Headed back to questions from the divination community this week! Today, we look at this: What divinatory tools/skills/modalities am I cultivating in 2025? To broaden that a little more, I’ll think about it in terms of divinatory trends and methods that will or can thrive this year, as well as finding things for your divinatory practice that will make you feel like your growing and/or thriving.
This week, I chose The Darkness of Light Tarot by Tony DiMauro. It’s an absolute stunner of a creation, though it came out at a weird moment and its entirely white cast of characters meant it remained destined for my shelf. A friend and I talked about the deck yesterday, though, and I thought this was as good a place as any to revisit it. Why not? I’ve got so many decks on the shelves that don’t get any love—and as I handed over a deck I love to this friend who I know will use it more, I realized it might be worth doing a bit more of that. Revisiting and potentially finding new, loving homes. But that’s not the point of this post; just some delightful commentary from yours truly. In an arc of five, we’ve got: 7 of Blades (4), La Stella (2), Knight of Cups (1), Three of Wands (2), Ace of Cups (5). Let us note the absence of earth, herein. Out of the gate, we know we’re not being asked to stay tethered to anything old or familiar. In fact, the exclusion of only earth from the line suggests that escaping the bonds of banality may be either necessary or desirable, depending on one’s point of view. Water/Cups holds an edge in the spread, being the only element represented twice. The Knight of Cups wants to be the central character, which is apt for knights, and I think there’s a certain dreaminess about this card that suggests escapism. I’m not an advocate of escapism, that you likely know, but let’s note that the question is not what “should” we be cultivating, but rather what “are” we cultivating. So this isn’t advice as much as it is a description of our collective divinatory tendency. I don’t, however, think escapism is the only quality the card depicts and here is where the reader’s life experience meets the cards in front of him. I have been feeling for a lot of the last year that a sea change was happening in terms of divination needs. My clients have started asking questions I’m never asked—questions about ancestors, spirituality, curses, magic, and mediumship. And this makes total sense for two reasons. First, humans in the industrialized/colonizer world frequently return in a big ways to spirituality—particularly alt spirituality (at least since “alt” became a necessary qualifier)—during and after times of global catastrophe. We are not yet out of the global pandemic and we face news of new diseases threatening our safety every day. Humans also seeks spirituality in times of or after war. The Spiritualism movement in the so-called US took off in the years after the “Civil War,” and again after the two World Wars. We are in a moment following massive, indescribable loss. Of course people’s connection to their honored dead and their understanding of their own temporariness drive them toward questions of spirituality. Second, we’re also in a moment where the “spirituality” of others is being used to destroy the lives of already marginalized communities. A lot of people recognize the sheer fuckeduppery of this and at the same time are craving a connection to something larger than themselves. I also think a lot of people on the supposed left who replaced their childhood Christianity with evangelical liberalism are discovering that this religion turns out to be as hollow as the prior—perhaps more. The dreaminess of the kn/cups need not be romanticism. It may be a Don Quixote-esque quest for the ideal. (Full disclosure, I honestly only know that story based on the musical Man of La Mancha; I can’t claim to have read the book.) The fact that the Knight is preceded by the Star, a pretty strong and also idealistic sense of direction, ennobles him (although it also could make him a bit dippy and dreamy, too) it’s the 7/blades that keeps us in check. Sevens are invested in things that are deeply important to the querent. We’re not talking about unimportant stuff here. So we do have a Knight of Cups shaped by the marriage of the 7/blades and the Star: serious, introspective, deep, focused, idealistic. This makes up for the lack of earth, I guess, making him somewhat “saner” than Don Quixote. What does the knight move toward? The Three of Wands and the Ace of Cups. I’ve written elsewhere in the blog about how spirituality can be detected in the cards through the suits and how they behave. Fiery spirituality is evangelical; watery spirituality is intuitive and fluid; airy spirituality is intellectual, theological, perhaps even scientific; earth spirituality is grounded, deep, earthy, practical. As we turn our attention to the 3/wands, we recognize how it’s “contained” by two water/cups cards. One could make the argument that this is intuition containing the evangelical, which we might take to mean the containing or capturing of fundamentalism with the fluid joy of, well, not-fundamentalism. And that might be part of it; I’m sure that most folx in the divination landscape have an eye kept firmly on the “religious” right and its fundie bullshit. I think, though, that I read this trio a little differently. I read fire here, evangelism, as “activating.” How I land there is that threes are expansive, as we know; fire, of course, hot and alive. Spirituality activates intuitive spirituality. I’ll use myself as an example, because it’s all I’ve got. I have actively kept spirituality out of my divination. There are many reasons, not the least of which is the damage that Christianity did to me in my childhood. It still worked. Quite well. And in fact, the further I took divination away from spirituality, the better I got at it. My readings became clearer, more useful, more satisfying; my interpretation process went from stress to delight. I went from kinda liking reading and being kinda good at it, to loving reading and looking forward to doing it. And that worked for me. And it worked for the clients I eventually began booking. And now it’s not enough. Neither I think for me or my clients. I have, as I’ve also hinted at here, been on a more active spiritual journey lately, and I absolutely have seen similar in the questions I’m getting. One might say, and this is odd to think given that my first book was called Tarot on Earth, that I was a pretty watery reader. By this I mean the spiritual connection was all intuitive and unseen, if it was there at all (I think now it was and I couldn’t see it). My readings weren’t activated by spirituality; they were activated by . . . I’m not really sure what, because I didn’t hold any particularly solid view of why tarot worked. It just did and I liked that. I would have said I was airy, but I think there’s something about water that’s innately trusting and doesn’t think too much about things. And that’s weirdly how I handled my understanding of how to read, if not the way I actually interpreted readings. If that makes sense. But of late the call to activate my work with some deeper meaning has been there and while it’s not about changing how I read, it is about changing to some degree the things I’m willing to read about. It’s also guiding my own continuing education. My focus is and will continue to be on ways of bringing more ethical spiritual support to my clients when and if they ask for it. I’m not, I want to be very clear, interested in people who try to foist their own spiritual shit on others, regardless of whether it’s “Christian” or not. When people want spiritual guidance from me, I want to be able to provide it. But only under that condition. For example, I’ve had clients ask me if I do any kind of blessings for people. That’s not something I currently offer, but it’s something that I’m exploring as something I might be comfortable with one day. And I think that’s the overall sorta journey of this reading. The spiritual is going to play an increasingly important and activated role in people’s divinatory work in 2025 and probably beyond. And that’s not remotely surprising to me. In fact, it makes me wonder whether I’m not simply offering up a big old pile of confirmation bias to you, except that I can see all of this in the cards. One thing I like to do, just to check myself, is look at the spread and see if any other combos jump out to me. So far I looked really at three sets of the cards: The Knight of Cups alone, the Knight in context of the Star and 7/blades, and the Knight in context of the 3/wands and ace/cups. Other combos worthy of exploring are the mirrored pairs, which would give us the 7/blades paired with the ace/cups and the Star paired with the 3/wands. Air and water have an affinity for each other, partly because what I think of as air—oxygen—is a big part of what makes water water. When we really consider (swords) what’s really important (seven) to us, we inevitably have big spiritual breakthroughs (ace/cups). What of the 7 of blades’ typical association with thievery and chicanery? Well, I’ve never really bought that—and that’s not what the Golden Dawn seems to have intended, anyway, which means that’s not really what PCS was drawing. The title of the card is futility, not theft. It’s doing something even though we think it won’t work, or even though it likely will not produced the desired result—or any result. Which may be what introspection and even a focus on the spiritual might seem like. “It’s futile to care about this.” But I’m of the opinion that now and for the first time in my life that our communal survival may actually depend on just that. The pairing of the Star and 3/wands is fun. In part because the Star is a “fire” card given that stars are, as I like to remind folx, being flaming balls of gas. We are always growing, this combo says. Why? The Star is our journey and threes expand. The fieriness of all of this, too, leads to that growth—because as long as there’s fuel, fire will grow. Whether we want to grow or not, we’re doing it; and if we’re diviners, we’re growing with the expectations of our clients or friends, because their questions are going to start moving along with the collective un/conscious. We are quite literally influenced by each other, which means that even if you’re a reader who has no desire to explore spiritual topics in your readings, you may very well find yourself getting more related questions this year than ever before. This is not in the cards, but I feel compelled to say it given tarot’s long association with spirituality. Whatever the history of the cards, and we are slowly finding more indications of what might have been the real history both of the deck and its use in fortune telling (see 78 Acts of Liberation by Lane Smith, and Secrets of Romani Fortune-Telling by Jezmina Von Thiele and Paulina Stevens for examples), when the hermiticists got their hands on tarot, they stole it from the