My Ghost-like Quality
Since I it is almost Halloween, I explore this holiday. I do have the feeling that I only scratch on its surface, that I am not getting at the real thing, but I keep trying. Today I have pulled a card for my ‘ghostlike-quality’. I have used the Halloween Tarot for my reading.
Ghosts do have a tendency to be evasive. They come and they go; they lurk in the shadows and possibly they are not even there.
The card I have pulled for my ghost-like quality is Seven of Ghosts (the equivalent of Seven of Cups). Seven ghosts are hanging in the air, and each has got another symbol on its sheet. Seven of Cups usually means (among other meanings) not to be able to choose, daydreaming, or deluding yourself. For me now it means ‘evasiveness’. I can be very evasive and vague sometimes, deluding others about who I am, and what I mean. At those times I do not want to show myself, just like ghosts. I do want to lurk in the shadows then, being invisible rather than visible. That is because I am afraid that if I show myself my head will be chopped off, that I am being criticized and rejected. I know this is a shadow side because I hate to meet it in others. I get very irritated when people will not get to the bottom, but leave all their possibilities open the air. This card shows this shadow side of me. Seven ghosts are up in the air, you cannot fetch them, just as you cannot get hold of me.
My ‘ghostlike-quality’ is the opposite of my ‘witchlike-quality’ (see the entry of October 23th), and yet they are related. It is my strength to go to the bottom, daring to say difficult things, but I am afraid of doing it because I fear that I will be rejected for that. Remember I was afraid for my witchlike quality? If going to the bottom of things means being rejected, then is staying evasive much safer (not so good though).
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For a long time I have studied Jacques Derrida, a philosopher who explored the 'ghostlike' qualities of meaning; that words escape their meaning, that they can always mean just something else. The style of his work is 'ghostlike' to, escaping a clear-cut meaning. Probably that is why I studied him, I met myself. He worked also with the term: ‘ spectres’.