Beginning

Greetings, ponderers and pundits, stargazers and sarcasm-slingers! You have located Illuminating the Fool’s Mirror, a blog seeking to trace the fine threads of imagination that bind ancient myth through classic literature and on to the myriad shared dreams of modern media and culture. It’s a murky cosmos out there, a web that spins outward and back on itself again. We may get lost now and then, but sometimes it’s fun to get lost. Your guide on this journey is Ceridwen Silverhart, mythophile and metaphor tinkerer. Feel free to say my name as you wish, though as you may guess, I do so love alliteration.

Well, now I’ve got the mystic out of my system, let’s get practical. My head may often stray to the clouds, but my feet stay planted firmly on the ground. So, what can you expect from me and my fool’s mirror? For starters, once a month I’ll be posting researched articles connecting ancient and old with bright and new. Myth and media are my tagline, but I will also likely touch on literature and cultural events, current and recurrent. If I have news to share or a question to pose, you’ll find those in occasional smaller posts. January, April, July, and October, I’ll post a Quarterly Bestiary focusing on a specific creature in myth and media. Expect citations at the end of articles. They’ll be roughly Chicago Manual style but with footnotes and bibliography as one. I’m an English major who believes in credit where credit is due. Besides, at a time when fact and sources are often questioned, I’d like to empower you readers to check the journey behind my posts. Please do tell me about any new or different information you discover!

So, about the title. Some of you may have heard of the Fool’s Mirror as a tarot technique described by Cherry Gilchrist in her book Tarot Triumphs. Please know I conjured that phrase before I learned about its tarot connections. However, on reading about it, I found the technique had a lot in common with what I hope to strive for in this blog. I haven’t read the whole book yet, but the Google Books preview had a paragraph talking about how the Fool’s Mirror is about accepting paradoxes with an outlook that mixes seriousness with humor.¹ That’s exactly how I like to approach life. So, if you love bantering about the latest movies and cultural trends but wish you knew more about the deeper roots behind them, or if you’re fascinated by ancient lore but wish it had more relevance to the modern world, welcome! I’m here to invite you on this fool’s journey. I’m not perfect, but I’m curious and eager to learn. Will you join me?

 

1. Gilchrist, Cherry, Tarot Triumphs: Using the Tarot Trumps for Divination and Inspiration, (Weiser Books, 2016), 97, https://books.google.com/books?id=irK7DAAAQBAJ&pg=PA94&lpg=PA94&dq=fool%27s+mirror+tarot&source=bl&ots=iZp7SjGHLu&sig=ACfU3U1XIy7qCbBqglmVymliUuXooVHgOQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj-v9n8tqbkAhVzMX0KHaJCB8IQ6AEwBXoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=fool’s%20mirror%20tarot&f=false.

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