Category: psychic readings
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.
How about that for synchronicity?
Tarot For Travel. Off We Go! Or Do We?
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.
Equally of course, the Tarot may warn against travel or foresee problems.
Travel is risky. We live in a bubble of illusion, forgetting this. Marco Polo would be astonished at our blase statements that we will be arriving here or there at a certain time on a certain day….To travel is to gamble…here the Tarot’s Wheel of Fortune card is symbolising the blind forces of luck, fate, chance…If you draw it right way up, it’s good news for travel. Drawn upside down? Uh Oh. Questions need to be asked. Identify the problem that the Tarot is sensing, you may be able to get that card to appear again, right way up, and then you’ll know it’s sorted.
Medieval Image of The Wheel Of Fortune
If you draw The Moon card you’d be wise to double- check the arrangements, tickets, passport, car hire, E111 cards and any other travel documents.The Moon can also warn of illness, poisoning or infection so it’s appearance is a reminder to take protective steps against malaria, travellers tummy etc. The Moon is paranoid at times, but here it is trying to help you, and actually it’s common sense. It’s just that The Moon is detecting an increased risk of problems at present. Be vigilant.
The Rider-Waite’s Moon card
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.
3-Rune ‘Day Ahead’ Reading
I use the Tarot as my chief means of divination, but there are other tools and ways of accessing the unconscious mind and one of these is to use Runes, an entire subject in its own right.
Here’s a 3 rune Day Ahead Reading, drawn for mid-morning on Saturday 19 June:
Rune 1 For the morning to come: FEHU…..fee, job, earnings.
Rune 2 For the afternoon to come: a blank rune…no ascribed meaning. Historically, there is no such thing as a blank rune. Rune scholars usually discount them as an invention of the 1980’s. However, this set had one and I drew it and decided to let it be.
Rune 3 For the evening to come: EIHWAZ …Yew…death/regenaration. Yikes, I wondered what form that would take. 
I had made no firm plans for the day at this point.
Within half an hour I took a telephone booking for a reading: this explained FEHU.
During the afternoon I crashed out tired from a poor nights sleep and remained comatose for two hours. This would account for my drawing the blank rune – a reasonable pictorial representation of my scondition between 3 and 5!
In the evening, we made what seemed like an impulse decision but actually wasn’t; to visit a family grave in Preston cemetery, taking a rose from our garden.
I had forgotten the rune reading and only realised on Monday, that this had actually been pre-indicated by the Yew rune. A cemetery (death) with yew trees.
The Yew rune must have picked up on an idea that I had not yet consciously formulated…my plan to go was bubbling up to the surface when I would become aware of it, but hadn’t reached it yet.
Alternatively, drawing this rune was a self-fulfilling prophecy, and had acted to remind me that an anniversary was coming up, that I was in the habit of marking with a visit to the cemetery and a rose and that I wouldn’t want to forget.
This year, I wasn’t going to be able to visit on the usual day, 21st, and the rune had served me a wake-up call to go earlier on account of this.
Gutenberg: Yew
The Yew is a tree considered sacred since pre-Celtic times, and is still considered special and mystical today. It’s wood is pliant. It bends but does not break; a living metaphor for resilience. For this reason it was often used in the making of bows in archery. Its berries are toxic and can bring death, but its leaves are evergreen and so, and because of the mature trees majestic and moody appearance, it’s symbolically suited to cemeteries…as a symbol of death with resurrection.
More about the yew and its mystical attributes here:-
http://www.whitedragon.org.uk/articles/yew.htm
A Day Ahead Reading is an excellent way to practice your predictive readings, and develop confidence in predicting (statements about the future detected as virtual fact) or forecasting (detection of trends and future likelihoods)
This applies whether with the Runes or the Tarot. You get the feedback same day and quickly start to amass data on which to assess your predictive ‘hit rate’ while developing predictive capability through the benefits of personalised hindsight study.
You’re welcome to share any of your own experiences of a Day Ahead Tarot Spread or predictive rune readings, clicking on the comment tag below.
Destiny or Doom? Tarot’s Cassandra Moments.
(source: http://images.ucomics.com/comics/ts/2006/ts060416.jpg)
On the evening of Saturday, Feb 13 2010, idly playing with my tarot cards, I become unsettled at the picture that emerged.