every day person and coopted it for the wealthy person. To whit, they stripped it of its “fortune telling” meanings and history and wrote over that with things that only rich people had the time to care about. This is not the spirituality I’m talking about here. When I say spirituality here, I’m talking about the personal, individual connection to divinity--as well as the personal, individual participation in the collective magic of liberation. That’s a pretentious phrase. It’s important, though. Witchery or any of its sibling spiritualities, are and always have been about the marginalized. Marginalized is a good word. Pushed to the margins. Witchery and divination are tools of the margins. And so we cannot escape into esotercism that way the moneyed men of the Golden Dawn attempted to (leading, in many cases, to massive mental health issues for some of them, by the way). And it’s temping to escape. When we discover the pure bliss of spiritual moments and the joy of truly connecting with our guides, it’s intoxicating. Real life can become even more banal and even less attractive, making us want to surrender to the spiritual entirely—like some kind of divine opium. We have to be careful of that, and we have to be careful not to fall into spiritual privilege. Whether a client wants an answer to a spiritual or a banal question, the readers’ job is always to read within the context of life. If we don’t remain connected, rooted, then we can start giving the kinds of readings that help no one—exactly the kinds of readings I so actively rebelled against years ago. Diviners must keep one foot in both worlds. The absence of earth cards in this spread does highlight a risk that I pointed out to begin with: dreaminess. We do need to guard against getting so lost in the spiritual that we do lose touch with reality—and, as a result, the ability to understand the conditions our clients operate under, and what a real person living a real life can do under real circumstances to avoid or improve them. Does that make sense? Yes to spiritual development and even welcoming more of that into the reading room; no to getting so divorced from reality that we can’t function in it or read about it. The fortune teller, alas, cannot float away. We are needed here on earth. And, as always, I offer you this week’s spread! I lack the energy today to demo it, but I know for certain you don’t need me to. Let me know how it goes!! A read of one’s own
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![]() I didn’t post a blog last week, though I wrote one. It just stunk. I intended to post it anyway with commentary about why it was a crappy reading, but the week, as weeks do, got away from me and ultimately I didn’t feel like giving it that much attention. While I don’t like the idea of curating my posts so that you only see me at my most effective, I ultimately recognize that some experiments aren’t really that much of a learning opportunity. The bottom line is that I did a reading with a crappy question and wound up with an overlong reading that kept deepening an ever-crappier answer. To give you some intel, I’d decided to take a deviation from the blog’s normal theme and do a reading about the first 3-6 months of the trump admin. The idea being that it would be posted on inauguration day and many folks’ minds would probably be on that. I asked the uber generic question, “What can we expect in the next 3-6 months?” And while I got an interesting array of cards, I never really wound up with an interesting answer. I got the germs of interesting answers, but I never had enough context to know what to do because I asked such an unclear question. There are times when a vague or nebulous question can be quite helpful, particularly when we’re not entirely sure what it is what want to know. Sometimes we need to do a few readings to figure out what even the question actually is. Sometimes the question is just crappy because it’s lazy. As mine was. In my case, a better-written question would have been something like, “What can we expect from international relations during the first 3-6 months of the trump admin?” or “What can we expect for the queer community during the first 3-6 months of the trump admin?” Now, I’m not certain I’d have achieved great readings on either of those questions; I tend not to read on politics that well, particularly predictively. (While I predicted joe biden would not win, and I predicted he’d likely drop out. I also predicted that kamala’s energy and financial windfall would send her sailing to a victory. Either tarot or I neglected to see that the DNC had already decided they’d lost and that sticking to a pro-genocide ticket was the right thing for them to do.) But whether or not my reading would have been better, I would have set myself up for much more success. Questions matter. Specificity is often where we go wrong, and that was the case for me, simply because there are too many possible directions this world could go. The fucktonage of fuckery is unfuckwithable. Trying to imagine what this country will look like after 3-6 months is not an easy task. Consider, the last time we’re sitting where we are now—a week into a donald trump “presidency”—we had no idea that in three months, the entire world would grind to a halt. And how could we have seen that in the cards? It’s next to impossible to predict something like that until we’ve been through it, and once we’ve been through it it’s both impossible to imagine going through again and also oddly the only possible future we can imagine. It makes me think this way: “Just because you can, does that mean you should?” By which I mean read about or predict certain things. And I don’t have a particularly good answer for you, partly because I don’t like putting limits on what we can do with divination—and partly because I simply don’t know. Thinking backwards, what card combinations could possibly have suggested to me a global pandemic? I don’t think there are any. I don’t know that I could predict that eventuality now, having been through it. It’s not the cards that would show me, honestly; it’s the question. Only if I were reading about the threat of a global health crises could I see cards that would speak to that concept. This is because the reading then makes everything about that topic—it’s the thing I’m reading about. And this gets to the central difficulty of general readings: there are simply too many possibilities of things that could happen, it’s very difficult to know what “arena” a reading will take place within without context, and so whatever we say will have to be very broad. And at a certain point, does that broadness become so generalized that it’s not predicting anything? It’s possible. There are ways of course of narrowing the scope of a general readings, and I typically use the dominant suit to inform that. But there isn’t a “global health crises” suit. If I were to work backwards from what I know, I might say that I’d look for a certain combinations of Mercurial cards (The Fool, The Magician, and cards ruled by Mercury’s signs, Gemini and Virgo). I tend to consider the suit of swords generally Mercurial, too. Mercury has associations with health and wellness, thanks in part to some shared and similar symbolism. For global, I’d look to coins/pentacles for obvious reasons, and of course The World. For crises, I’d be especially interested in how many fives (including the Hierophant, Temperance (14 = 1+4 =5), and possibly for tens as they were higher “octaves” of five. But--and this is key—I’d probably only think to do that if I were actually looking for that potential. Otherwise, why would it occur to me? It’s an interesting thing, because as I said I don’t like to impose limits on what people can do with tarot—particularly me. I’m not interested in being told “you can’t.” And yet: just because I can do something, should I? My question for last week’s blog wasn’t only poorly-worded, it was also poorly-intended. Meaning that I was both trying to ask a question I didn’t want the answer to and also keeping purposefully nebulous so that I couldn’t see anything I didn’t want to see. And this is all to say that sometimes it’s not that we can’t ask a good question; it’s that we purposefully don’t so that we won’t get the answer we’re reading. We protect ourselves from information, which is only something we can do when we’re reading for ourselves. Generally, other readers aren’t interested in shielding us from that. In fact, they’re not really doing their jobs if they are. And this is why we ask readers either no question at all or a carefully-worded question about what we really want to know. As much as I use the “are they cheating?” question as an example, I have never been asked it. It’s too specific! People rarely ask that kind of question because they know if they get the answer they’re going to have to live with it. Instead, they’ll sit at your table, think about how they want to know if their partner is cheating, and then tell you, “no, no question,” or “I guess I’m curious about my love life?” And the context ends there. They’re protecting themselves. Which is an oddly validating thing for divination, because if we didn’t think it actually worked, we wouldn’t worry about protecting ourselves. When we really want to know something, we work out the question. We just do. Anyone who crafts spell work knows the importance of stating a clear intention or making a specific petition. Most of us may not be particularly tenacious about writing our intentions or petitions, but we understand that the clearer and more specific the better. When we have a problem with the vacuum cleaner or the stove, when our car starts making a weird sound, what do we do? We go to the internet and we ask questions. And if we can’t find what we want, we ask different versions of the same question. We change the wording, we refine our search criteria, and we keep looking until we find at least close to the thing we’re working toward. We do not do this with tarot. Or anyway, I don’t and nobody I know does. And I don’t think it’s because we’re not tenacious. When we really want to know something, many of us read for it multiple times. We’ll ask the same question multiple ways. People don’t like to admit that because for some reason the tarot community decided there’s shame in doing that. Nonsense. When I’m working with a pendulum I ask the same question multiples times in multiple ways on purpose. Why wouldn’t I? The wording impacts the answer we get and so to get a series of supporting answers that validate the original reading, we simply get more confident that our answer is correct. And if we don’t get a consistent answer, we know something is either wrong with the question, the situation, or the divination tool. So we try something else or try again later when the energy is more certain. Like, when we want to know then we will find fucking out. But what we know we don’t want to know, or aren’t sure we want to know, we ask lazy questions. Another