With Katie-Ellen Hazeldine, professional tarot reader, consultant and writer in the UK
Not long ago I did a reading for a father, worried about job and training prospects for his sixteen year old son who had just left school. The teen years had been turbulent. It seemed important that the young man should be helped to find his feet with a new role, routine and responsibilities sooner rather than later.
The Tarot indicated that the hiccups were not yet over, but the cards offered encouragement by way of these three cards. The reading timeline indicated that the developments illustrated by the cards were likely to materialise within 3-4 weeks at the soonest, six months at the latest,Â
Most promising was the appearance of the 2 of Wands, the 8 of Coins/Pentacles and the King of Wands.
The 2 of Wands indicated an agreement or contract to come, career related. A job therefore, or work placement or traineeship. Travel, relocation, even migration are sometimes associated with this card.Â
The 8 of Coins or Pentacles indicated again, an apprenticeship with pay, in which hard work, consistency and attention to detail would be expected.
The King of Wands indicated a man of business, bluff, outgoing, direct in all his dealings. A no-nonsense employer. I asked the father if he was already aware of such a placement provider yet. He wasn’t sure…he had been casting about and had one or two possibilities in mind. Wands is a suit I have come to associate with sales, estate agencies, travel and transport. I sensed heat and thought of engines. This King of Wands might possibly be a garage owner? Or something else connected with cars, maybe motorbikes?
The client had actually already considered this idea, which was interesting.
A month later, and I learned yesterday that the young man had relocated to take up a work placement traineeship. It wasn’t with a garage. There wasn’t such a placement available at present through the Jobcentre. But it was a placement that would be reviewable in 13 weeks, when a change might be possible. Meanwhile, it represented an arrival into the world of work.
Good luck to him, there may still be a garage placement when the 13 weeks are up and he could be re-allocated. I hope he’ll stick with the start he’s made meantime, as shown by the example of the apprentice in the 8 of Pentacles. It can be a hard and fearful leap, from the safety of home out into the wide world, but for the well supported child, as this young man has been, at least it can be made in guided stages and with a safety net. Many might think that a luxury.
Psychic Marshmallows…
Love n light. Well, these are beautiful words and mean beautiful and all important things. But they will take a tarot card reader only so far in delivering meaning and resonance for the other person in a reading.
Readers must aim for meaning and precision, and avoid waffle at all costs. Being ‘psychic’ is one thing. Being a practitioner of a discipline is another. Effective communication is another. Clients want specifics.
They want to know what do the cards MEAN? For them? Right now? In terms they can get hold of and use, should they so choose?
We live in a physical world and must wrestle with ourselves, yes, at times, but so many life challenges focus on matters of practical substance, and this is not the lesser stuff. It is simply temporal, time specific where the metaphysics is the stuff of enduring truths and eternal experiences.
I was doing a reading for a lady who worked as a hypnotherapist, when the Tarot suddenly seemed to suggest it was time to put her cigarette out. This was the feeling I got, drawing The Ace of Wands Reversed, and although it may mean many other things. I put this to her.
‘Why is the Tarot saying stub out that cigarette?’
It is important to emphasize the Tarot wasn’t making any criticism in saying this. It wasn’t presuming to nag the lady about smoking. It was simply sensing something, picking up on some thought that was coming from her.
The Tarot does not judge. It detects and it reflects. The reader might judge but they’d better not presume to do anything of the kind. It will get in the way of the view. It will interfere with their ability to do the truest possible reading, as in, truest to the person being read for, who is the only person who matters in that moment.
The client confirmed that she did smoke. She had taken it up again recently, not feeling settled in her new job. This job situation was the reason for the reading. But just before we got stuck in, and just by the by, something else leapt out at me, looking at the cards laid out before me.
My eye was unaccountably drawn to one card in particular; the Page of Cups.
