Barbara G. Walker

And you see this in art, in other art as well.

In Barbara Walker tarot deck, there's, I think, the Princess of Wands, is supposed to be an ancient goddess, but her body or her torso has been turned into this face and the lower region is this mouth with jaws that is green and the breasts, the eyes that are looking at you about to devour you.

Aubrey Beardsley also has a painting of a demon where the same thing, the body, the torso is a face and the breasts are staring at you menacingly.

And it does crop up in art, fine art, quite a lot, even though we don't notice it and we don't notice that, well, you know, the severed head of, you know, John the Baptist, you know, has these breasts pointing at him or his eyes are fixed, right? on Salome's breasts.

Now, I will assume that most of the witch wide web has watched this movie, but if not, spoiler alert, when Max lights the forbidden candle, he brings three witches back to life and some wonderfully campy chaos ensues, but...

I never considered the origin story of this phrase, hocus pocus, until fairly recently when I was looking through my favorite book of symbols from Barbara Walker, where she suggests that hocus pocus evolved from the medieval practice of intoning liturgical words as invocations and charms.

She says that hocus pocus is a corruption of the Latin phrase hoc est corpus maem, meaning this is my body from the sacrament of the Eucharist.

The word Eucharist derives from the Greek noun Eucharistia, meaning Thanksgiving, and it refers to a sacred Christian rite that commemorates the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples.

Yeah.

So to speak a little bit more on the Hermit, because this is one of my favorite cards of the Major Arcana, I have some quotes here from Barbara Walker in her book, The Secrets of the Tarot.

She writes, "...numbered ninth in the Major Arcana, the crucial number of the muses who gave inspiration and poised to enter the second lunar phase, the Hermit seemed to be starting a journey into the inner world of consciousness and the mystical." She goes on to say, often in a pit or cave, symbolizing the womb of spiritual rebirth.

I really love both of these quotes.

And really it goes back to this idea of the vestal virgin.

So I'm going to read a bit of that history from the Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara G. Walker that I have referenced before.

It's a... a giant tome of a book and again literally an encyclopedia um so they have some different uh what's i gonna say um references in here so they talk about virgo um season um they talk about the word virtue they talk about virgin birth and that idea of kind of the immaculate conception virgo is the constellation Virgo or the Virgin was Aragon the goddess of justice or Astraea the starry one.

They are identified with the Libera or Libra with the scales of justice, which is like the sort of like legal scale of balance imagery.

They have a book called Sacred Sex as well, so if you are interested in the ideas I talk about today, that's another kind of deep dive you can do.

That's by Gabriella Herstick.

I also have The Secrets of Tarot book by the same author that I talked about earlier, Barbara G. Walker.

The Secrets of Tarot Origins, History, and Symbolism.