thing happened, and it was the reason I wanted to share that now-trashed post, which is that the cards drawn seemed to indicate a much calmer reality over the next 3-6 months than I believe is possible. So I was either misreading the cards, I was letting my bias into the equation, or things will be calmer than I think—all of which are possible, though some more likely than others. And the thing that stopped me from even getting too deep in providing the commentary on the original post was that I was seeing the flurry of executive orders, designed mostly to exhaust and hurt, and I felt, “well, there’s no way this reading was giving me useful info—and I’m just bad a political readings.” Which could be true, but could also be chalked up to the fact that I asked a vague question and was lazy about trying to get a better answer. Or even asking a clearer question and trying again. I mean, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with abandoning a reading you’re realizing is not about the right thing. When our guides try to give us messages about things they don’t fully understand, the message will be muddy. A reading that isn’t making sense probably has more to do with the question or lack thereof than about the cards and the interpretive ability of the reader. I think I thought this post was going to include a reading. I think I thought I was going to ask, “What should I have done differently in last week’s lesson?” But I know what I should have done differently: either asked a better question or sat with the wreckage caused by my shitty question and suffered the consequences. But I realized as I was writing this that there is a third way. And that is to read the same spread on multiple topics. Last week I used the nine-card box and that’s not a great spread for this blog. I’m already longwinded and while it’s an easy spread to read, it’s a pain in the ass to write about. For a client question, we love all the context; for a blog post, it’s a bit too much. But what I could have done (and will demonstrate below) is reading the same spread about several different but related concepts. Very few things in life are entirely discreet. In fact, in this “country” we tend to think of our individualism above all else, but everything is interconnected. We know it, because we can see the impact we have on each other all over the place—from our social media friends and enemies, to the impact of our actions on the climate, to the ways in which we attempt to legislate away people’s humanity and reality. Nothing is separate. It’s what Thích Nhâť Hanh called interbeing. “We inter-are,” he would say. And because of this, and it’s rare for me to think too much about Buddhism and fortune telling because in many ways the seem to be rather at odds, one spread of cards can of course cover multiple related topics. Rather than guessing what topic the reading is covering, read it from several and see how the interbeing of events plays out. To demonstrate this, I’m going to ask the same lousy question I asked last week with just a three-card reading. But I’ll give an overall summary of the three and then explore what they suggest through different political lenses. For the sake of brevity, I’m not going to over explain (shocking, I know), but where there are takes that seem incongruent to typical card meanings, I’ll add my thoughts. For this reading I’m using the same one I attempted last week, the Tarot Nuages by Gniedmann. It’s a somewhat pippish, somewhat Waite-Smith-y, somewhat eerie fantasy deck. It was an impulse buy, but I do like a spooky fantasy moment. This might remind you a bit of the Deviant Moon, a deck I don’t vibe with, though I do enjoy Patrick Valenza’s other decks. Anyway, I’m not certain this will become a go-to, but I do like it a lot and it’s nice to see a release from US Games without a fucking copyright brand marring the front or back. I’ve drawn 10 of Swords, 5 of Swords, Hierophant Rx. (I typically don’t read reversed cards, but because of that—and because this card showed up reversed on top of being one of the main players in the reading I did last week—I’m taking special note of that.) General reading: A major flurry of combative writs (10/s) that slows to a slower but more upsetting sprinkle (5/s)—that bumps up against sudden immovable object. The unexpected influence of someone powerful and disruptive, an old power, an intense one, and one that might actually be MORE potent than this administration inserts itself into the equation. This Hiero card had the SAME weird feeling last week, it is not playing nice with the admin. I suggested last week that it could literally be the pope, but I doubt it would be that specific. But it someone/thing with that level of power, import, and institutional power. The formerly active and cocky combatants are cow-towed. I don’t see this is a hopeful change, though; the house wins. It’s just whose house goes from something chaotic to something more institutional. I felt like getting more context, so I added another card to the Hiero—the Knight of Swords. And because it was yet another swords card, I tacked on a fifth just to give me more color. This yielded the Four of Coins. The institutional power is energetic and focused on stabilizing things. (See photos below. Weebly no longer allows inline photos in blog posts.) There’s a bit of an invader quality with knights—especially the weaponized Knight of Swords. I don’t know what this is, but it is a shift. I don’t know that it’s fully fleshed out which is why we can’t see what it is, yet. The knight’s helmet has a winged rat-like dragony thingy on top. Makes me think of Ratatouille. They may be working on behalf of someone else. I’m talking about this like a person, but it may not be. It could be the “wind” of something—swords are air—so, like, a cultural shift influenced by an unexpected moment (that rat-bat-dragon thingy). But it has the effect of stabilizing things a bit. OK, not a bad reading. This is actually not that far off from what I wrote last week, though shorter and with more swords—more wind. More gasbaggery, if you will. If I want to, though, I can read this through adjacent lenses. Economy: An avalanche of cuts, death by a thousand paper cuts, that lead to some really hard choices, conversations. There’s a downsizing influence. If we had an ace in the reading, I think that would have been bad news. I think we teeter on the edge for a dangerous moment, and then the old money comes in. There’s probably foreign influence, with a focus on the global stability of the economy. Civil rights: A major blast of cold air, lots of words—again, death by a thousand paper cuts. These attacks focus in a few weeks, aiming with specificity and meanness. A line is crossed. Again, a more mature influence asserts itself. As with all of these, we’re not necessarily talking about person or people. It could be. I drew an additional card to support the Hiero to see if I could get a sense of who/what—and of course I got another sword. The 9. I would say the “faithful” (Hiero) just get fed up (9). “This isn’t what we actually care about. We’ve got this other shit to deal with.” Maybe? The two mirrored hands are catching me, but I can’t necessarily ID why. They weirdly remind me of an oyster shell, with the spooky figure in the center as the oyster. But what could an oyster symbolize? They’re really filters; they’re incredibly good for the ocean, because they make the water healthier. They’re healthy foods for humans, too. So though they’re ugly and slimy on the surface, especially if you don’t know what they’re for and how good they taste, they’re actually wonderful and useful in multiple ways. They also tend (if I remember correctly) to be good harbingers of the ocean’s health. So there’s almost an oracular quality to them, too. So whatever this Hiero thing is, it “looks” ugly and isn’t. It looks like the same old thing, but it’s not. It only appears to be unappetizing. Go figure. Again, the Knight and the 4/coins suggest a stabilizing influence. International relations: Fighting continues apace (10/s) and with fierce (if less frequent) harm (5/s). There is little faith. But there is again an outsized institutional influence. Because I keep using added cards to recontextualize the Hiero for me, I gave it another go and this time added the Queen of Coins—who also came up reversed and happened to be the center card in last week’s spread. I realize now that I put the cards in that spread back into the deck reversed, but that doesn’t mean the reversal (for someone who never uses them) doesn’t have import. Nothing that happens in a reading is an accent. The Queen of Coins is a financial negotiator—either literally or figuratively. They know—I can’t believe I’m about to say this—the art of the deal (vomit sounds). I think the reversal, and the reversal of the Hiero, along with that bat-rat-dragony thingy on the knight’s helmet signal a covert operation. Someones/things with major influence is working behind the scenes. There is a show, a performance, and what is seen is not as it seems to be. The shift seems to switch both the focus and tenor of the administration. In the reading I did last week, I said there comes a point where the parties are going on too long and certain egos realize the parties were never actually for them to begin with. That feels relevant here, too; though that’s only a gut feeling. I don’t have the cards to justify it as I did last week, but these seem to point in the same direction. There’s a moment of shift or drift and who is doing what changes. The “rhythm” of the reading kind of stays the same, but it doesn’t have to. I didn’t need to read the cards in the same order every time; I could easily have let them guide me as to which one was the most “important” or influential during the particular re-reading of the question. In this case, and this makes sense because three is really the minimum I ever use, pulling additional cards to keep adding to and re-contextualizing that Hiero was a version of doing that. I gave myself new info while using primarily the original cards I drew. You get to do that if you want to, particularly when you do it with intent. Either way, the rhythm of the reading makes sense if its similar because these are all interrelated things and not at all as separable as the pundits like to make it sound. Political steams tend to push all topics in the same direction. Generally, if a nation is having financial trouble, they’re probably also having civil rights issues. Granted, when we hear about financial issues most of the time, what we’re really hearing about is how comfortable rich people feel with their unimaginable wealth. But whatever. It’s temping to do another reading for what will happen in the 3-6 months following this. There’s no reason not to and I nearly did, except this is now my second reading on this topic and though I add more cards and try to deepen the context, I have a strong sense that the Hierophant here is not fully formed and also likely to be heavily influential. So I don’t think there’s much we can glean beyond this timeframe. It doesn’t seem like there’s “enough” to work with yet. Which is one reason I tend to limit readings to 3-6 months rather than a year. That said, I’m not universal in that practice so do what works for you. A Read of One’s Own Rather than design a whole spread, what I think is most valuable here is to experiment with reading the same spread multiple ways. Pull a general spread of any length and use it to read about your job, your relationships, your health, your finances, whatever you’d like (certainly not anything you don’t want to know about). Feel free to practice this on others, too. How do they react to having one set of cards speak to several areas of their lives? Do you find that it’s too similar? Or do you find that the things going on in their lives are actually shockingly similar and we tend to repeat patterns all over the place? Let me know how it goes! Today’s query is a good one. It’s something a lot of folx struggle with, particular when reading for ourselves. It goes a little something like this . . . : How can I check my biases or be aware of them? What are questions I can ask or approaches I can take to try and see the reading as “objectively” as possible? How can I be aware of blind spots? This reader specific reading for themselves, but it’s a thing all readers face at some point. So let’s explore it both from a self-reading and client reading POV.