This card traditionally symbolises offers, gifts, advents and arrivals. It might turn out to mean an invitation, a proposal, a new friendship, or a birth. It may be announcing an engagement or wedding ring, a recovery from illness, or a new creative or spiritual project. I have also come to associate it rather less romantically, with fish oil supplementation, for reasons you’ll guess at, studying the image.
Something about the pink of his sleeves arrested my attention, and before I knew I was going to say it I asked. ‘Do you eat a lot of those pink and white marshmallows. You know, the ones you get in bags?’
She stared at me a moment then said. ‘Oh my God. I absolutely love them. I’ve got a thing about them at the moment. I’ve got some right here in my handbag. How on earth did you know that?’
She reached for her bag and opened it, producing said bag of marshmallows, and offered me one. I declined. I don’t eat or drink while reading, though visitors get a glass of water or a cuppa. Biscuits have been known to manifest.
So. Back to her question. How did I know?
Well, I didn’t ‘know.’ I had a sudden sense of knowing. This may seem an odd or meaningless distinction, but let’s take a second to consider.
I didn’t know. Not as such. How could I? I had a passing thought, and then I came out and said it aloud, even though I did not yet know where that thought had come from.
In this case my thought about marshmallows was triggered by the Page of Cups. It was the look of the card. My eye was drawn to his sleeves and tunic. Lateral thinking based on colour association. it triggered the thought that popped into my head, so I said it whereas as a beginner I might not have dared, for fear of being wrong and looking stupid.
This marshmallow thing was new to me. I have never said it before or since in respect of this same card. This was a purely one off interpretation, and this is not unusual in a reading.
One can study card meanings and they will take you a long, long way in reading for someone, but associative thinking can trigger insights that no book can teach you.
The challenge for a reader is to learn to trust the first thought that comes into your head. This means risking being wrong, but if you’re not ready to take that risk, and don’t share that thought, you won’t be able to validate the accuracy of such insights, and that’s how a reader develops their skills and perhaps their so called psychic capability…by going off-script.
But it started with the card.
Till next time:)
I had a dental appointment coming up at the hospital. An extraction. Uh Oh.
I was dreading it. But it was another chance to put tarot to the test just for myself.
By law, tarot readers may not offer medical advice to clients. But many cards in the Tarot do relate to physical health as it is such an important part of life.
Readers may use that capability for themselves, may they not.
I asked the cards, was the dentist was going to do a good job me on the appointed date, and I drew the Page of Coins Reversed.
This card, I felt, represented the doomed tooth.
And I drew the King of Swords.
This stern king represents the concept of the expert, the authority figure.
He has strong associations with the Law, Science and Maths, Music, and Medicine, especially Surgery.
Thus a King of Swords can represent a doctor or dentist, the Queen of Swords if the doctor or dentist is female.
It was a good card to draw, in the circumstances. This dentist was going to be on good form. I felt reassured.
King of Swords
What would I have done had I drawn ‘bad’ cards:Â For example; in this contect, these might have included:
King of Swords Reversed, Page of Swords Reversed, Ace of Swords Reversed, Temperance Reversed, The Moon, Tower etc?
Well, Â would have looked at it again, to clear the decks of my emotional projection that might be clouding the hard information I was trying to reach. Had I drawn a strong negative response three times in a row, I would have considered changing the appointment day, and hopefully, avert trouble and improve the outcome.
Does this mean I can always avoid a bad experience? Of course not.
On another occasion, I decided not to look in the Tarot. A wisdom tooth had to come out. That was that. I decided not to risk frightening myself. I would just experience it in the normal way and it was a ghastly experience. A nerve was damaged, leaving me with local parasthesia for 18 months. Had I ‘looked’ beforehand, I could have declined the appointment and re-tested with the cards against a new appointment.
But, prescience is not omniscience,  Divination is of itself not magic, or magick, and Life is not all roses.
This is the risk of consulting with oracles. You might hear something you don’t like, and wish you had just found out at the time, without the forewarning, and then you wouldn’t have had the worry as well.
