I was looking in my cards to help Il Matrimonio. He was due to drive down to Leicester the following day, to meet with a telecom company with a view to a one off contract in Project Management. He wanted to know what hints and tips I might have for him, in consultation with the Tarot, and what was the forecast for the outcome.
I drew The Chariot Reversed, The Six of Pentacles and Judgement. This row of 3 cards represented the story arc and timeline for the next day.
My impressions:
Chariot Rev: Car trouble was possible, hopefully minor. I saw no injury. The following two cards were mitigating factors in deciding the problem was not too serious.
The Six of Pentacles: I felt they might not want to pay the proposed rate of £850 daily. I felt they would offer a rate in the £600’s.
Judgement: I saw a contract, comfortably acceptable as in the best interests of both parties.
I warned him to drive with extra caution and that the daily rate was the obstacle to be negotiated as the man himself did not have the final say on budget for the task, but had to refer it to committee.
There was nothing of sharp practise in respect of this to the best of my ability to detect. The Magician Reversed or the Seven of Swords would have been the signs of that, for me.
As it was a reading for Il Matrimonio I did not have long to wait to know the outcome.
The car problem was the exhaust. It pretty much fell off at Stoke. Fortunately he was not on the motorway at the time, and was able to carry out a temporary repair . He pulled in at a petrol station. He got oil on his shirt cuffs, and it was a bit fraught, but the car behaved thereafter and, getting the call, I booked it in at our local garage for next day.
The company wanted the service but already had a list of preferred suppliers in situ.
A rate of £650 was agreed and paperwork has now been signed with a contract for a few days work initially, perhaps more later. I feel there will be more because the Judgment card is like that. The Two of Swords also represnts a contractual agreement, but Judgement trumps it in terms of scale or longevity.
The Sixes in Tarot are generally indicative of something beneficial:
The Six of Pentacles or Coins is a card of community, charity, schooling, co-operation and the karmic notion, ‘what goes around comes around.’
Do as you would be done to.
I’m still in disgrace of course, for not telling him it was the exhaust. Sorry, hubs. My – er-superhuman Remote Viewing Capability mustn’t have been switched on.
Well, he is the Project Manager round here…he should be keeping his car serviced properly…
So exciting! Well, maybe, if you’re interested in how psychic Tarot reading works. The Tarot’s Eight of Swords talking about…. real life damp and drains.
There is Tarot you learn by book study. Then there is the Tarot you develop through experience, in which you discover or allocate new meanings for the cards via association and your own intuition. An example from my own experience is in readings featuring the Eight of Swords.
The Eight of Swords from The Gilded Tarot, by kind permission of Ciro Marchetti.
Standard Keywords: Frustration, feeling trapped or stuck, being unable to see a way ahead, chagrin, mortification, sometimes melodrama. A drama queen. One may be making a mountain out of a molehill. Passivity, the person is awaiting rescue when she only has to step forward with care and negotiate past the fence of swords, but she lacks focus, or else the nerve to try.
This is what you will read in any Tarot study guide. But sometimes, you look at a card and think, no, that’s not it. Why not? Perhaps it makes no sense in the context of the discussion. What else is the Tarot trying to flag up for attention using the stock of images at its disposal?
Your choices when this happens in a reading, dismiss it as an aberration or try to get to the bottom of it. Stay relaxed, an idea may present itself.
CASE STUDY ONE: An email reading for a lady I had never read for before:
No background was provided, and Tarot, like Reason likes a context. Nonetheless I decided to try rather than request further clarification first, and I drew The Eight of Swords in a key position.
What I sensed and shared was, ‘no matter where you work, and I sense a kitchen table with negotiated time slots free from family use, the place of work must be free of damp. I see wet feet. Whatever that space is, that’s got the wet feet situation going on, if you recognise it, do not use that room as your workspace.’
