prediction – Page 2 – 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.

Time To Say Goodbye…retirement was on the cards.

I was in good odour with a regular client. In June 2010, a reading indicated that her husband had reason to be hopeful of early retirement with a viable retirement package. He had been wanting to go for some time, but hadn’t found an early way out that he would find acceptable financially.

The cards assessed the chances of an opportunity materialising before the end of 2010 as 6 out of 8, odds I translated as meaning it was highly likely, though not inevitable.

Nothing is inevitable but Death…and taxes, so the saying goes. The future consists of so many complex variables, I find it more meaningful to attach a weighting to ‘predictions’, or forecasts, as I prefer to think of them.

What’s the difference? Well, a prediction is a statement about the future presented as a virtual fact, a done deal. A forecast is an indication of the likelihood that something will happen, leaving space for the workings of undetected random chance and free will. Society uses all manner of forecasting…from the weather to the Stock Exchange. tarot readers just offer another, personalised form, intuitively collected using tarot symbols as tools of assessment and translation, as our equivalent of the gathering and statistical analysis of hard data.

The chief cards I drew indicative of a viable ending coming into view over time’s horizon were The Emperor Reversed, Justice and Judgment.

The Emperor often indicates a man of mature years, or an organisation, generally a large one. His employer was a global defence company.
Justice = Law, contract.
Judgement = as in Judgement Day, in a benign way, a time of reckoning, the right time for completing or ending something.

I heard today he was invited to go in December, as part of a larger redundancy programme and – which will not necessarily the case for all such invitees – he is delighted.

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.

Hark the Heralding Agents sing…

The Page of Wands from Kat Black’s beautiful GOLDEN TAROT (U.S Games) See reviews on Llewellyn’s website.

In November I had a telephone call from a young hairdresser I know. Let’s call her Cate. She comes over every six weeks or so and gives everyone a trim, except for the cat and the fish (two tanks of tropicals.)
Cate was ringing to let me know she has had her first child, and that it is a boy. This was not only wonderful news, but a ‘psi’ moment.

In Tarot, the card shown above, the Page of Wands, is one of several strongly associated with birth. Wands is the suit of Fire, of passion and the primal spark.

Dowsing to find out the numbers and sexes of future children is an old wife’s hobby, and there are arguments for not doing it. The surprise is part of the excitement of the arrival of a new baby. But precisely because no-one expects it to be accurate, people still do it, for fun and out of curiosity about their latent psi talent.

I dowsed for Cate when she was a little more than five months along, using a smoky quartz pendulum. Most of my divinatory work is with cards.

Earlier, back in April I asked a young client if she was expecting a baby or thinking of starting a family—seeing a page of wands and the page of cups prompted my question. My client answered that she was not expecting a baby, but then she returned in June and told me that she was three months pregnant, had in fact been pregnant at the time of the April reading, but hadn’t known it herself at the time.

I have had some interesting results with pendulums previously…and a pendulum is sometimes the quickest tool for a short yes or no answer to a question. But whatever divinatory method I am using, I never claim I KNOW anything until a client has confirmed it. That would be hubris. I will only ever say what I feel, always acknowledging the possibility I might be wrong.

So, dowsing for Cate, using the pendulum, I asked the baby if it wished to tell us: was it a boy Yes or No? There was a pause. The chain began to gain momentum and the pendulum began to describe a vigourous clockwise circle. According to my programming with the question, this was a yes, the baby was communicating he was a boy.

I then asked: are you happy to tell us: are you a girl? The pendulum began to describe a vigorous anti-clockwise circle, meaning no. I performed this three times and got the same response each time. Therefore…according to the pendulum, a little boy was on his way.

The baby’s official due date was the 25 October. I felt the baby would beat that date but didn’t say so. I felt the birth would be OK but there might be some tough moments. Again, I didn’t say so. I felt the outcome would be fine and I did share this, because it could do no harm to add to her confidence and strength.

The night of the 23 October, I dreamed I was in a corner shop standing behind two girls talking. One said to the other, ‘did you hear? Cate’s had the baby?’ It was so vivid I made a note in the morning to remember it. I have just been told the labour began on the 23rd, and the baby arrived in the early hours on the 24th. Synchronicity of psi with real time.

So what was happening here? One idea is that dowsing works on the interaction between two detected electro-magnetic fields…when a positively charged field meets a negatively charged one, there is a answering movement in a divining rod, or ring or needle. Worked metal is an obvious conduit but many rock specimens may also possess ‘charge’ and amber which is fossilised resin is also known for possessing charge. Any living thing possesses charge…it’s why we sometimes receive static shocks from hairbrushes or getting out of a car.

I can’t know for sure, but perhaps the crystal on the chain detected the baby’s electro-magnetic field, and I had given it a language for telling me what it was sensing.

The tool itself may be doing little, is another possibility, and its value

is in detecting and exaggerating a twitch or tremor of the dowser’s body. This twitch or tremor is unconscious in origin. It means that the autonomic nervous system has detected information. The ANS has no language, only its ability to transmit chemical and electrical stimuli, resulting in physical movements. It knows something the conscious mind does not, and makes the dowser perform a movement puppet like, by means of electrical impulses travelling from the brain down the spine and ultimatrely to the finger tips. This movement might be so subtle that if it weren’t for the movement of a hazel rod, in the case of dowsing for water, or the swing of a pendulum in other types of dowsing, it would be missed by the naked eye. The movement of the tool amplifies this tiny signal from the brain.

So welcome to this world, little boy. May you stay as long as you like, be amazed as you should be, do and learn plenty with happiness not harm, and may all good luck go with you.