I’m using a line of five, here, similar to the arc I typically use (less visually arresting). This particular method of reading comes from JM David’s brilliant Reading the Marseille Tarot. It’s a HUGE book, but it’s one of the absolute best out there. I think it flies under the radar because it’s independently published and isn’t done through Amazon, which is wise for the creator but makes it harder to find. The link above will take you to JM’s webpage where you can find it. (I bought the PDF and had it printed and spiral bound at Staples, which wound up being just as expensive as buying the book—but either way, get your hands on it. It’s excellent.) This line of five is read in progressing sets of three, a little something like this. First pass: 1, 2, 3 Second pass: 2, 3, 4 Third pass: 3, 4, 5 For this reason, I draw the cards in the order that you see them on. I didn’t start with the middle and work out as I typically do with an arc. The deck I’m using today is also an underrated one. The Radiant Tarot by Alexandra Eldridge and Tony Barnstone is a pip-style deck, with blends of animal and people—and animal/people hybrids—and reminds me a lot of the popular but long out of print Stella’s Tarot (another of my great loves). I recommend highly. Sometimes when I read at events I’ll bring a couple decks with me and allow the client to choose which they’re drawn to. When I bring this one, 95% or more of the people select this. First pass: 1. Six of Cups, 2. Six of Pentacles, 3. Queen of Swords I love that we start with two sixes and that they are the receptive suits. To my way of thinking, we also have an active suit and a passive one. This is something I haven’t talked about that much, but you’ll likely hear me talking about it more. Water is active, based purely on its behavior. It flows. It cannot stand still and in fact when it does stand still, that’s typically where disease festers. This is why I don’t gender the elements. Water is both receptive (you can get into it) and active (it moves). Earth, on the other hand, is receptive and passive. I mean if we want to get really technical, none of the elements are totally passive (nor, truly, is anything). The Earth moves and grows, too, but to our human eyes—our largely impatient eyes—we don’t see it, so we assume nothing is happening. Fire is projective and active. It consumes, it cannot generally be resisted (and this is a good chance to wish my friends on CA well . . . the images of the fires there are devastating and it is another signal of this country’s great sins that our leaders’ greed, ineptitude, and pandering puts all of us at risk of losing life and/or limb far too often). Air is projective and passive. It’s not necessarily that air imposes itself in the way fire does, which is what it’s “passive,” but it’s everywhere and we are literally desperate for it, so it is projective. There’s a little gift of a lesson for you! OK, two sixes and then the q/swords. I love this for us and for this question. Here’s how I would read this: Bias cannot be avoided, it is inevitable because it is built into who we are. It is innate (that’s not the cards talking right now, that’s science). Bias is actually part of our survival mechanism. It is how our brain decides whether we’re safe or not. The problem is that society takes advantage of these biases and teaches us that certain groups are safe and others aren’t based on bigotry. And society usually has it backwards. Society tells us that cops are safe and immigrants aren’t. But I think a quick glance around at . . . all this . . . demonstrates that we’ve learned the wrong lesson. So it’s not necessarily that our biases are the issues as much as the fact that our innate tendency toward biases has been exploited by powerful people to control us and marginalize groups that have been identified as “not our kind.” But I’m prompted to write about this by the cards, even if this isn’t in the meanings. Here’s why: sixes are beauty. That’s a typical meaning for the number. But in this context, for some reason I’m thinking of beauty in part as a filter. Why? The q/swords, actually. More on that in a sec. The two sixes feel good. Right? If we can extrapolate “beauty” into a feeling, which we want to because we have cups here, we can say “feeling beautiful” or “beautiful feelings” — and that leads us to “feeling good.” We get the same vibe from the 6/penties, but of course in the realm of earth. I might distill this card as “good life.” Inherent in six is desire. Why? Because we all want beauty, whatever that means to us. It nourishes us, as do food and water. We want to feel “beautiful,” we want our life to be “beautiful.” And when we’re reading for ourselves we smack up against the reality that life doesn’t always look good and we don’t always feel good. And when we lay out the cards, we worry that our bias will either make the reading be too happy or too unhappy, but either way that we won’t be getting the “real” reading because we’re not objective enough. The Queen of Swords is about as objective a character as the tarot has. She’s been through it and she’s highly experienced/educated (probably a combo of life and formal schooling, but take that as a metaphor for anyone who is “experienced” in good and wise ways). But she knows that she can’t escape the fact that no one is entirely objective about anything. She’s smart (swords) enough to understand that reality. Because she’s a queen and queens are typically associated with water (aggressive-receptive), she knows that we’re going to be at the mercy of our wants and feelings (water/cups) and that we want the best for our lives (6/penties). But she also recognizes that for all our bias, we’re also smart enough to know when we’re blowing smoke up our own asses. Because we have enough self awareness (a very q/swords thing—that sharp, clear mentality means that the court of swords “knows” itself and sees itself much more clearly than the others) to know we’re full of crap. “Don’t worry about your biases,” she says, “because your desire for a good life, to feel loved, to feel safe, is not going to get in the way of your reading. In fact, the reading will account for it.” (Note from future me: Here I want to point out we’re talking about you’re biases when reading for yourself. If you’re reading for others you have a responsibility to understand your biases about others and to face them. I’ve written about that elsewhere, but this is NOT a reading justifying your societal disengagement and anti-colonial lassitude. Wink.) How does she know the reading will account for it? Because she understands how divination works. She’s got enough of an understanding of how she believes that a reading functions to now that her biases will become part of the reading, not something that needs to be run from. More on that in a moment, too. Second pass: 2. Six of Pentacles, Queen of Swords, The Tower When things are going well (6/penties), we know (q/swords) things will eventually go to shit (Tower). Now, here’s where the queen’s “knowing,” her wisdom, is flawed. Because it’s being influenced by the imagination. Sixes and Sevens are numbers that I typically associate with the imagination, sixes fantasy and sevens intimate —but both in the imaginal realm. Sixes have a romantic worldview. And while “romance” usually is perceived as positive, romantic thinking can be negative, too. Ask anyone who fantasizes about breaking up with their lovers or about having fights with people they care about. Anyone prone to disaster thinking understand that romance isn’t just good stuff, it’s epic stuff in the literary sense. Anything “romantic” is usually over the top in the way that the romance movement was in both literature and art. Sure, we’re not entirely in the realm of romance—we’ve got a practical, earthy angle, here—but because the earth represents our lives, we’re not entirely in the logical mode. Our lives are important to us and the idea that they might be riddled with disaster is scary—romantic, too, in the sense that we imagine ourselves in a movie closeup with a single tear streaming down our cheek, lit beautifully—and that’s what this trio reminds us. We tend to expect the worst, especially when life is pretty good (6/swords). Even though the q/swords knows better, she’s still not immune from her tendency to expect the worst. Third pass: 3. Queen of Swords, 4. Tower, 5. Page of Swords Here, the tower is bracketed by two swords cards—both courts. We’ve already talked about the queen and the Tower, but each pass re-contextualizes the cards as it adds one and leaves another behind. This spread is really like doing three three-card readings, but you only use five cards instead of nine. The Tower flanked in this way reminds us that the concept of “disaster” is really contextualized by our perception (swords) of it. What’s that mean? The bigness (queen) or smallness (page) of an event (Tower) corresponds to the way we perceive it, regardless of it’s real bigness or smallness. What I’m saying is, shit will feel bigger or smaller based on how you’re receiving it. You might get a flat tire on a day when you were in a good mood, and it might be a giant hassle, and it may ruin your good mood, but it’s a thing that happens and you deal with it. Or, you might get the same flat tire on a day when you’re already cooking and this is the last fucking straw and you just fucking cannot. It’s the same event, same cost to fix, takes the same amount of time to resolve, etc., but your reception of it depends on the