‘Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.’ 🙂
But sh*t happens. And you might equally say, ‘forewarned is forearmed.’
Tarot cards can be used in combination with dowsing techniques to hunt for missing items.
The other day I got a Skype call from my sister in France. She teaches English as a freelancer with several client organisations including colleges. It’s been exam time again, and she wondered if I would take a look to try and help her ‘find’ a missing examination paper.
She gave me the background. I fetched a pendulum. It wasn’t one I’d used before so I asked it to show me its signals for yes, no and maybe. It showed me that it would use a clockwise circle to say yes, an anticlockwise circle to say no, and a tick tock motion to say maybe or to to indicate that it was still thinking.
I asked, Is the lost paper recoverable? I got a clockwise circle. Yes. (Good.)
I asked, Does M (this was my sister) have it in her sphere of keeping at this moment?
I got a vigorous anti clockwise movement…an emphatic no.
I asked: Does F (the colleague my sister had been co-marking with, who had reported the paper as lost) have it in her sphere of keeping at this moment?
I got a clockwise movement. Yes.
This was a relief to my sister, but she wanted to know if F would be able to find the missing exam paper quickly. Losing one was no joke at any time or for any reason but it belonged to a very deserving and conscientious student, too.
Where might it be now, she asked, and what were the chances of the lost paper would be found that same day or at least, quickly?’
I drew 6 upright cards out of eight. This was an encouraging answer with an affirmative implied. It looked strongly likely that the paper would be recovered that same day.
Then I focussed on imagery in the individual cards to suggest clues as to where it might be. I had a lot of 3’s in my row of cards, I noticed. I had 3 cards with a number 3 attached.
I had The Empress (Major Arcana Three) Motherhood? Was someone in F’s office having a baby? I asked.
I had the 3 of Coins (3 sharing an office?) Were there 3 desks in F’s shared office?
I had the 3 of wands Reversed (Someone was away? Someone was absent from Education)
Up to 5 people currently used F’s office, my sister explained. There were 3 desks. One colleague was away on Maternity leave and had just had a baby boy. Someone else was using her desk right now.
Well, I said, I don’t know, but I think it’s just been misplaced in F’s office. And the number 3 looks like the Tarot’s clue to where the lost paper is right now.
I drew another card. It was The Page of Swords. The suit of swords is strongly associated with IT and Computers. The Page to me often signifies a window or a screen.
‘News is coming soon, I think,’ I said to my sister. ‘Look out for the exam paper being near a window or computer screen. And this card can mean an email.’
‘Hang on!’ she said. ‘One’s coming through right now.’
It was an email from F. The missing paper had been found. It had got in with the wrong batch of papers.
It had got in with the YEAR 3 papers.
Questions and comments welcome.
True Tarot’s also a book lover and writer. Truth and Art…is there really any such thing as fiction? Even the most fantastically way out fiction is ultimately only a vehicle for accessing and expressing the truths of the human story.
On my writing blog you’ll find some of my short stories, poems, a book corner and other sundries. You can access it from my Blog Roll…
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/
Now where the *beep* did I leave my cup of tea?
Until next time 🙂
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Death Card To The Rescue…a true tarot hamster tale.
 The Angel of Death, by Evelyn de Morgan.
The Death card has in recent years been distanced from death as a physical event by the Tarot profession. The motivation has largely been so as not to frighten or disempower anyone. The Death card has been repackaged with an emphasis upon its power and value as Transition or Transformation.
There is much to be said in favour of this change of emphasis. Life is full of change and flux. Circumstances change, die, evolve. Winter comes. Sometimes a situation is over-ripe for change, and the appearance of the Death card will identify this as a good time to let go and move on, which is helpful to know if decisions are called for. I often draw it in a guise that the querent finds entirely welcome.
But Death is inescapable. It walks amongst us in Life, and is the agent of much of our greatest grief and fear. It is not our enemy, except as the thief of desires unfulfilled. Nature wants Death. It has engineered it for Life In The Grand Scheme.
