With Katie-Ellen Hazeldine, professional tarot reader, consultant and writer in the UK
This could have been the theme for tarot blogs in recent unsettled weeks, in the fiery light of the London riots. In fact, I found my cards foreshadowed these events, and the tragedies that followed with the Tower card and the Ace of Swords Reversed. No, this is the story of a personal reading, in which I was struck by a definite theme.
There were Wands cards everywhere:-
Wands in Tarot is the equivalent of Clubs in playing cards and its corresponding element is fire.
The associations of this Tarot suit are: fire, energy. passion, drive, ambition, travel, communications, business, moving house, heading south, summer, speed, and speaking literally, such things as combustion engines, flames, hot foods…
You get the idea…Now, in this reading, we had:-
The 5 of Wands, the Page of Wands (Rev) the Knight of Wands (Rev) the Queen of Wands (Rev) and finally, the King of Wands, Dignified.
It emerged that:
The Five of Wands was flagging up the client’s worries about disruption, gossip in her workplace and was indicating a certain amount of stress, even anger centering on failed communication.
The Page of Wands referred to a move at work that she was not happy about. It also referred to her reservations about a proposed house move. She had not fully realised just how uneasy the idea made her, she said, until she saw it reflected in the cards.
The Knight of Wands Rev. The man in her life had children and he didn’t want any more. She herself had no children. He had initially said he would consider having more, as she was helping look after his children, although they were not married. However, he had lately reconsidered and was saying no. This card spoke therefore of ardour dampened, ignition of new life denied.
The Queen of Wands Reversed referred to the client’s feelings about this situation. Astrologically speaking, she was a Queen of Pentacles, a Taurus queen. She was being shown as a Queen of Wands REv because her impulses were ruling her actions. Her common sense and her need for security, were being overruled by her passionate feelings, both happy and unhappy.
The King of Wands represented the man…an archetypal Wands figure, fun, dynamic, exciting, charismatic, but also, capable of carelessness, ruthlessness and selfishness. He could be chaotic and volatile and she had good reasons to feel cross.
Drawing another card of flames, The Devil I wondered what was her her job?
She couldn’t possibly be attached to the Fire Service, could she?
Yes, she could.
She was a firefighter.
!
The Devil: The Gilded Tarot
With kind permission from Ciro Marchetti
How was she to manage the flames of this relationship without getting burned? The Tarot’s answer came from the client’s own astrological suit…Pentacles.
The Tarot called for her to build and maintain a firewall of Taurean earth. to be able to enjoy the warmth of the flame in safe bounds.
What might this mean in practical terms?
The Four of Pentacles, the 10 of Pentacles and the Ace all asked her to reconsider begore agreeing to sell her house.
It was her own house, in her sole name, willed to her by a grandparent.
The Tarot could not have issued a louder warning against selling at urging of this man, her partner, without security of marriage.
Would she act on this?
True Tarot was secretly doubtful. Fire scorches earth, earth smothers fire, and what was the glue at work here?
The seductive power that’s also represented by that fiery Devil card. Uh oh. Can it be reasoned with, before it’s burned itself out? Does this golden oldie below remind you of the tarot card illustrated above?
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.
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?
Psychic Marshmallows…
Love n light. Well, these are beautiful words and mean beautiful and all important things. But they will take a tarot card reader only so far in delivering meaning and resonance for the other person in a reading.
Readers must aim for meaning and precision, and avoid waffle at all costs. Being ‘psychic’ is one thing. Being a practitioner of a discipline is another. Effective communication is another. Clients want specifics.
They want to know what do the cards MEAN? For them? Right now? In terms they can get hold of and use, should they so choose?
We live in a physical world and must wrestle with ourselves, yes, at times, but so many life challenges focus on matters of practical substance, and this is not the lesser stuff. It is simply temporal, time specific where the metaphysics is the stuff of enduring truths and eternal experiences.
I was doing a reading for a lady who worked as a hypnotherapist, when the Tarot suddenly seemed to suggest it was time to put her cigarette out. This was the feeling I got, drawing The Ace of Wands Reversed, and although it may mean many other things. I put this to her.
‘Why is the Tarot saying stub out that cigarette?’
It is important to emphasize the Tarot wasn’t making any criticism in saying this. It wasn’t presuming to nag the lady about smoking. It was simply sensing something, picking up on some thought that was coming from her.
The Tarot does not judge. It detects and it reflects. The reader might judge but they’d better not presume to do anything of the kind. It will get in the way of the view. It will interfere with their ability to do the truest possible reading, as in, truest to the person being read for, who is the only person who matters in that moment.
The client confirmed that she did smoke. She had taken it up again recently, not feeling settled in her new job. This job situation was the reason for the reading. But just before we got stuck in, and just by the by, something else leapt out at me, looking at the cards laid out before me.
