With Katie-Ellen Hazeldine, professional tarot reader, consultant and writer in the UK
Last Sunday my older daughter rang to say she had applied for a job at a vet’s practice. She had been considering a move for some time, due to lack of further training prospects at the vet’s she had been with for three years.Â
Hearing there was a job going, she called the recruiting practice only to found the closing date for applications had already gone. She was downcast, then thought, what the hell, sent her CVÂ and a letter of application anyway and was rewarded for her intiative with an invitation to interview.
Would she be offered the job? I was disinclined to look. I didn’t need the cards to offer suggestions for tackling the interview. I used to work in recruitment amongst other things.  Applying for the job was a no-brainer; no help asked or needed from the Tarot on that score. What would be, would be etc.
On Tuesday my mother rang, and we got talking about it. I quickly shuffled the cards while on the telephone, asking to be shown a card connected to the outcome of the interview. I was sneaking a peek with no intention of passing it back, as, whether the outcome looked positive or not, I had no wish to interfere with my daughters own processes.
I drew The Fool card.
This card of arrival, reinvention, reincarnation, setting forth, is above all a harbinger of new beginnings. Much energy and enthusiasm attach to it. Notice the dog. My daughter’s special interest is dog training and she has run puppy classes.
The dog in the card represents common sense. The Fool card, when drawn upside down indicates either over-timidity or recklessness, immaturity, irresponsibility, bad timing…and very occasionally, death, because the card is associated with number zero…Â
Looking at The Fool I remarked to ‘Grandma’ that I felt the prospective employer was going to like her. Being dignified, right way up, this was a great card for job hunting. If she didn’t get this one, she’d be getting another soon. My mother sniffed, unimpressed, declaring that of course they would like her; such a neat and efficient button-like person. A proper grandma is nothing if not loyal.
The interview was on Wednesday. On Friday evening my daughter rang to say she had got it, and though she’s not much ‘into’ what I do, she’s absorbed enough not to have been unduly perplexed at my turn of expression as I congratulated her.
 ‘Who’s a clever little Fool, then?’ I said.Â
That’s my girl.
I have found that the Tarot‘s predictive abilities will help with travel plans, and I’ve made use of this when booking holidays etc.
This was how I first discovered the potential.
Planning to drive from Lancashire to Tewkesbury one Saturday,  a round trip of 330 miles that had to be done in a day, in a two car convoy delivering a car to my elder daughter, we were dreading the M6.
I thought I’d ask the Tarot to suggest the optimal time for setting off, that would enable us to avoid traffic trouble.
To do this I drew cards to represent a range of logical departure times, drawing one card per time slot. In the card slot representing a 1.00 pm departure I drew a very positive ‘travel’ card…the Page of Wands.
Here is the Rider-Waite’s Page of Wands card for anyone not familiar with it. (U.S. Games)
He’s warmly dressed for the desert, isn’t he? His tunic is decorated with little salamanders, an amphibian magically symbolic of the element of fire. Wands is the fire suit in Tarot, and symbolises the South. Pages in the Tarot represent starts/beginnings, amongst other things, and Wands is the suit of flickering flames, movement and travel. The card therefore represented a relevant fit to the question.
We set off at 1.00 pm and the Page didn’t let us down.
Heading south we passed an horrendous jam on the northbound carriageway just north of Stafford. It was the length of two junctions. There had been an accident. We carried on, crossing our fingers for the injured people, and the poor souls stuck in the jam, getting desperate by now surely, and wanting drinks or the loo.
We dreaded returning that way within the next few hours. Having to avoid the jam by changing route was not a good option. The Page of Wands was being put on his mettle.
But he proved reliable. Heading north again, nothing remained of the jam but some debris swept into the central reservation. Arriving home free of further worry, what could I say but ‘Thank you.’ Here was the Tarot showing, yet again, that it’s a fully adaptable tool for the modern world.
