"According to this card, which you have drawn at random, there is an ancient tradition connecting madness and pigs or boars. At a playful level, this may be no more than an audience being struck by a "morris dancer" who wields a pig's bladder full of air. More seriously, it meant that those who were mad had to live and act as swineherds, and, in the most extreme cases, as that boar whose skin torn from its body and wrapped around a wounded human form can heal, Merlin, when he went mad, talked with pigs, for this indicates that madness and insight are often closely connected, though this was not the feeling of the young maiden walking by that particular morning who happened to end up spattered with shit and thought a dozen bathings in the hot springs would not entirely remove the odor so clinging to the fine internal hairs of her nostrils. This means, as far as you're concerned, since you're the one who drew this card at random, that you may have to go through a period of "breakdown" so that "something deeper and wilder can enter" your life. The Boar is the emissary of the Terrible Mother, and many of one's deep unconscious problems with women, are connected to her arrival. Oh, I see you are smiling sardonically, as if you knew to what the card refers, and, yes, it may be _your_ terrible mother, or the terrible mother you are, or have been, unknowingly, to another, or the Terrible Mother herself. Who knows who is who these days?. Well, just remember the tusk of a boar be used as a razor to shave a giant, and that the comb and scissors between a boar's ear can be used to cut the giant's hair, for in ancient rock-carvings in Scotland, boars are depicted with mirrors and combs beside them. By this we know, they are emissaries of the goddess, though they also represent male aggression, for as Erich Neumann wrote "The Great Mother is the sow that farrows and the boar that kills," and in Scotland, women would traditionally give birth at the Boar Stone, placing their bare feet upon the stone to absorb its power. And the White Boar of Marvan, an Irish tradition, was a muse to his master. Hunting and healing may seem unrelated activities, but the Celts linked the two concepts, the hunt was a metaphor for the journey of the spirit, in which both life and death occur, and healing is found through the process of healing, rebirth is impossible without death. Just remember that at first as you are met by the primal life-force of this terrible emissary, that you will stare into the mouth of the Underworld and out of it numberless numbers of pigs will emerge, an infinite number, so many you will neither be able to count or destroy them. If you stand your ground before those snarling mouths, for the boar's head trumpet with its articulated wooden tongue which vibrates when blow, attempts to render the horrendous and frightening sound of the boar, then you will see a single boar before you, no longer a snarling animal. That'll be $15, please. What? you were expecting blackbird, four and twenty, no doubt, baked in a pie? No, I'm not saying that you need to wrap yourself in the skin of a boar, that's the trouble with you literal-minded types. "

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