tarot reading – Page 13 – True Tarot Tales

Tarot Bites…

Summertime, and the livin’ is easy. Except, flying home from Spain on Sunday over the Bay of Biscay , it was clear to see the cradle of our summer weather problems….you could look down and see what the jet stream was brewing there, and the head on the beer just went on and on. The account below was written in 2010 and spoke of events in 2009. Our summers have been odd since at least 2008, with the last scorcher in 2006. Implications for the UK Tourist Industry, offset against the effects of recession?

‘The weather was odd at home last year in 2010, and even in N Italy where we went in August 2009…it was very changeable, cool at times, and there were cracking thunderstorms nearly every day. Forked lightening like you could scarcely believe. Now, you can’t see the bites in this photo, taken near Florence that summer, but the Italian for ‘mosquito,’ I can inform you, is zanzara. And the word for a bite is puntura. These are helpful words to know when you need to go to la farmacia.

I had received a warning about the mosquito campaign from the Tarot, fat lot of good it did me. The warning was presented as follows.

The Page of Swords (A Page card in Tarot can mean something small, swords can mean air and something that is sword-like and sharp – like a needle or in this case, a bite or sting)

The Page of Pentacles Reversed (ie in Tarot’s language ‘debased earth’, prefiguring the infection of said bites, round and swollen and red, the opposite of the green associated with pentacles cards, the suit of earth. )

The Page of Cups Reversed. Ahem. Not looking one’s best going round impersonating a human giant measle. The suit of Cups relates to healing, happiness, well-being and beauty. It corresponds with the element of water, and therefore also indicated a need to ensure maintenance of adequate hydration.

I had upon reading this duly armed myself with repellent ( ask for controlgio d’insetti, folks) after our first night there. Did it work? Did it heck. But don’t let that put you off. It might for you.

Then – and perhaps I reacted unusually badly because my immune system was depressed, I tried anti-histamines, hydrocortisone, lavender, tea tree, TCP and finally, a course of antibiotics from a gentle Italian GP who came out 40 minutes after being called. This allowed us the guilty thrill of using that little plastic E111 card for the first time. The service was brilliant though it did cost 25 euros for the call-out, but hey, it was 7.30 on a Saturday evening. We were grateful. Would we have received such a prompt response at home?

We need the Jet Stream to move north. I think we’ll have some better pockets dotted fairly regularly throughout August. Better than June and July, I mean. Another fairly crummy summer so far…but we will never surrender. We will fight it in the garden, and in front of the telly, and in good company, and with a cup of cocoa and….

One of the hottest summers I remember, was two weeks spent on the Appin Peninsula in NW Scotland. And it was sublime. It was glorious, and there were white sands and blue waters to rival the Med any day. The only problem (- there is always a serpent in paradise) was the darn, pesking clouds of mozzies.

I think that’s where I came in…

Tarot ‘Plays’ Footie

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?

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.

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.

Double Trouble…

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?

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.

House Buying/Selling: The Moon card was not good news

House hunting and house selling are, not surprisingly, a frequent theme in Tarot readings.

The Cards commonly seen around this theme include the Ace of Coins, the Ace of Wands, 4 of Wands, any of the Swords/Wands court cards may represent a property or legal professional, and for relocation – when it’s further afield, not just a move to another part of town – we might see the 6 of Swords.

A client was having trouble selling and asked why. The Tarot drew The Moon and the 9 of Coins reversed. This combination; The Moon showing dogs barking, and implying disturbed sleep, and the 9 of Coins Reversed, indicating boundary issues or difficulties with neighbours, prompted me to wonder if there were dogs next door. Maybe they barked a lot.

The Moon is a tricky card. It means unreliable information, lack of clarity, uncertainty, worry, risk, while it was the imagery itself that prompted me to wonder about dogs. This happens a lot in readings. It will often be the imagery itself that prompts a psychic hit, above or beyond any expressly listed card card meaning.

Oh dear. Yes there was. The doggies barked day and night.

