Tag Archives: tarot

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The Nidana Cards: A Buddhist Oracle

Bhikkhu Parasamgate dropped by a few days ago. He’s a self-styled monk, whom I hadn’t seen in a while. He brings a bag, a bedroll, and goes around the country staying with people – usually for about a couple of weeks. He’s very low-maintenance. Provide him with access to a bathroom, kitchen, and a space for his bedroll, and he’s more than happy. People who invite him often ask him to teach meditation, yoga, or other esoteric stuff in return for his keep. I just like having good, long chats with him, about his current views, and what practices he’s using to deepen his understanding of awakening. In fact, ‘the Tibetan monk from Bedford’, who appeared in the previous article on this site, was pretty much based on Bhikkhu Parasamgate (although the real bhikkhu was first trained in the Theravadan tradition).

I was glad to see he’d put on a little weight since last summer, when he was looking far too skinny. I like the way he organises his life, always roaming around, completely outside the system, teaching and writing in his notebooks. (I’m not sure where he puts them once they’re full.) It’s a pretty insecure existence, however. We’ve discussed this, and I know it’s something he thinks about occasionally.

He told me about an idea he’d had to make a little cash, which he hoped to put away in case of emergencies. He’d noticed how popular tarot cards have become, and how useful they are for opening up insights into personal issues, or providing forecasts of possible events. But he’d also noticed how Buddhism has nothing equivalent.

nidana cards

Three of Bhikkhu Parasamgate's nidana cards in action.

This set him thinking. The reason that tarot is so effective, he decided, is because of how it maps the entire panoply of mundane experience. Everything is there in those 78 cards: the suits representing earth, water, air and fire; the minor arcana embodying the 10 sephiroth of the Tree of Life; and the major arcana corresponding to the 22 paths between between the sephiroth. Yet the main concern of Buddhism is with finding an exit from ordinary experience (or ‘suffering’, as the Buddha characterised it), rather than revelling in all its mundane glories.

Of course, for Buddhism to achieve that, it has to provide a full understanding of exactly what must be ‘escaped’. And this was what brought Bhikkhu Parasamgate, finally, to the nidanas – or ‘chains of causation’. These are the teachings within the Buddhist tradition that describe in greatest detail the ordinary, unenlightened world. So it was upon the nidanas that the bhikkhu built his new and uniquely Buddhist oracle. And the more he thought about it, the more amazingly suited to this purpose the nidanas seemed to be.

However, leading the sort of lifestyle that he does, his resources were limited. Luckily, he had a friend who could typeset the book he wrote. Although Bhikkhu Parasamgate is many things, he’s no draughtsman, and sadly he couldn’t find an artist with the time and interest to create original images for each nidana. He had to resort instead to trawling the internet for suitable pictures. Of course, he knew he couldn’t make money from these (that would be copyright theft) but he hoped that a professional publisher would take up the idea, run with it, and hire a suitable artist for the job.

Unfortunately, given the current state of publishing, no one was interested in taking on the substantial up-front cost of producing an original deck of 26 cards. Bhikkhu Parasamgate carried the nidana oracle in his bag, still hopeful, for three or four years, but last week he handed me a USB stick and explained he’d given up on making money from the idea, although he still thinks the nidana cards are too good an idea to waste. He has asked me to release both his book and the cards onto the internet, for free, with an assurance he hasn’t profited financially from anyone else’s work. He can’t remember now where he culled the images from. Hopefully, many of them are already in the public domain.

 

The Nidana Cards: A Buddhist Oracle and Teaching Tool, by Bhikkhu Parasamgate. (Book. 112 pages.) Download [PDF 14.1MB]
The cards. (26 cards, plus single backing design.) Download [PDF 32.6MB]
Backing design. (For use in making a deck of cards – see below.) Download [PDF 64Kb]

 

What the cards mean, how they’re used, and what divination has to do with Buddhism anyway, are questions the bhikkhu explores in his book, written in a style more wonderfully concise and engaging than anything I could manage. I hope readers of this website will find it as interesting as I did. It really does seem to offer a uniquely Buddhist system of divination.

The nidana cards are a nuanced and subtle oracle, nowhere near as ‘earthy’ as the tarot or the runes, and probably best applied to issues that are primarily psychological, or concerned with spiritual development. Even if you don’t use the cards, there’s plenty of interesting material in the book concerning Buddhism, meditation, enlightenment and divination. Spiritual geeks will probably enjoy the appendix, in which the bhikkhu shows how the nidanas can be mapped onto the tarot, the Tree of Life, and onto salient concepts from Integral theory. But if you decide you would like to use the cards, then you’ll need to make yourself a deck by hand, from the files supplied.

