The Lord of Valour can best be summed up by the phrase ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’. It is a card about encountering demanding and formidable situations in life, and having the courage to be true to your own desires, ambitions and needs.
Life is full of challenges. And sometimes we find it difficult to seize the moment, grasp our opportunities and live life to the full. The Seven of Wands comes up to indicate that you are facing one of those momentous happenings in life, and advises you to believe in yourself, grab your courage in both hands and go forward.
This will not only apply to difficult things – it can also point out to you that there is an opportunity to make your wildest dream come true, if only you will throw caution to the winds and dive right in!
The Lord of Valour is an exciting card, but when it comes up you will probably also feel a bit apprehensive. Don’t let caution dampen your enthusiasm. Go ahead! Fight for what you want. If you do, you’ll stand a good chance of getting it.
Because Wands are a suit much concerned (at their deepest level) with the ethics of right living, there is another instance when this card might show in a reading. That is when you find yourself in a position where you are forced to fight for what you believe in. Whilst sometimes reluctant to take up the fight, you will feel compelled to stand up and be counted. Identify this aspect if you have the Aeon (the Last Judgement) or Adjustment (Justice) coming up. Often, if we acquit ourselves well in times like these, we will achieve major progress in our own spiritual journey.
And remember – there’s no courage without fear. If you don’t feel fearful, courage is not required!!
stickymarx Jun 3, 2017 YEMEN – SANAA (Changed ‘title’ to try & save it from deletion by uToon..fyi? Dec.1st. ’19) She knew that this ;,SNL; & the ‘live’ performance she was ‘booed’ into! at an MTV Special? ‘We all love Robert Zimmerman’..Gig! The ‘Bought & Paid for’..Celeb? Audience! Full of ‘other ‘sick-oh-le-phants’? Would be the end of her ‘Career’! But? She did it anyway! A ‘real’ Heroine! Eire..needed ‘someone’! To do ‘something’! To try? Stop the Horror!! But? Normal? Age-Old & Daily Abuse! & Murder! Of her Children! Now go find that ‘clip’! It’s available on YT! (or was?)Take a look at ‘Who’..were ‘booing’! Then ‘ask yourself’..why? & to Sinéad o’Conner..I say..’War’! Till these Evil Perpetrators! Enablers! & all of those within the Law & in whose hands the ‘Power’ lies! Do your feckin’Job! Till ‘Justice’! Is no longer..Blind! I say ‘War’! For..The Victims! Survivors! & Untold numbers! Of the children who did not! Rest in Peace! In the ‘Grace of God’s! Care! I will never forget what you did! Sinéad! Bless You! Daughter! Thankyou! From a Crazy! Old! Cat Lady? ;Q xxx
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Emotions are not inconvenient distractions from reason and logic. They are key to the rigorous functioning of our rational minds. Neurologist Antonio Damasio proved this conclusively in his book “Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.” The French philosopher’s famous formula—”I think, therefore I am”—offers an inadequate suggestion about how our intelligence works best. This is always true, but it will be especially crucial for you to keep in mind during the coming weeks. Here’s your mantra, courtesy of another French philosopher, Blaise Pascal: “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.”
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The famous Taurus TV star Jay Leno once did a good deed for me. I was driving my Honda Accord on a freeway in Los Angeles when he drove up beside me in his classic Lamborghini. Using hand signals, he conveyed to me the fact that my trunk was open, and stuff was flying out. I waved in a gesture of thanks and pulled over onto the shoulder. I found that two books and a sweater were missing, but my laptop and briefcase remained. Hooray for Jay! In that spirit, Taurus, and in accordance with current astrological omens, I invite you to go out of your way to help and support strangers and friends alike. I believe it will lead to unexpected benefits.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): “Did you learn how to think or how to believe?” When my friend Amelie was nine years old, her father teased her with this query upon her return home from a day at school. It was a pivotal moment in her life. She began to develop an eagerness to question all she was told and taught. She cultivated a rebellious curiosity that kept her in a chronic state of delighted fascination. Being bored became virtually impossible. The whole world was her classroom. Can you guess her sign? Gemini! I invite you to make her your role model in the coming weeks.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): In the coming weeks, I advise you not to wear garments like a transparent Gianfranco Ferre black mesh shirt with a faux-tiger fur vest and a coral-snake jacket that shimmers with bright harlequin hues. Why? Because you will have most success by being down-to-earth, straightforward, and in service to the fundamentals. I’m not implying you should be demure and reserved, however. On the contrary: I hope you will be bold and vivid as you present yourself with simple grace and lucid authenticity.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): In 1811, Leo scientist Amedeo Avogadro (1776–1856) formulated a previously unknown principle about the properties of molecules. Unfortunately, his revolutionary idea wasn’t acknowledged and implemented until 1911, one hundred years later. Today his well-proven theory is called Avogadro’s law. According to my analysis of the astrological omens, Leo, you will experience your equivalent of his 1911 event in the coming months. You will receive your proper due. Your potential contributions will no longer be mere potential. Congratulations in advance!
