genderless immortal soul that reincarnates, the soul that is inseparable from the body (and thus is what the body is) that rests when they die, and the soul that is created by memories that dies once they are forgotten. The memory-soul's "gender" is what they are remembered as and has nothing to do with one's biology.

Person depends on perspective. We all know first, second, and third person. First person is from the perspective of the subject "I ran home". Second person is from the perspective of the other "you ran home". Third person is from the perspective of an outside observer "they ran home". But there are other persons to go with. Could simply split the third person to have one case for denoting the topical person and the other case for the obviate person. Could even have a 4th person or a 0 person for an indefinite general referrence.

Tense is another commonly understood one. English has three - past, present, and future - right? Actually, no. That may be true in an abstract temporal sense but not in a linguistic sense. English only has two tenses: past and non-past. "I wanted", "I want", and "I will want" are all talking about want at various temporal moments, the past being "I wanted". But "I want" and "I will want" are using the same grammatical tense, the non-past tense. The word "will" is adding context about the non-past verb "want" to denote this as a future thing that is to come. But there are languages that do have a dedicated future tense so "I will want" would have "will want" as a singular verb with a future tense, so it's more like "I want-F". There are a lot more tense systems - and even tenseless systems which rely on context clues and "helper" words. Past-Nonpast is as described, Present-Nonpresent and Future-Nonfuture work similarly. Tenses work in two ways: relative or absolute. An absolute tense is relative to the "now", a relative tense is relative to another point in time. A relative tense can also be divided between a strict relative and an absolute-relative tense. Strict relative is relative to just some point in time, absolute-relative is relative to a point in time that is relative to the "now". "I ran", "I sweat when I run", "I will be running tomorrow" are examples of absolute, strict relative, and absolute-relative, in that order.

Aspect is another side to temporal marking. Rather than telling the point in time, aspect tells the finality, or lack thereof, of the verb. These do more than just say whether or not the verb is ongoing (continuous "I'm running") or complete (perfect "I ran"), it can also tell that it happened in a single moment (momentane "I sighed"), that it's done regularly (habitual "I run everyday"), that it almost happened (defective "I almost fell"), and that it is beginning (inceptive "I'm about to run").

So breaking down the verbs:

Stood : Past tense, perfect aspect of Stand

Overlooked : Past tense, perfect aspect of Overlook

Is how it was : Past tense, perfect progressive aspect of Be

All of these verbs had an ending, all of them happened before the present, one of them is the end of some that was continuous. Last thing I want to get to is adpositions and modifiers, which are divided between prepositions (preceding their complement) and postpositions (following their complement). The main thing about adpositions to look at is Hawkins' Universals:

Preposition ⊃ ( (N-Demonstrative v N-Numeral v N-Possessive ⊃ N-Adjective) & (N-Adjective ⊃ N-Genitive) & (N-Genitive ⊃ N-Relative) )

Postpositions ⊃ ( (Adjective-N v Relative-N ⊃ Demonstrative-N & Numeral-N & Possessive-N) & (Demonstrative-N v Numeral-N v Possessive-N ⊃ Genitive-N) )

Lemme explain what you're looking at...

If the language is Prepositional, then is the Demonstrative, Numeral, or Possessive comes after the Noun then the Adjective will come after the noun, if not then it can go either way. If the Adjective is after the Noun, then the Genitive will come after the Noun, if not then it can go either way. If the Genitive comes after the Noun, then the Relative will come after the Noun, if not it can go either way.

If the language is Postpositional, then if the Adjective or Relative come before the Noun, then the Demonstrative, Numeral, and Possessive will come before the Noun, if not then they can go either way. If the Demonstrative, Numeral, and Possessive come before the Noun, then the Genitive will come before the Noun, if not then it can go either way.

I just threw a lot of words at you so I should define things that you probably don't know (we all know what an Adjective and Noun are, right? I don't need to define those, right?).

Demonstrative : "this" and "that" words, indicating what's being referred to

Numeral : "one" and "once" words, indicating the quantity of what's being talked about

Possessive : 's, indicating the owner of a thing

Genitive : an expression of the relationship between two nouns

Relative : a clause that modifies a noun

And finally, languages have hierarchies in the order of a modifier. The modifier hierarchy for English so as so:

Quantity > Opinion > Size > Age > Shape > Color > Origin > Material > Purpose > Noun

You don't say "the grey round old stone", you say "the old round grey stone". In an agglutinative language, you could pile all of these into one word, mashing word pieces together to build a bigger word. "The old grey stone" could be theoldgreystone if English were agglutinative.

