True Tarot Tales – Page 11 – True Tarot Tales

Psychic Scratching in the Cartomancy Sandbox

Recently I added to my reading mix, a deck of ordinary playing cards. These have been in use for cartomancy; divination and fortune telling, for at least 400 years longer than the Tarot, and neither one of them began as fortune telling tools. They were both invented for gaming purposes. In the case of playing cards, it’s thought they first came to Europe from the Middle East, arriving there in turn from the Far East.

Fully illustrated Tarot cards contain pictorial ingredients offering unlimited possibilities of translation via associative thinking, but playing cards, while less interesting pictorially, and somewhat prosaic, will do the job.

I thought I’d try them out in a recent face to face reading for a new client, reserving them for getting at a few yes or no answers if required.

Asking for the Tarot’s insight into my client’s recent significant past I drew The Fool and The Ace of Pentacles from The Gilded Tarot, images by kind permission of Ciro Marchetti.

gilded-fool The Ace of Pentacles, The Gilded Tarot, Ciro Marchetti

The Fool is about opportunity, enthusiasm, a gamble, a birth. The Ace of Pentacles suggests a windfall, a new job or business, a new home, a garden or a new, precious object.

These following The Emperor prompted me to ask the client, had there been a recent major change or opportunity to do with a new job or new kind of work, and also maybe a new home?

And was it possible this new home might be in the countryside or else have a big garden or some land?

He said he had bought a house with land, and was planning to build on that land, and he wanted to know, what were the prospects for successful completion?

Yee-haa! Time to put my ordinary playing cards to the test and I drew these.

playing-cards-spread-showing-building

My first observation was that I had drawn two red cards and one black. Learning to do psychic readings is all about self-programming, and like learning anything, involves rote and repetition. I’ve decided a red card mean yes, whether it’s a diamond or a heart, and a black card means no, whether it’s a spade or a club card. And then I go for best of three, and the numbers might swing my thinking.

You could decide that a black card means yes, if you wanted, and a red card means no, and it might work splendidly reliably if you are consistent, though it might prove counter-intuitive as the most challenging cards in a playing deck – most, not all, are contained within the suits of spades and clubs.

Once decided on your own system, you need to stick to it. There’s no right or wrong with these things. There’s what works subject to proof. This is where there can arise a problem with going to classes ‘to be taught’ how to read. You are your own best teacher. Learning to ‘see’ in this way is solitary. Even lonely. It is not gregarious at source. Study adds skill and there is a vast library here to study, but in the end, while rendered articulate by skill, the oracular spirit, to be true to itself, remains a cat who walks alone.

The short answer to the client’s question therefore was yes, but I was struck by the appearance of two diamonds cards, equating to the Tarot’s suit of Pentacles; the suit of earth.

I was additionally struck by the fact that the middle card was twice the number value of the first card. a 4 and an 8. It made me think of foundations, and plumb-lines; four walls, and then four walls, doubled.

It didn’t seem random, it felt as if it might be significant and I said to the client, ‘are there going to be TWO buildings, by any chance? And one is twice the size of the other? But this black card, the 3 of Clubs, suggests there’s a bit of stress already?’

Notice, I was asking him. That’s because I did not know if this was correct. I only knew that’s what I was being shown, and wanted to check.

‘There ARE going to be two buildings’ he said, nodding surprised, ‘log cabins and one is going to be exactly twice the size of the other one. And yes, it’s fair to say there’s a fair bit of stress…’

And so the discussion moved forward.

Well done, my little £1.99 fortune-telling friends. Although I don’t tell fortunes, you’ve clearly got my number, and I think you and I need to get better acquainted.

Until next time 🙂

Tarot Said ‘Ow’!

I’ve been reading Tarot some years but it’s an ongoing study and a daily practice. There is always something more to learn, new techniques for using the cards to get at useful information.

What I often do is pull a few cards at the end of the day, asking for the back-story. This offers the benefit of hindsight as well as the possibility of instant validation.

Last night I asked for the Tarot’s- eye story about my day yesterday and the first card out was The Tower.

Image from The Gilded Tarot by courtesy of Ciro Marchetti

Keywords: Sudden change, Upheaval, Revelation, Downfall, Shock

Eh? I said to myself. Today began with a Tower moment?

Did it?

No way does a Tower moment escape your attention. It basically says ‘kaboom’!

