ghosts – Page 4 – True Tarot Tales

Tarot Talks Fee-Fi-Fum-Football.

Cover of "The Gilded Tarot" — Cover of The Gilded Tarot

I have had the cards out on a few football questions recently, out of interest. Not my interest, particularly, but Il Matrimonio’s.

This is such a poisoned chalice. When I get stuff like this right, he’s intrigued and chuffed, but he’s likely to turn round next day and say it was a good guess, or deny I’d told him what I’d told him, the treasonous reptile. If I get it wrong, he’ll jeer, whereupon I beat him back into his vivarium, and would throw a cockroach after him, if I could find one.

I’ll have a go at these questions anyway. I’m not charging for this work, it forms no part of my professional service, not directly. It’s to benefit my own study. How else does may one study the workings of intuition except to test it on those questions where one has no emotional stake?

Recently, he asked me to consult the Tarot re: Wigan Athletic v Manchester City in the FA Cup Final.

I looked and said I thought it was Wigan Athletic to win this match. I assessed their chances as 75% likely to win (but I did not see them winning their next match, I tweeted to this effect, and sadly, they didn’t)

He said this was impossible, that none of the pundits agreed. Why not, I asked? Because, he said, Man City were second in the Premier League, Wigan Athletic were in the bottom three, and Wigan hadn’t scored against Man City since 2007.

His objections to the forecast were based on trend, but a pattern may break at any time. Right or wrong, that was what I saw. The odds were in Wigan’s favour plus, I’d got The Magician as the outcome card, and The Magician is Mastery of Skill.

The Magician from The Gilded Tarot, by kind permission of Ciro Marchetti.

So, how had I decided this?

By means of a counting spread, and by using reversals (allowing upside down cards) as a way of qualifying the odds numerically.

I shuffled (which I do abominably) asking, ‘Wigan Athletic to win?’ Then I drew three cards and laid them out in a row. How many upright (‘dignified’) cards did I have? Two out of three. the middle card counted for 50%, the flanking cards for 25% each. The middle and final cards were upright, and the final card was The Magician. This was a wonderful card in the circumstances. It is the ultimate card of Skill and Mastery.

This forecasting method has proven highly reliable. Not infallible, I ‘m no such thing and would never claim to be, but I’d expect to get it right 90% + of the time and am perplexed till I understand why I miss the mark when it happens.

Today, however, I was asked another football question, and arrived at a response very differently.

Il Matrimonio slithered into the kitchen, hissing, ‘Crystal Palace or Watford?’

This time I did not reach for my cards. I was preparing lunch, I just said ‘wait,’ and paused, knife suspended fatefully over an imperilled avocado.

‘Crystal Palace?’ I said aloud to myself, and upon saying this felt a mild but distinct spasm on the left side of my neck which ran down my left arm into my fingers. It was mildly unpleasant, like the crawls you might get, pedalling your feet in bed at night when you’re low on magnesium or other salts.

Noting this reaction I said, ‘Crystal Palace to win’.

‘They’ve just scored,’ he said. ‘Fifteen minutes to go, let’s see if Watford pull it back,’ and off he wended, sidewinding his way back to the television.

Result: Crystal Palace 1: Watford 0.

So what?

For many it will only be stating the obvious to say that the physical and the psychic are one and the same. The very subtlety and sophistication of the Tarot’s vast reference library may be a weakness as well as a strength; a temptation to intellectualizing, which is NOT what is wanted, in trying to obtain a true result on Divination.

Until next time 🙂

The Tarot Interviews St George…

Tarot As A Story Telling Tool: St George

In honour of St George’s day, I’ll try the Tarot out as an interviewing tool, as a Translator across Time and Truth. St George’s Day, April 23rd, is also thought to be the anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare.

The Tarot tells no lies, but it stands to reason, factually speaking, there can be no getting at ‘the truth’ of St George. A legend may contain grains of fact, while representing the poetic truth of an amalgam of people or myths. As the poet, Kathleen Raine expressed it, ‘Myth is the Truth of Fact, not Fact the Truth of Myth.’

What some call fantastical, or lies, even damned lies, if they don’t apprehend poetic truth, for others is just taking a possibility for a walk, an interesting exercise with judgement in abeyance. Let’s suspend judgement just for a moment, as we enter the Tarot’s Imaginarium.

Raphael: St George and the Dragon: Public Domain

That poor dragon. Call the RSPCA. Well, that’s another way of looking at it, by way of a change.