In an eight card spread I had the Chariot Reversed in the opening position, the Seven of Swords in the problem position, The Moon card in the ‘external influences position’ and the Ace of Coins Reversed in the outcome position.
It suggested a car problem. Losses, a sneak thief or maybe a database problem affecting the car. I knew I didn’t like it. But I was uncertain about the specifics. I puzzled over the ‘thief’ thoughts prompted by The Moon and Seven of Swords in connection with our car. How to respond?
We were away from home that night, and, feeling time was of the essence I asked Il Matrimonio to go straight down and check on the car. He returned saying everything was fine, adding a few rude remarks about mad cows for good measure.
Cassandras need broad shoulders sometimes. It’s perfectly true Tarot readers and their kind need to keep a tight rein on discipline and common sense if they are not to be carried away by the fairies. But Tarot is learned rather than taught, and risk of error and looking like an idiot is what it takes, in a serious attempt to hone skill. There will always be moments of self-doubt, confusion, discomfort, even downright fear at times.
Sometimes it’s with hindsight that we realise the Tarot did in fact know, and did in fact, try to tell us. We just weren’t able to join the dots in time. This is the occasional doom of all ‘sooth-sayers’ and is what I call a Cassandra Moment.
Cassandra was a seer and princess of Troy. She knew that the wooden horse left behind by the Greeks who had supposedly left and gone home after a ten-year siege was dangerous. She said so, but in their joy and relief that at last it was all over, no-one was ready to listen. The Greeks climbed out of the horse in the night, swords in hand, and her gift wasn’t able to save Troy, or herself either.
Anyway, back to the ‘car thief’. I was not satisfied. I was uneasy. But I just had to say, pending the hard evidence…my intuition on to something, and time will soon tell me what this was about. And in fact I found out the very next day, on returning home, when we discovered an unexplained debit on our credit card.
A car rental company in Pisa had on Friday 12 taken a payment of £42.00 for no reason we had been informed of. So the ‘theft’ had already occurred by the time I saw it on Saturday.
If I had seen it on Thursday, could I have stopped it?
Pisa: Author’s own photograph
Well, no. Having drawn the Ace of Coins Reversed (taking a financial loss) and Justice Reversed (injustice, bad contract) I was not hopeful of redress, and it emerged we had been fined for a parking offence committed last August in Pisa. That’s right. Last August! No wonder it hadn’t occurred to me to look in that direction.
The Tarot had warned me actually. The day before our trip I had drawn The Tower card. This is rarely good news. It can be a disaster card. However, I interpreted the cards appearance as a prefiguring of the Tower of Pisa. So you see how Cassandras may self-deceive.
On the way back to our holiday accommodation from Pisa we had a blow out on the autostrada, an unpleasant experience though no-one was hurt. I was able to warn my husband just before it happened and he went into the slow lane, thank goodness. The Tarot had proved itself with almost immediate effect, and this fining business was now the post script.
Merda! We were not knowingly guilty of an offence. We had stopped to ask for directions to the nearest parking, to be beckoned into a parking bay by a smiling uniformed parking attendant. But the police in Pisa had fined the car rental company for unauthorised parking, and the car rental company had recouped the fine on the credit card without notifying us. We were dismayed that they had retained our card details so long and were besides, furious.
I challenged the fine, and was with great politeness referred to some mind-bogglingly complex, time-bandit bureaucratic municipal maze.
Therefore, be very, very careful if visiting Florence Pisa or Rome by car. This is a worryingly common story.
I did say the Justice card was reversed, didn’t I? One must keep one’s sense of humour. I’ll only add, beware smiling car park attendants in the Comune di Pisa. They might turn out to be a little wooden horse, or a little wooden pony. Or an ass.
Tarot’s Helicopter View…The Elemental Spread.
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 1 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
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Card 1 (N) Coins Four of Wands Reversed (dissatisfaction at work and at home. A home feeling incomplete
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Card 2
Cups The Emperor Reversed (Bureaucracy, overbearing or absent male figure) -
Card 3 (S) Wands The Three of Cups (Friendships, celebrations)
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Card 4 (E) Swords The Wheel of Fortune (Thinking of making major changes, this being indicated as a good idea)
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Question Card: Judgement
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. 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 🙂
Related articles
- Tarot Basics and Understanding (transformationaltarot.wordpress.com)
True Tarot Tales 