Now it's time to finally build this language... in the next post! I did a lot for this one, I'll get back to it later.

[kingoftheu]

"In the beginning, there was One, and the One was All and None. They were in the image of every Race, and the image of none. Into every Race They poured a small sliver of Themself, and All of Themself.

They created the heavens and the earths. They called the universe from nothingness. They set upon the universe Their law. They bored holes into Their creation, and sewed Races large and small.

Unto every Race They sent Two, Two they sent. A First before Them, to prepare the way, and a Second after. And the First did not know for whom they worked, but the Second does, and so perfected the work of the First. And so every Race shall know the One that is All and None"

Variations on the Infinite Stars, the Holy Symbol of the Omnivitas Faith, the primary evangelical religion in a SciFi setting I may start cooking with. All, of these would be used by various groups from, “Theocratic Government” to “Church in neighboring state unaffiliated with the theocrats” to “bored kid doodling”

[son1c]

thinking about the sonic world and worldbuilding again and you know, sonic is a famous hero in the same way that tony hawk is a famous skateboarder but there's so many gods and deities in the sonic world that what if some people just thought HE was a god? he'd hate that so much. but it would make sense, and it would be insane if he stumbled upon something dedicated to him like that

[valtsv]

Hii have you read "Hell is an absence of God" by Ted Chiang? It made me think of your angelverse a lot...

i haven't, but i'm definitely going to now! i think there's a fundamental difference in that in angelverse, the existence of any god or godlike being is left deliberately ambiguous; even angels don't know if there was ever a god or gods. they've destroyed their own historical records so many times in the wars for the throne of heaven, and its changing of hands between the various political factions that make up the republic of heaven, that it's impossible to be sure. which is both a liberating and vulnerable position to be in, because it leaves a lot of people seeking to place their faith in something in a position to be exploited by angels and demons posing as false gods, or emmissaries of one. however, from what i've gathered from the summary, it would serve as fantastic inspiration for my writing and worldbuilding.

[chamerionwrites]

Intellectually I understand where people are coming from, but personally I do THE biggest double take every time someone boils down conservative Christian ideology (and/or secularized cultural reflections thereof) to a kind of dour puritanism that proclaims happiness is sin/suffering is a moral good/everyone should be miserable all the time. Like I get it! I do. But also, institutionally, I have never met a group of more passionate worshippers and vicious defenders of their own comfort than evangelical Christians. There is a reason the common thread between my various weird triggers more or less boils down to "toxic positivity." There is a REASON my exvangelical tag is #walking away from omelas.

[ihavea-tummyache]

Poem #1:

[asterdeer]

tear the pitch apart

not really please be nice-ish but i'm submitting a pitch to a literary festival pitch war and i need to be the most specialest goodest writer so the pitch war runners will say nice things about me in front of 50 people and maybe decide to agent me. haha what

A farm boy follows a thief on an interplanetary petty crime spree in search of a mythical deep-space monster. The Monster At the Bottom Of the Universe is a sweeping space opera about the myths we tell to keep ourselves alive — and what happens when those myths come true.

it has to be 280 characters or less (i'm presuming including spaces a la twitter) and this feels so shallow and uninteresting to me but i don't have ROOM for more and i'm trying to follow their pitch construction formula. would you read this book, is the second line too cheesy, is it too vague (I CAN'T HELP IT), should i temporarily change the 41-character book name so i have a little bit more room to pitch the damn book rather than its title, do i need to start from scratch

[loveerran]

There are LDS folks who believe a) all Spirit Children of our Heavenly Parents are binary male or female, and b) everyone's assigned sex at birth matches their Spirit's eternal gender. Since LDS theology holds that our underlying Spirit is part of an eternal existence that has no beginning or end, the binary gender view is particularly significant.

However, consider that there are times sex at birth is assigned incorrectly or cannot be determined:

Perhaps 100 billion humans have lived. If only .02% have had ambiguous/divergent genital/chromosomal presentation, we're discussing 20 million individuals, up to 2 million of whom are alive today. At broader definitions of intersex, that number is more than 100 million persons alive today - about the same percentage as people born with red hair.

