learning tarot – Page 13 – True Tarot Tales

Practical Tarot:The Chariot

I find a 4 card spread is a neat but comprehensive way of quickly opening a reading, I think of it as ‘taking someone’s temperature’ Tarot-style…

North card. Material Affairs, home, work, health etc

West Card: Relationships, spiritual matters, mood.

South Card: Career, ambitions, passions, energy levels

East Card: Thoughts, intellectual preoccupations, planning.

A central card or simply an extra card placed alongside may be used to identify the question or concern that is the motivation for coming to the reading.

This may or may not be logged in the forefront of the client’s conscious thinking at the reading’s outset and may emerge later. Don’t be put off too much if you’re new to reading, share the meaning of a card and a client refutes it. Don’t argue, accept the rebuttal and wait…very often it will emerge during the reading that the Tarot was right, and the client just needed a little more thinking time or to settle into the conversation first.

In the North I drew The Chariot Reversed. A card of Travel, Transport, Ambition, Partnership, Cohesion, Teamwork, Success achieved through focus and determination. Being drawn Reversed…was he currently experiencing trouble with transport or a sense of dissatisfaction with his job?

Not with transport he said, looking baffled. Yes, to the dissatisfaction at work question. He was a building labourer, a skilled one, and that was OK, he liked the work, but he had a hunger for learning, and a taste in reading and curiosity in metaphysical matters that he found was not readily understood by his work mates.

This formed the greater part of the discussion that followed.

But for now that did not seem to be all of ‘it’…what about his car or van, I asked? This was probably not a serious problem, positive surrounding cards indicated it as a passing concern, but it was lodged in the material and financial department of this small spread.

The MOT was due on it the following week, he said, and he was not looking forward to the bill one bit.

Aha. The Tarot was picking up on basics. And so it should.

1jjChariot-761232 — The Chariot from the Swiss IJJ Tarot.

Oh, Happy Fool!

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.

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 CV 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.

rider waite fool — The Fool: Rider-Waite: U.S Games Systems

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…

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.

That’s my girl.

A Tarot Tantrum!

A Tarot Tantrum!.

A Devil Of A Tarot Tantrum!

Jung coined a phrase to describe how he thought tarot worked: ‘synchronicity.’ Something in the reader connects with something in the cards. The cards are shuffled blind and drawn at random. However, synchronicity proposes that actually the selection isn’t random;

”[In synchronistic experiences] the perception of wholeness derives not from our ego, our conscious sense of self, but instead from the way in which the meaning unites all of who we are, parts of experience we were unaware of, potentials we have that have lain dormant or underdeveloped, elements of our personality that we didn’t know existed”

One evening a client left after an intense reading, and that day I had been very, very tired. I went upstairs with a cup of tea to lounge with a book. My teenage daughter came in asking me to take a look in the cards for her.

I said, ‘not right now, sweetie, I’m too tired. Give me half an hour’.

She persisted, and as I knew the question, and knew it wasn’t serious, and could wait I became annoyed.

‘If you keep on asking when I’ve said I’m too tired,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you the Devil card! Now then.’

She asked again. Oh, dear.

‘Right!’ I said and whipped the cards out from their cloth and shuffled them furiously.

‘Now see THIS!’ I hissed, pulled a card and brandished it at her, and knock me down with a very small chick feather, it was, it really was THE DEVIL CARD. Look atta ugly mug.

Ooh-er. A Devilish Tarot Tantrum to match my own.

She was I might say, suitably impressed. In fact she ran from the room howling for her dad, who was watching the footie and wasn’t remotely interested in this psychodrama, while I sniggered, feeling better now, peacefully drinking my tea.

Hey, you old Devil… you said it for me, heh heh! Now go away again, thank you.

Devil's Backbone — Devil’s Backbone (Photo credit: pietroizzo)

How about that for synchronicity?

Tarot Marshmallow

Tarot Marshmallow.

The Tarot and The Tooth.

I had a dental appointment coming up at the hospital. An extraction. Uh Oh.

I was dreading it. But it was another chance to put tarot to the test just for myself.

By law, tarot readers may not offer medical advice to clients. But many cards in the Tarot do relate to physical health as it is such an important part of life.

Readers may use that capability for themselves, may they not.

I asked the cards, was the dentist was going to do a good job me on the appointed date, and I drew the Page of Coins Reversed.

This card, I felt, represented the doomed tooth.

page coins golden tarot — The Page of Coins, The Golden Tarot, Kat Black.

And I drew the King of Swords.

king swords golden tarot — The King of Swords from The Golden Tarot (Kat Black)

This stern king represents the concept of the expert, the authority figure.

He has strong associations with the Law, Science and Maths, Music, and Medicine, especially Surgery.

Thus a King of Swords can represent a doctor or dentist, the Queen of Swords if the doctor or dentist is female.

It was a good card to draw, in the circumstances. This dentist was going to be on good form. I felt reassured.

And how did it go on that occasion? Well, the dentist really was a

King of Swords

He even looked like one, except that he had a beard and smiled a lot. The extraction went smoothly.

What would I have done had I drawn ‘bad’ cards: For example; in this contect, these might have included:

King of Swords Reversed, Page of Swords Reversed, Ace of Swords Reversed, Temperance Reversed, The Moon, Tower etc?

Well, would have looked at it again, to clear the decks of my emotional projection that might be clouding the hard information I was trying to reach. Had I drawn a strong negative response three times in a row, I would have considered changing the appointment day, and hopefully, avert trouble and improve the outcome.

Does this mean I can always avoid a bad experience? Of course not.

