Temple of the Mysteries of Mary
The Mysteries of Mary Tarot Deck
THE MYSTERIES OF MARY TAROT DECK
The inner mysteries of the journey of the Soul as portrayed by Mary;
the feminine tradition of Compassion, Beauty,
Peace and Wisdom
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The Mysteries of Mary Tarot Deck was completed and published in 2016.
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The deck is available directly from myself at hettienne@telkomsa.net or from my online shop The French Madonna at www.etsy.com/shop/thefrenchmadonna.
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You can discover and read more about the deck on my blog The Mysteries of Mary Tarot Deck at www.hergracesacredart.com
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I am honoured to announce that a copy of the Mysteries of Mary Tarot Deck and Book is included in the wonderful tarot museum, Museo dei Tarocchi in Riola, Bologna. I recently visited the museum and you can see pictures on my Instagram feed @thefrenchmadonna.
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The Mysteries of Mary Tarot is a mystical vision of the sacred mysteries of the Soul and its unsung feminine path. The Mysteries tells of a Great Work that needs to be done in order to birth a new mythos and an era of heightened senses, poetic insights, visionary and prophetic sensibility, creativity, imagination and the healing of the earth and her creatures. The Mysteries of Mary speak of the potential and possibility of a world inhabited by Spirit. The Mysteries gather the torn and scattered threads of an ancient story in order to remind us that Mary in all her many aspects, both physical and divine, is waiting for our recognition and acknowledgement of Her existence as the ground of our being.
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In this deck I set out to find the torn, shredded and hidden fragments of a story of human consciousness. I see this story like a huge tapestry, each stitch worked by inspired hands. Through the ages this tapestry was stolen, torn apart, burnt and pieces of it buried in deserts and thrown into oceans. But we remembered and everyone had a piece of the story. We use a secret language to remind each other and ourselves, that there is a Queen of Love waiting in the wings and that She has always been with us, directing from the shadowy parts of our consciousness. This deck is a mystical vision of the religion of the Soul as reflected in the archetypal images of the story of Mary, the divine feminine and an effort to create a thealogy – a spirituality where the female divine is central – based on the many religious and non-religious stories of Mary and the development of Mary as archetype of the Self. The collective unconscious births these stories in different cultures and different forms, but She re-appears over and over.
Jung explains the archetype of the Self as the power greater than the personal ego-consciousness. A strong and powerful ego-consciousness is essential for the person to realise the guidance of the Self. The Self therefore encompasses and includes both the consciousness and unconscious of the personal. One would imagine that the Self would be seen as without gender by the unconscious, but in especially the Western religions the divine manifestation of the Self has been represented by only male figures. Nowhere is Mary recognized as a divine being, thus a woman has been deprived of the right to project her Self onto a female figure and archetype. But the collective unconscious has been birthing a thealogy in fragmented stories of the Blessed Mary.
Today we know the Blessed Mary as the Mother of Jesus who plays a small part in the story of Protestant Christianity and who plays a bigger part in the Roman Catholic tradition. She is lesser known as a goddess in the feminine traditions and very few would connect her with the great Mother goddesses of the past or the Lady Sophia in the Wisdom traditions.
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But to myself, and many, many others, there is a connection, a red thread that connects the dots in the eye of the heart. The ancient divine feminine had been demonised many moons ago and her stories had gone underground. One has to rely on myth, folk tale, oral traditions, fairy tales and subtle clues and especially correspondences, to uncover Her story. And today Mary is the Sacred Keeper of all Our Lady’s titles and Her Wisdom.
The Mysteries of Mary is a reweaving and a regathering of all these threads of Our Lady’s garment created from red wool and linen. We look in the Bible, in the Koran, the Kabbalah and many other ancient and rediscovered lost books. There are also esoteric and apocryphal books that tell the stories of Mary, the feminine counterpart of the Divine Creator in the Western religion and myth and many of these stories have been included to create The Mysteries of Mary deck.
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Woven into the tapestry of myth, metaphor and inspiration, are fairy tales and in particular, the folktale of The Handless Maiden. And so are the Greek, Roman, Egyptian, pagan and especially the Judaic history which is the precursor to the Christian mysteries.
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The deck incorporates alchemical principles and as such it is a marriage of opposites, a living hieros gamos which follows the sacred journey of the Holy Fool through the mysteries of Mary. I focus on the mystical and inner meanings of the Mysteries of Mary as gathered threads are being reworked into a new tapestry of meaning and hope.
It is my vision that this deck can be the start of a far greater vision : one that marries the mind and the heart; the feminine and the masculine. It is my hope that you will glimpse the revelation that all religion contains Soul and that the veils of dogma and manipulation obscure the truth. May you look in the mirror of Sophia and see yourself as Eternal Love.
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A mystery religion is a religion that keeps its inner teachings secret. This Arcanum, or secret wisdom, is divulged to initiates step-by-step only after they have gone through certain ceremonies or achieved a certain level of understanding. The ancient mysteries represented an esoteric initiation based in part upon the re-enactment of the story of a god or goddess, which promised members a deeper understanding of the universe and their role in it. This was the standard religious structure for many mystery schools in the Greek and Roman empires and other ancient cultures.
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Religion, myth, legend and fairy tale carry the archetypal energies and messages that explain to us why we are here. If we pay attention and listen to the messages of the stories and symbol that dog our footsteps, we can uncover the meaning of our suffering and we can discover our own North Star, that which give us purpose in life. Each one of us is here with a unique purpose and mission and we bring something that this world needs. In the words of Meister Eikhart : we are to birth the Christ child and in order to do so, each one of us has to become the Mother of God. In that process of birthing the Christ child within, we become reconnected to our Source and Source can flow through us and manifest in this world.