3 · The Seven Ages of tarotbyphil ❤️🔥
"And then the lover... with a woeful ballad made to his mistress’ eyebrow... "
This post focusses on me, and is the third of seven (inspired by Jacques’ ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech from Shakespeare’s As You Like It) occasional very personal posts over the year asking Tarot to help me understand who I was, and why I see life the way I do.
The style will be a little different for these posts, but not permanently… honest! 😃
JAQUES All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages … And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.
As You Like It; William Shakespeare; Act 2, Scene 7 146-154 (full speech footnoted 1 below)
“Sighing like a furnace…”, nah, not me 😀 but, “… with a woeful ballad…” much more like it!
I never burned furnace-like with passion, I sighed with despair at the unattainability of my dream… a Times Square ticker tape in neon capital letters running continually around my teenage brain with my mum’s immortal words …
“Let’s face it… you’re no oil painting are you!” 😂2
I wrote dull, sad songs of unrequited love on the guitar, then spent hours on the telephone to the beautiful Anne inventing numerous ways of avoiding asking her out on a date, whilst trying desperately to prolong the conversation! 😀
Finally… the worldly Jill, three years older than me (seemed a lot back then!) sheepskin-rugged me into manhood at the ripe old age of nineteen… (yep… I was that late a starter 😳).
So… in the continuing spirit of these Seven Ages posts, I asked Tarot about my hormonal teenage self and what kind of lover I was back then (fear not, there will be no graphic sexual descriptions in this post… you can read with safety, enjoying a cuppa and… perhaps, a nice digestive biscuit?… whilst you do 🫖😀)…
Let’s Tarot…
Position 1 - What attracted partners to me? - 5 of Swords
I was always more than a little in awe of the confident guys around me, laughing, joking, and teasing their happy girlfriends; strong arms casually draped around their shoulders, or waists. They could conversation, they could funny, and they were on the brink of fabulous, manly adulthoods.
As previously discussed in part 2 I never was that guy. Having mastered the art of social anonymity, any public show of “going out” with someone would have made me feel intensely uncomfortable, and vulnerable… waiting on the terrifying humiliation that was sure to follow when it all went horribly wrong.
However, unfathomably, I did attract some attention, even though I felt I totally lacked those cool young male qualities I was convinced were necessary for a successful date (or, more than one, if I were unbelievably lucky! 😀) so… I must have had something, but had absolutely no idea what! 🤔
Apparently, according to this spread, the ‘what’ was a 5 of Swords quality… what? I mean… WHAT? This short card description from the LWB3 actually made me laugh out loud… 🤣😂🤣
Sometimes defeat is so great that it only brings degradation and broken hopes with it. Castelli & Alligo.
Others were attracted by my “… degradation and broken hopes”??? My hopeless, broken-down sadness following my defeated younger years were the attraction??? Get out of here!!! In this card, I am sitting hopelessly, sadly, hoping for the kind and gentle touch of the beautiful, long-black-haired Anne… yeuch! 😳
I was clearly a hopeless case. A ‘friend’ later told me that Anne enjoyed spending time with me because I was a “safe option” in a world of real men, who were that guy. I don’t know whether this was truthful, or spiteful, but later, Jill, clearly saw the cigarette-smoking, beer-drinking, tortured poet, beyond that safe option 😀
It seems, then, that partners were attracted to me, back then, because I wasn’t that guy… what I saw then as an epic manhood fail, was actually attractive to some… and allowed me to quietly enjoy some lovely friendships with wonderful women, who, naturally, I never found the courage to ask out… 🤦🏽
Q - What would have changed had I had a little more ‘furnace’ back then? 🤔
Position 2 - What repelled them? - 7 of Cups
I mulled lengthily over this question, knowing it needed including in this spread if I was to make any sense of this confused period of my life. Ultimately, how many of us really want to know the truth of this? Then I realised that if I didn’t want to know the truth, I wouldn’t have contemplated a reading in the first place!
The maid ravished by her own reflection is the symbol of excessive fantasies, of over evaluation of oneself and of unlikely plans. Castelli & Alligo.
Vanity… moi? 😀 I wasn’t a mirror-gazer back then (still aren’t, other than to shave) as I have never been ‘ravished by [my] own reflection’… 🪞
… so… moving on to ‘excessive fantasies’? I was a hormonal teenager 😀… what do YOU think? 🤣 ‘… over-evaluation of [my]self…’ hmmm… very likely… I was bright, and I knew it, and was attracted to bright and beautiful girls. It is entirely possible that this preference ‘leaked’ (behaviourally speaking!) into my natural introversion presenting me as stand-off-ish and self-absorbed… 🤔
‘… unlikely plans…’ I wanted to be an actor, I wanted to be a musician, I wanted to be a journalist/writer… I didn’t want to thump out machine parts in brown-overalls in a Black Country4 factory… but, as a teen in the middle of a huge national economic crisis, these dreams were deeply unrealistic (if enduring! 🙂).
Hmm… I see it now. I must have appeared a snobbish, and unrealistic fantasist, and that that must have been the main repellent impression that I gave others. Of course, all I saw were seven ‘cups’ between which I was unable to choose, as I over-ate, heavily-smoked, and drank my way towards the exit from my teens.
Q - Perhaps I should have checked that mirror. Who the hell did I think I was?
Position 3 - What can I learn from this time? - 8 of Cups
The proximity of this card to the 7 of Cups in the ‘repels’ position suggests to me that my key learning lies more in addressing what made me repellent rather than attractive.
Looking at the first two cards, both of which surprised me in different ways, it is the 7 of Cups, facing away from the 5 of Swords, but towards the 8 of Cups, that points me to the learning lying in the well-dignified Cups.