context. Not unlike the cards in a reading. And so what the fuck does this have to do with our inability to be objective in tarot readings? Glad you asked. Say you do a reading and it predicts a flat tire. Objectively craptastic, but not, like, life altering (context-dependent—if this flips your car or makes you let for a dream job interview, maybe it does . . . but we’re being super general here). When that event comes to be, whether or not it is annoying or devastating will depends on what else is going on that day. And this is the case for, like, everything. Say you’re thumbing through Amazon while watching TV and you see the thing that you’ve been missing that you must have or you simply won’t be able to go on. It’s a little pricier than you want and you’re a little broker than you’d prefer, but, fuck it. You deserve a little treat. This is the fucking thing you’ve been waiting for and it is the single solution to all your problems. FUCK YEAH! BUY NOW, BABY! You’re flooded with dopamine and you spend the next day fantasizing about it, checking the delivery status, watching the driver on the map. And you get it and you tear into the package and . . . it’s fine. We’re so afraid of predicting bad things, especially for ourselves, especially when we’re new and/or or especially if we’re given to disaster thinking. We know bad things will happen to us and we know they’re just around the corner. Most of the time for most people in most contexts, even if the reading portends something “bad” or disappointing, the probability is that it’s not going to be THAT bad in the scheme of things--and the degree of badness won’t depend entirely on the thing, but on the context of the thing. Meaning, a flat tire is a flat tire—but whether it’s just a fucking pain in the ass or literally the worst thing that has ever happened on the day will depend on so many more things than just the event. And we also fail to consider that good things, the things we desperately need and want and must have oh my god or we’ll simply DIE are also sometimes contextually . . . meh. That may sound flip, given what a fuckton of despair is happening in the world right now. But when we’re in the throes of that kind of despair, chances are we’re not breaking out our tarot cards and checking in on the progress of our spiritual journey. We’re literally surviving. We tend not to read for ourselves in moments when we’re in the midst of catastrophe. And because of that, we don’t have to worry quite as much about bias as we think we do. Let me step out of the reading for a moment and add a little sidebar, here. This question of course stems from the anxiety that we’re not going to be able to read for ourselves and get a good answer—and from the tendency humans have to either over-catastrophize or completely under-catastrophize. And we worry, say, that we might do a reading and see something like what is happening with the wildfires in California as I write this. What if we miss this in a reading and could have done something? Or, what if we see it in a reading and it turns out not to be true. Here’s where my experience kicks in and takes over from this reading a bit. When you’re worried about seeing or missing good or bad things in a spread, when you’re worried about whether your interpretation is slanted either by desire or fear, you don’t need to rely only on the cards. Remember, there are contexts at play in a reading beyond the cards that we’re seeing—and that a reading does its best to reflect likelihoods based on current conditions and energies and behaviors. So, let’s say you’re looking at a spread and you’ve asked the questions, “What if anything should I be prepared for in coming month?” Let’s say you lay out cards and you see The Sun and a metric fuckton of wands. Fire! “There’s going to be a major wildfire,” you think. And because it’s in the news, you’re particularly sensitive to this and it’s a great phobia of yours. Fair. And you could do another reading to see whether your interpretation is correct—in this case, maybe a yes/no based on the question “is my interpretation of that reading accurate.” But another thing you could do is pause and consider your world. Are you in an area prone to wildfires? Are you in a season where wildfires are common? Are you experiencing drought? As you answer yes or no to these questions, you immediately begin to understand whether the likelihood is high or not. If you’re presently living in a humid, wet, rainy location where wildfires have never happened, that certainly doesn’t mean that they can’t happen—but the likelihood is slim, and so it might be wise to consider another interpretation. If you’ve predicted something, it’s worth considering how likely it is even the existing conditions. If it’s extremely unlikely, probably you’ve let your anxieties guide you and it’s wise to return to zero and start again. And I think that’s a decent summation, too, of these three cards (to remind you, the q/words, Tower, p/swords). Perception and insight are both swordsy realities. “I perceive this as terrible, what insight do I have to validate whether that danger is real?” There’s a logic to swords that applies here and says, “Is this disaster or is it an inconvenience?” Swords have an investigative nature, don’t they? Another thing we don’t talk about, but if we think about the world of investigative reporting, it’s very airy—tenacious, oblique, intellectual, even somewhat cold, as investigative reporters aren’t known for their empathy when trying to get a juicy story. All very swordsy to me. Investigate the evidence you’ve got to see if it fits, if it makes sense. Swords are sensible, at least in theory; anyway, the “get” the idea of being sensible, and in this spread, I think that’s the gift they bring: clarity, logic, investigation, sense. “No, it does not make sense that I would face a wildfire next month given the current conditions. Let me retry this interpretation.” A fourth pass - mirroring: Have read the three sets of three, I feel compelled to explore whether mirroring the cards (paring cards on oppo sides of the reading) offers any additional context or insight. This matches the Six of Cups with the Page of Swords, and that is quite a useful pairing. The Page of Swords is curious and unsentimental. The Six of Swords is quite sentimental, moony, dreamy. The page comes along to this dream and attempts to pop the bubbles. “Is this too good to be true?” They see something good, but they don’t take it a face value. Like the example above, “how likely is this to be true?” And because they’re fairly ruthless in their ability to question what they think they see, they’ll tease out that likelihood. And page’s curiosity allows them to approach without judgement. Meaning they don’t “care” whether or not the answer is what they want. And this reminds us to be a little ruthless. If we get a positive answer, is there any way to poke holes and see whether or not that’s truly likely? By the same token, this implies doing the same with negative answers. If you get a big fat terrible answer that you hate, do the same. How likely is this to be the reality? Poke holes in it. Pairing the next two, the Six of Pentacles marries The Tower. This reminds us that life happens, to borrow a phrase. How many annoying, bad, shitty, and/or crappy things did you put up with last week, things that totally ruined your day—and then you forgot about completely? How many things that seemed totally devastating to you on one day wound up being completely non-issues days later? Bad shit happens to us all the time. We tend to think that if a bad thing shows up in a reading, then it must be a really bad thing. Why? Tarot doesn’t judge the size of what happens to us; it answers the question. “Will I get into grad school?” “No.” For you, perhaps the worst thing that ever happened. But the cards don’t judge that. You asked a question, you got an answer. (I guess this is a reminder, too, not to ask about things you don’t want the answer to.) The Queen of Swords sits in the middle, resolutely holding up her sword. Trust yourself, she says. You know when you’re bullshitting you and when you’re not. You know when you’re being dramatic and when you’re not. You know when you’re overthinking it. Yoav Ben Dov, whose work I greatly admire, said in Tarot: The Open Reading that, in essence, everything that happens during a reading is part of the reading. It all means something, from the little hungry belly noises you make all of a sudden, to the client’s stoic face, to the way a sentence forms itself in your mind. Does that mean we stop and interpret everything around us? Of course not. But it does say that if you’re worried about your biases impacting the reading, then that is part of the reading. Again, I want to veer away from the spread for a second, but this is inspired by the spread; particular, the queen there in the center. Divination is an act of trust. And while we may trust our guides, the cards, even our technique, it all means nothing until we trust ourselves. And that is fucking hard for a fucking lot of us. We have been taught not to trust ourselves. We have been taught not to listen to our instincts. Jesus, sometimes I wonder if over-thinking and anxiety actually aren’t innate mental states, but come from a lifetime of being told to ignore what’s right in front of you. We hear constantly that critical thinking is essential in life, and it is—but that’s not what the structures we serve mean when they say that. They mean to do the exact opposite. Let them (the structures) do the critical thinking, and you . . . you just be a good boy and obey. The so-called American education system is actually designed to stop you from critical thinking. You don’t experience the need for it until college, which is one reason that the right wing wants to make college as inaccessible as possible. Primary and high school are designed to make you follow instructions, which is helpful for a country whose economy is built on manufacturing. Does it matter that the wealthy owners of factories realized they could make more money by moving manufacturing to other places and then not replacing those jobs with anything? Nope. Because obeying and following rules is still helpful for that class. So is not thinking critically. Problem is, we are critical thinkers by nature. Because we’re told not to listen to that instinct, because we’re told to believe what we’re told not what we see, we start to doubt ourselves. In fact, self-doubt is another valuable tool for the oligarchs, because you will see what they’re doing and hear that their words don’t match and you might be tempted to ask, “Wait—but you just said—” That would be bad for them. So you’re taught to doubt yourself. And then you lay out a divination and you doubt what you see and your lifelong conditioning to not follow your gut kicks in and it becomes really complicated. I cannot tell you how to do this, friends, but you must do it: Believe in your reading abilities. Don’t get cocky