For some the weighty Judgement card is the penultimate card of accountability. Some interpret it as offering an opportunity to pull off the masks we have been wearing and be accountable to ourselves, be honest about our choices.
Holding up a mirror on our life and the lives of our ancestors takes courage. It is not easy to hear the accusing voices and own up to it all, to acknowledge the successes and failures, to feel. regret about choices made, opportunities lost, moral infringements. But the self acceptance that comes with doing a reckoning is liberating. It sets us free when we dispassionately see the pattern of our lives.
Magda Szubanski is indisputably one of Australia’s most loved comic actors. However her true identity has been hidden within the characters she has played, like Sharon, the unlucky in love netball player, who shot to fame in the comic series Kath and Kim.
When Szubanski took up the challenge of writing her memoir, entitled ‘Reckoning’, she peeled back protective coatings and unflinchingly exposed old emotional wounds. Like a forensic scientist she explores wounds passed from one generation to another.
Are you up for this kind of introspection and reckoning?
The word Judgement is loaded. In the Judgement Card in the Rider Waite deck we see an angel, with a huge horn, beckoning the dead to rise from their graves and, presumably, face judgement. It certainly invokes ideas expressed in the New Testament where the primary idea of redemption is the deliverance from bondage, specifically the bondage of sin.
However many readers do not subscribe to the idea that there is a judgement, ransom or reckoning taking place and this view is supported by artists like Rachel Pollack’s who replaces the word Judgement with ‘Awakening’ in her ‘Shining Tribe Tarot‘. The idea is that the Angel is calling upon the dry bones to awaken and reincarnate into a fresh new life.
It would be easy to think of this kind of awakening or transition as some kind of rebirth, but really, as Lisa Freinkel Tishman points out in her book ‘Mindful Tarot’ it is more about simply responding to a divine calling, responding to the trumpeter and accepting the intervention of a higher power. It implies that the time is right for the querent to move into a brand new phase. The querent can look forward to dynamic new beginnings.
Sandra’s personal life is an incredible tale of trauma, transition, transformation, and survival.
Sandra Anne Pankhurst’s early experience was horrendous. It was not a good beginning. At the age of seven, when she still identified as a boy, Sandra’s given name was ‘Peter’. As Peter he was told by his adoptive family that he was “no longer wanted”. After that, he survived 10 years of severe physical and psychological abuse before running away from home.
At 18, Peter married and soon after had the first of two boys with his then-wife. At 23, when Peter’s wife discovered that he had been visiting gay bars, Peter went through a major transition. He moved out of the family home, separated from his wife, and embraced his emerging identity as a woman, as Sandra.
For many trans people, transitioning is a process of becoming the gender identity they always wanted to be. But for Sandra, it wasn’t like that – she didn’t always want to be a woman. In Sandra’s experience, she decided to transition when she learned that it was possible.
Read the Trauma Cleaner and marvel at how Sandra Anne Pankhurst, an individual, who had faced a lifetime of hostility and transphobic abuse eventually responded to a calling and became dedicated to cleaning up the messes left behind after the trauma of suicide, meth labs, and hoarding. The idea for her trauma cleaning business emerged when she was a funeral director, as there were no death/crime scene specialist cleaners.
Pankhurst was also an active advocate for aged care rights, disability, mental health and ethics. She was extremely passionate about making a positive impact on the welfare of people of all lifestyles in the aged care and mental health sector.
The word judgement usually implies that one is going to evaluate evidence before making a decision. However in the case of Tarot the Judgement card is often said to signal a time of resurrection and awakening, a time when a period of our life comes to an absolute end one must make way for a new dynamic beginning.
Both the Amenti Oracle and the After Tarot bring to mind our so called ‘Day of Judgment’, the time when an individual has to account for their lives before resurrection. The Guardian Tarot which depicts figures rising from what appears to be an urban area gives some weight to the idea that historywill be the judge of our actions (finally determining what is the good and the true).
The Judgement card is a call to face yourself, completely. To hold up a mirror to your entire life, to see it all. To own it all. Your successes and your failures. The good times and the bad. Everything you’re proud of, and all that you wish you’d done differently. It’s yours – and you must own it all, you must accept it all.
The problem with the idea of a day of judgement, that somewhere in the future there will be a commuppance for those who sinned, is that modern society is strewn with harmful acts that were justified as serving some higher purpose. We all bear the rippled impact of such heinous acts.
Rather than orientate towards the shortcomings of moral recklessness it is, perhaps, more helpful to talk about the actions of those whose contributions provide an example for others to follow.
Mary Bennett was the daughter of a successful squatter. Although she wrote with love and admiration about her father in her book Christison of Lammermoor, by the end of her life she would describe Western Australian squatters as the “enemy” of Aboriginal people. In 1927 she referred to the 1891 striking shearers as “a cruel and cowardly lot,” but three decades later she worked with their union, the Australian Workers’ Union, to gain wage justice for Indigenous workers.
Although she has been described as a feminist, she fell out with Perth feminists in the 1930s when they failed to oppose the removal of Aboriginal children from their mothers. She never went to school herself, but she became a gifted and progressive educator on Mount Margaret Mission. Her thinking about Indigenous Australians and their place in Australian society displayed great intelligence, a strong moral compass and a palpable love for the first peoples of this land.
On her death in 1961, a large crowd of Wongatha, the Aboriginal people from the Kalgoorlie region, gathered in the heat on the red earth of the area’s main cemetery to mourn the loss of their friend and patron. There were elderly folk, weather-beaten pastoral workers and family groups carrying their young children. The mourners’ lives would become more difficult with the loss of their friend and advocate.
As Australians collectively recover from the fallout of the Voice Referendum it is worth looking to figures like Bennet for guidance about how to ensure we are accountable to our descendants and don’t leave a legacy of guilt. Far better to show we have contributed to the well being of all people in a positive way.
Waltzing With Matilda's 