It may be an emotional shock. It may be physical. It may be getting fired from your job, or learning you have been lied to and now what are you going to do about it? It may be a plane crash, a storm, an earthquake, a tsunami, a detonated bomb.

The Tarot is somewhat under threat of ‘spiritual’ sanitisation these days. There’s a movement afoot to say Tarot’s Death card does not mean Death, the Tower card does not mean physical disaster. And the Eight of Swords no doubt, only means chagrin or an attitude of helplessness, and never means plumbing or toilets (which actually, it may do in my experience)

We are all so engaged in spiritual evolution, these rock bottom, immutable things will soon all be beneath our notice, except that we happen to inhabit the material as well as energetic plane, so had better engage with it while we are here.

But the oracular voice is older than anyone alive, and while it is a living oracle and therefore subject to vagaries of fashion in thinking, it must never lose sight of its roots and neglect the material plane. Life means struggle, Life demands Strength.

The Tower card is ruled by Mars, god of war.It’s day is Tuesday, named for Tyr, Norse god of war. If you ask when something will happen and then I draw the Tower card, it will likely happen on a Tuesday.

While Tarot is at times exceedingly subtle and The Death card may well not mean an actual physical death and the Tower card may not spell physical disaster, they well MIGHT. Real life readings for real life people demands respect, which means recognising terrible things really do happen, physically, and the reader needs to be prepared to acknowledge that and not seek to sugar coat Tarot with spiritual sounding avoidance, immediately jumping to say things along the lines of ‘the Death card. Well, this card means transformation.’

Oh does it? Does it now? Not that I am necessarily disagreeing, but try for a few specifics, and by the way, I do not wanna be transformed just yet, thank you. I’ve got things to do first, if the universe will allow it, and anyway I am transforming all the time, and so are you , like it or not, and hopefully not just with lines and wrinkles but with each new thing we learn .

And now that I thought about it, staring at my Tower card, I was being plum stupid. My day did indeed start with a teeny Tower moment. Teeny for me, but maybe not for some other living creature.

I can see the bird feeder from where I lie in bed in our first floor apartment. It hangs on the balcony door and it’s my delight to watch the songbirds arriving from about half seven. The robin arrives first and then the coal tit, and they each return a few times in quick succession, stocking up for the day.

This morning, a dark shape flared suddenly in the window followed by a smack and a thump as a bird hit the glass and the bird-feeder fell of its hook and dropped out of sight.

Il Matrimonio was out, pumping iron at the gym like a macho man, unless he was getting into quarrels with pensioners- again – and this is never too unlikely -the man is incorrigibly irritable and likely constitutionally deficient in Nat Phos -sodium phosphate.

I could not get up to see if there was an injured bird – pesky damn wheelchair business – and in fact when he got in ten minutes later, there was no bird. And no sign of loose feathers or blood.Even so a sparrowhawk could have come and snatched a bird of the feeder, hitting the pane in the process. Or else some little bird misjudged its flight. Either way, some bird got a shock, and so did I.

Was it the robin? I now draw The High Priestess, so probably it was.

Was it OK? Knight of Cups Reversed. Not really, poor thing. It had a fine fright.

But there was no Death card and I saw the robin again this afternoon, so hopefully, all’s well that ends well.

Till next time 🙂

Tarot Plays Ball

I’m a contributing member to a few online Tarot chat and study groups. One study group member still new to Tarot shared her card asking, ‘what is this card saying about person X? What is he like?’

The card was the Six of Wands and her deck was a Rider Waite.

The Six of Wands bespeaks effort, progress and hard-earned victories. Wands is a suit of summer time, of warmth, speed and generally volatile energy and for obvious pictorial reasons, suggests archetypal masculine qualities which are of course demonstrated by both male or female.

So I said that I thought person X was a young man of high energy, not really available to anyone at this point, driven, competitive, a team worker – and was he sporty?

As a newcomer to Tarot you will not necessarily find this word used in association with this card in any of your books, though it’s an obvious possibility at least, based on figurative interpretation.

Further reading here

in 2011 I drew the Six of Wands for a young man, asked him about an upcoming trip that was sports related and was told he was going to the States for training and had been selected for the UK wheelchair rugby team in the 2012 Paralympics.

This young lady now replied, ‘Funny 🙂 he is a professional soccer player!’

Now, this highlights a difference between clairvoyant reading and Tarot Divination. Had I been clairvoyant on this occasion I might have picked up on the football, specifically.

Might.

As it was, Tarot plus a sneaking hunch simply landed me in the appropriate ball park.