Response: She identified herself as a psychic living and working not far from me. My reading had answered the question she had not wished to specify. She had been thinking of converting her shower room, which was in any case old and tired and in need of a revamp, into a room for receiving her own tarot clients in. Now, she was going to reconsider.
Eight of Swords from the Rider-Waite Tarot deck (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
CASE STUDY TWO: A Skype reading for a family member, buying property for the first time in France. Was the flat a sound buy?
The Tarot was rather negative, pointing out all manner of defects, structural and social, some of which she made sense of right away, being aware of them already. Others however, remained to be verified. Drawing the Eight of Swords I suggested the Tarot sniffed something diabolical (The Devil card) down in the basement. Uh oh. Trouble with the drains? This, she said, was not a problem. Nor need it be her problem in any case, as the flat she was after had no basement.
The purchase went ahead, and she was delighted about the new home and remains so. However, the various problems sensed before purchase announced themselves one by one, and the drain problem declared itself almost immediately on moving in , when the floor had to be taken up in the communal entrance hallway to sort them. It didn’t matter, such is life, all the same, she was unaware of the impending work at the point of buying.
One day the Tarot is going to use the Eight of Swords to tell me about someone’s toilet. I just know it. How rip snortingly excitin’, do I hear you say? No? The point is, Tarot is merely a map key of the psyche, tattooed on card stock. Man’s soul may be a butterfly, we’ve got to sweat the nitty gritty of daily life, so the Tarot’s insights will surely go there.
Curiosity about Life, respect and generosity. Life invites ongoing learning. Progress demands it.
‘Schools out for EVER. School’s out COMPLETELY’…though it never is, or shouldn’t be for anyone with a curiosity greater than an amoeba’s.
Teachers: great ones, good and bad ones, the malevolent or indifferent. The ones I remember with affection, I remember for a variety of reasons.
Gentle bachelor Mr F always wore a salmon pink jumper and taught history. I was in his good books for ever, after asking a guest historian, a Professor David Hampson, what was later termed in my report, as ‘a very perceptive question’…an over-egging of my achievement my family found hilarious.
.
Mr F died of cancer quite young, and was remembered by later pupils as prone to violence. But it was the affliction of the tumour in his brain, creating cruel change. He threw blackboard dusters at people.A most gentle person.
It wouldn’t be allowed today.
Big, loud, red-faced Mr W, was Head of Hawk House, of which I was an incumbent and he taught me Maths. You’d hear the roaring from his office after assembly as he dealt with one bully or another.
‘Ohhh,’ he’d roar.’So you think it’s clever to get a little first year lad by his ear, do you? Tell me, how do YOU like it when I do THIS?’
‘Aayaa, ayaa! No sir!’
‘Or this?’
‘Ayaa, ayaa! no sir!’
‘Well, don’t you do it then, or you’ll be back in here for some more.’
It wouldn’t be allowed today.
Meeting me in the corridor at break times he’d press me to the wall with his enormous belly, and, stinking of cigarette smoke, he would bellow good naturedly from his great height. ‘Hello! SILLY WOMAN! How are you diddling?’
I knew, as did my sisters at the same school and as young people immediately do know; he was OK, not even remotely creepy, so we only laughed about it, while avoiding it if we could. I only smile at the memory but…
It wouldn’t be allowed today.
One of my ‘life lessons’ came from an elderly and very gentle science teacher. Mr Vest (yes, really) gently admonished me one day for my untidily presented homework. Embarrassed, I explained that my pen was leaky.
He said, ‘Now Katie, I know you like sayings. What’s the saying for this situation?’
I couldn’t guess which one he might mean.
‘A bad workman blames his tools’ …
An apple for teacher. But our memories are the apples they have given us, crisp and sharp, rosy and polished, maggoty and rotten.
Tarot Goes Shopping in London Town For London Fashion Week
A dowser, from an 18th century French book about superstitions. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Recently, my Tarot went to London Fashion Week.
Not literally, alas.
My cards and I stayed here, my behind stuck firmly to a chair in my home, True Tarot Central, in Lancashire.
A regular client – she’s been using my service six or seven years now- owns a boutique where I live. She is a rock and a gem. has been in business more than 20 years and employs a 4-8 staff at any given time. She wanted the Tarot’s inputs as part of planning her buying trip to London Fashion Week.
How did this work?
Tarot had previously forecast a challenging year to come for her business in 2012, with a need to diversify.
Responding to this, a few days ahead of her buying trip to London Fashion Week, the client briefed me with checking out a list of 20 fashion collections which she had shortlisted as buying possibilities.
My brief was to dowse through this list, identifying which collections represented the best buys for her boutique in terms of likely future sales revenue.
How did I set about it?
I carried out card counting spreads in respect of each collection listed. Ithen checked these findings against my pendulum. A clockwise swing of the pendulum was positive corroboration. An anti clockwise swing of the pendulum was a negative which demanded further enquiry for clarification.
Collections getting a positive reading of 6/8 or better were flagged up as Green for BUY
Collections getting a positive reading of 5/8 or 6/8 were flagged as Amber-Green BUY SELECTIVELY
Collections getting a positive reading of 4/8 were flagged as Amber OCCASIONAL PIECES
Collections getting a positive reading of 3/8 were flagged as Amber-Red IF IN DOUBT LEAVE
Collections getting anything below this were flagged as Red. WARNING!
The Tarot offered other comments and suggestions.
It is too soon to verify the sales forecasting.
But a note from my client confirmed that with the Tarot’s help, I had at least accurately anticipated her reactions upon actually seeing the colelctions for herself in person. This reinforced her own instincts and she told me, this reinforcement from another quarter helped her arrive at her decisions more quickly and with confidence.
It afforded her a ‘second opinion’ to draw on when she was unsure. An inside track with no vested interest other than in giving reliable service.
Tarot is at the Questioner’s service. The Questioner is always charge and remains in control of the use he or she chooses to make of the information.
What a business dowser can do, at the least, is offer a virtual psychic companionship, resulting in avoidance of waste, risk and loss through uncertainty in difficult times.
Is it profanity, is it unspiritual to use the Tarot for business, for money making?
Well, is it profane to help people working for their daily bread, who are providing work for others in the process?
It is Life which is sacred, not the 78 pieces of cardstock which comprise in physical terms, the oracle of Tarot.
The Tarot is a portal for reaching inward, then reaching outward, to me, ‘myself’, to ‘you’, to ‘us’, to ‘them’.
Things that go bump in the night. If it’s filmed, I don’t think it’s the ‘real’ aka unreal thing.
Why not? Because such experiences are lonely perceptions of the Amygdala. The eyes see what the brain sees, projecting, not reflecting. This is the vision of the psychic eye. It does not mean that it is not ‘real’. Two or more people may witness it at the same time, but that is unusual.
Reports of reliable sightings of ghosts may be considered suspect for a number of reasons. Not least, motivation. For one thing, they can be good for business-certain businesses. There was an interesting legal situation in the ’90s when a famously haunted Lancashire property, Chingle Hall, was sold at a value to reflect its haunted status with tourist income potential, which did not, em, materialize as substantially as expected.
Article in The Independent Monday 20 June 1994 :
“A PROFESSOR and his wife were ‘gullible and nave’ when they bought a historic moated manor, dubbed ‘the most haunted house in Britain’, the High Court sitting in Liverpool, heard yesterday.
Plans for the historic Chingle Hall in Lancashire to be a tourist attraction were a ‘pipe dream’, said William George, counsel for a Canadian professor, Trevor Kirkham, and his wife, Judy.
Professor Kirkham, of Montreal University, and his wife are suing the former owner of Chingle Hall, John Bruce, a barrister, and his solicitors, Hodgson & Sons of Preston.
They claim they were misled into buying the pounds 420,000 house at Goosnargh, supposedly haunted by a martyr, John Wall, and other spirits.