On another occasion, I decided not to look in the Tarot. A wisdom tooth had to come out. That was that. I decided not to risk frightening myself. I would just experience it in the normal way and it was a ghastly experience. A nerve was damaged, leaving me with local parasthesia for 18 months. Had I ‘looked’ beforehand, I could have declined the appointment and re-tested with the cards against a new appointment.

But, prescience is not omniscience, Divination is of itself not magic, or magick, and Life is not all roses.

This is the risk of consulting with oracles. You might hear something you don’t like, and wish you had just found out at the time, without the forewarning, and then you wouldn’t have had the worry as well.

‘Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.’ 🙂

But sh*t happens. And you might equally say, ‘forewarned is forearmed.’

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 🙂

Dowsing For Drought-Relief (dreamsincognito.wordpress.com)

The Death Card: The Angel & The Hamster

Death Card To The Rescue…a true tarot hamster tale.

The Angel of Death, by Evelyn de Morgan.

The Death card has in recent years been distanced from death as a physical event by the Tarot profession. The motivation has largely been so as not to frighten or disempower anyone. The Death card has been repackaged with an emphasis upon its power and value as Transition or Transformation.

There is much to be said in favour of this change of emphasis. Life is full of change and flux. Circumstances change, die, evolve. Winter comes. Sometimes a situation is over-ripe for change, and the appearance of the Death card will identify this as a good time to let go and move on, which is helpful to know if decisions are called for. I often draw it in a guise that the querent finds entirely welcome.

But Death is inescapable. It walks amongst us in Life, and is the agent of much of our greatest grief and fear. It is not our enemy, except as the thief of desires unfulfilled. Nature wants Death. It has engineered it for Life In The Grand Scheme.

But it’s the ultimate gateway to the unknown, perhaps to the extinguishing of our uniqueness, our personality? I think our consciousness survives the moment of bodily death at least for a few days. Where it goes afterwards is not for anyone to know for sure.

In my own experience, the Death card is actually not the sole predictor of human physical death in the Tarot. I tend to see instead multiple and repeated combinations including the Fool Reversed, Tower, Judgement dignified or reversed, 4 Swords, 6 Swords, Ace Swords Reversed, Strength, Star Reversed and the Sun reversed.

But I have seen the Death card in readings where the card has done exactly what it says on the tin, detecting a recent death, or presaging one. Tackling or avoiding these discussions when the cards raise them requires careful judgement. Readers must do no harm, and can get it wrong. Humility is the corollary of respect.

But the Death card can be a friendly angel. One afternoon two summers ago I drew this card, and it appeared to be referring to somebody in a state of childhood (The 6 of Cups)

I immediately got up to go and check on the hamster. I associate the suit of Cups not only with childhood, children, nostagia, happy times, but with animals, who live so pignantly in the moment, asking little.

The hamster had recently had a fall. She did not fall far, she tumbled down the back of the sofa on to a cushion. Her landing was soft and Il Matrimonio laughed because it looked comical but something about the way she picked herself up worried me.

Bam-Bam the Bold, Beautiful and occasionally Bad (a toe nipper in her youth) had been ill two days after this fall, and we had thought she was on her way out. Tears in our eyes, hankies at the ready, spritzing the air with Rescue Remedy we took turns to hold her for more than three hours.

Then ANTICLIMAX. All at once the small personage decided she was better, and scrambled off. She was bright as a button next day, trying to climb the wine rack (that’s my girl) and chomping my Gombrich’s History of Art on the lowest book shelf (in hardback)

We were delighted of course, but puzzled. She was my tenth hamster and I’d never seen such a recovery from prostration. The little things don’t ‘do’ illness.

So now, drawing the Death card ten days after this event, an awful thought struck me. I headed upstairs as fast as I could go to the Hamster Palace and found her in great distress, stumbling about. She tried to evade my hand and knowing she was sexist, as animals often are, I knew she would prefer my husband’s smell, I mean, scent, and went to fetch his pyjama top to use for getting hold of her.

I held her cuddled upright in this for two hours while she rested, unmoving. Later that evening she was sufficiently recovered to eat a small square of brown toast with acacia honey (good for rodents with diarrhea) I offered her cooled chamomile tea, which she first refused at first but later took a real shine to. I had read this would calm her and possibly offer pain relief.

Speaking with the vet on the telephone. I wondered if Bam-Bam might have had a hernia of her diaphragm. If she did, then when it popped out that would explain her struggling to breathe. When it popped back into its rightful position, it would explain why she recovered and why holding her almost vertically against my body produced recovery, gravity doing its work. The vet thought a hernia highly likely after the fall. But he had nothing to offer that would not involve distress for an animal so small. And at 18 months, she was at a classic age for hamster health problems.

The third attack will be her last, I told my husband. (The 3 of Swords)

She left us two weeks later. The Angel of Death took her away in a kindly fashion with nothing of Swords in the manner of it. I was deeply grateful to the Tarot for the forewarning that sent me to her when she was in distress. Even animals who are solitary by nature, will learn to look for company and when she went, she was not alone.

Bam-Bam The Bold is buried under the pink rose in the back garden with her predecessor, the curtain climbing, mighty-for-her-size but ever sweet-tempered Coco the Courageous. There are Dog roses. I say, let there be Ham Roses or any kind of animal roses we want. Only animals? Well, so are we. It’s all Life, and what would a heaven be without them, anyway?

I’ll still swat a mosquito though, as soon as look at it, and think komodo dragons are entirely disgusting, from which I deduce I am not ready for Enlightenment.

Until next time 🙂