My eye was unaccountably drawn to one card in particular; the Page of Cups.
This card traditionally symbolises offers, gifts, advents and arrivals. It might turn out to mean an invitation, a proposal, a new friendship, or a birth. It may be announcing an engagement or wedding ring, a recovery from illness, or a new creative or spiritual project. I have also come to associate it rather less romantically, with fish oil supplementation, for reasons you’ll guess at, studying the image.
Something about the pink of his sleeves arrested my attention, and before I knew I was going to say it I asked. ‘Do you eat a lot of those pink and white marshmallows. You know, the ones you get in bags?’
She stared at me a moment then said. ‘Oh my God. I absolutely love them. I’ve got a thing about them at the moment. I’ve got some right here in my handbag. How on earth did you know that?’
She reached for her bag and opened it, producing said bag of marshmallows, and offered me one. I declined. I don’t eat or drink while reading, though visitors get a glass of water or a cuppa. Biscuits have been known to manifest.
So. Back to her question. How did I know?
Well, I didn’t ‘know.’ I had a sudden sense of knowing. This may seem an odd or meaningless distinction, but let’s take a second to consider.
I didn’t know. Not as such. How could I? I had a passing thought, and then I came out and said it aloud, even though I did not yet know where that thought had come from.
In this case my thought about marshmallows was triggered by the Page of Cups. It was the look of the card. My eye was drawn to his sleeves and tunic. Lateral thinking based on colour association. it triggered the thought that popped into my head, so I said it whereas as a beginner I might not have dared, for fear of being wrong and looking stupid.
This marshmallow thing was new to me. I have never said it before or since in respect of this same card. This was a purely one off interpretation, and this is not unusual in a reading.
One can study card meanings and they will take you a long, long way in reading for someone, but associative thinking can trigger insights that no book can teach you.
The challenge for a reader is to learn to trust the first thought that comes into your head. This means risking being wrong, but if you’re not ready to take that risk, and don’t share that thought, you won’t be able to validate the accuracy of such insights, and that’s how a reader develops their skills and perhaps their so called psychic capability…by going off-script.
But it started with the card.
Till next time:)
Tarot cards can be used in combination with dowsing techniques to hunt for missing items.
The other day I got a Skype call from my sister in France. She teaches English as a freelancer with several client organisations including colleges. It’s been exam time again, and she wondered if I would take a look to try and help her ‘find’ a missing examination paper.
She gave me the background. I fetched a pendulum. It wasn’t one I’d used before so I asked it to show me its signals for yes, no and maybe. It showed me that it would use a clockwise circle to say yes, an anticlockwise circle to say no, and a tick tock motion to say maybe or to to indicate that it was still thinking.
I asked, Is the lost paper recoverable? I got a clockwise circle. Yes. (Good.)
I asked, Does M (this was my sister) have it in her sphere of keeping at this moment?
I got a vigorous anti clockwise movement…an emphatic no.
I asked: Does F (the colleague my sister had been co-marking with, who had reported the paper as lost) have it in her sphere of keeping at this moment?
I got a clockwise movement. Yes.
This was a relief to my sister, but she wanted to know if F would be able to find the missing exam paper quickly. Losing one was no joke at any time or for any reason but it belonged to a very deserving and conscientious student, too.
Where might it be now, she asked, and what were the chances of the lost paper would be found that same day or at least, quickly?’
I drew 6 upright cards out of eight. This was an encouraging answer with an affirmative implied. It looked strongly likely that the paper would be recovered that same day.
Then I focussed on imagery in the individual cards to suggest clues as to where it might be. I had a lot of 3’s in my row of cards, I noticed. I had 3 cards with a number 3 attached.
I had The Empress (Major Arcana Three) Motherhood? Was someone in F’s office having a baby? I asked.
I had the 3 of Coins (3 sharing an office?) Were there 3 desks in F’s shared office?
I had the 3 of wands Reversed (Someone was away? Someone was absent from Education)
Up to 5 people currently used F’s office, my sister explained. There were 3 desks. One colleague was away on Maternity leave and had just had a baby boy. Someone else was using her desk right now.
Well, I said, I don’t know, but I think it’s just been misplaced in F’s office. And the number 3 looks like the Tarot’s clue to where the lost paper is right now.
I drew another card. It was The Page of Swords. The suit of swords is strongly associated with IT and Computers. The Page to me often signifies a window or a screen.
‘News is coming soon, I think,’ I said to my sister. ‘Look out for the exam paper being near a window or computer screen. And this card can mean an email.’
‘Hang on!’ she said. ‘One’s coming through right now.’
It was an email from F. The missing paper had been found. It had got in with the wrong batch of papers.
It had got in with the YEAR 3 papers.
Questions and comments welcome.
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