Use whatever criteria you want to determine whether a body is male or female, somewhere there will be an individual who rides the line between male and female such that you cannot determine which side of the line they fall on. No matter who defines the criteria, or what those criteria are, there comes a point where we just can't tell.

Which Spirit does God put in that body? What if, under given criteria, the body is 60% male/40% female outside and 60% female/40% male inside? What Spirit is sent to the body then?

We don't have to go far to find cases that raise questions. Castor Semenya was born, raised and competed as a woman her entire life, until it was discovered she was XY (and she still competed as a woman some after that). Other cases, like a 33 yr old man with a uterus, ovaries and XX chromosomes internally, but full outward male genitalia, or an XY woman who never got her period, are mentioned relatively frequently in medical literature and the news. Development factors, natural and artificial, further complicate gender and sex identity. We're still learning about neurological differences outside of typically identified intersex characteristics.

If someone who is reproductively female spends their entire life as a man, what Spirit did God send to that body? Because somewhere, somewhen, this has happened and it may be more often than you think.

Since we cannot make a blanket statement about the gender of Spirits matching assigned sex at birth, let's be more careful about what we say. The truth is we don't always know. The gospel is about ministering to the one, and somewhere that one is listening to you. Be kind to them. Tell them the truth, even if that truth is 'we don't know all the answers for everyone' (LDS Handbook 38.7.7). There is goodness and power in admitting to not knowing everything and in pleading with the Lord for further light and knowledge. Such honesty may give us less to repent of later.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

The word transsexual is not a slur.

Transgender just does not do justice in explaining our experience anymore. It has become too broad a word. If you’re going to say that you do not need gender dysphoria or to medically transition in order to be transgender, there needs to be a word that describes people like me who need medical intervention in order to survive.

The transsexual experience has much less to do with gender than it does with our own sex characteristics. Gender is kind of a secondary problem, but for us what it’s really about, is our sex, therefore transsexual. Because we experience so much distress over our biological primary and secondary sex characteristics.

That's why this whole narrative of, "gender is a social construct and therefore I can be whatever gender I feel at any moment," is so frustrating for us because gender is really a secondary problem for us where the main problem being our sex, which is why we have the need, the intense need and drive, to transition medically.

Do I feel more comfortable in the female gender role? Yes, absolutely, of course I do. But really, I could take on all those roles as a man. And I wouldn’t be any less of a man.

It is this incongruence between my brain and my heart and my physical body combined with a distress of my biological sex characteristics that drives me to transition. Not because I think, "oh well, I always liked Barbie dolls, or I always like the colour pink." And while those things may be true, it all boils down to our sex characteristics. That is the driving factor and motivation behind us transsexuals' transition.

Not making this video to invalidate anyone. I’m just getting a lot of comments of saying, "ew, gross, why would you say transsexual?" And the reason is because it is a definition that describes my experience and other people's experiences like me, and it is needed and it is underneath the trans umbrella. Okay, that’s it.

==

Reminder: every "LGBT" group has already removed dysphoria from the definition of "trans." It's now entirely about preferences, personality traits, moods, and fetishes: what are your favorite colors, what toys do children like to play with, do you feel more feminine or more masculine today?

People with a significant clinical disorder are left out in the cold as pretenders, narcissists, fetishists, perverts and other activists steal or manipulate the language they use to explain who they are.

I support the plight of transsexuals. I will not participate in the pretend games of "transgender"; you're an average person LARPing as special and screwing things up for those who have real needs.

[vergess]

It's the fucking ~revolution will save us~ rapture shit, it really is.

Westerners are so poisoned on their own toxic theology-turned-colonialism that they cannot fucking conceive of a Good End.

Palestinians must be grateful that Hamas slaughters them en masse for the goal of slaughtering all Jews, because it's ~better than the alternative~ of Israeli immolation.

Have you sick, twisted western animals ever fucking considered that perhaps your refusal to ALLOW a good end because of your own colonial needs are the goddamn problem?

No?

No, you think it's just the Jews, right? The Jews have a special evil deep in their hearts, yeah? The Jews, who were EXPELLED VIOLENTLY from every other place in the region are the problem.

Why?

Because your religion says so.

Your religion says Jews are evil and Palestinians are animals to be sacrificed in cleansing that evil.

You're all barbaric little mongrels.

[miochimochi]

Alright, time to build the language.

Let's play around with word order after figuring some other stuff out first, although I'm leaning towards OSV right now. Let's just remind ourselves the system we're working with

Subject Object Verb Link

The Creator stood upon the mountain and overlooked a frozen land. This is how it was in the beginning.

I'll be going with Active-Stative alignment, so S¹=A and S²=P, perhaps going with agentive-default fluid-S, so this would mean that S¹=A will be unmarked, as it is assumed the default position, where S²=P will be marked, as it is a change to the default. Nouns will have a Agentive and Patientive form as a result, with the Patientive Sole being marked like the Patient. But languages aren't strict rule followers, they have exceptions. I could imagine there being exceptions to the rule, such as a Locative being marked in both Agentive and Patientive cases, depending on which one is being x'd on. Speaking of cases, I think I'll go with Genitive (GEN - attributive relationship between two nouns), Dative (DAT - marks the recipient of an action), Locative (LOC - indicates location in relation to another noun), and Instrumental (INS - something being used by another noun) cases. For the locative case, the specifics of in, on, under, &c. is inferred but helper words could be used.

And here's the rule for adpositions:

Prepositional - Demonstrative, numeral, adjectives, comes after the noun, possessive, genitive, and relative come before the noun

Quantity > Opinion > Size > Age > Shape > Color > Origin > Material > Purpose > Noun seems perfectly fine to me, I guess I could change some just to change some. Could order them by objectivity I suppose. I could go objective to subjective

Quantity > Material > Size > Shape > Origin > Age > Color > Purpose > Opinion > Noun

Or the reverse

Opinion > Purpose > Color > Age > Origin > Shape > Size > Material > Quantity > Noun

The noun should come at the end due to the language being prepositional. So I'll go with subjective to objective for this, keeping the objective closer to the noun just makes sense to me.

Number is something I didn't really go over, that's my bad. English only has 2 numbers: singular and plural. But I'll do more than just the two. Singular (SNG) "one dog", definite plural (DPL) "multiple dogs", indefinite plural (IPL) "many dogs". The definite plural is for a defined or implied set amount, such as "dogs in the city" or "two dogs". The indefinite plural is for an undefined amount, there's just "dogs" out there and we're not talking about some specific amount.

I will also go with a tri-gender system of Masculine, Feminine, and Inanimate. There is a neuter as well, but it would be based on syntax. So this means I would need to determine what triggers gender agreement. The most common is vowel-based triggers. I think I'll go with /i/ and /ɪ/ for the feminine neuter and /a/ and /o/ for the masculine neuter. The masculine and feminine are together the "animate" gender for this language, but this doesn't mean only animals will get it, as animacy has been applied to what is inanimate, such as rivers, mountains, the sun and moon, &c. Pronouns would come from this, so He/It (it¹), She/It (it²), and It⁰ are the pronouns that come directly from this gender system but some others will be used as well. There will be both an inclusiveᶦ and exclusiveᵉ to various pronouns. Clusivity is simply marking whether includes or excludes something. English doesn't have this, if you say "we" one would have to infer by context clues if you're including them or if it's you vs them. So, we have I/me, youᶦ referring to a group, youᵉ referring to an individual, weᶦ including you, weᵉ excluding you, and they. It⁰ would be divided between 3 definites: d¹, d², and d³. These are the this, that, those, and these of the language. There's also the relative and indefinite pronouns which I would say distinguishes directness r�� for the relative which refers back to something "to whom it may concern, that which we knew what was to come" and r⁰ for the indefinite which is more general "to each his own"

Another thing I forgot to mention in my last post: articles. Articles are the "the"s and "a(n)"s. English has 3 articles, 2 marked. Definite, indefinite, and zero. Definite is like "the book", whereas indefinite is "a book", and zero is simply "books" as it's only used for plurals and mass nouns. I'll go with animate definite "the¹ man", inanimate definite "the² book", and zero which will be for anything not definite "the² book" vs "⁰ book".