and arrogant about them. But believe them. Believe in your ability to read. Believe what you see in a reading. Not every reading speaks in literalisms. Sometimes readings yield a message that requires further parsing. But assume that every reading you do is correct and if the answer doesn’t make sense, it’s only that the answer doesn’t make sense yet. There’s more to do to discover it. I used to be pretty uptight about answers in readings coming completely from the cards. I think I push that agenda pretty hard in Your Tarot Toolkit, which I didn’t write that long ago. And I still think that. Like, I don’t think we should start espousing our personal viewpoints or philosophies to clients unless it’s contextually relevant or we’re asked. I also think we need to be able to point to the reading and justify whatever we say as the “final answer.” But I’ve also realized, especially after putting myself in reading situations where I’m 99.9% certain to get 99.9% percent general readings, that there are times where a readings answer will offer an allegory, poetry, or myth that needs to be further clarified before it makes for a relevant answer. In Tarot Toolkit, I use the Celtic Cross as an example of how a reader is forced to answer a question obliquely, telling a story about a relationship and then making value judgments about that relationship. It’s actually a good example! If I remember right, the example in that book is a reading about a relationship. The “reader” interprets the cards in such a way that they “realize” that the relationship is toxic and the client should breakup with her partner. Now, this is a bad answer for a few reasons: it’s telling the client what to do with no evidence, and that’s super gross. But it’s also putting the reader in the position of judging the health of a relationship they’ve only done a single reading on. The reader could say, “I see a huge amount of conflict in this relationship. Like it seems to thrive on disagreement. Am I misreading that?” But saying, “this is a toxic relationship and you need to get out” would be bad. Why? The first invites additional context; the second makes a huge value judgement based on a card reading. A good way not to let bias impact your readings, particularly for others, is not to judge the situation but to describe it. The client gets to decide what’s toxic or not. You say “I see a lot of combat.” They say, “Ah yes, this is toxic.” They may also say, “Yes, we role play as soldiers when we fuck.” Anyway, I’m digressing a bit. If you have reached the end of a card interpretation and you lack clarity, then interpret your interpretation. Maybe you’re simply not done that. That’s OK! Some readings are more complicated than others, and that’s particularly true when reading for yourself. I’ve written about this elsewhere in this blog, but sometimes the reading tells you a story and that story is a myth that yields the answer. Sometimes the reading says “dump him” (rarely), and sometimes it says “there once was a man from Nantucket . . .” And then we have to figure out what the story of that dude means in relation to our life. The Oracle at Delphi was known for being inscrutable. You might have to figure it out on your own. But you, my friend, you: are a fucking READER. And readers read til we get the answer . . . unless the reading us just for ourselves and we’re being lazy. OK, I actually really have digressed here. But not unhelpful digressions, if I do say so. What I was getting at is that we have to trust ourselves in our readings. Because tarot works. Trusting yourself, if you’ve never done that, can be a radical act, friends. Bigly. If you can’t trust yourself, for some reason, if you just cannot afford to grant yourself that grace, think of it this way. (This is a SHOCKINGLY spiritual answer from me, by the way, so . . . gird your loins.) Let’s assume for a second that tarot is a tool our guides use to give us messages. The guides understand who we are and what we’re going through, they know more about us than we do, and so they account for all our weird tendencies. They know we’re going to have biases because they’ve experienced them. And they’re going to do their best to select the correct cards to get you closest to reality. They’re going to account for your wonky humanity. And so when you’re trusting yourself, what you’re really doing is trusting your guides. And that means when you’re doubting yourself . . . well, you’re really doubting your guides. And do you want to be the one to tell them you don’t believe them? I don’t. A final thought. I could go on. And in fact I haven’t really summarized the reading yet, but before I do that I have one more thing to add. It, annoyingly, also falls a bit into the spiritual category. If you truly do not trust yourself—and if you truly believe that your readings are incorrect or not helpful more than they’re correct or helpful . . . it might not be that you’re inept and can’t do this. Maybe you first need to build a relationship with your guides. I know! That’s such a fucked up thing for me to say — and actually not just because I don’t really discuss this stuff. It’s worse because I have been so insanely lucky that my guide knew far better than I did what I was heading toward—and I’m fairly certain managed to subjugate his own ego for most of my life while I came to terms with the fact that between the obliterating fuckupery of Catholicism and the depressing nihilism of atheism, there is something else and that I’m part of it. But. Who knows? It may be that you’re not a “bad” reader. It may be that you benefit from developing the relationship first and understanding how you can talk more fluently together. Summing up: Shit happens in life. Most of the time, the shittiness of that shit has as much to do with what else is going on and our general mood and whether we had lunch as it does with the actual shittiness of the thing. This is born out by the amount of shitty shit that happens on any given day, week, or month that we erupt over and then forget about in minutes, hours, days. Few of us over-estimate our luck, but if tend to image the best for ourselves more often than is possible, we also should remember that even getting stuff we desperately “need” can still leave us feeling cold. “Good” or “bad” in a reading is a matter of perspective and context, and because we tend not to read for ourselves near or in the throes of horrible events, most readings probably won’t take us to the graveyard. Even if it does, we have context clues—our actual life conditions—that can tell us whether this disasterous interpretation is likely or not and/or whether we might benefit from going back to square one. Scrutinize all answers for likelihood and “plot holes” — try to pop the bubbles, as the Page of Swords does — and then trust yourself. If the news is bad, what can be done to prevent it? If it can’t be prevented, what can be done to endure and learn from it? If it’s good, is it really good or merely the hit of dopamine needed to make it through another Sunday night. Remember that sometimes the cards offer a myth that needs to be interpreted in the same way the cards were. If an answer doesn’t make sense, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong; it’s probably just that the reading isn’t over yet. Finally, trust yourself and your guides—and built a relationship if you find that your readings lack clarity or accuracy. This was a long one! Pardon if I beg off on creating a spread and an example. If you do want to do a reading, choose one of the points in the summary and use the cards to see whether or not you might benefit from digging into and experimenting with that topic. Until next time! Happy reading! Deck: Dalí Tarot
Layout: Arc of Five Knight of Wands (4), Temperance (2), Nine of Wands (1), Nine of Swords (3), Ten of Swords (5). Update: I thought it would be cool to bring you all into the puzzle this year. So rather than every post being a reading where I ask the cards what the divinatory lesson for the week is, I asked my social media pals to tell me questions they have about divination that I could ask the cards. So in the next handful of weeks, that’s what we’ll look at! For the sake of privacy, I won’t reveal who asked me what—but if you want to ID yourself in the comments, please do! Here’s the question we’re working with today: How do you help people understand the more “negative” cards? Like, if someone gets the devil or the 10 of swords and isn’t swayed by your initial explanation, how do you help them integrate the lesson? This was the first question someone sent so it’s the first I’m going with, but it also happens to be a topic I love talking about! Granted, I’m not going to tell you what I think; I’m going to tell you what the reading says. Let’s see if I’m “right.” I’m doing just a simple arc of five. It’s been pointed out that I haven’t talked about how to read this spread, and that’s partly because there isn’t really a way I read it. I just let it guide me. I start where the eye takes me, often the middle, but I’m usually going to use various card combos—including cards that “mirror” each other, meaning those that are in the same place on opposite sides of the spread. As always, the number following the card name is the order in which I drew and placed it down. We’ve got two swords cards, two wands cards, two nine cards, one major and one court; we’ve got no cups or penties. And I think in the lack of these two suits, we can remind ourselves—it’s not our job to feel the clients’ feelings (cups) or live their lives (penties). Good advice! But let’s jump in to the cards we do have. When reading a line or an arc like this (to me the shape is immaterial), I let the cards tell me where they want me to start. When there’s nothing demanding my attention, as here, I start in the middle since that’s typically the card I put down first. In Waite-Smith decks, I can never remember which is the nine and which is the ten, the one standing wounded with the wands or the one carrying the tonnage of them—and that’s partly because I find them so over the top. That’s wands! They perform. It’s hard to see many of the wands cards and not see histrionic actors hamming it up in a bad play. The Nine of Wands gives somewhat performative defensiveness (compare with the seven, which is more actual defensiveness). I think with the 9/wands, we’re saying, “no, don’t come near me because look how battle scarred I am. I will fuck you up! I am a survivor!” But, like, it’s clearly we’ve already shot our wad. It’s showing off. “Look how much I’ve been through, oh me . . .” And I recognize that sounds incredibly judgmental, but remember I’m talking about the card not the client and not you. The 9/wands is bolstered by the suit’s knight, which is to its left. Knights, I ain’t gonna lie, can be somewhat performative, too; they’re partly doing what they do to get attention. Right? Knights aren’t always the Arthurian ideal—in fact, they’re not even that in Arthurian legends (what