George, if I may, if you can hear me, what can you tell us about yourself?
The Six of Swords Rx:

I am the other side of The River. I hear you only faintly, your words are not my language, and yet I understand you. There must be a translator somewhere. I have forgotten many things, but I remember I was a traveller. I made long journeys over the sea as well as by land. When I was small I’d go looking for frogs amongst the bullrushes in the pebbled stream, near where I lived. It was good luck to find a frog.

I didn’t read as well as my father wished, I had some letters, taught me by an old Persian with scarred legs – I didn’t know how he’d got those. He knew about numbers and about the stars. Sometimes he would let me sit by him, and show me maps of the sky.

You’re reputed to have killed a dragon. What can you tell us about that?
The Queen of Cups/Ace Pentacles Rx.

There was something once, but I wouldn’t call it a dragon. It was a water-drake, a filthy great eel, attacking fishermen, robbing nets some place I stopped off, they saw I was a military man and they offered coin and a night’s lodgings if I would help them hunt and kill it, and they were in difficulties, so I did.

What about the rescued princess?

Queen of Cups Rx

Princess? I don’t know. There was a woman, still beautiful, not young. Nothing to do with the drake. I was passing through, the problem was mentioned, good coin offered (Ace Coins Rx) I went out at night with the fishermen. One guided the boat, I saw the great eel showing silver at the surface, and threw my lance. We had to withdraw and wait. There was no question of pulling the lance out of this thing, or pulling it from the water still alive. Its mistake was in coming so close to the surface when the moon was so bright. I’d never seen one so huge. They said it had taken a child.
Another thing happened that might have become a story of a dragon. A battle chariot came down on us. A huge thing with its horse team decked out in the semblance of a beast, with a beast’s head carving. I flung a spear, it went through the spokes of one of the wheels. My farthest throw ever, they said. Maybe that’s the root of the story. It was that, or the eel. I kept a pine marten once, for a season, but I don’t imagine that will qualify.

What was your profession?

The King of Swords
(This ties in with known history) Oh, I was ‘miles’, a soldier, I became ‘miles’ after the death of my mother, and I went on to become an officer. A thing to be said for Rome was, it rewarded skill and service, it gave you chances. I wasn’t popular, or perhaps I simply mean, I wasn’t easy and outgoing. I was known for a certain reserve, nothing to do with rank. I was rarely the worse for wear, I laughed at jokes, but I didn’t make many. But the men didn’t give me a hard time either about getting promotion. I tried hard to be fair, always, didn’t put on airs, and few of them could see further or clearer than I could, or better me with a lance. I had a horse, a grey mare called Usa .

(Reading note: I got this name by ‘hearing’ it. Sometimes insights come this way in a real life reading. I had to look it up, and I found that ‘Usa’ is not listed as a Roman or Cappadocian name, but it is a Sanskrit name, meaning ‘Dawn’. My surprise was at finding the name actually existed, I hadn’t come across it before.)

What else, George?
Whatever I said I would do, I did. In my life I had two homes, two peoples, two purses and they were sometimes empty. I was always divided. But it was not in my nature to function divided. I looked at this, or I looked at that, the rest went into the background. I think others besides myself might have paid a heavy price for that. I could not see that at the time. Or if I did, I could not, or would not change it.

Is it accurate to say you were a Christian?
The Hierophant Rx
The word echoes. I remember that I found myself out of step, dangerously so.

Why was that?

The World.

Perhaps it was just the world I had came into.

What do you remember about leaving Life?

Seven of Wands, Ace of Cups.

There must have been pain and fear. but I don’t remember. I can only see blows coming at me to know it was not gentle. Then I was looking down from a height, the peace of knowing I had escaped and was free. Little else.

Did you have children?
The Three of Swords Rx
I feel I was mourned from afar. A son. I last saw him, before embarking overseas again. He had lately been apprenticed. Tooling of leather, I think. He was enjoying the work. Perhaps he continued to become a craftsman or merchant (3 Wands) I hope Life was good for him, I hope he got what he needed and wanted, but what his life path was like afterwards, I can never know.

Here Ends The Transmission

Until next time

St George’s Day (feelthebest.wordpress.com)

The Moon: and things That Go Bump In The Night

The Tarot’s Moon card: Things That Go Bump In The Night…

English: The Moon card from the Visconti-Sforz... — English: The Moon card from the Visconti-Sforza Tarot deck. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Tarot card that might be talking about things going bump in the night, and we don’t mean burglars…is The Moon card.

Its meanings: dreams, illusions, shadows, psychic perception, ghosts, deceit, danger, travel, paranoia, poison, infection, contagion, flood.

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.

Things that go bump in the Night (willowthevampire.com)

The Death Card, Dowsing & The Diamond Ring.