Typical Tarot! Still, it was on the ball and it didn’t miss the net.

Until next time 🙂

Tarot says ‘Baaaaa..d or good investment?’

Updated 12 May 2020:

I handle a lot of business questions in my professional readings. My clients are looking for an extra steer, that is all, but the stakes can be high, and of course, it is the client who will bear the responsibility of their own decision making.

A psychic reading cannot be considered a substitute for a professional financial, legal or medical question.

All the same, if I am asked, I will give it a go and share my findings, and the client may or may not welcome the answer. That is one of the risks in consulting with oracles

I may be asked anything at all. For example: If I go ahead and build these two houses, how well will I do out of it when it comes to selling them, and how fast will I sell them? etc etc

I don’t know the answer to their question. How could I?

Or perhaps I do, but I do not know that I know it.

Prescience is not omniscience or psychic readers would go mad. We don’t go round knowing everything. We have to stop and look.

Did I know this hideous coronavirus thing was coming? Did I heck. The only thing was, I had a peculiar experience back in January, I saw an apparition. It was unpleasant and I wondered if something nasty was coming.

I remember saying so to myself. What’s coming? I was uneasy. But that’s not the same as knowing. I didn’t know, though some astrologers did apparently, notably an astrologer called Andre Barbault who wrote in 2011 that he detected a risk of a pandemic in 2020/2021, based on a planetary cluster or stellarium noted before in association with previous historic events.

There is a lot of astrology in Tarot but it is not astrology.

Back to my cards. I cannot prepare in advance for doing a reading. I can only prepare to respond and be ready to make a leap in the dark, inviting a question then looking into my cards to help me decide what I think about the answer.

Reading cards works a bit differently to doing astrological readings. No drawing up of astrological charts. Unless the client wishes to brief me, I do not have any advance information whatsoever. I could be asked absolutely anything and need to deliver a more or less instant answer, shooting straight from the hip so to speak while providing at least some kind of readily verifiable information in that feedback, or how can the client benchmark what I am saying?

What can really help me out here is synchronicity, but what is synchronicity?

Definition as supplied by Merriem-Webster: the coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events (as similar thoughts in widely separated persons or a mental image of an unexpected event before it happens) that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality —used especially in the psychology of C. G. Jung

A recent instance was during a reading

Of course I am not reading face to face at present, during the current lock-down, and in any case I mostly read by Skype these days. I suppose I ought to look into Zoom as well but Skype has worked perfectly well so far.

I was doing a Skype reading. The client had a business question and I drew the Seven of Pentacles from

The Gilded Tarot by Ciro Marchetti

Classically this card refers to reaping a reward for hard work or patience and suggests that there will be a good return on a long term investment, but no quick returns.

I view this card more positively than some readers. One of the traditional meanings for translation is futility. Waiting for a kettle to boil but it’s fused and you don’t even know it yet.

Certainly, if I draw the Seven of Pentacles out reversed, I’m likely to decide I’m looking at a future poor performance or loss on your current or proposed investment.

If the Tower card were to turn up alongside it, forgeddit! The Tower means a crash. But if we got the Ten of Pentacles, well, that’s looking like a safe bet, just slow to mature or materialize.

If you were a prospective buyer, I might well be sensing you need not to buy in this or that product range. This does not represent a good acquisition. It may either not sell well, if you need to re-sell it, or it might take forever to shift.

The client in this instance was asking about the shifting of retail stock. Money was the presenting issue, and as often happens, a particular detail suddenly leaped out at me.

‘Do you have sheep living behind your house?’ I asked.

‘Yes’, he said, looking somewhat mystified ‘a field at the back.’

This is a typical instance of what Jung meant by synchronicity. But does it mean I enquire about sheep every time this card appears in a reading?

No. It absolutely doesn’t. I had never asked that before, in drawing this card. It just so happened that on this occasion, the sheep jumped out at me and so I asked.

Would this same card appear in a reading done for a sheep farmer?

Well, it ought to.

Returning to the more usual meaning of this card. If I was thinking of buying stocks or shares and this came up, would I go for it?

Probably, so long as it came out upright, but not necessarily, depending on the surrounding cards.

That’s how it goes.

Until next time 🙂

Tarot Parroting…Another case of psychic Art Imitating life

Tarot loves to start off a reading, playing parrot.

Just as Art imitates or rather, conjures Life, that’s how Tarot works. As within, so without. The first thing I aim to do in a reading, is ask the cards to help me identify my client’s most pressing concern or question. The Tarot tells me by ensuring I draw the card that most accurately mirrors that unspoken concern or question, as closely as can be managed from among the 78 cards in a Tarot deck.

This ‘mirror-card’ tells me and my client that we are on the same wavelength, which provides a reliable baseline for the rest of the reading.

My Tarot did it again today, and deserves one of those little nectar pots adored by larikeets and parrots alike.

I was about to self- inject for the first time, trying out a new med for quite a severe severe rheumatoid-type illness (I have tried MANY approaches in 20 odd years, with too much ground covered to mention, while exercising great care in agreeing which pharma meds to try )

The med is called Orencia or Abatacept. It is a new class of meds known as biologics. Orencia works to inhibit the production of T cells, T1 and T1. These are normal proteins, and are essential for your normal immune response, but if that goes wrong for any reason, they can go into overproduction, causing an inflammatory cytokine cascade resulting in acute pain and long term damage.

These biologics, while for some they offer a last chance of respite, can be dangerous, so I thought I’d pull myself a few cards before injecting.

The first card out was The Tower.

Just look at that pic. How well did the Tarot do, with a deck of 78 cards to work with, shuffled and drawn blind and at random…in guiding me to draw this card, signifying the issue in question.

Look at the card again. Look at the injector pen.

Squawk! Pretty Polly!

This is how readers know their question has been heard and logged by their unconscious mind. The first card out of the deck will mirror the stated question, or even the unstated question.

Next I drew

4 Swords, (illness)

Ace Swords ( a sword, or in this case…spring loaded needle)

and 7 Pentacles. (tend to the crop, patience is required.)

This last card was also a suitable reflection as this med is is a weekly injection.

I therefore concluded, that while I could not expect a miracle, or even a significant observable response, there would be no significant negative response; a finding which I am so far in a position to validate.

Tarot does make me laugh sometimes.

Till next time 🙂

Evil Walks Abroad. The Devil’s Own Whiff of Sulphur

Last Thursday, July the 14th, I was unsettled at what I saw in my cards. My question to the Tarot was, what kind of day could I expect the following day to be? We were away from home, with a drive next day to see family en-route home again.

Out came The Chariot, drawn reversed, and out also came The Devil.(Universal Rider Waite)

This was a combination that spelled bad news for a partnership, a venture, a vehicle, or a journey. Fear, anger or violence might be attached. I shuffled and drew again. Out they came again, The Chariot Reversed, The Devil, and The Wheel of Fortune Reversed.

Nasty. I felt a lurch in my tummy. I could see it was bad but what did it mean? Not being an all-seeing psychic with remote viewing (it has happened, but rarely. Such acutely specific psychic skills as that are extremely rare if not non-existent) I did what most of us would do, and thought first in terms of the immediate situation.

‘You need to take it extra easy on the road tomorrow’, I said to Il Matrimonio. ‘Maybe inspect the car before we leave the hotel. There’s something here I’m not liking to do with wheels and the parking is tight. I’m seeing tyres.’

The Devil card at at its worst extreme can mean murder. I did NOT think of that, but I was uneasy, deciding we may additionally hear bad news next day concerning family health, and we did hear news that concerned us, about the health of a friend.

Next morning, Friday the 15th…and The Devil is the Tarot’s fifteenth card, we woke to the appalling news from Nice.

The cards had been drawn about an hour ahead of the actual events. This, then, had not been an instance of prediction…but a vague, ominous though with hindsight, apposite foreshadowing. Tyres. Rage. Terror.

Sleep easy, les pauvres.

Vive la France.

How could the Tarot be used to avert disasters? Certainly, a reading may help an individual to avoid trouble if they heed a warning. I have certainly known this happen just as I have known a warning gone unheeded, and the consequences. On a public scale, it would need the right person to ask a reader a closed question such as, what is the risk of.(event X)….happening here (location Y)…at such and such a time/day (Y) And that person would need permission and resources to act on the feedback. Not gonna happen, is it?

Another instance of the Devil card featured in the news in May of this year, when a client told the Tarot reader he had killed someone after she drew the card in front of him. She rang the Police on 999 and was advised to call the non-emergency number which she did, going outside to make the call with the client sitting there. The Police arrived 52 minutes later, and in due course it was discovered that the money had told the tarot reader no more than the simple truth, in response to her drawing the Devil card, the Death card and The Emperor Reversed.