I recall of them, anyway). They’re out there trying to get some action. They’re players. “Tom, what the hell does this have to do with the question?” We’ll get there! Right now, we’re just getting an overall “feel” of the reading. What am I as the reader feeling, right now? What are the cards making me see? Neither of the interpretations above are ones I typically jump at when looking at these two cards, but the fact that I am reading them that way now means something. Right? These cards have triggered that reaction, which is part of the reading. I’m not immune participation. OK, I have a “sense” of these two cards. Before doing more with them, let me look at the other three—starting with the two swords cards. The Nine and Ten of Swords are equally no one’s favorite, and have a similarly histrionic sense about them. Like, it’s not just bad; it’s the worst thing that’s never happend! (But, like, also it’s probably just a hang nail? That kinda vibe?) Nines in swords function similarly to wands, but obviously the realm of language, communication, intellect, learning, and suchlike. Nines, as I frequently say, can suggest burnout (“I’ll never get to this fucking finish line!”) but they can also suggest major expansiveness (3x3). Tens are full—or empty. They are complete—or depleted. All depending on context. They two cards make up the entire right side of the spread, so they’re working really closely and they appear in numeric order. They provide the perception of drama. But if wands are the actors in the bad play, swords are the actual bad play itself. It’s the “writing” So we’ve got this bad play, full of sturm und drang--very German—and it’s being performed by these melodramatic actors who are just dying to show everyone how hard they’re working. What of Temperance, then? Well, in just about all ways it is the complete and total opposite of all we’ve just described. So what the fuck is it doing here? Ah! Excellent question. In my early days, this would cause me so much anxiety. Incongruent cards can make you doubt your whole sense of ability as a reader. But they shouldn’t. In fact, they should make you quite excited! It is in the tension between the expected and the unexpected, between the congruent and incongruent, where the real magic of reading happens. Why? Because we’re frequently trying to anticipate and solve problems with readings and what are problems but unresolved tensions? And even when we’re not necessarily dealing with a problem, we’re usually trying to reconcile the tension between the known and the unknown. And so when cards create tension by not making “sense,” we get to experience the magic of that! Of course, there are times when the card never comes together and we just can’t make it work—but those are really rare. There are also times when a card isn’t saying much in a reading, behaving in much the same way that vowel sounds do in English-language words, but you usually only notice that once you’ve gotten an answer and realize you didn’t spend much time with a particular card. That sort of glossing over a card usually happens when you looked at the spread and the answer just kind of fell on you. Temperance is a card of moderation and it is a card of integration. It provides a container, it mitigates flow, and it also can bring parts of different things—often incongruent things!—together. Crowley and Harris’s transformation of Temperance into Art shows us an alchemical process of disparate parts becoming whole. Temperance as a card is likely going to serve a similar function in this reading. OK, I’ve given myself a sense of the impressions I’ve gotten from all the cards and a basic sense of the overall mood of the reading. We don’t talk about this much, at least I don’t, but a reading’s “mood” is important. It’s influenced of course by the reader’s mood as well as the clients’ and anyone else in the situation and even in the room, but it’s also going to be influenced by the deck, the environment, the lighting—everything. In this case, this is a deck whose mood I’m not sure I’ve figured out. This is literally the second reading I’ve done with it. My mood is . . . fine. But you can see from my instant reaction to the cards that I definitely have a feeling about these cards that is super specific—bad actors in a bad play, right? Mitigated somewhat by Temperance. Before we get into finding the answer to the question, it’s always OK to look back and see if we’re noticing anything we haven’t before. For example, I haven’t said anything about the fact that the Knight of Wands and Temperance are both facing the 9/wands (the rest of the reading, really). But that’s not necessarily giving me any hits yet. Nothing else particularly strikes me. So that’s my glance. This is more or less what I do with every reading, every spread I encounter. And thought it took me a while to write it and likely for you to read it, this all happens really in the first thirty seconds to minute of the reading. I’m just letting the cards tell me what’s up. I’m not imposing anything on them; I’m letting them give me a vibe. Now, there have been times when not a single one of those initial impressions helped me solve the reading. There have been times where I started down a wrong track and discovered I had to start again. By that I mean, I start interpreting the cards all over again, as though they’re new, but with different context. it’s rare that I would redraw an entire spread. Though, frankly friends, I have absolutely done that. Why not? Because someone said not to? If the difference between getting an answer and not is redoing the damn spread, then redo the damn spread. The goal of readers is to get an answer, not to show off and torture ourselves. The point of not redrawing a spreadsheet is to is to not let yourself off the hook. And if you find yourself redrawing the damn spread every time, that’s probably a sign you’re not being tenacious enough, you’re letting yourself get distracted by imposed meanings, your question isn’t that well-worded, or you’re me and you’re lazy. Sometimes readings describe situations literally (“you are going to have a fight with your boss over the budget, and you will lose your temper and that’s going to get you in trouble—again”) and sometimes they’re mythological (“this looks like a bunch of bad actors in a bad play”). And here my twinkly little brain finds delight, for it is with mythological answers that we can sometimes deliver bad news—help the client hear and integrate it! And to share this little tidbit of advice, I don’t need to read the cards any further. I don’t have to think of elemental dignities or anything, or of who is facing what, etc. I just have tell you that I actually have a completely relevant theory about handling difficult cards and bad news in readings that is connected to the mythology of bad actors in a bad play. Because the point of a reading is to get a relevant answer triggered in your mind, not to follow dogmatic approaches to card reading. So, here’s the first answer to the question inspired by the cards: When you’re faced with difficult cards or a difficult answer, use myth. Pretend the situation is a bad play peopled with over-emotive actors. For example, one may do a little something like this (given an imaginary card draw of Death, The Tower and the Five of Cups): I see a man (Death) who relentlessly pursues his goal. Doesn’t matter what’s in his way, he’s going to trample over whatever is in his path. Sometimes that’s what needs to be done; sometimes it’s needlessly trampling over people we care about. Can you think of anyone in your life/in this situation/at work (whatever the context is) that resembles this? (We allow the client to answer.) OK, great. So your ex-husband Conrad is like that. From the vibe of this card draw, I feel pretty certain that this has actually been problematic for him. What do you think? (Let’s say the client tells us that it hasn’t been problematic for Conrad, but it has been problematic for the client—let’s call them Ted.) Ah, got it. So I’m hearing Conrad is the bull-in-a-China-shop type. (“Very.”) Heard. Well, he’s headed for a blowup. A big old, ring-the-curtain-down, Titanic “My Heart Will Go On” style POW situation. And he’s riding right into it, like he knows he can see it coming but he doesn’t think it’s actually going to happen. But it’s going to happen. I could keep going, but that would make this even longer and no one wants that! Point is, you can see how I’m using an oblique story-telling technique to explore these more difficult cards. I’m not using the word “you” and until the client confirms for me that the Death card represents his ex, I’m not using names or implying any card represents anyone. I’m just telling a story, in many ways describing what’s happening on the card—and I could continue in that vein through the 5/cups and to the answer. This is inspired by Susan Tompkins’s book, The Contemporary Astrologer’s Handbook, which I recommend highly. It explores a similar method of talking about difficult parts of a chart or progression. And it’s got two benefits: It lets you off the hook and it puts the client in the driver’s seat. It allows them to come to the conclusions the reading suggests and likely it will lead to them giving themselves the bad news. Crises averted and you even did a collaborative reading! The downside with this approach is that telling these kinds of stories takes practice and can be somewhat difficult on the spur of the moment. You really have to take your time, slow down, and think about what you’re going to say before you say it. Allow pauses. The other downside is that some people are so fucking dense they just won’t get it. But that’s another issue. OK, that’s one method of dealing with this. Myth! But let’s keep reading, cuz why not? If we take the cards as I began interpreting them above, we remain with a story of bad actors overdoing it in a bad play. And, to put it bluntly, so is life. Life is bad actors in a bad play. And that’s just the way it goes. Sometimes we have to tell clients, “I’m sorry, but you’re just stuck in a really shitty drama right now and unfortunately you’re the star.” Why? Because that’s life. He says only somewhat sarcastically. I mean it is. To talk about difficult cards and situations we got three difficult cards—the nines of swords and wands and the ten of swords. Tarot reflects reality and when something is difficult, tarot is going to reflect it. Here’s where I’m maybe going to start adding my own methods into the sauce—but I do think they’re prompted by the cards. Look, the nine and ten of swords could easily suggest “difficult conversations.” Right? The heft and difficulty of the numbers paired with the communication inherent in swords. Think about times in your life where you’ve known a difficult conversation was necessary and you avoided it—whether because, like most folx, you’re conflict-avoidant, or because you didn’t think it was that important, or you were too shy to deal with it, or you felt like it