I never imagined this blog would turn all ‘arts and crafts’, but here are some instructions, based on how I made my own deck of cards:

  1. Print out the cards at as high a quality as your printer allows onto separate sheets of thick photo paper. I used glossy, A6 sized sheets (148 x 105 mm; 5.8 x 4.1 in), which worked really well.
  2. For the backing of the cards, print off a few sheets of the backing design onto A4 (or similar-sized) thick photo paper.
  3. With scissors, trim the nidana cards fairly close to, but not exactly on, the edges indicated by the fine black line.
  4. Using PVA glue, stick a group of cards face up onto a backing sheet. Make sure the backing sheet is oriented in the same direction for each group, otherwise it might be possible to guess the front of the card from its back!
  5. Cover the glued sheets with a cloth, and press overnight under a pile of books (or other weighty object) to flatten and prevent curling whilst the glue dries.
  6. Then, with a scalpel and ruler, cut out each card (now glued securely to its backing) along the fine black lines. Trim the rounded corners with sharp scissors.
  7. You’ll need some sort of covering to protect your cards, because printer inks are very vulnerable to moisture. I used self-adhesive plastic to cover mine – which turned out okay, although it was tricky to avoid air-bubbles. Various kinds of spray-on varnish are available, which might produce a good effect, if you’ve a suitable space in which to apply them.

Bhikkhu Parasamgate sends his best wishes to readers of this website, hoping that you find the book and cards useful, and he wishes you the very best of luck with finding enlightenment in this lifetime. If you have any feedback on his work, let me know, and I’ll pass on your comments the next time he swings by.

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The Liberation of Ronove

If you can summon a demon and bind it to your will, why couldn’t you liberate it into everlasting luminosity and peace?

But if you did, would that demon be gone for good? Would other magicians still be able to work with it?

Suppose someone summoned each demon of the Goetia in turn and compelled them to yield to everlasting bliss. Would that maleficent system of sorcery then have been dismantled for good?

From past experience I’ve learned it’s never a good idea to invite Goetic demons into your home, so Alan and I decided on an outdoor venue: the ancient hill fort on Hollingbury Hill, near Brighton. But first – at home – we banished, then invoked the Holy Guardian Angel and asked it via the pendulum whether this venture was a good idea. The answer was affirmative, so next – using bibliomancy – we chose a specific demon to liberate. The lucky winner was number twenty-seven, Ronove, who takes the form of ‘a monster’. (Not ideal company at midnight on the summit of an isolated hilltop.)

Hollingbury Hill Fort

The sensible way to approach Hollingbury Hill Fort - by daylight.

Previously we’ve established that recitation with intent of Leo Marks’ poem ‘The Life That I Have’ will liberate spirits that were formerly human. But, as Alan put it, ‘There’s no way am I declaring to a Goetic demon: “The life that I have is yours!”‘.

It was a good point. Luckily, Alan had to hand the text of a Tibetan Buddhist ritual: Natural Liberation of Negativity and Obscuration Through Enactment of the Hundredfold Homage. This seventeen-page wonder, which is included in the full translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Dorje, 2006), involves prostration to no less than a hundred ‘Peaceful and Wrathful Deities’ yet, with its promised result of guiding all beings to the pure buddha fields, it seemed that nothing less would do.

Equipped with rucksacks of Goetic paraphernalia, we set off for the site after dark. The hill fort is situated in a golf course on park land, so quite what that couple and the man with the dog had been doing, whom we encountered as we headed up, past the woods and into the dark, was entirely their business.

Raising Hell: The Ritual

No one else was in evidence when we arrived. It was Lammas (1st August), and I’d wondered if any pagans might be marking the festival, although midday seemed a far better time to be commemorating the fructifying powers of the sun. The lights of Brighton twinkled below us as we walked around the fort’s outer rampart, yet once we’d stepped down inside and begun our search for a suitable spot, the night was absolutely dark.

The demon wouldn’t choose to manifest as a feeling of being watched. I knew that much, because I was experiencing it already. The interior of the fort was covered in thick patches of gorse, which kept making sounds suggestive of someone hiding inside. Alan was putting on a brave face, but I could tell it was creeping him out too.

Circle and triangle.

A triangle of glo-sticks, and an uncircular circle of LED fake candles.

We found a raised, roughly circular area that we decided marked our spot. To form the triangle for the demon and our protective circle, we’d brought some string. Yes, somewhat flimsy, but I’d figured that it defines an unbroken area well enough, and is so light that it was actually quite unlikely to be blown away by the wind. We’d also brought a bag of plastic LED fake candles and a tube of glo-sticks. (It’s remarkable how much magical equipment is stocked by The Pound Shop.) We used the glo-sticks to delineate the triangle. The flickering LEDs we placed around the circumference of the circle, which – due to the uneven and scrubby ground – was in fact very far from being circular indeed. In recognition, once I’d performed the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, Alan took the trouble to cast a wand around our perimeter, to give it that extra protective boost.

Troubling both of us as we stood amongst our string and pretty lights was the thought of how we’d stand our ground if the demon manifested (for instance) as a police helicopter with its searchlight directed at us; or (far worse) as a psycho with a knife running at us from the bushes. Alan’s first evocation of the demon, which featured all the classic threats of ‘blasting rods’ and ‘torture in the fires of Hell’, produced no such results however. There was indeed a sensation of lurking, gloating evil, but – as I mentioned – that had been there already.

I took a turn at evoking. Then Alan again. Then me again. We’d just decided out loud to burn the demon’s sigil and be done with it (a bluff, because both of us had realised we’d forgotten to bring any source of fire) when Alan suddenly stopped and said, ‘He’s here.’

As soon as Alan said it, I could feel it too – what he later described as, ‘Just a nasty, creepy feeling.’ To me it seemed like a sort of ‘shimmer’ in reality; the fabric of space was wobbling in a queasy, decidedly not good way.

Asking the demon to confirm its presence, we listened out. Apart from the breeze there was no sound, so we resorted to the pendulum. In true demonic fashion, Ronove chose an anti-clockwise spin for ‘YES’, clockwise for ‘NO’, and side-to-side for ‘CANNOT ANSWER’.

He left us in no doubt that he knew what liberation was, but hated it. He said he was afraid – yet was this an attempt to gain our sympathy? He also insisted that even though we might dispel him, he’d somehow still be available to other magicians.

The Seal of Ronove.

Seal of the 27th demon of the Goetia, Ronove.

We were going to do it anyway, so we cut the chat and got down to business. Neither of us relished the thought of seventeen pages of prostrations, to be read by two tiny LED flashlights, which had to be kept lit by pressing down on a tiny button that after a few minutes reduced our hands to painful cramps. (The Pound Shop, again.) But we set about it, mustering as much gusto as we could.

We fell into a pattern: one of us reading; both of us bowing; the one not reading casting an eye into the darkness for any signs of mischief. My heart hammered when I saw distinctly over Alan’s shoulder a light not far away, as if someone were approaching with a torch. It quickly went out, and I never resolved whether that’s indeed what it had been, or whether it was just a headlight in the distance. And it wasn’t as if the Tibetan deities whose praises we sang were all sweetness and light either:

I bow down to Gauri of the eastern direction…
Wrathful, white and aloof on her throne of human corpses,
Brandishing a human corpse as a cudgel
To destroy the conceptual landscape of cyclic existence…

Not the sort of bodhisattvas you’d want to meet on a dark night. Except that was precisely what was happening in Alan’s case. He reported afterwards a vision during the prostrations of a host of bodhisattvas and buddhas.

The results were more subtle in my case. If Ronove had upset my perception of space, then The Peaceful and Wrathful Deities affected my sense of time. Hours and hours seemed to have been compressed into that period we’d been standing inside the circle. How long had it been really? I had no idea. Both of us were surprised when we reached the end of the prostrations. It felt too soon, even though (as you might imagine) we’d taken every care to miss out not a single one.

So which had it been: had time passed quickly or slow? Both, it seemed. Even more apparent was the effect on my mood: the fear and sense of being watched had gone. Granted, you’re unlikely to feel entirely relaxed whilst out in the countryside at midnight, but the oppressive fear that had been there at the beginning had lifted. And it was evident from the size of his grin that Alan felt it too. So we banished, packed up, and made our way off the hill.

The Devil in Me: The Results

Both of use had positive dreams that night, but the next morning, when we performed a tarot divination to cast more light on the outcome of the ritual, there were strong suggestions that something had been overlooked and was likely to result in emotional fallout. The phrase that came to my mind was, ‘We’ll end up feeling gutted.’

Three Card Spread

The forecast in short.

Detailed Card Spread

The forecast in detail.

Right on cue, the next morning I woke from an intensely personal and turbulent dream the like of which I’d not experienced in ages. Alan too reported a confrontation with psychological issues of an unusual intensity. For both of us these experiences were strong and disturbing, but left us feeling somehow resolved and cleansed.

I wish I could remember where he says it, but I’m sure in one of Steiner’s lectures he remarks that it’s not the business of humans to liberate spirits of any kind. Of course, you’d have to give it a try to fully understand why. And perhaps now I have.

It seems possible that liberating a demon leaves behind a vacuum that our own etheric bodies rush to fill. In the dream, I was confronted by feelings that presented as being unresolvable. Perhaps we resolve a demon only to have what is unresolvable in ourselves come to the fore. What came to the fore in me were feelings for the first girl I ever loved, which – I realised – I could never renounce or overcome.

It was as if I were being told, ‘Well, you might have liberated a demon, but look at the intensity of what remains unresolvable in you. From the perspective of a higher being, you look to them like a demon.’

As Alan put it, ‘There are certainly personal aspects to any invocation or evocation, and we essentially liberated a certain part of ourselves from “negativity and obscurations”. That’s certainly how it felt, anyway.’

What will the longer term outcome of this working be? Should we suppose that magicians around the world will begin to report they are no longer able to evoke or gain results from Ronove? It would be nice to think so. I suspect, however, that the true result is the exorcism of this particular demon only from my reality, plus the realisation that we cast out a demon by surrendering that which appears demonic within ourselves.

Video

The Liberation of Ronove

A short film containing footage from the working. Click to view on YouTube. (Duration: 7 mins.)

Reference

Gyurme Dorje, Trans. (2006). The Tibetan Book of the Dead: First Complete Translation. Introduction by The Dalai Lama. London: Penguin.