Now for verbs... imma be pretty basic with tense: past (PST), an unmarked present (PRS), and future (FUT). Then I have to think of the aspects that I want to convey. I think unmarked would be perfect (PER - it has happened and still has relevance to the now). There will also be a perfective (PFV - it has happened at some point in relation to the now), continuous (CON - it is ongoing in the now), discontinuous (DIS - it happened but might not be now), prospective (PRO - it is beginning to happen), and I couldn't find one for this so I'm creating the name suspensive (SUS - it is about to stop happening). The discontinuous could only be applied to the past. At least, I can't conceptualize it being used in a present or future tense.

Word order is still there to figure out, though... so the general rule across the majority of languages is Object-Verb bonding. That means that the Object and Verb are most likely to be next to each other. So SOV, SVO, VOS, and OVS. So would Proto-Mochians hold to this? Most likely. But part of what should be figured out is where exactly their Euro-Asiatic ancestors came from and then we can look at how their languages developed. One idea for the first peoples of the Americas would be through ancient Siberian populations. So what are the Siberian languages like? Itelmen is SOV, Chukchi is free but SOV is standard, Alyutor is also free with SVO and VSO being common, Nivkhe languages are SOV, Ket is SOV. It seems that among Siberian languages, there's a tendency towards SOV, but this also may be a result of contact with other languages, such as the Turkic, Slavic, and Mongol languages. What of languages in the region in our timeline? The Salish languages are by and large verb-initial with the most common word order being VSO. Alyutor has VSO also being common, so perhaps the Alyutors (sadly going extinct with less than 500 people and less than 10% of that actually speaking the language) and the Salish might have a common linguistic ancestor? Highly unlikely, bordering on the absurd, though interesting to think about such a possibility. So we could take the other approach to the Salish for that dichotomy of the two worlds, but I think a fusion of them might be better. So what do we get with SOV+VSO? We could use both, and indeed this proto-language will be free word order, but for the purposes of where we'll end up, let's go with VOS as the commonly used word order and give that a shot. Can always change it later as a part of the language's evolution.

Next step after putting all of this together is to take the phonemes and these rules and put them together to finally (for real this time) translate.

[axololtls]

[stacy-fakename]

Rat Grinders:Don’t do anything to the Bad Kids until antagonized, and it’s later revealed that their bad actions were a result of being groomed by one of their teachers for years and then murdered and possessed.

Intrepid Heroes:Fuck you, sending you to hell and you can’t be revived.

[thejaymaniac]

Alright I'll say it. The reason i don't believe in the Christian God is because men have the same amount of ribs as women. Major plot hole there, can't believe we let them get away with this

[cookinguptales]

Thank you so much for the tarot reading you did for me a little while back 💜 i'm sorry it's taken me so long to say that! i do rather think you have prophetic gifts, by the way- it was spookily accurate and helped me a lot 🔮

No problem! I'm glad it was helpful to you!

I do tend to get at least one message like this every time I do a tarot night for my followers, and like... you are totally entitled to that belief! What do I know about psychic phenomena and prophecy anyway? lmao. Maybe I am psychic.

But personally, I believe that tarot has a high likelihood of speaking to us no matter what, if just because the archetypal nature of the cards means that they're dealing with problems that we all struggle with. We all have self-doubt, we all have complicated relationships with money, we all crave love of some kind. We all have trauma in our past and we all want to believe that this time, things could be okay.

One of the reasons I like tarot cards is because they are inanimate objects that we imbue with meaning. They were just playing cards, y'know? We're the ones that gave them power over us, and we did that by filling them with our own stories. We placed a mirror in those cards, and while mirrors can be used for scrying, they can also just be used to take a good hard look at ourselves.

If I say "oh, you've had money troubles in the past," who doesn't that apply to? Maybe I'm thinking about me, when we were homeless for a while when I was a kid. Maybe someone else is thinking about the money they lost to gambling last week. Maybe someone else, someone wildly wealthy, is thinking about a stock market crash that brought their five mansions down to two. Maybe a final person has just never had quite enough to make ends meet. God knows that describes a lot of people.

I like tarot because we can all look at the same spread and see something different. I see a story to tell to the best of my ability, and that's how I do readings. But for the people getting those readings, they're often looking into little mirrors and seeing how they reflect their own personal experiences.

Because, you know, we all see different things in the same mirror! That's how tarot works, I think. Maybe some people are a little better at reading things in that mirror and interpreting what they see there, but we all see something new and different and deeply, deeply personal when we look at those cards.

Love that for us.