would eventually fix itself. How often did it just go away? Not often. How often did it get worse? Often. Imagine you’re my boss at Acme Tarot Publishing (not a real company). You brought me on as a line editor and I turned in my first manuscript late, but I was meticulous about it so you assumed I was just trying to be hyper-prepared since it was my first gig. But all five of my following projects were late and none of them were as well-proofed as the first one. Your bosses are pissed and you’re like, “OK, I thought he was gonna be better.” But you never ask me what the fuck. And I just keep fucking off, turning in half-assed shit whenever I feel like it, you and your bosses roll their eyes and say, “gee, that turned out to be a crappy hire.” And that goes on for years until I finally fuck up so big you can’t ignore it anymore and you fire me. To me, this is completely out of the blue and I’m stunned—and I file a wrongful termination suit against ATP (not a real company—and anyway soon it’ll probably be impossible to sue corporations for anything). I’m going to win. Because you never gave me the feedback and you never documented a damn thing. You never coached me, you never set the expectation, you never had the difficult conversation. So I got fired and your company loses a lawsuit because you avoided the difficult conversation until it was too late. Part of the point of reading is to give bad news, odd as that might be to say. And we just have to get comfortable with that. Ya know? No one wants to get bad news a reading and no reader wants to give it. This is what we’re worried about when we turn down certain topics--what if I get it wrong and I give them bad news and I ruin their marriage? Better not to tell them! Except if the marriage was perfectly fine, the client probably wouldn’t be asking about it. Of course there are exceptions, right, but when something is on people’s minds and they bring it up in a reading, there’s a pretty sure bet that it’s dogging them because something isn’t working or something is causing them anxiety about it. The other thing that swords suggests is perception, and in this case I mean the perception of the reader. When we look at the cards and say “oh fuck, that seems bad,” we’re actually judging the situation on behalf of the client. We don’t actually get to decide what cards are good or bad in a reading, the client does. It’s their reading! If we’re reading for a client who is not a friend, we likely don’t have even half of the context of the situation—and even with friends, we know they ain’t always telling us the whole tea. No one does. We may have a client ask whether they’re getting into grad school and the reading says “no sir!” and we feel bad—but the client only applied to grad school to make their mother happy, and now they don’t have to go! Whoopee! We have to be careful as readers not to project or perceive (swords) drama (the two nines and the ten) where it may not be. Dalí’s cards are wonderfully open to interpretation—which, given much of his famous art, is quite something. And there are so many ways that these images could be interpreted. We don’t get to decide for the client. And they may not even know how the hell they feel about something until they get the reading. (BOOK/MOVIE SPOILER AHEAD:) There’s a moment in the book Conclave (you don’t see it in the movie) where the Stanley Tucci character, who spends the whole first third of the novel saying he doesn’t want to be pope, realizes that he’s not going to be elected pope. And he really, really thought he would be. So did everyone else—including most of the media. And though he didn’t want it, the shock of not getting it—of being told you were a shoo-in only to discover that your peers don’t want you—is a devastating (in theory) as getting it would have been. But the character would have no way of knowing that until they experienced it. And had he been elected, he’d likely go the rest of his life thinking “Dear God, I would have been so much happier had they passed on me.” It’s a beautifully nuanced moment of character writing by Robert Harris, and having both read the book and listened to the audiobook, you can really see the character’s reaction in the moment he realizes it ain’t gonna be him. Such good writing. (I actually really enjoyed both the book and the movie, for what it’s worth. Though I revile the Catholic church, I’m a former Catholic and despite myself, I can’t help but enjoy Vatican palace intrigue. And, no, I don’t think the “twist” was tacked on or forced; Harris laid the groundwork well (the screenplay less so). Humans are fuckin’ weird, folks. The thing you thought could have been the best news ever may turn around and make your client weep with grief. We just do not know. And so it is helpful to guard our perception—to temper our perception, as it were. And here I can return to the cards to justify my thesis: the 9/swords mirrors temperance—so the card of anxiety and despair (for many W-S readers) is mirrored by the card of moderation and integration. It’s saying, to quote Edwina Monsoon, “Cheer up world, it might not bloody happen!” In other words, “hey reader, your might be perceiving this as more dramatic than it is.” And the 10/swords mirrors the Knight of Wands, who—though I gave him a kind of shallow makeover earlier—is nothing if not brave enough to rush into the mire and burn shit down. Which means that the client may actually need--may actually WANT--to get in the dirt and fuck shit up! And who are we to deny them that? Shit may need to get fucked up! Let them do it. Tell them the truth. The Knight of Wands matched with Temperance actually says the same thing: “OK, hothead, let’s not rush into this reading projecting doom and gloom. Let’s, like, practice a little restraint.” Temperance looks at the rest of the cards in the spread and in fact protects them from the knight. Ah! Do you see what she’s doing? She’s tempering them. “No, 9/wands, you are not as dramatic as you appear; no, 9 and 10/swords, you are not, either. Life tends to be far more banal than you expect it to be, so even though this news isn’t good--it’s also, in the scheme of things, not life or death.” The knight/wands otherwise would rush in with allllll the community theatre drama you can handle—and more—and will be the, OH MY GOD GURL DID YOU HEAR???? But that’s not you, dear reader, because you are a diviner. And you temper such impulsive reactions with gentleness. Because you: are cool. Tell the clients the truth, pals. They asked for the reading. That’s not the cards talking now, that’s me—after Camelia Elias. They asked for the reading, you owe it to them to tell them the truth. It’s what they asked you for. You’re not their mommy or daddy, you’re (likely) not their shrink, you’re not their lover or pal—even if you’re actually those things IRL. Right now, you are their fortune teller, their card reader, and you have vowed to them to say what that cards are telling you. Do it. The only exception to this, and again this is me not the cards talking, is when I’m certain the answer will poison their well. What do I mean? Suppose I saw in a reading that the second the person stepped out of their home tomorrow morning, an asteroid would fall and crush them to death. Were I to share that, I would likely ruin whatever time they had left. And there is nothing they can do about it—I guess other than not be home? So I wouldn’t say, “you’re going to die tomorrow morning.” I might say, “Have you thought about spending the night a hotel? Just for fun?” Other than that, I feel like I owe my clients the truth. Finally, I’ll add that when scary-looking cards go down you can easily just lower the temperature in a couple ways. “Don’t worry about that,” I’ve been known to say, “it’s not a bad card, there are not bad cards.” Or, let’s say I’ve just got the grimmest-looking spread—like we got all the daddies of drauma, honey, Okrrr? I have been known to say, with a big old genuine laugh, “OK, we’re going through some shit right now, aren’t we?” And the client will inevitably laugh and say, “YUP!” Because they almost always already know the answer, anyway. So let yourself off the hook. Tell them the truth. They asked for it. And these cards agree! A Read of One’s Own There are lots of reasons we may resist giving bad news or addressing funky cards. Sometimes, we want to protect our clients from the world; sometimes, we want to protect ourselves. Sometimes we’re afraid they’ll take it out on us and sometimes we just think we’re not good enough, so we’re not going to be “right.” We may even be attempting to live the clients’ lives for them (something more common than you might think). Of course when I say “client,” I mean anyone we’re reading for, paying or not. Not to over corporate-ize the reading process, but I think of every reading as an agreement. This reading is meant to help you see whether you’re avoiding telling the client the truth, why, and what you might do about it. As always, take this with a grain of salt if you don’t think you do that. The first card is a yes/no (“Do I do this?”). I recommend letting all odd-numbered cards mean “no,” all even-numbered cards as “yes,” and any court card as “kinda.” The meaning of the card can tell you more about what’s behind that answer. Position 1. Do I tend to avoid giving my clients the full truth? (Obviously if the answer is “no,” you don’t have to do the rest of the spread.) Position 2. What’s the root cause of this? Position 3. What’s one thing I can do immediately to correct that? Position 4. How can I measure my progress? Brief example. For position one, I chose the King of Wands. That’s a court, so I’ll read it as “kinda.” Which is fair, I concur. I think there’s a somewhat overdramatic (fire) tendency to read the worst, but also a somewhat smug (king/fire) tendency to think, “Oh, maybe they’re not ready to hear this!” or even the occasional, “I don’t want them taking this out on me”—which is something very kingly. For position two, why, I chose the Page of Wands! I didn’t select that card until after I got my “kinda,” so I was pleasantly surprised to consider the page. I’m actually going to give myself three cards here, because I just really hate reading one. 🤣 So I also got the Chariot and Nine of Penties. There’s a somewhat passionately naive (page/fire) tendency to carry (chariot—more on that presently) the client who is just going through their life (9/penties). Why am I reading the Chariot as “carry”? Because it’s the major typically associated with Cancer (for some reason, Dalí assigns it Sagittarius—but since my moon is in Cancer, I’ve gotten used to that connection . . . even though I actually don’t think it makes much sense, and actually I think I agree with Sal) and chariots also carry. So it is a caring carry, as it were. The Cancerian protector/nurturer can make the Chariot into a whambulance. So to speak. For position three, I chose the Queen of Wands, Three of Cups, and the King of Cups! Lots of Cups. Whoa! “You, