pirate borealis

2026 July 12

Galaxy NGC 474: Shells and Star Streams Image Credit & License: CFHT, Coelum, MegaCam, J.-C. Cuillandre (CFHT) & G. A. Anselmi (Coelum)

Explanation: What’s happening to galaxy NGC 474? The multiple layers of emission appear strangely complex given the relatively featureless appearance of the elliptical galaxy in less deep images. The cause of the shells is a topic of research, but they are possibly tidal tails related to debris left over from absorbing numerous small galaxies in the past billion years. Alternatively, the shells may be like ripples in a pond, where the ongoing collision with the spiral galaxy just to the right of NGC 474 is causing density waves to ripple through the galactic giant. Regardless of the actual cause, the featured image dramatically highlights the increasing evidence that the halos of some elliptical galaxies are surprisingly complicated. Similarly, the halo of our own Milky Way Galaxy is one example of such unexpected intricacies. NGC 474 spans about 250,000 light years and lies about 100 million light years distant toward the constellation of the Fish (Pisces).

Pages from an illuminated manuscript of The Book of the Law by Steffi Grant (Soror Ilyarun) (1944).

Deck: Tabula Mundi - Manus perfectus

Question: What would be the benefits of a spiritual practice in my life?

Card: 10 of Cups - Satiety

Resources used: Book M: Liber Mundi by M. M. Meleen, Book of Thoth by Aleister Crowley, Esoteric Meanings (website)

From what I remember the Thoth take of the 10 of cups is more pessimistic. Something about how once you have everything you wanted, you found you didn’t want it after all. The Rider Waite is more positive, felicity, happiness and fulfillment, possibly familial love and bliss. I think this being satiety, it can be like the feeling of gorging yourself on a meal and feeling quite sick of it after and just sick in general from overeating something.

Let’s look at…well, let’s look at Book of Thoth first actually.

It doesn’t say much. It says the work proper to water is complete and a disturbance is due. That there’s a conflicting element between Mars and Pisces, as they are basically opposites.

Let’s look at Book M. Actually I’m gonna take out the Moon and Tower card to compare to this card.

Looking at Book M, the ocean is patterned like brain waves of sleep. I thought those were pomegranates but they’re poppy pods. It mentions opium as a symbol, how they fool your brain by mimicking endorphins and are highly addictive. The griffin is a symbol of mars.

She has a quote from Crowley and I’m wondering where it’s from. I’m guessing somewhere in the Book of Thoth he talks more about the 10 of cups. Quoting it now it talks of excess of pleasure, boredom and quarreling arising from it, disgust springing from too great luxury, drug habits, and I don’t know what this means but, the revenge of nature. In regards to the getting everything you wanted, it says now one must pay. It says “it’s all very dreamy and pleasant for a time, as a definite ultimate success has been reached, but it isn’t stable.”

Let’s look at Esoteric Meanings.

Oh that’s nice, they have the page number where the “now one must pay” line is from.

It also talks about the inherent instability of the cups. It talks about finding short term fulfillment in something and getting bored with it and moving on to the next thing. It says we can even do this with relationships, or find that we have come to the end of what a relationship can offer or possibly need to alter the dynamic. It mentions this is what shopaholics do.

I guess if I were to interpret it, it might be that engaging in a spiritual practice might help me see the areas of my life where I engage in such a manner and disrupt it with a higher mind perspective. I spend most of my time steeped in material and transient pleasures like gaming (I’ve bought a few games on sale in the past year and have yet to play or finish them), scrolling tumblr, watching youtube videos, ordering take out, and having fun at home. I move on from thing to thing or rotate between pleasures. I’m sort of stuck in this phase. I can’t drive (I recently got my permit renewed) and don’t have much spending money to change bigger things, plus it’s a little tricky trying to coordinate my mom and mine’s schedule. There is more I can do in my life, like studying math, and it’s cooled down now so learning to drive again, make art, etc. I just let the material and transient pleasures of life lead.

I guess that’d be a good benefit, is disrupting that way of living. I hope I’ve interpreted this adequately. I think it’d be weirder to go the other way and say a spiritual practice would lead to a level of pleasure that would cause feelings of overindulgence and ultimately abandonment and have that be a benefit.

Anyway the point is i wanted to ask how you went about making your tarot, like, how did you decide card suits and such? I think I'd like to try to try to make a tarot to play with myself now i know a deck doesnt have to be a specific set of cards.

Anyway, have a nice day!

I designed my own deck when was I was just starting out with this occult stuff. I was kinda frustrated with how a lot of divination decks refused to engage with the RWS's depth of imagery and interpretive history. They're such artistically fecund objects, and so many are just "here is a screen grab of a TV show character labelled with the high priestess" which feels like leaving a lot on the table.

I kinda tried to re-create the feeling of playing with a tarot deck for the first time, not knowing what a deck was. The quasi-religious abstracted imagery, references to archetypical things like kings and wheat and heavenly bodies. I also liked how the pip cards suggested a story without actually being a story, so I made my pip cards evocative of the wheel of the year. A cycle! Also the elements neatly correspond to the seasons.

I also felt the RWS cards are fairly static. I don't necessarily agree with that opinion anymore, but it spurred me to design my own cards with some kind of narrative tension in mind. Each card is a moment in time where something is striving or wanting. I wanted every card to imply a motivated event.

Also rather than major arcana, I wanted several smaller runs of trumps with related meanings. So there's a set of eight moons, seven dead kings, six books, etc, down to the first three cards: The Sinner, The Mourning Queen, The Empty Throne.

I also wanted to encourage mechanics from common card games to make reading easier. I specifically wanted the deck to encourage "poker hand" type readings where pairs and flushes have specific interpretive meanings. I felt like this was an under-explored aspect of cartomancy. People forget the original tarot deck was for a normal card game, and the esoteric tradition evolved out of tarot decks as a household object.

I was thinking about making a rainbow spread based on the pride flag colours, but Interrobang Tarot beat me to it! Not only that, it's part of a free e-book with seven queer inspired spreads! Go check it out

The Emperor. Art by Julia Rich, from Zeke’s Arcana.

“What binds gives power,” he stated. His throne thrummed with power. My body begged me to kneel. Instead I responded, “And what gives power binds.” His crystalline face gave away nothing but he let me pass.

My birth cards, the Moon, 8 of Cups and King of Cups.

Pretty solid, tbh. I’ve never really considered the king of cups as a signifier for dumb gender reasons, but it’s not a bad fit.

The World. Eliphas Levi handmade deck