But it’s the ultimate gateway to the unknown, perhaps to the extinguishing of our uniqueness, our personality? I think our consciousness survives the moment of bodily death at least for a few days. Where it goes afterwards is not for anyone to know for sure.
In my own experience, the Death card is actually not the sole predictor of human physical death in the Tarot. I tend to see instead multiple and repeated combinations including the Fool Reversed, Tower, Judgement dignified or reversed, 4 Swords, 6 Swords, Ace Swords Reversed, Strength, Star Reversed and the Sun reversed.
But I have seen the Death card in readings where the card has done exactly what it says on the tin, detecting a recent death, or presaging one. Tackling or avoiding these discussions when the cards raise them requires careful judgement. Readers must do no harm, and can get it wrong. Humility is the corollary of respect.
But the Death card can be a friendly angel. One afternoon two summers ago I drew this card, and it appeared to be referring to somebody in a state of childhood (The 6 of Cups)
I immediately got up to go and check on the hamster. I associate the suit of Cups not only with childhood, children, nostagia, happy times, but with animals, who live so pignantly in the moment, asking little.
The  hamster had recently had a fall. She did not fall far, she tumbled down the back of the sofa on to a cushion. Her landing was soft and Il Matrimonio laughed because it looked comical but something about the way she picked herself up worried me.
Bam-Bam the Bold, Beautiful and occasionally Bad (a toe nipper in her youth) had been ill two days after this fall, and we had thought she was on her way out.  Tears in our eyes, hankies at the ready, spritzing the air with Rescue Remedy  we took turns to hold her for more than three hours.
Then ANTICLIMAX. All at once the small personage decided she was better, and scrambled off. She was bright as a button next day, trying to climb the wine rack (that’s my girl) and chomping my Gombrich’s History of Art on the lowest book shelf (in hardback)
We were delighted of course, but puzzled. She was my tenth hamster and I’d never seen such a recovery from prostration. The little things don’t ‘do’ illness.
So now, drawing the Death card ten days after this event, an awful thought struck me. I headed upstairs as fast as I could go to the Hamster Palace and found her in great distress, stumbling about. She tried to evade my hand and knowing she was sexist, as animals often are, I knew she would prefer my husband’s smell, I mean, scent, and went to fetch his pyjama top to use for getting hold of her.
I held her cuddled upright in this for two hours while she rested, unmoving. Later that evening she was sufficiently recovered to eat a small square of brown toast with acacia honey (good for rodents with diarrhea) I offered her cooled chamomile tea, which she first refused at first but later took a real shine to. I had read this would calm her and possibly offer pain relief.
Speaking with the vet on the telephone. I wondered if Bam-Bam might have had a hernia of her diaphragm. If she did, then when it popped out that would explain her struggling to breathe. When it popped back into its rightful position,  it would explain why she recovered and why holding her almost vertically against my body produced recovery, gravity doing its work. The vet thought a hernia highly likely after the fall. But he had nothing to offer that would not involve distress for an animal so small. And at 18 months, she was at a classic age for hamster health problems.
The third attack will be her last, I told my husband. (The 3 of Swords)
She left us two weeks later. The Angel of Death took her away in a kindly fashion with nothing of Swords in the manner of it. I was deeply grateful to the Tarot for the forewarning that sent me to her when she was in distress. Even animals who are solitary by nature, will learn to look for company and when she went, she was not alone.
Bam-Bam The Bold is buried under the pink rose in the back garden with her predecessor, the curtain climbing, mighty-for-her-size but ever sweet-tempered Coco the Courageous. There are Dog roses. I say, let there be Ham Roses or any kind of animal roses we want. Only animals? Well, so are we. It’s all Life, and what would a heaven be without them, anyway?
I’ll still swat a mosquito though, as soon as look at it, and think komodo dragons are entirely disgusting, from which I deduce I am not ready for Enlightenment.
Until next time 🙂
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