What’s this all about? Forecasting or magic, or tuning into instinct and trying to programme the will? Are all three one and the same? Very likely. Will it always work?
The most confident and expert reader in the world (and this is not me) is only human and frail, so, I would say not. Interesting potential here though, do you think?
Other positive travel cards in the Tarot: The Ace of Wands, the 8 of Wands, the 6 of Swords, The Chariot, The Wheel of Fortune, The Sun, and The World.Â
Runes are used for advice about travel too, or to invoke ‘magical’ protection. Auspicious runes for travel include Rad or Raitho. (Journeys, Riding) as shown below…
… and The Horse, Ehwaz (vehicle, a unit of travel, such as a carriage, shank’s pony)
 (Images source sacreddivination.com)
My experience, having used these alongside Tarot, is such that I would not neglect their study for this work, either. For ‘luck’ a prospective traveller might for instance, copy out their symbols, investing positive, respectful  and appreciative expectation into the act of drawing. The symbol might then be carried on the person, in a pocket or wallet, or in the vehicle but it needs to kept upright, not carried or stored in such a way it might turn upside down and reverse the ‘luck’.
Magical thinking?
A bit bonkers?
Perhaps. But the human mind is eons older than human language and:-
‘If the mind will trust the body, the body will trust the mind, then the spirit of a thing can become greater than one thing.‘
I don’t know who said it..but really, I think it says it all.
Today, the day of summer solstice, and the zenith of the sun, let’s talk about the ultimate Tarot card of Masculinity with a capital ‘M’,  The Emperor.
‘The Emperor’ appearing in a Tarot reading signifies the current extra significance of an important man in your life, at an individual level. He’s a father, husband, employer, friend or advisor.
The Emperor stands for government, law and order, other big, hierarchical organisations. He is the Armed Forces, the Police, the Civil Service.
He is the guiding principle of protection and of the guardian at work in society and in the home. See those ram’s heads on the arms of his throne? The Emperor is associated with the sign of Aries, the fiery ram. It may indicate a future event occurring at that time of year.
Image below is The Emperor from The Gilded Tarot, by kind permission of Ciro Marchetti
The Emperor in his true dignity is strength with justice, courage with reason: a defender, a chevalier, a sheltering tree, nests held safely in his branches. He is rule with mercy, compassion for the weak. He upholds fair play, raising his shield so not everyone sheltering behind it gets splattered with rubbish and  er…manure.
He has another side to him of course: war, dictatorship, tyranny, petty officialdom, overbearing bureaucracy. The card may alternatively signify absence of structure and leadership. A bully. The Emperor Reversed is a very serious matter. War.
But greetings are due to The Emperor at the top of his game – best friend to womankind; those men that we love, and what we love best in men, sons of the red earth.
Let your Emperor wear his crown and ermine every now and then.
You may be an Empress, and you can wear yours too.
Greetings to the Tarot’s beloved Emperor.
Until next time 🙂
I rarely watch sport, and can’t bear all the roaring and howling that comes out of the telly when football’s on. Some of those commentators get really foamingly hysterical and could do with a slap. But who am I to naysay a national passion? The card below, the 6 of Pentacles, also known as Coins or Discs, is the card I have learned to associate with the ‘home crowd’.
 I wouldn’t feel comfortable using the Tarot for betting purposes. Or safe. It would seem disrespectful, contrary to ethics, and if  it didn’t work out, there could be unwanted comeback. And if it did work out, there could be unwanted comeback.
Maybe someone would like to make a movie about a tarot reader who gets a hit man set on to them by a cartel of evil bookmakers, because the reader’s giving too many winning tips and it’s costing the bookmakers big time. Hello, Quentin T? Are you there?
But if Tarot is a divination tool, what will it co-operate in divining for and what won’t it divine for? Does the ability to divine depend upon the reader having a personal interest or sense of connection to the question?Â
I live just down the road from Blackpool and Saturday was a big sporting event. Blackpool (the Tangerines) were playing Cardiff at Wembley. At stake, so I gather, a place in the Premier League and £90 million. High stakes indeed.
