Cartomancy – Page 4 – True Tarot Tales

The King Of Swords Had A Kukri

My brother and his wife were selling their house. The Moon card reflected, amongst other more specific things, their uncertainty about when it might sell and where they would go next.

It had been on the market the previous year and they had pulled it due to lack of buyer interest. It had gone back on the market in late May, and now it was mid June.

I whirled my cards about blind and drew the Three of Wands. Since Wands cards deal with travel, property, sales and movement in general, the immediate appearance of this commercial card was encouraging for better luck this time around.

‘There’ll be viewers soon,’ I said. ‘The future is not set in concrete but chances are good, you’ll have a suitable offer on it within three viewings, or within three weeks, three months max.’

‘We’ve had three viewings already, sis, he said.

‘Oh, OK,’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll be picking that up, I expect, but the cards often say several things at once. It’s still looking likely there’ll be developments sooner rather than later.’

Big deal, one might say. How very oracular and vague.

Well, er, quite. Oracles are not always easy to decipher, even for the oracular practitioner.

I now drew the Ace of Pentacles. This is the Tarot’s ultimate house, job and money card.

My brother and his wife have moved to a country lane near Stroud. This card proved a quite literal foreshadowing of their new home.

Illustrations from The Gilded Tarot, by kind permission of Ciro Marchetti. Buy on Amazon and other places or visit his website: http://www.ciromarchetti.com/

‘Positive developments round about the middle of July,’ I said, ‘It’s looking like the sale of house, or it’s job-related or both.’

Then I drew the King of Swords and the Queen of Pentacles. ‘I’m seeing your buyers here, I think. They’re a couple, just as you’d expect. She’s probably got dark hair and maybe eyes; very house proud, and he…well, he might be a legal advisor, or policeman; or it’s possible, a military man.’

The following week they had an offer on the house which they neither accepted nor declined, as it was well below the asking price and early days, the prospective buyer wanted to push for a very early completion. Then they received another offer a few days after that from another prospective buyer, a few days later. It was closer to the asking price, and less urgent for completion and they accepted.

Sales can fall through of course, and they had quite a rocky time of it but the sale went through and what made me smile was this news of the buyer: a family man, married with three children, and whether currently serving or not, my brother doesn’t know, but the buyer was not only a soldier but a Gurkha.

The King of Swords had a kukri!

More soon 🙂

The Moon Card’s Such A Tricky Beast: A New True Tarot Tale Part One

My brother and his wife are selling their house. They put it on the market at the end of May. Lots of things are up in the air for them both; whether to look to buy again or rent for a while pending possible career moves for them both in the not too distant future. He and I were chatting on the phone a couple of weeks ago, about all this, and I drew blind cards, shuffling them about with my free hand while we were chatting.

‘Hey, Boofs,’ I said (nickname for a younger brother who used to be in his own toddler words, a ‘bad boofs’) ‘has there been any illegal hunting going on near you that you’re aware of: badger-baiting, for instance?’

‘Not that I’ve heard of, particularly,’ he said, ‘but I’ve had a few suspicions lately. I’ve seen a few dead badgers on the road and thought, they’ve not died there. They’ve been put there afterwards.’

That’s probably what I’m picking up, then,’ I said. ‘Or why else am I pulling this card and thinking; hunter, hunting…a hunter’s moon?’

I had pulled out at The Moon Card from Kat Black’s Golden Tarot, pictured by kind permission of US Games, available to buy on Amazon and other places.

Traditional Associations for this card: Psychism, Artistic Vision, Dreams, Delusion, Lies, Error, Infidelity, Danger, Travel, Infection, Fertility, Pregnancy.

‘F*** me!’ he said, ‘We’ve been thinking about maybe going to stay at the Hunter’s Inn, next week, in Exmoor…’

In fact, they did not go and stay there. They went on a day-trip down to the Dorset coast instead, and had a nice day out though my brother got lost, according to my lovely sister-in law, something he indignantly denied.

And so, the Moon card was not predicting, not forecasting, it was just facilitating enhanced telepathic communication, making literal use of the card’s imagery. Tarot will often work this way, and this is often how the most ‘far out’ or psychic insights are triggered.

Establishing the difference is what can make Divination so tricky, you just have to go with your gut, and there is no card trickier than the Moon card.

Constant in inconstancy, fidelity in fickleness…

Part Two coming up tomorrow, that’s Sunday, or else Moon-day *cough* 🙂

Answer to the Question: Do I Believe in Reincarnation?

Yesterday someone asked did I believe in reincarnation?

yew gutenberg

The Yew: symbol of resurrection. Its branches grow down into the ground to form new stems, which then rise up around the old central growth as separate but linked trunks. After a time, they cannot be distinguished from the original tree.

The rune EIWAZ represents the yew, and its numinous capacity for regeneration. It is the one living thing on Earth that could, at least in theory, live indefinitely.

I could not say yes or no, only that my perception is that it is possible for it to be true.

Some years ago, standing cooking, I experienced a strange sensation. For just a split second, I seemed to be standing in an entirely different kitchen, sparse, dark, above a courtyard. There was sunlight coming in at the open door from which I knew there was a flight of steep, narrow steps leading down to the courtyard, and I was wondering where Pietro had got to.

NB The name of the present Il Matrimonio is not Pietro. It is sometimes Mr Hissy (the man is a Libra subject but he is practically a Scorpio, and don’t I know it, but today he’s being good – just slithered in with a cup of tea.)

I have to say, I’m not keen on the idea of reincarnation. Of course we are all recycled material. Life on Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and we are just the current manifestations of it. In that sense, it would be unscientific NOT to believe in reincarnation.

I don’t hugely welcome the idea of repeating the human experience, doing everything again, exactly. And this is not meant as a complaint. I live with pain, and have done for many years now, but in many other respects I’ve done anything but draw the short straw.

I am pretty sure of this though. Whatever happens, it won’t be my choice. Life works in mysterious ways. I strongly sense, based on some rather strange experiences, that our consciousness is not extinguished at the time of bodily death, and that our departure is a process that can take days or longer. The tradition of the Wake was a wise one. We’d do well to bring it back.

There are other ways in which we live on, such as ‘returning’ in a descendent who looks like us, or who shares certain very particular qualities. Perhaps, therefore, reincarnation is race memory at work; the ultimate expression of ancestry.

Do we come back as our evolving selves as the Buddhists think? I’m not someone who’s going to rule it out. There have been too many extremely strange, compelling and quite convincing stories. READ HERE

Could it be that some people return quicker than others depending on their need?

Let’s talk about a very sad reading I once did for a young lady who told me her brother had recently died. This was a reading done by email. I had never met the lady.

I asked how he had died and she replied that he had in fact killed himself.

Her questions were:

Where was he now?

How was he, now?

I needed time to think about this one, as you can well imagine, and when I sat down to it, I drew the Sun card from The Gilded Tarot by Ciro Marchetti.

I find it a very useful deck. However, this card below, drawn from the Waite tradition, better illustrates and exemplifies what arose from that reading..

sun card

This is a card of life itself, and joy and of childhood. And of innocence and animals. Things in their natural state. You can see this for yourself, looking at this card. In other decks, those meanings are not necessarily so clear.

The appearance of this card suggested to me that wherever he was, whatever he was, he was like a child again, that he didn’t remember his death, not at all, or the darkness that drove him to it. Because this is a card of births…I felt he may even return again. Very soon in fact.

Bless his soul. He was a child again. I seemed to see him kicking about in a puddle. Sometimes he was too deeply asleep, and knew nothing, remembered nothing as one might generally, and naturally expect from the dead. But at other times, while facing away from this Earth, shown behind him, he was this child, kicking at a puddle, quietly engrossed and at ease with himself. But soon he would join the queue to return. And this is at present, a queue under pressure. For the two going out of human existence every second of today, four are coming in. The unborn are banging on the gates of the docks. What’s the limit of on the shipping lanes..

Why would he come back so soon, assuming if was ‘him’? unfinished business? Another chance? A wound to be healed?

I do not know. How could I? But I sensed news of a coming birth. This news looked or should I say, felt, as if it was coming soon. Bizarre as it might have seemed, I go with the flow in readings, and I wondered if it might even be him, coming back for a fresh go.

About three weeks after this I heard back from the lady, an email, rather excited, saying she had just learned her sister was expecting a baby. She might, she joked, be her own brother’s auntie this time around.

I could only hope it offered some kind of comfort, however peculiar, for a truly terrible grief. Because not all griefs are equal, some are worse than others.

These are mysteries beyond me. All I can say is, I wonder.

This one had me as they say, gob-smacked.

Until next time 🙂

Tarot Lotto

From an edition of Boccaccio's De Casibus Viro... — From an edition of Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustrium showing Lady Fortune spinning her wheel. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Has anyone ever foreseen a lottery win with the Tarot? Yes, you will find a link at the bottom of this post, but I haven’t, at least, not yet, for myself or anyone else.

Someone, a friend of a friend whom I don’t know, personally, messaged me via the friend to ask – light-heartedly, this was not a consultation- could I see him winning the Euro Millions Lottery? A big win? Because if I couldn’t, he had apparently said, perhaps he wouldn’t bother to continue buying tickets.

Now, I might not have bothered, but this is a question I have often been asked about. Amongst some readers there is the superstition that this question should not be asked. I can see no ethical or karmic reason why not, so long as you don’t shoot the messenger when you don’t like the answer. Tarot reading is divination, not magic, though Tarot is sometimes used as a magical tool for trying to bring something about.

I understood the man’s question to refer to a BIG win, and I drew three cards,

The Devil Reversed,

the Lovers card, and

The King of Pentacles or Coins, drawn Reversed.

This was a counting spread where I counted to assess the probability of a yes answer. In the spread I used each flanking card represents 25% and the centre card represents 50%.

The odds were therefore 50: 50 ie the odds you would expect, BUT reading the card literally, and since the King of Pentacles suggests a money king, and he had come out upside-down, as seen below in this image from I think, the Radiant Tarot, a Rider-Waite based deck, the odds reduced.

The final card is like turning over the last page in a storybook to get the ending.

I say what I see, no dissing the oracle, and my reply was therefore no, I did not see any significant lottery win, but I saw other good stuff. The Devil Reversed and The Lovers.

I sensed he had a passion about to be fulfilled, maybe to do with music or entertainments, then I learned he was a musician and amateur DJ.

The friend joked that now I was out of favour, telling him this bad news, (sigh, well this goes with the territory)

He asked, could a prediction not be overturned?

Another possible response might have been to say, oh bah. Well, that chimes with my gut, and that’s a few quid saved on buying tickets. But the risk in asking oracles anything, is that you might not like the answer, so the bargain is, not to shoot the messenger should you not win the Tarot Lottery of hearing what you long to hear.

The Emperor Tiberius used to ‘shoot’ his messengers. He had his soothsayers hurled off the cliff tops on Capri, if he did not like their sooth-ing, except for one called Thrasyllus who made him laugh by sooth-ing that he could feel his life was in danger at that very moment. And indeed it was, but Tiberius was so tickled he decided to let him off. I can’t help feeling, that their terror in reading for Tiberius is not likely to have increased their accuracy.

But, in answer to his question, yes, it might be that a prediction can be overturned. The future is subject to change, apart from the certainty of physical death, and readers can misconstrue the cards. I offer forecasts, not predictions.

What’s the difference? A forecast is a sniffing of the air, sensing prevailing and coming weather, an intuiting of trends, and a qualified reckoning of odds, unlike predictions which make flat statements about the future as if it is a done deal.

Therefore, to the friend asking whether my forecast that he will not win the Euro Millions Lottery can be overturned, I’d only say, I see it’s a ‘no’ by all means, chance your arm if you feel you can afford to. You can’t win if you don’t buy tickets (remembering that the original question was, did I see a big win, because if I didn’t, he might not bother to buy tickets.)

What were the chances of him overturning my forecast?

I drew positive cards, but no actual money card. This did not imply future poverty to come, but was a symbolic with-holding of that particular jackpot. The question as stated is the context to stick with.

Hope as they say, springs eternal, and I for one, am not knocking it. There is ALWAYS the chance of the wild card. And that card is the Wheel of Fortune, as illustrated in this newspaper story.

I told him he had good news coming. Not a Lottery win but a lucky break.

His good news was not long in coming. The tarot had given a 50:50 answer for its own good reasons, not just to do with the laws of chance, because in a sense he DID woin the lottery.

A few weeks after this he was made DJ of his very own radio programme.

How about that for a jackpot. AND he had earned it.

Till next time 🙂

And take a look at this news item below:

Lottery winner ‘saw it’ in Tarot

Continue reading “Tarot Lotto”

Tarot says, Broom Broom Bah! The Chariot Reversed.

The Chariot Card from the Gilded Tarot, by kind permission of Ciro Marchetti.

I was playing with the cards, no particular question, just a few things on my mind. I pulled The Chariot card, but it was upside-down, Reversed.

I drew it with the Strength card and this was also Reversed but I wasn’t sure of the message. The function of questions in tarot reading is to provide a framework for interpretation. Sometimes though, the challenge is what question to frame, and then, the trick is to just start pulling cards, refine with further questions, or wait for an insight.

The car was behaving itself, so it wasn’t a vehicle malfunction message, which it certainly can be, drawing The Chariot Reversed. I asked my eighteen year old daughter how she was getting on with her driving lessons. She’d only had five lessons, and was loving it, or so I thought, but she replied that she wasn’t enjoying them any more.

I asked why not. She’d had a scare last time, she said, turning left. She’d struggled to steer, the wheel locked, and another driver got impatient. More than that. Furious.

‘Steer!’ the instructor shouted.

‘It won’t turn any further!’

‘Steer!’

She felt shaky afterwards. Other drivers were so aggressive, she said. Tail-gating, gesticulating, sticking their fingers up as they overtake. They could see this was a learner, learning with Mr Pass, in his mini with its big sign on top, and they were learners once.

So, her nerves had been a little rattled. Maternal counselling followed, a small bracer. Keep your mind on what you’re doing, stick your fingers right back up at them. Testosterone twats. They were learners once. We imagined a few scenarios, she began to laugh and concoct in he rimagination enjoyable ways of deliberately causing annoyance, pressing the buttons of the petrol stress-heads. Laughing draws many a sting.

So, what had the Tarot done, here? Nothing unduly dramatic, it had merely waved a flag, causing me to pay attention to something that had been passing under the radar. For her first three lessons she had been eager to go out, and she’d come in whoop-whooping, and now, waiting, she was saying, ‘I’m not in the mood.’

The shine had come off the learning. Now that the Tarot had drawn it to my attention, I could offer perspective and encouragement, the polite word for a gentle kick up the rear.

The Chariot Reversed stood for Driving, negatively aspected. Strength Rev represented the experience of intimidation. She’ ll have to turn Strength right way up, and not let into her emotional space any unmannerly Mr Toad stress-merchant who wants to go at 50mph in a 30 mph zone, and thinks they are an expert and infallible, forgetting respect.

If you’re Mr/Ms Toad. Take it easy. Poop-poop! Remember what happened to Mr Toad. Remember the hare and the tortoise.

English: An original card from the tarot deck ... — English: An original card from the tarot deck of Jean Dodal of Lyon, a classic “Marseilles” deck. The deck dates from 1701-1715. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Until next time 🙂

Pithy Tarot meanings – the Chariot (jamesricklef.wordpress.com)

Psychic Tarot Plumbs The Depths

So exciting! Well, maybe, if you’re interested in how psychic Tarot reading works. The Tarot’s Eight of Swords talking about…. real life damp and drains.

There is Tarot you learn by book study. Then there is the Tarot you develop through experience, in which you discover or allocate new meanings for the cards via association and your own intuition. An example from my own experience is in readings featuring the Eight of Swords.

The Eight of Swords from The Gilded Tarot, by kind permission of Ciro Marchetti.

Standard Keywords: Frustration, feeling trapped or stuck, being unable to see a way ahead, chagrin, mortification, sometimes melodrama. A drama queen. One may be making a mountain out of a molehill. Passivity, the person is awaiting rescue when she only has to step forward with care and negotiate past the fence of swords, but she lacks focus, or else the nerve to try.

This is what you will read in any Tarot study guide. But sometimes, you look at a card and think, no, that’s not it. Why not? Perhaps it makes no sense in the context of the discussion. What else is the Tarot trying to flag up for attention using the stock of images at its disposal?

Your choices when this happens in a reading, dismiss it as an aberration or try to get to the bottom of it. Stay relaxed, an idea may present itself.

CASE STUDY ONE: An email reading for a lady I had never read for before:

HER QUESTION: ‘Where should I work?’

No background was provided, and Tarot, like Reason likes a context. Nonetheless I decided to try rather than request further clarification first, and I drew The Eight of Swords in a key position.

What I sensed and shared was, ‘no matter where you work, and I sense a kitchen table with negotiated time slots free from family use, the place of work must be free of damp. I see wet feet. Whatever that space is, that’s got the wet feet situation going on, if you recognise it, do not use that room as your workspace.’

Response: She identified herself as a psychic living and working not far from me. My reading had answered the question she had not wished to specify. She had been thinking of converting her shower room, which was in any case old and tired and in need of a revamp, into a room for receiving her own tarot clients in. Now, she was going to reconsider.

Eight of Swords from the Rider-Waite Tarot deck (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

CASE STUDY TWO: A Skype reading for a family member, buying property for the first time in France. Was the flat a sound buy?

The Tarot was rather negative, pointing out all manner of defects, structural and social, some of which she made sense of right away, being aware of them already. Others however, remained to be verified. Drawing the Eight of Swords I suggested the Tarot sniffed something diabolical (The Devil card) down in the basement. Uh oh. Trouble with the drains? This, she said, was not a problem. Nor need it be her problem in any case, as the flat she was after had no basement.
The purchase went ahead, and she was delighted about the new home and remains so. However, the various problems sensed before purchase announced themselves one by one, and the drain problem declared itself almost immediately on moving in , when the floor had to be taken up in the communal entrance hallway to sort them. It didn’t matter, such is life, all the same, she was unaware of the impending work at the point of buying.

One day the Tarot is going to use the Eight of Swords to tell me about someone’s toilet. I just know it. How rip snortingly excitin’, do I hear you say? No? The point is, Tarot is merely a map key of the psyche, tattooed on card stock. Man’s soul may be a butterfly, we’ve got to sweat the nitty gritty of daily life, so the Tarot’s insights will surely go there.

Until next time

Wha-Heyyyy! The Tarot Went To London Town

Tarot Goes Shopping in London Town For London Fashion Week

Recently, my Tarot went to London Fashion Week.
Not literally, alas.
My cards and I stayed here, my behind stuck firmly to a chair in my home, True Tarot Central, in Lancashire.

Booooooo

No, what I am talking about is Business Dowsing. Using Divination for a psychic inside track to assist with decision making in Business.

A regular client – she’s been using my service six or seven years now- owns a boutique where I live. She is a rock and a gem. has been in business more than 20 years and employs a 4-8 staff at any given time. She wanted the Tarot’s inputs as part of planning her buying trip to London Fashion Week.

How did this work?

Tarot had previously forecast a challenging year to come for her business in 2012, with a need to diversify.
Responding to this, a few days ahead of her buying trip to London Fashion Week, the client briefed me with checking out a list of 20 fashion collections which she had shortlisted as buying possibilities.
My brief was to dowse through this list, identifying which collections represented the best buys for her boutique in terms of likely future sales revenue.

How did I set about it?

I carried out card counting spreads in respect of each collection listed. Ithen checked these findings against my pendulum. A clockwise swing of the pendulum was positive corroboration. An anti clockwise swing of the pendulum was a negative which demanded further enquiry for clarification.

Collections getting a positive reading of 6/8 or better were flagged up as Green for BUY
Collections getting a positive reading of 5/8 or 6/8 were flagged as Amber-Green BUY SELECTIVELY
Collections getting a positive reading of 4/8 were flagged as Amber OCCASIONAL PIECES
Collections getting a positive reading of 3/8 were flagged as Amber-Red IF IN DOUBT LEAVE
Collections getting anything below this were flagged as Red. WARNING!

The Tarot offered other comments and suggestions.
It is too soon to verify the sales forecasting.
But a note from my client confirmed that with the Tarot’s help, I had at least accurately anticipated her reactions upon actually seeing the colelctions for herself in person. This reinforced her own instincts and she told me, this reinforcement from another quarter helped her arrive at her decisions more quickly and with confidence.

It afforded her a ‘second opinion’ to draw on when she was unsure. An inside track with no vested interest other than in giving reliable service.

Tarot is at the Questioner’s service. The Questioner is always charge and remains in control of the use he or she chooses to make of the information.
What a business dowser can do, at the least, is offer a virtual psychic companionship, resulting in avoidance of waste, risk and loss through uncertainty in difficult times.

Is it profanity, is it unspiritual to use the Tarot for business, for money making?
Well, is it profane to help people working for their daily bread, who are providing work for others in the process?

It is Life which is sacred, not the 78 pieces of cardstock which comprise in physical terms, the oracle of Tarot.

The Tarot is a portal for reaching inward, then reaching outward, to me, ‘myself’, to ‘you’, to ‘us’, to ‘them’.

Until next time 🙂

Which Way Home?

‘The hunger for meaning and purpose is nothing less than the human homing instinct — the Fourth Instinct — at work. But in the tangled maze of history, we have been sidetracked; in the long journey home, we forgot our destination. Indeed, we were told that it does not exist.’ Arianna Huffington.

The Tarot‘s Cards correlating to the Four Major Points Of The Compass are:

Ace of Pentacles = North

Ace of Cups =West

Ace of Wands =South

Ace of Swords= East

But where is ‘home’, beyond it being the people in your life?

‘There’s that feeling I get, when I look to the west’.’ Led Zeppelin.

‘My sun shall rise in the East, then shall my soul be at peace, ‘ Vangelis.

‘From all points of the compass flock’d birds of all feather.’ Source: Gutenberg. Org

From the beginning, we have been a migratory animal, in some parts of the world, more than others. Several cards in Tarot talk of home, rightly so, as it is a key ingredient of human experience, and a ruling perception. The Ace of Pentacles, Ten of Pentacles, Four of Wands, and Six of Cups all tell stories of a person’s home in a reading.

The Tarot’s Ace of Pentacles, which sometimes talks about food, money, or books, or bricks and mortar says, Earth itself is the nest, the Soul of Man is in the roots of the species. Below is The Ace of Pentacles from The Gilded Tarot, publisher Llewellyn, by kind permission of Ciro Marchetti.