The cards were picking up on her anxiety about what this meant not only for herself, but for selling her property. She had not fallen out with the neighbours—they had only recently moved in and she didn’t know them. In fact she was, understandably, anxious at the thought of raising the matter with them,but the disturbance was becoming intolerable.

This issue directed the next few minutes of the reading.

The Tarot drew the sharp and incisive air sign card, the Page of Swords in response to her question about possible ways to handle this difficulty.

One would always go softly softly to start with, and give others the full benefit of the doubt. ‘A soft word turneth away wrath.’

Who needs wrath, if it can possibly be avoided? Life is too short.

But there are also things we can’t reasonably be expected to put up with. This page is all about the fact that Knowledge (Information) is Power. In this case, this suggested a knowledge of the legal rights and responsibilities of householders, and the procedures and authorities attendant upon the exercise and upholding of these in cases of noise disturbance. But this is a notoriously tricky issue.

The Page of Swords suggested she make a polite, clear, and to the point request, possibly a note so as not to appear confrontational, stating the problem and phrasing a clear request to the neighbours. This is the Page’s style – clear, calm, no fudging, and to the point…

The Page of Swords is a researcher, a planner (and plotter) has a highly developed sense of ‘natural’ justice (and does readily not admit defeat.)

If this initial step did not produce results, still, it would serve to benchmark and document the problem, but the legal minded Page of Swords served as a reminder that if the situation escalated to a dispute, this would, by Law, (UK) have to be notified to prospective house buyers.

If she asked nicely and got ‘no joy’ from the neighbours, or if it escalated. then the Page of Swords – a figure of logic, law and surveillance might follow such tactics as these:-

1- information gathering—keeping records in other words, gathering a body of evidence, pending preparatory to seeking help from the local authority.

<p value="<amp-fit-text layout="fixed-height" min-font-size="6" max-font-size="72" height="80">2-possibly, if no joy, and if the problem persisted, call RSPCA (concern for the dogs's welfare…no walks, shut out on cold nights…)2-possibly, if no joy, and if the problem persisted, call RSPCA (concern for the dogs’s welfare…no walks, shut out on cold nights…)

On another occasion, The Moon made a house buying forecast. I could see a house coming up in the coming months. It had a lovely garden (10 cups) but the client needed to be vigilant.

The Moon, coupled with the 9 of Coins Reversed suggested to me that a problem with boundaries and/or neighbours was going to emerge.

Should this happen, then any behaviour that was less than full and frank from the vendor in respect of boundaries should be taken as a warning sign against proceeding further.

The client confirmed she was thinking of moving soon, but had not started hunting yet, and had not therefore identified such a property.

All a reader can say in these circumstances is, in that case only time will tell.

Eighteen months later, the lady returned for another reading. and she had found a house with lovely gardens, and had fallen in love with it, and put in an offer.

However , the subsequent solicitor’s search revealed that the garden did not actually belong to the vendor. Not legally. A sizeable portion of it belonged to the neighbour, and it should not have been included in the sale details -a fact of which the estate agent seemed unaware.

The client remembered the Tarot’s warning and withdrew at this point, sadly, but probably wisely.

Till next time 🙂

Ding Dong (Door) Bell…

A client was late in arriving. She had wanted a reading at a Saturday tea-time and now she was 1o minutes late. Hmmm. Was she en-route or was she going to be a no-show? Tarot readers get caught out now and then, just like anybody else. They’re only fallible…

I have a friend, Andrew, who is a very gifted clairvoyant. He will quite often pluck meaningful names out of the ether…very spooky, and when he does there’s nothing hit and miss about it. He did that with me once. ‘Who’s Edward?’ he said. ‘He’s very important to you. He’s a relative isn’t he? Is he your father…no hang on. He isn’t Edward. He’s Ted.’

Correct. And even someone with this spooky ability gets hit by timewasters and importunate sales callers. Even the most super-psychic person in the world could not operate at their highest frequency all the time.

Andrew’s telephone rang one day.

‘I’ll make an appointment,’ the man said. ‘If you can tell me my name.’ Andrew might actually have been able to do so. But there was only one response such ignorance and crassness deserved. How would a reading with such a discourteous client have gone?

