divination – Page 7 – True Tarot Tales

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.

Spooky Style Money Stuff

The Tarot’s Insights offer a head start on uncertainty. Tarot in the hands of a practically minded Intuitive ot ‘psychic’ can minimise risk and wastage, resulting in savings of time, worry, energy – and money.

Intuition, like instinct, is a natural capability.

It is instinct rising from the gut and finding words. It is a key element of intellect, and is probably, I suspect, actually super-fast reasoning and deduction that’s bypassed conscious processes, simply by virtue of extreme speed. Intuition is not the antithesis of reason. Each is an element of the other. Where their findings meet in the middle, there is an advantage in the face of uncertainty.

Divination is an activity as old as mankind. We’re the species that likes to plan further than a day or two ahead. Mankind is always, by one means or another, from weather forecasting to mineral prospecting, trying to stay ahead of the game. Instinct is about survival first, and decisions great and small are often taken in advance of the proof that fully rationally justifies them. That’s why we say ‘Rather safe than sorry.’

For instance: ‘Roar! Snarl!’

‘Oh noo-ooo. I just KNEW something was wrong, but I couldn’t be sure, without hard evidence. The hair went up on my neck. But I didn’t see it, hear it or, um, smell it. Now here it is , and as a matter of fact (I only deal in the known facts) I am in its jaws right now, and it’s a lion. Sheesh. I wish I had trusted my instincts on this one. Ewwww. It’s slobbering. The evidence is in, I am in a lion’s load of trouble and that’s a fact. Owww! Too late now. Good-bye world!’

Yesterday, and this is not an unusual task, I was asked to clarify a spending figure for a fashion retail client who has been using my service for some years, which I did for her straightaway by Email, pending her upcoming trip to Munich, Paris and London.

Her Question: Should she allocate for Stock Buying For the Season Of Spring/Summer 2012 :-

a) £150 k
b) £170 k
c) £180 k?

Pass the smelling salts. The responsibility of a question remains the client’s, but the reader accepts a responsibility in answering it.

I sat with my cards, spoke the question, shuffled and drew three cards blind and at random.

The £150k option was ‘The Answer.’

How did I arrive at this conclusion?

I drew 2 cards upright out of 3 in respect of this option, and only 1 out of 3 upright in repsect of the other 2.

To me this intuitively calibrated as a ‘yes’ for the 2/3 result, and a ‘no’ for the 1/3 results. In addition those two upright cards were symbolically positive and relevant in respect of the presenting question.

We had the Nine Of Pentacles

The Gilded Tarot, by kind permission of Ciro Marchetti

This card shows a woman who works hard, provides for others, and is a lover of fine things. She may be a collector of beautiful objects, and a cultivator of gardens. She often has a good head for business, and is a manager or employer.

I have also come to associate this card with boutiques/beauty salons/related business and services.

And we had the Queen of Wands: a card indicating a consummate saleswoman, with great marketing instinct.

I therefore confirmed the optimal option as £150k. The client was delighted.

She had already decided on this sum herself. She had been ‘testing’ to see if I would arrive at the same conclusion. The fact I did so gave her, an independent sole proprietor for over 20 years, and an employer of several staff, the extra assurance that she was reading her own instinct aright. Now she could proceed with confidence.

The Tarot’s insights and affirmations offer a head start on uncertainty. This in turn can minimise risk and wastage, and result in savings of time, energy – and money.

Until next time 🙂

Nail It: Two-Card Tarot.

A good discipline for a reader is to read little and often. It’s a kind of self-programming. Make it tough on yourself, tarot is wonderfully subtle but sometimes you need to nail a colour to the mast.

However open your vision, and habits of interpretation when doing readings for others, it’s good to know you will generally get it right. You won’t always of course, so feed yourself a piece of humble pie every day, but you need to be right a LOT as a professional reader, or what’s your value? So practice, and challenge yourself with the nail-biting no-no that is the CLOSED QUESTION.

‘Will XYZ happen or won’t it?’ The second card is to ask why will it or won’t it? The discussion or meditation then opens out again if necessary.

Here is a recent example: I was thinking of attending a tarot social event, taking a friend, a fellow local tarot reader and professional clairvoyant . Knowing what a hermit-crab this shy friend can be, I marked him as a POSSIBLE attendee only, half-expecting him to bow out in advance.

Two days before the scheduled event, he rang to say he’d be going, but I still expected him to change his mind, and the day before I pulled two cards to test this out.

I drew The Ace of Wands Reversed. Wands is the suit of trips and longer journeys, also of selling, bartering and exchange, buzz, chatting, marketing…general communications. Drawing it reversed, denied, suggested he was about to cry off. Now, this was absolutely fine, and was just as I expected, but could the Tarot tell me why in advance of the facts?

I drew The Hierophant Reversed. The Hierophant which used to be known as The Pope, suggests a priest, a teacher, a counsellor or healer, a church, a tradition and an established order. It is orthodoxy and conformity. It can also signify marriage…and keys! That’s the Tarot for you!

I looked at it and was puzzled. ‘But A***** doesn’t GO to church!’ I said.

Later that afternoon he rang to say he still wanted to go to the tarot event but was now double-booked. I was glad to think he had plans elsewhere, he’d been a bit down and depressed, and I read this as a sign of recovery. I told him not to worry about the tarot social, I could see he really wanted to go to the other thing instead.

What was it?

A Christian Science church, he said. Did I want to go? Er, well, no. They had a guest speaker coming in, he said. A healer visiting from the States.

Ahaaa! So that was why the Tarot had seemed to say ‘church.’ But it also meant ‘priest/healer.’ It knew what was going on, all right. And the cards had been drawn reversed because, having decided time-planning didn’t allow him to go to both, the events were then being perceived as being in conflict with one another.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gilded-Tarot-Boxset-card-deck/dp/0738705209

Tarot Temperatures Rising…

Well, it has been a white Christmas here where I live by the sea on Lancashire’s usually mild, if sometimes windy Fylde coast. It did not strictly count as white, for anyone who might have placed a bet on it, as no new snow fell, but it looked white all right.

Il Matrimonio, the husband, asked me, thinking of prospects for inter-familial travel, did I see a thaw coming by today, Monday?

I performed a single card reading and drew THE KNIGHT OF WANDS.

The Knight of Wands From The Thoth Tarot: Alesteir Crowley/Frieda Harris c. U.S. Games Systems.

The associations for this card are: speed, change, sudden arrivals and departures, warmth, the south, sultriness.

The Tarot was therefore indicating a thaw that would arrive on or by Monday, which is today.

And here it is, a relenting of the icy grip. Icicles falling off the roof, meltwater rushing out of the drains, a metre wide ribbon of water standing on the road. Drip drip. Plip plip.

A little respite for the birds who are having a tough time of it.

A thaw, yes. Sultry…well, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it that, but technically, yes, in the sense that the melt is due to warm air coming to us from the south, from the continent.

Keep warm this winter, may you successfully fend off all sniffles.

You may be interested in looking up the medicinal uses of such home use remedies as oregano oil:- http://www.homeremediesweb.com/oil_of_oregano_health_benefits.php

Fire, I’ll Teach You To Burn!

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 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?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2g-6QGsC8g&feature=related

Practical Tarot:The Chariot

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.

1jjChariot-761232 — The Chariot from the Swiss IJJ Tarot.

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.

Devil's Backbone — Devil’s Backbone (Photo credit: pietroizzo)

How about that for synchronicity?

The Death Card, Dowsing & The Diamond Ring.

I drew The Ace of Pentacles once, and was initially puzzled as to why, Tarot was flagging it up as a problem, but the lady was adamant there were no money or property issues troubling her, as I would have expected with this card, being drawn reversed as it was.

In fact it did represent a property issue. It was just that the lady hadn’t thought of it in those terms. The Ace of Pentacles reversed represented a diamond ring, and the card was drawn reversed because the ring was missing and had been lost now for more than eighteen months. The lady was very sad about it. The ring had been a gift from her husband who had died three years previously; a fact I knew already from previous readings for this delightful lady.