I laid out my cards in a counting spread. I laid out six cards and above them another. The six cards ‘count’ for one point each. The solitary card above them counts for two, giving a total of eight.
I laid out two of these spreads, one to represent Blackpool, the other Cardiff.
As I shuffled I asked to be shown the winning team.
Normally in a counting spread, a likelihood of something happening will be given by a result of drawing more upright cards than upside down cards, known as reversals.
I drew a count of three upright cards for Blackpool. Doesn’t look great, I thought. Then I drew a count of two uprights for Cardiff. Oh, I thought. That’s not a win either according to my usual system.
I decided that the Tarot had answered a differently phrased question. It knew what I was trying to get at and had answered me very directly, not by saying a yes or no, but by indicating the SCORE.
And a little over two hours later, we had the score: Blackpool 3: Cardiff City 2.
SEE VIDEO HIGHLIGHTS BELOW (…if you absolutely must.)
http://www.footytube.com/video/blackpool-cardiff-city-may22-47851
As a tarot reader, getting an answer that doesn’t seem to fit the question, be prepared to discover that the answer you’ll get is a correct answer to the question as the Tarot preferred to tackle it.
Tackle. Geddit?
So in answer to the original question…no. Divination does not require an emotional connection from the reader. In fact, this could skew the results. Reading for yourself if you’re tired or anxious, or reading for loved ones where there is anxiety or hope attached to the question, may produce distortion of interpretation.Â
If reading for yourself, try pulling  an extra card – a  BIAS CARD to identify any such distortion.
When receiving a reading, bear in mind tarot and similar activities work best when your reader is in an ‘alpha state,’ a condition of relaxed consciousness. Scowling at a reader with cold suspicion, arms folded, is not conducive to the alpha state for either of you…because you too, will get most from your reading in the creative receptivity of alpha state.
If you follow football, you have pretty good hunches sometimes, and want to be even better at hedging your bets…you could do much worse than hone your intuition by learning a divination skill. Joking aside, such skills, whether you’re using tarot cards, ordinary playing cards, runes, divining rods, mirrors or pendulums…are a tool for life, with who knows how many applications.
Questions or comments? Just click on the comment tag below.Â
What a few weeks it has been for anyone using the Tarot to try and divine the Election outcome. On May 4 I looked in the cards and saw a riot of apparent contradiction. Cross- referencing a number of question-and-answer columns, I seemed to be witnessing the following scenario post May 6:-
Gordon Brown still in situ in No. 10
BUT David Cameron the ‘winner’…just
AND a Hung Parliament was probable. (chance 3/5 or greater.)
GB! I thought. And I meant Gordon Bennett!  not Gordon Brown. It looked completely bonkers. I tried to rationalise what I was looking at and couldn’t. I couldn’t  think of a formula or precedent, that would allow me to accept the Tarot’s preview as likely.
Now, to use the Tarot for divination on public matters or world events doesn’t feel at all the same as doing an interpersonal reading. When attempting to divine impersonal events, such as earthquakes for example, or the actions or thinking of a mass collective…such as the national consciousness, the variables are truly enormous.
Even so. Hindsight (or Back In Time, as Tarot author Janet Boyer terms it) serves here as a reminder that reading the Tarot can require NERVE.
We have come though an education system that doesn’t teach us to how to train or access our unconscious mind pro-actively. To live peaceably in society settings, the human animal has had to compromise individual instinct…which is why the divination arts are so often regarded with mistrust and disfavour. They theoretically represent a potential threat to society.  Imagine the social consequences of all of us acting on our gut feelings about other people…we’d struggle to work productively in co-operative teams of strangers in the workplace for starters, wouldn’t we?Â
As a tarot reader it doesn’t necessarily come easy, trusting what you see in your cards when it doesn’t square with your rational analysis of the question. Learning to ‘just go with it’ is the simplest and yet the hardest thing of all.