The maid painted in a demure attitude represents moderation but also insecurity. Castelli & Alligo.
I was demure. I wasn’t moderate. I was insecure.
I just realised that here in part 3 are the first Cups cards in my story. I am dealing with emotions for the first time, and the deeply sighing version, too 😳 Following my largely pragmatic journey to this point, I hadn’t really had to negotiate the swirling waters of life that couldn’t be figured out, one way or another, rationally.
Sudden emotional overwhelm in the 7 of Cups, left me, like many I imagine, insecure, and full of doubt and woeful sighing during my early dreams of dating.
So… normal then! Phew! 😀
Unfortunately, I clumsily over-compensated for my lack of emotional intelligence and experience. Probably over-egging my tortured poet, in my desperate, and raggedly hormonal, hope that it would make me attractive enough to find exactly the right bright, beautiful, dream girlfriend. It didn’t.
Q - What if I’d simply been me, and enjoyed that time instead of acting?
Arithmancy and elementals…
The sum of these cards is…
5+7+8 = 20 = 2+0 = 2 = II·The High Priestess via XX·Judgement.
The overall energy of this reading describing me as a lover back then points to a feminine/passive yin energy ruled by the watery energy of the Moon. Lack of clear masculine/active characteristics, emotionally self-absorbed, and living in a dream world of what might be, rather than what was… arrived at from…
… XX·Judgement, having ‘woken up and smelled the coffee’ when at some point I’d completely understood that I was very much out of my depth, didn’t have David Cassidy’s5 looks, and must find alternative ways of getting noticed 🙂
Elementally, the Cups in positions 2 & 3 are water energy, which traditionally doesn’t play well with the Swords air energy of position 1. To me this underlines my being more attractive for my mind, where my rationale of love was seated, rather than in a heart full of emotions, too self-absorbed to express love.
Conclusions…
The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, why do we do this? Are we trying to make sense of something? Pretty much like I am now with this Substack? 🤔
My clear memories of those times have always revolved around my mother’s offhand comment, and my belief I was simply too shy and lacking in courage to get a girlfriend. There is something wonderfully comforting about finding clearly expressible reasons when telling our story… easily shared, easily filed… 🗄️
… but looking for the real truth, accepting responsibility, and that I was much more of an active author in my own story, than the above short version suggests, is where real self-awareness lives, and without self-awareness… what can we learn?
This Seven Ages series of posts is about self-learning… 🕯️
What have I learned?
The first key point about these cards is, once again, the absence of major arcana cards. Personal growth and significant development as a Lover were never going to be the most important part of my life journey. I was given brains instead of beauty (see David Cassidy below 😊)… but, I’m ok with that… now!
The second, and most surprising key point, is the 5 of Swords representing the attractive energy I had. It really shouldn’t surprise me now (given how my life has developed) that my intellectual qualities should prove to have been my best romantic asset (rather than emotions) after a childhood dedicated to them.
Seeing Cups as representatives of what I needed to know about this period shouldn’t have surprised me, either. This period was the first time in my life that things weren’t driven by pentacular pragmatism, leaving me somewhat adrift in weird sea of new emotions, where biologically my hormones were screaming ‘BE IN LOVE’… with no model, or frame of reference for what that looked like.
The third point is the absence of Wands and Pentacles cards describing these years. There was no elemental ‘fire’ XX·Judgement (The Spirit of Primal Fire6) in me in those days. My earthy pentacular life, absent in this spread, had left me to find alternative ways to ground myself during the huge changes that were happening to me… and, of course, this was only right… how could I grow without developing alternative resources?
Crucially, in my search for self-understanding, this reading has helped me to understand that, like many people, I went into one of the most significant life-changes we all have ill-prepared, inauthentic, and reverse polarising the positive and negative impacts of my behaviours on others…
… and that’s ok…
…I was young, and… I’m human.
Next time… 4 · The Seven Ages of tarotbyphil: “Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths.…”
Thank you very much for reading this, especially if you’ve made it this far! I would love to read any thoughts you may wish to share on these cards, too, as I am always, and especially, open to learning... so, please feel free to comment below (I welcome respectful disagreement and discussion!) and also please let me know if you would wish to read any further posts in this series, thanks... 😊
Love, light, and laughter... always,
tarotbyphil 🕯️
JAQUES All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
As You Like It; William Shakespeare; Act 2, Scene 7 146-173
See my previous post for more on this…
From the LWB (Little White Book) accompanying the Tarot Art Nouveau, written by Antonella Castelli and Pietro Alligo.
The Black Country is an industrial region in England's West Midlands, primarily encompassing the areas of Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall, and Wolverhampton. It gained its name in the mid-19th century due to heavy industry and the soot from coal mines and iron foundries, creating a dark landscape. Source Google AI.
David Cassidy, 1970’s singer and heartthrob.
The Golden Dawn title for XX·Judgement.
I am always so caught by your eloquence and rigorous acuity you give to your writing. You are an inspiration, honestly! It is so difficult to drill down the way you do and it is funny, interesting, relevant and revealing in equal measure. Thank you Phil, sending you many Blessings! Namaste 🙏✨🕉️🦋🌼
Such an insightful reflection, Phil! These are my favorite posts of yours. I’m impressed by the depth that you bring to each card and how you consider every corner of it and how it connects to your story.
The seven of cups, in general, feels like a card that depicts adolescence. My child & adolescent development professor calls this period “leaving the oatmeal house” and being bombarded with the world and the need to differentiate and individualize. It’s the time where we seek to construct our identities, and sometimes the choices can feel shiny, spectacular, and overwhelming.