I drew The Ace of Pentacles once, and was initially puzzled as to why, Tarot was flagging it up as a problem, but the lady was adamant there were no money or property issues troubling her, as I would have expected with this card, being drawn reversed as it was.

In fact it did represent a property issue. It was just that the lady hadn’t thought of it in those terms. The Ace of Pentacles reversed represented a diamond ring, and the card was drawn reversed because the ring was missing and had been lost now for more than eighteen months. The lady was very sad about it. The ring had been a gift from her husband who had died three years previously; a fact I knew already from previous readings for this delightful lady.

If I had not already known, the appearance of the 9 of Swords (grieving, bereavement, sleepless nights) would have been a clue.

Below is the Rider-Waite Nine of Swords (U.S. Games)

The lady asked my help in finding the missing ring. DISCLAIMER follows: Neither dowsing or remote viewing – the other possibility for finding lost objects psychically – form part of my professional service, which focusses on situational feedback, advice and forecasts.

I reminded her of this, but she asked me to please just have a go anyway. I’d been right about things before, and the loss was preying on her mind. I agreed because I knew her, and knew she would understand it was a long shot. I said I would not charge, as I could not guarantee success. She replied, gracious as always, she wished to pay for my time, regardless.

I began by asking the Tarot whether the lost ring was still in my clients flat.

I did this using a counting spread. This is how it works. Drawing more than 50% of the cards upright is a yes answer in this type of spread, less than 50% is a no. The more upright cards, the stronger the ‘yes’ signal. The more reversed cards, the stronger the ‘no’ .

Getting a 50% answer, which happens a lot, gaaahhh, is the greatest challenge and often, I have learned the hard way, signifies the need to rephrase the question, or ask a different question to obtain the best answer.

Using this counting approach now, the Tarot indicated that yes, the ring was in her flat still. It had not been thrown away by accident as she feared.

The prospect of using the cards for narrowing down the exact location of a ring in a flat I had never visited was a time -consuming prospect however. I decided that instead, I would try dowsing with a pendulum.

I didn’t have my quartz pendulum handy, so I removed my neck chain which had a small pendant. I would use this to request yes, no and maybe answers that would help me edit out all the other impressions that might come to me through the cards.

I would draw single cards for extra information.

I wrote the word ‘Bedroom‘ on paper first because my client was pretty determined that the ring must be in the bedroom. I suspended the chain and locket over the word and it described an anti-clockwise circle which I took for a no answer.

Was the ring in the kitchen? No.

The bathroom? No.

The sitting room? The pendulum described a clockwise circle. Yes.

Dowsing appeared to have selected the sitting room. I drew another card at random and got The Death card. All I could think was that the lost ring was somehow in the keeping of the lady’s deceased husband.

Had her husband been buried or cremated, I asked? Cremated she said. I proceeded to tell her a story from my own life in which I had dowsed a dear one’s ashes, to know where they should be scattered, in accordance with the owners preferences, there having been no instruction in the will. Why did I tell her this? I did not fully understand at the time, but I would later.

Was there a vase in her sitting room with white roses in it? I asked. My reason for asking was that the thought came to me, considering the white rose on Death’s banner you can see on the picture of this Rider-Waite card (U.S Games).

No, she said, there were no white roses. Oh, well, I said, it was just a thought. Not to worry, but perhaps just bear it in mind while you look.

She left with advice to search the sitting room, near objects with a strong physical association with her husband. It really felt to me as if he had it, and was looking after it for her…a crazy notion, on the face of it.

She left at 12.30. At 2.55 she rang to tell me she had found the ring. She had needed a step- ladder to find it (so, if you see the 6 of Wands, which appeared at my first look, bear in mind it might, depending on circumstances, literally be a ladder.)

The diamond ring was on top of a wall unit in the sitting room, right beside the jar in which she kept her husband’s ashes.

‘I feel so silly,’ she said, ‘you asked about white roses, and I told you I hadn’t any when all the time there was a vase of them – silk ones, you know – on the hearth by the wall unit.’

I was delighted as you can imagine. Also a teensy bit freaked and considerable in awe.

How strange the Universe is and its workings. How mysterious the human mind is. She might have put it there herself, done it on automatic pilot and then forgotten. I helped her fetch it out of her memory. If not …the possibilities are strange indeed.

BUT. This is crucial, she was willing to work with me and help me try to help her. We found it together.

Check out dowsing on Google and Dowsing Associations and Societies if you’ve ever wondered if you have hidden water in your back garden, or want to know more about it in general. Use these links:-

http://www.britishdowsers.org/

http://www.dowsers.org/

Now where the *beep* did I leave my cup of tea?

Until next time 🙂