The couple allege misrepresentation over profit and income from the Grade II listed house and the availability of planning permission.
Mr George said that Professor Kirkham and his wife originally made an unsuccessful offer for the 13th-century house in 1986. Two years later, they were visiting Professor Kirkham’s father near Preston when they again visited Chingle Hall. At that time there was a possession order on the house because Mr Bruce had fallen ‘considerably into arrears with his mortgage payments’, Mr George said.
‘It is the plaintiffs’ case that they were gullible and nave faced by the first defendant (Mr Bruce) who explained that he was a member of the Bar and also had considerable commercial experience,’ Mr George said.
‘He made many statements about the successes and likely successes of the business being carried out at Chingle Hall as a tourist attraction.’ However, at that time annual losses at the hall – which was open to the public – were in excess of pounds 30,000. Also, plans for the house to be developed further as a tourist attraction were later turned down by the local authority.
The case continues today. “
This doesn’t mean there aren’t ghosts at Chingle Hall.
But ghosts are not performing seals.
This begs the question, what is a ghost, anyway?
Have I experienced anything of that sort, myself? Yes, on a few occasions.
The first occasion was long before I ever thought of learning Tarot, and the full strangeness did not hit me right away or even for some years. I was ‘fetched’ to a scene where a man had just died, and it was the man himself who had done the fetching. There was the body, round the back of M&S in Leicester. There was the ambulance, and the paramedics, trying to resuscitate him. And he was there, close by me, somewhere off to my right. But he was too far gone, too far outside himself, and he was very shocked, poor man. I spoke to him, hoping to reassure him that it was OK, though I have no way of knowing if he could hear me.
There’s the ghost of a small dog on the staircase in my house, just now and then. I’ve seen it running down the stairs, fading in and out of view; nothing unpleasant about it whatsoever. I’ve seen it in the kitchen and on the landing, and I’ve seen it run under the dining table. It’s the size of a large terrier with pricked ears and a short dark coat. I see the movement and the shape, not the detail. Il Matrimonio has not seen it. My younger daughter has seen it once, at the top of the stairs.
I imagine it’s some kind of energy residue; a print, or a memory of a previous household pet.
Other things I have seen over the years have been altogether sadder, stranger, creepier, and I have not wished to see them.
I’m not asking anyone to ‘believe’ in these things. If you see them, then you see them. If you don’t, you don’t, and many don’t. But I hear a lot of stories, quite matter of fact in presentation, from eminently sensible people who are clearly in perfect possession of their marbles.
TC Lethbridge, psychic researcher and academic with a scientific background said, ‘today’s magic is tomorrow’s science,’ and perhaps he was not far off the mark.
The world is not only stranger than we know. It is stranger than we CAN know. It is easy to laugh at what we don’t understand. But why should recognizing the possibilities and the limits of our current understanding be raised as a barrier to enquiry?
Tarot, Runes, our dreams, myths and songs, are some of the many boats we sail for exploring these waters. Some prefer to stay in harbour and not explore these things, and they needn’t. But sometimes it’s not a choice and the current pulls us out.
For all our intellectual achievements and aspirations, resistant to ‘superstition’ or not ‘we’ remain an instinctive animal. We rely on it for our safety. If someone gives you the creeps, then they give you the creeps, and there’ll be a reason. Police, Emergency Services Personnel, the Military, they all rely on good instinct- or else.
What we call psychic is only an extreme manifestation of instinct. This is our nature and our default. Factual truth may also be poetic. Stories come from someone’s experience, and myths and fairy tales from a collective experience. In this sense, however fanciful, even ghost stories contain some essential truth. They do not lie.
Here was an instance of using tarot card counting to arrive at a qualified forecast.
My daughter, 16 at the time, was learning piano. She went for lessons once a week and practiced – ahem, sometimes– on a small, reconditioned 1930s piano in the dining room. We had been hearing a lot of renditions of ‘Oliver!’ – Fagin’s song about reviewing the situation, ‘I think I’d better think it out again!’
At Christmas I got a phone call the piano teacher, to say my daughter would soon be due to put in for entry for her Grade 2 exam, but she wasn’t going to be ready as she wasn’t putting in the necessary work. Well, I asked my daughter, did she want to go for it or not? It was her decision, but if she decided to go for it, I expected her to show that she meant business.
She opted to go for it, upped the practise sessions, and had the exam 29 March, held at school during the school day. She came dragging home with a long face. ‘I made loads of mistakes,’ she said, ‘in both pieces.’
What did the Tarot think, she wanted to know. Had she passed? She couldn’t see how, she was sure she had made ‘loads of mistakes’.
‘And what did you do? I asked.
‘I kept going,’ she said.
Slips might not have mattered as much as she feared if the examiner had detected an overall fluency, I told her. The examiner would expect slips due to nerves and overall ‘flow’ would have been the indicator of underlying technical competence.
I drew 8 cards and turned them over. Six were upright, which to me signified a yes answer from tarot. Two were reversed, upside down, indicating a no answer. Therefore the Tarot thought it highly probable, a 75% probability that she had in fact passed, despite her feelings about it.
Two cards in particular were encouraging. The Page of Swordsmade an appearance and was upright. This was a lucky sign because my daughter is herself a Page of Swords, born under Aquarius. Facially, the card resembles her too, and the hair is not dissimilar, nor the build.
The Page Of Swords, The Gilded Tarot, publisher Llewellyn, used with kind permission of Ciro Marchetti
The Queen of Swords was another of the cards drawn in its upright or positive aspect. Was the examiner an older lady, elegant and well-spoken? I asked her. Yes, she said, sort of old-fashioned, serious, but very nice.
‘She liked you,’ I said, I sensed that this Queen had recognised in her a young ‘page of music’.
Because the suit of Swords has strong correlations with Science – Physics in particular- and Medicine, Mathematics and Music.
These two court cards appearing amongst the six upright cards reinforced my confidence on her behalf and anyway, the thing was done, and I told her not to worry. And she did pass.
You don’t have to be ‘psychic‘ in order to learn tarot, which is a skill of divination, in which one attempts to uncover hidden or semi-hidden information or understanding. You do have to be interested in symbols and associative thinking, you do have to be receptive, but to be ‘psychic’ helps sometimes, to make the symbolic more precise, and to talk in every day, concrete terms, about specifics.
Am I ‘psychic’? Yes, to an extent, and so probably, are you, but what does it mean?
The word ‘psychic’ may comes from the Greek, ‘psyche’, meaning soul and derived from the word ‘psychikos’ meaning, mental, of the mind. ‘Psychic’ implies soulic knowledge, the soul entering and leaving the body on the breath. The word intuition also refers to an inner knowing, that which is our inner tutor, and which we all possess as an inseparable element of normal human instinct.
So what is the difference between being intuitive and psychic? It’s subtle. Perhaps it’s most simply defined as a matter of precision or degree.
The intuition provides us with impressions, feelings, and reactions. Time being of the essence where safety is an issue, intuitions arrive instantly, in advance of any hard evidence to explain them. Intuition is a courier of super-fast intelligence, bypassing conscious processes. Everyone is intuitive. It is a function of competent, normal intelligence, but not everybody, maybe for cultural or ‘intellectual’ reasons, feels comfortable about acknowledging it.
Some ‘diss it’ by saying they will deal only with ‘proven facts’ or evidence or reason.
Yawn. Well, let them, if they want to limit themselves unnecessarily. But this, it could be argued, is actually anti-intellectual. The mind is a whole, not a pie servable in slices.
Psychic insights come when they come, are instantaneous and specific. Something may be ‘seen’ or ‘heard’ or ‘smelled’ or dreamed of, but it will be particular, unlike the formless but none the less powerful, and even life- saving promptings of the intuition.
Early Tarot Images of La Papesse, or High Priestess.
The High Priestess, pictured above, represents both the Intuition, and the Psyche and psychic promptings, or refers to a person who may be female or male, who works or serves as an advisor, or seer.
Reading for a client one evening, I sensed she was holding something back, and to encourage her, asked her directly about a ‘rude man’ I kept sensing, a bully with a loud voice, fair or ginger, a salesman of some kind? The card triggering this was the King of Wands Reversed.
My client said she knew who this was; a man who had a market stall near hers, but she insisted that she’d come only for advice regarding retirement. Courtesy demanded I take her at her word, and we carried on, but I remained uneasy that she hadn’t shared the real worry, and so I hadn’t had a chance to try and help. Such was my feeling.
After she had gone, I was lying in front of the television with a cup of tea, when I suddenly ‘saw’ her in my mind’s eye. She was holding a big round pot in both hands, and she was mending it, with great care and attention.
Oh! I thought. Well, I had mentioned to her that I could see her taking up pottery (prompted by the appearance of the Page of Coins) But I was struck, the mental picture was so vivid.
Next day she called, but I had someone with me and couldn’t call back straight away. When I returned the call, the phone rang for a long time before I rang off. She called again and at last we spoke. The lady now wanted to tell me what was bugging her about the rude man. He was an unwanted admirer. He’d told her that he’d been to me for a reading, that I had performed psychometry on his wrist watch (psychometry is a psychic reading performed using as a focus an object connected to the person being read through a history of physical contact or at least, proximity) I had predicted, so this man said, that he and this lady were going to marry.
So her real reason for coming to see me had been to check this out. Would I say anything that would correspond with this man’s account?
The gentleman was a fibster. What a lot of porky pies and utter ……
I did not know him, I had not read for him, nor do I offer psychometry readings. Nor would I ever have said such a thing. I do not offer predictions, but forecasts, offering a sense of the odds on a question, but nothing prescriptive, for whom am I to disregard the possibilities of free will or the wild card?
I told her this, we chatted awhile, and as a light hearted way of signing off the call, I mentioned my vision of the night before.
‘ That’s why I couldn’t pick up the phone when you rang!’ she said. ‘That’s why I
Psychic Chasms (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
had to call you back. I had glue all over my hands, trying to fix a pot I broke yesterday!’
The vision had therefore been an instance of psychic, as opposed to intuitive ‘knowing’.
It’s a matter of record now, I’m as sane as the next person, or at least as sane as any one of us could prove ourselves to be, but I am a ‘potty’ psychic.
I was in good odour with a regular client. In June 2010, a reading indicated that her husband had reason to be hopeful of early retirement with a viable retirement package. He had been wanting to go for some time, but hadn’t found an early way out that he would find acceptable financially.
The cards assessed the chances of an opportunity materialising before the end of 2010 as 6 out of 8, odds I translated as meaning it was highly likely, though not inevitable.
Nothing is inevitable but Death…and taxes, so the saying goes. The future consists of so many complex variables, I find it more meaningful to attach a weighting to ‘predictions’, or forecasts, as I prefer to think of them.
What’s the difference? Well, a prediction is a statement about the future presented as a virtual fact, a done deal. A forecast is an indication of the likelihood that something will happen, leaving space for the workings of undetected random chance and free will. Society uses all manner of forecasting…from the weather to the Stock Exchange. tarot readers just offer another, personalised form, intuitively collected using tarot symbols as tools of assessment and translation, as our equivalent of the gathering and statistical analysis of hard data.
The chief cards I drew indicative of a viable ending coming into view over time’s horizon were The Emperor Reversed, Justice and Judgment.
The Emperor often indicates a man of mature years, or an organisation, generally a large one. His employer was a global defence company. Justice = Law, contract. Judgement = as in Judgement Day, in a benign way, a time of reckoning, the right time for completing or ending something.
I heard today he was invited to go in December, as part of a larger redundancy programme and – which will not necessarily the case for all such invitees – he is delighted.
True Tarot Tales 