And so, returning to the reading on the Election, we drew the Emperor Rev as an Emperor  (PM, Government, authority figure, paterfamilias) departed – with gravitas and dignity in my personal view, just as he had conducted himself in the T.V debates – with gravitas and dignity.
And now we have two younger, smaller Emperors…
Let’s hope it’s a harmonious workable team, as in the Tarot’s Chariot card, able to forge smoothly ahead, and not the Chariot Reversed which would signify Double Trouble…
Below is the Chariot Card from the popular pre 1900’s IJJ Swiss Tarot Deck.
I would say to tarot students, ‘nerve’ develops with experience.  Cutting your ‘tarot teeth’ reading for a forgiving audience -family, friends, friends of friends, doing lots and lots of them, will help you find your key strengths and affinities in working with the Tarot.
This develops confidence in your divination…the Tarot’s power is the power of self-trust.
Simple Tarot Spread, getting a snapshot reading by using the major points of the compass.
I often use a 5 card spread to get a quick sense of how someone is doing in general. It’s useful when I haven’t been given any question, in which case I use it to help to identify the question.
To go up in my tarot helicopter I shuffle blind and draw 5 cards.
Card 1Â EARTH/ the North stands the Suit of Coins (also called Pentacles or Discs.) I Look here to see how my querent is faring in terms of home, job, money, health, stability and security.
Card 2 WATER / West stands the Suit of Cups: I look here for insights into matters of the heart, what’s going on in their personal relationships. How’s their mood? I look out here also for issues to do with health, healing and recovery, and for creative and spiritual preoccupations or questions.
Card 3 FIRE/ South stands for the Suit of Wands: here I’m asking myself via the Tarot, what’s driving them? What’s the dream right now? Travel and relocation plans may also show up here, and social aspects, and levels of inspiration and energy.
Card 4 AIR/ East stands for the Suit of Swords: here I’m looking for a sense of, what’s going on in their head right now? (apart from the reading, obviously) I look here for their plans, pending decisions, exercising choice and power, and any legal, medical or intellectual matters.
A fifth card is drawn for the centre of the cross, and here I am explicitly asking, what is the priority to be addressed in this reading session? What is THE Question?
A recent client drew
Cups The Emperor Reversed (Bureaucracy, overbearing or absent male figure)Â The Four of Wands Reversed
Client Response: This Card correctly indicated dissatisfaction connected to a home/property and/or a professional matter. The client had a flat on the market, no offers as yet, and had just bought a new house, but didn’t feel settled and was feeling anxious that she had made a false step. She liked her work but had been unsettled there recently, having difficulty with a new manager’s communication style. She was thinking of retirement (and this card when reversed means a LACK or ENDING or a NON-STARTING of a professional activity or satisfaction.)
The Emperor Reversed
Client Response: This card rang true. Â She confirmed both as concerns that were preoccupying her at this time.
The 3 of Cups
Client response. She wanted, not a husband necessarily, but a proper companion. The man in her life would not entertain the thought of marriage, nor would he court her, nor even come to visit her in her new home. She was beginning to feel, not only sad but angry about this (the growing anger shown again to me later by the 5 of Swords) Her new house did not feel like home…she felt she hadn’t had a  ‘house warming’…
The Wheel of Fortune
Client Response:  She was ready for change, beginning to think very hard about what she wanted and needed after retirement. She felt she wanted life to continue opening up…she didn’t want it to narrow, she dreaded the idea of a dead-end.
The Question Card  Judgement: Retirement was approaching, the end of a major life chapter. A kind of Judgement Day. Her essential question was, What would her life be like after it?
There were strong signs of happiness in retirement, indicated as being about eighteen months down the line. The relationship problem wasn’t going to be an obstacle to this. If the man chose not to opt in more actively, I sensed she was going on to sail on regardless, and if he didn’t respond, he was likely to be left behind.
Until next time 🙂
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