A man lay dead in a pool of blood.

Asking my brother, who is a police officer, what he made of this story, he was horrified that it had not been treated as an emergency. The tarot reader should have been assessed as being at immediate risk, herself, as a witness to a man who might have changed his mind at any time, about allowing himself to be arrested.

The BBC interview here

Usually, thankfully, The Devil does not operate at this horrific level, though the card is rarely, if ever good news in a reading with me unless it comes out drawn reversed. It may mean compulsive drinking, or drug use. Or it may just mean a temper tantrum. Who threw their rattle out of the pram, then?

There is a school of thought that presents the Devil instead as Pan, god of wild things, and some decks portray this alternative interpretation, but for that sense of things, I rely on The Hermit or The Ace of Pentacles.

Changing subject, but not entirely, recent diabolical viewing on the box or DVD has been…next to nil because I stop watching. Occasionally I will shout ‘shaddap!’ or worse if it’s just too inanely squawky but a repeat of ‘Coast’ will always soothe the feathers flat again. It never seems to get old.

‘The Secrets In Their Eyes,’ based on the novel of the same name by Eduardo Sacheri, is a story with the Devil at its heart, but also The Star, The Lovers, Judgement and Justice. It is a story of murder, enduring love, and the search for justice in the face of a corrupted legal system. Above all it’s an epic love story, set in Argentina during the last years of the Junta.

I saw the film first and read the book afterwards. There are a few plot differences but the crux, tone and feel of the story remain true.

It is a story of two heroes, the law man, called Chapparo in the book but Esposito in the movie. He’s a diffident character, not ‘heroic’ in the blockbuster sense, but such is his quality and his charm…you’re rooting for him to get the girl…. and then there is the enduring passion for a murdered wife of the bereaved husband, Morales, who is determined to apply justice when the Law does not, being corrupt and held on a Junta choke- chain.

The grieving husband’s idea of justice is not what you might suppose, and it costs him every chance of a new start, especially in the novel. Faced outright with the wordly power of the Devil he decides that for him, there is only one love, and there is nothing more to live for now but justice. A sad book, a sad film, but The Devil gets a comeuppance, quietly, secretly, at a great cost to the bereaved husband, as the mills turn slow but certain.

The book

The film

I’ll hope not to draw the Devil card again, it’s no use saying never, but not for a long time.

Until next time.

Tarot Guesses The Birthday Pressie

Or tries to and almost does, but not quite.

A friend came to stay recently and brought a present for my birthday. We thought it might be fun for me to try and guess what was inside the packaging using my pendulum and cards. It was roughly cylindrical, not too heavy, rolled in bubble wrap and brown paper.

I held my pendulum over it.

‘Are the contents of this package edible?’ The pendulum span anticlockwise. No.(sob)

‘Are the contents of this package paper?’ No. ‘Ceramic?’ No.’ Wood?’ Yes.

I drew the Three of Pentacles, a card signifying progress in business and pride in one’s work, and from The Gilded Tarot by kind permission of Ciro Marchetti.

‘Is it a craft item? I asked my friend.

‘Yes.’ she said, smiling from ear to ear, as ducks suddenly quacked outside on the pond and Il Matrimonio ran to the balcony to see there if there was a fox. There sometimes is. Then I drew the Six of Swords, a card of personal progress, solemn journeys and quests for learning.

Was it something to do with a river or riverbank, I wondered. Was it a little wooden boat? Or a frog? I like frogs.

‘No’. My friend said, smiling, ‘But you are warm. Now open it!

And inside it was – this! A wooden Indian Runner Duck. What a little character.

🙂

Well, I never. No wonder she’d been laughing to herself every time we’d fed the ducks, knowing what she had in store to give me.

Now, that is what I call a friend. And psychically, here was that darn Jungian synchronicity thing at work again.

Good try, Tarot my friend. Not a bull’s eye this time, but a respectable attempt, and this often is how Tarot works in a reading, too, regardless of the classical card meanings, sparking ideas directly off the imagery.

This is how, while Tarot presents a great academic study, anyone can read it, who likes to use associative thinking.

Until next time 🙂

Tarot Synchronicity: The Psychic Hit and the Lucky Guess

Carl Jung speculated that the Tarot works according to the principle of ‘synchronicity’- that psychic insights are triggered by apparently random and yet meaningful co-incidence, which he thought might be explained by Quantum Mechanics.