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Israeli poet Yona Wallach mourned the fact that her soul felt far too big for her, as if she were always wearing the clothes of a giant on her small body. I suspect you may be experiencing a comparable feeling right now, Virgo. If so, what can you do about it? The solution is NOT to shrink your soul. Instead, I hope you will expand your sense of who you are so your soul fits better. How might you do that? Here’s a suggestion to get you started: Spend time summoning memories from throughout your past. Watch the story of your life unfurl like a movie.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Nineteenth-century Libran physician James Salisbury had strong ideas about the proper ingredients of a healthy diet. Vegetables were toxic, he believed. He created Salisbury steak, a dish made of ground beef and onions, and advised everyone to eat it three times a day. Best to wash it down with copious amounts of hot water and coffee, he said. I bring his kooky ideas to your attention in hopes of inspiring you to purge all bunkum and nonsense from your life—not just in relation to health issues, but everything. It’s a favorable time to find out what’s genuinely good and true for you. Do the necessary research and investigation.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): “I’m amazed that anyone gets along!” marvels self-help author Sark. She says it’s astonishing that love ever works at all, given our “idiosyncrasies, unconscious projections, re-stimulations from the past, and the relationship history of our partners.” I share her wonderment. On the other hand, I am optimistic about your chances to cultivate interesting intimacy during the coming months. From an astrological perspective, you are primed to be extra wise and lucky about togetherness. If you send out a big welcome for the lessons of affection, collaboration and synergy, those lessons will come in abundance.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Please don’t make any of the following statements in the next three weeks: 1. “I took a shower with my clothes on.” 2. “I prefer to work on solving a trivial little problem rather than an interesting dilemma that means a lot to me.” 3. “I regard melancholy as a noble emotion that inspires my best work.” On the other hand, Sagittarius, I invite you to make declarations like the following: 1. “I will not run away from the prospect of greater intimacy—even if it’s scary to get closer to a person I care for.” 2. “I will have fun exploring the possibilities of achieving more liberty and justice for myself.” 3. “I will seek to learn interesting new truths about life from people who are unlike me.”
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Champions of the capitalist faith celebrate the fact that we consumers have over 100,000 brand names we can purchase. They say it’s proof of our marvelous freedom of choice. Here’s how I respond to their cheerleading: Yeah, I guess we should be glad we have the privilege of deciding which of fifty kinds of shampoo is best for us. But I also want to suggest that the profusion of these relatively inconsequential options may distract us from the fact that certain of our other choices are more limited. In the coming weeks, Capricorn, I invite you to ruminate about how you can expand your array of more important choices.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): My best friend in college was an Aquarius, as is my favorite cousin. Two ex-girlfriends are Aquarians, and so was my dad. The talented singer with whom I sang duets for years was an Aquarius. So I have intimate knowledge of the Aquarian nature. And in honor of your unbirthday—the time halfway between your last birthday and your next—I will tell you what I love most about you. No human is totally comfortable with change, but you are more so than others. To my delight, you are inclined to ignore the rule books and think differently. Is anyone better than you at coordinating your energies with a group’s? I don’t think so. And you’re eager to see the big picture, which means you’re less likely to get distracted by minor imperfections and transitory frustrations. Finally, you have a knack for seeing patterns that others find hard to discern. I adore you!