If I had not already known, the appearance of the 9 of Swords (grieving, bereavement, sleepless nights) would have been a clue.

Below is the Rider-Waite Nine of Swords (U.S. Games)

The lady asked my help in finding the missing ring. DISCLAIMER follows: Neither dowsing or remote viewing – the other possibility for finding lost objects psychically – form part of my professional service, which focusses on situational feedback, advice and forecasts.

I reminded her of this, but she asked me to please just have a go anyway. I’d been right about things before, and the loss was preying on her mind. I agreed because I knew her, and knew she would understand it was a long shot. I said I would not charge, as I could not guarantee success. She replied, gracious as always, she wished to pay for my time, regardless.

I began by asking the Tarot whether the lost ring was still in my clients flat.

I did this using a counting spread. This is how it works. Drawing more than 50% of the cards upright is a yes answer in this type of spread, less than 50% is a no. The more upright cards, the stronger the ‘yes’ signal. The more reversed cards, the stronger the ‘no’ .

Getting a 50% answer, which happens a lot, gaaahhh, is the greatest challenge and often, I have learned the hard way, signifies the need to rephrase the question, or ask a different question to obtain the best answer.

Using this counting approach now, the Tarot indicated that yes, the ring was in her flat still. It had not been thrown away by accident as she feared.

The prospect of using the cards for narrowing down the exact location of a ring in a flat I had never visited was a time -consuming prospect however. I decided that instead, I would try dowsing with a pendulum.

I didn’t have my quartz pendulum handy, so I removed my neck chain which had a small pendant. I would use this to request yes, no and maybe answers that would help me edit out all the other impressions that might come to me through the cards.

I would draw single cards for extra information.

I wrote the word ‘Bedroom‘ on paper first because my client was pretty determined that the ring must be in the bedroom. I suspended the chain and locket over the word and it described an anti-clockwise circle which I took for a no answer.

Was the ring in the kitchen? No.

The bathroom? No.

The sitting room? The pendulum described a clockwise circle. Yes.

Dowsing appeared to have selected the sitting room. I drew another card at random and got The Death card. All I could think was that the lost ring was somehow in the keeping of the lady’s deceased husband.

Had her husband been buried or cremated, I asked? Cremated she said. I proceeded to tell her a story from my own life in which I had dowsed a dear one’s ashes, to know where they should be scattered, in accordance with the owners preferences, there having been no instruction in the will. Why did I tell her this? I did not fully understand at the time, but I would later.

Was there a vase in her sitting room with white roses in it? I asked. My reason for asking was that the thought came to me, considering the white rose on Death’s banner you can see on the picture of this Rider-Waite card (U.S Games).

No, she said, there were no white roses. Oh, well, I said, it was just a thought. Not to worry, but perhaps just bear it in mind while you look.

She left with advice to search the sitting room, near objects with a strong physical association with her husband. It really felt to me as if he had it, and was looking after it for her…a crazy notion, on the face of it.

She left at 12.30. At 2.55 she rang to tell me she had found the ring. She had needed a step- ladder to find it (so, if you see the 6 of Wands, which appeared at my first look, bear in mind it might, depending on circumstances, literally be a ladder.)

The diamond ring was on top of a wall unit in the sitting room, right beside the jar in which she kept her husband’s ashes.

‘I feel so silly,’ she said, ‘you asked about white roses, and I told you I hadn’t any when all the time there was a vase of them – silk ones, you know – on the hearth by the wall unit.’

I was delighted as you can imagine. Also a teensy bit freaked and considerable in awe.

How strange the Universe is and its workings. How mysterious the human mind is. She might have put it there herself, done it on automatic pilot and then forgotten. I helped her fetch it out of her memory. If not …the possibilities are strange indeed.

BUT. This is crucial, she was willing to work with me and help me try to help her. We found it together.

Check out dowsing on Google and Dowsing Associations and Societies if you’ve ever wondered if you have hidden water in your back garden, or want to know more about it in general. Use these links:-

http://www.britishdowsers.org/

http://www.dowsers.org/

Now where the *beep* did I leave my cup of tea?

Until next time 🙂