‘I think it must be Mr Twat,’ Andrew said. ‘But I’m sorry, I’m all booked up.’

I don’t pursue clients in any way shape or form. Don’t spam, don’t telephone (though I return calls if a message is left.) If they book then don’t show up – which has happened four times in 10 years – without making a cancellation, well, OK. I’ll remember them, and they just won’t get another appointment

So now, with this lady running late, having requested a time that I had accommodated out of goodwill, I asked my cards, was the client en-route?

I drew The Chariot. This card of travel vehicles, speed, progress, ambition and teamwork was an indication that yes, she was on her way over.

The IJJ Tarot’s Chariot

How soon would she be arriving?

I drew the 4 of Cups. This seemed to indicate that she would be arriving in approximately 4 minutes, and that there was probably no particular crisis to be discussed in the reading, but she was in a rut and looking for ways to move ahead.

The lady arrived, apologising, just as I was re-shuffling the cards. It might have been 4 minutes later, more like 2-3. And she was a delight to read for.

An Outing for The Justice Card

Injustice eats at people.

Sometimes in a Tarot reading, the issue being detected is literally a legal matter. For a true story about that see my later blog ‘Manpower. The Emperor Card.’

Very often though, it refers to our sense of natural justice, our wish to see fair play done. The Tarot may then kick in as a kind of agony aunt. When we draw it in a reading for ourselves, the advice is to remember to play fair, to try and keep a balanced view, to deal in facts and to keep a cool, calm head.

I recently drew a card, Justice Reversed (meaning injustice or delayed justice) in a tarot sitting with a new client. The client had explained that she didn’t really know why she had come. There was no specific problem to be addressed, she said, but she had a weight on her mind and would welcome a little help in getting free of it. The Tarot adores doing this sort of work.

The Justice Card (Rider Waite, U.S Games)

Justice Reversed was the first card drawn, the keynote card of the reading. Because it’s a Major Card and because of the lack of a clear single theme shown in the other 7 cards of the spread, I felt its influence was working on her in more than one respect.

She wasn’t depressed, I didn’t think. Not as such. (No Star card Reversed) There was illness in the family though. I drew The 4 of Swords nicknamed ‘the hospital’ card. There was great anxiety and conflicted feelings connected to the forming of a new relationship (The Devil) There was a much loved mother on her mind (The Empress)

My client hadn’t mentioned her job. She hadn’t told me anything, only that she had a baby son.

But drawing the Justice card, though Reversed, prompted me to tell her that she could discuss work if she wished, because I had experience of reading for commercial lawyers. She then said she was a commercial lawyer.

Now the Justice card, as with any predominance of Swords cards, can indicate that a client works in the legal profession. However, there are many more occasions when when there’ll be no such connection. So a reader seeing this card cannot assume the client’s job is in Law. But on this occasion the card had served to prompt a hunch. Thisis the bridge between intuition and clairvoyancy.

The client had been harbouring a sense of injustice following a promotion disappointment the previous year. She did not trust the reasons she had been given for not getting the promotion. The Tarot however said that justice had been done. She was still very young, had been in practice 4 years and had been judged not quite ready..it was no more worrying or sinister than that, and so letting go would serve her best now. Promotion looked as if it was in the offing in the not too distant future…positive developments were indicated for July-September.

This the client said she could imagine, as she was aware of activities in the pipeline around that time.

There were other, less easily resolvable issues attached to Justice Reversed, relating to difficulties with a father who had ‘disowned’ her because he hadn’t agreed with her choice of husband. The Tarot had things to tell her and she left saying she felt much better, calmer in herself. She had formulated a strategy now for handling the problem with her father, and other issues

The Tarot is economical. It has to be able to talk about any human experience at all, using a toolbox of only 78 cards. Each card is a plump and shiny-coated workhorse, and will do multiple jobs in the course of a single reading. Especially if it is a Major card – this can really ‘up the ante’.

Comments or questions welcome. See the comment tag below.