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Is the first sip always the best? Do you inevitably draw the most vivid enjoyment from the initial swig of coffee or beer? Similarly, are the first few bites of food the most delectable, and after that your taste buds get diminishing returns? Maybe these descriptions are often accurate, but I believe they will be less so for you in the coming weeks. There’s a good chance that flavors will be best later in the drink or the meal. And that is a good metaphor for other activities, as well. The further you go into every experience, the greater the pleasure and satisfaction will be—and the more interesting the learning.
In the winter of 1947, drained by the bustle and constant striving that drives life in New York, Nin took a holiday in Acapulco, Mexico — still a mostly undeveloped patch of wilderness, on which the Hotel El Mirador had been built as twelve rooms on the edge of a cliff just a few years earlier. She was immediately struck by the world of difference between the local way of life and the obsessive living-making of the workaholic culture from which she had taken respite.
Three decades before Susan Sontag lamented the “aesthetic consumerism” of vacation photography, which commodifies the experience by prioritizing its record over its livingness, and more than half a century before we came to compulsively catalog every private moment on the social web, Nin writes:
I am lying on a hammock, on the terrace of my room at the Hotel Mirador, the diary open on my knees, the sun shining on the diary, and I have no desire to write. The sun, the leaves, the shade, the warmth, are so alive that they lull the senses, calm the imagination. This is perfection. There is no need to portray, to preserve. It is eternal, it overwhelms you, it is complete.
Nin had many friends of color in an era when that was rather uncommon for the average white person, and saw white Americans’ and Europeans’ way of life as a rote existence greatly inferior in its sensorial unimaginativeness compared to the cultures from which jazz, the art-form she most admired, sprang. Faced with the radically different disposition of the Mexican locals, she considers what they know about living with presence that the society from which she escaped does not:
The natives have not yet learned from the white man his inventions for traveling away from the present, his scientific capacity for analyzing warmth into a chemical substance, for abstracting human beings into symbols. The white man has invented glasses which make objects too near or too far, cameras, telescopes, spyglasses, objects which put glass between living and vision. It is the image he seeks to possess, not the texture, the living warmth, the human closeness.
Illustration from a rare first edition of Nin’s 1944 short-story collection ‘Under a Glass Bell.’ Click image for more.
Many decades before we became transfixed by the glowing screens of our devices, which came to interfere with the very basics of being a city life, Nin adds:
Here in Mexico they see only the present. This communion of eyes and smiles is elating. In New York people seem intent on not seeing each other. Only children look with such unashamed curiosity. Poor white man, wandering and lost in his proud possession of a dimension in which bodies become invisible to the naked eye, as if staring were an immodest act. Here I feel incarnated and in full possession of my own body.
Four years later, Nin returns to Acapulco and is once again enchanted by the aliveness that its invitation to presence awakens in the spirit:
To me Acapulco is the detoxicating cure for all the evils of the city: ambition, vanity, quest for success in money, the continuous contagious presence of power-driven, obsessed individuals who want to become known, to be in the limelight, noticed, as if life among millions gave you a desperate illness, a need of rising above the crowd, being noticed, existing individually, singled out from a mass of ants and sheep… Here, all this is nonsense. You exist by your smile and your presence. You exist for your joys and your relaxations. You exist in nature. You are part of the glittering sea, and part of the luscious, well-nourished plants, you are wedded to the sun, you are immersed in timelessness, only the present counts, and from the present you extract all the essences which can nourish the senses, and so the nerves are still, the mind is quiet, the nights are lullabies, the days are like gentle ovens in which infinitely wise sculptor’s hands re-form the lost contours, the lost sensations of the body… As you swim, you are washed of all the excrescences of so-called civilization, which includes the incapacity to be happy under any circumstances.
The Ace of Cups represents the beginning of love, fertility and creativity. It is a card to inspire confidence and happiness. When it turns up a reading of an everyday nature it can indicate the start of a loving relationship (of either the romantic or friendship variety); it can represent the beginning of a project in which a great deal of loving energy is invested (rather like the beginning of angelpaths); or sometimes it can reveal conception – the beginning of a new life.
If you are looking at the Ace of Cups indicating a new relationship, then there will also be people cards up. If it is a romantic relationship, expect to see other good Cups, and perhaps the Lovers. Friendship will be more indicated by Wand type good cards.
