Third House Secrets

Welcome to Third House Secrets, where writer Cameron Steele and clinical herbalist Meg Madden use krisis, or more plainly, the kairotic moment of a tarot draw as a path into conversations about spirituality, wellbeing, and life under the auspices of the divine feminine. In Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adults, Federico Campagna mentions krisis in his discussion of the tradition of Ars Memoriae, which began in the sixth century as an art-form that sought to liberate memory from oblivion by “composing mental landscapes where memories might take root and flourish” instead of decay and disappear. In German art historian Aby Warburg’s revitalization of Ars Memoriae in the twentieth century, Warburg posited that human beings’ “primordial experiences of the overpowering forces” of reality have taken on particular, recognizable, nearly universal forms, called “engrams.” These engrams are not static but “permanently active,” meaning that when we encounter them, they have the ability to sustain, change, or eradicate reality as we know it. They’re not just images, they’re messengers. In Campagna’s words, they “bridle reality.” As he writes writes:“An engram can always bring to the fore a memory of that particular experience of reality, and thus it can inaugurate a krisis (moment of judgement) when a subject is called to decide whether to confirm or to challenge the parameters of their own fundamental frame of meaning” (165).To confirm or to challenge the parameters of our own fundamental frame of meaning … we can’t think of a better description for what the tarot has been for us over the past years. An engram, a spirit, a way to talk to God, a moment of judgment every time we flip a card, a miniature crisis in which I open myself up to the possibility that reading—cards, books, bodies, moods, myself—can both change and stabilize reality.Although we love podcast series on the tarot that take a researched dive into the intellectual and esoteric underpinnings of the cards—sho