POS – Day 20 – Following the Harpy’s Trail

Question:
What final thoughts should we work on?

Cards:

• Present: Venomous Garden
• Past: Harpy
• Future: Grimoire

Reflection:

As I decided to conclude this experiment after 21 days rather than the original 30, I asked for a concluding message. I left room for one more day of reading to further clarify if the meaning isn’t clear here. I have to admit that the reading did not feel like an ending so much as a summary of everything that had come before. There is no way I’m “done” with this deck as it’s now a new favorite, but for now we are close to putting it away for another journey.

As I pulled the cards this morning, my attention kept returning to the Harpy in the past position. Traditionally, harpies are beings that combine a woman with a bird. That immediately connected back to the very beginning of this journey. The deck introduced itself through the Vampire, a recurring feminine figure who became, in my mind, the symbolic spirit of the deck. Throughout the readings, numerous feminine archetypes appeared—witches, queens, nymphs, banshees, fallen angels, and other mysterious women. Running alongside those themes were repeated references to magic, folklore, mythology, and the occult.

The Harpy seemed to unite those ideas into a single image.

It also reminded me of one of the earliest and most memorable moments of this project. After drawing the Raven, I was led to visit a cemetery, where I unexpectedly found raven feathers scattered throughout the grounds. I remember way back then that when I took my wife to the cemetery I told her I wasn’t sure what we were looking for but I think it’s a woman and maybe should have raven on the gravestone. What a WILD coincidence as now I get the Harpie card which is a mythological creature of woman and bird. Whether viewed as coincidence or synchronicity, that experience became one of the defining moments of the entire experiment. Seeing a creature that is literally part woman and part bird brought that memory back into focus and made it feel as though the deck was tying its own narrative together.

The Venomous Garden in the present position is the only card that leaves me a bit perplexed. While I’m unsure of it’s meaning now, I feel that it will come to me later.

Finally, the Grimoire in the future position felt less like a mystical instruction and more like a simple invitation: keep studying.

A grimoire is a book of accumulated knowledge, and the card immediately made me think that perhaps I should learn more about harpies specifically. That curiosity led me to search for scholarly resources, where I discovered The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth (2024), edited by Debbie Felton. The work appears to contain substantial material on harpies and many other mythological creatures that intersect with subjects I already explore on my Beyond channel.

The book is prohibitively expensive—around $135 even for the Kindle edition—but I also learned that Debbie Felton is still an active professor. On impulse, I reached out to her with an invitation to appear on the channel to discuss Greek mythology and classical monsters. Whether anything comes of that invitation remains to be seen, but it was an unexpected real-world consequence of today’s reading.

As I come to a close on this 21-day journey, that may be the greatest lesson I take from it.

Regardless of whether the cards are communicating with anything beyond my own subconscious, they consistently pushed me toward curiosity, reflection, research, and action. They encouraged me to notice patterns, ask better questions, and follow threads of interest wherever they led. In this case, those threads led from a raven feather in a cemetery to the mythology of harpies, and from there to a respected scholar whose work may become part of my continuing education.

That feels like an appropriate place to end this chapter—not with certainty, but with another book waiting to be opened.