The beginning of a project will normally have something like the Star or the Priestess, and Disks around it. These will help you to determine the viability of the project.
But at a spiritual level the Ace of Cups is even more important. The chalice depicted on most versions of this card is taken to be the Holy Grail, or in pagan terms, the Cauldron of Kerridwyn – source of inspiration and granter of wishes and dreams.
In this interpretation of the card then, we are examining a major spiritual step forward – a period where the deepest and most heartfelt spiritual desires of the querent come to the surface, and may be identified and pursued.
When this card comes up with the Hierophant, The Sun,The Moon or sometimes with Death, we must see ourselves as entering into a major transformational period from which we will emerge totally changed by the power of the Universe. During periods such as these we touch the very essence of spiritual power, and hopefully, we succeed in growing toward it, and allowing a little more of its light within us.
The Lion’s Gate Portal opens every year on, August 8 [and the days surrounding]. It’s a hugely important astrological phenomenon, which offers a chance to manifest more abundance than you could ever dream of.
Just when you thought Full Moon rituals were the only opportunity to lean into your witchy side, it turns out that there are plenty of dates in the astrological calendar to burn some sage and get the crystals out.
This date in particular screams let in the light and manifest bliss, but have you even heard of the Lion’s Gate Portal? More importantly, do you know how incredibly potent Lion’s Gate Portal manifestations are?
WHAT IS THE LION’S GATE PORTAL?
The Lion’s Gate Portal opens up once a year on August 8. The event is often referred to as 8/8 by spiritualists and astrologists, who associate the number with abundance. This is, among other things, because the number 8 on its side looks like infinity.
As it falls in Leo season 2022, it’s a time of great strength and pride. Its proximity to the absolute drama that is the August Full Moon 2022, also known as the Sturgeon Moon, means that this is your time to shake up the universe and dream big. The Lion’s Gate Portal opening is a time when you’re able to manifest abundance more than any other time of the year.
Every year the opening of this portal gives us a chance to evolve and become a more empowered, stronger, better version of ourselves. It’s a chance to move nearer to the person you want to be and the life you want to live.
LION’S GATE PORTAL RITUAL IDEAS
As the Lion’s Gate Portal is fully opened, the high frequency of energy offered means it’s the perfect time to manifest your deepest desires and dreams. It’s a time to slow down, meditate and focus on your dreams.
One ritual, recommended by the contributors AstroTwins is to write down what you’d like to heal in your life, continue to develop and nurture, what you’d like to purge, and most importantly what you love and adore most about yourself. “Then, consider how you can use your amazing uniqueness to usher this new paradigm of love into the world,” they say. “Bring out your inner Leo to play, and see how it feels to infuse some ferocity into your world. May we all roar our way through the gate!”
She’s an Irish journalist and writer with a background in creative writing, comedy, and TV production.
Formerly Aoife was a contributing writer at Bustle and her words can be found in the Metro, Huffpost, Delicious, Imperica, EVOKE and her poetry features in the Queer Life, Queer Love anthology.
Outside of work you might bump into her at a garden center, charity shop, yoga studio, lifting heavy weights, or (most likely) supping/eating some sort of delicious drink/meal.
New Thinking Aug 1, 2023 Daniel Drasin is a cinematographer and editor, known for Calling Earth (2018), Scole: The Afterlife Experiment (2021) and Like, Totally… (2004). He is author of A New Science of the Afterlife: Space, Time, and the Consciousness Code. His website is https://www.dandrasin.com/ Here he shares insights from his long career as a paranormal student and researcher, from the 1960s to the present day. 00:00 Introduction 02:10 The Mothman prophecies 08:59 Full body materialization 14:25 Afterlife frequencies 27:48 Impossible but true 33:04 Parapsychology PhD 37:18 Afterlife communicators 47:56 Conclusion Edited subtitles for this video are available in Russian, Portuguese, Italian, German, French, and Spanish. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. (Recorded on June 27, 2023)
I am lying on a hammock, on the terrace of my room at the Hotel Mirador, the diary open on my knees, the sun shining on the diary, and I have no desire to write. The sun, the leaves, the shade, the warmth, are so alive that they lull the senses, calm the imagination. This is perfection. There is no need to portray, to preserve. It is eternal, it overwhelms you, it is complete.
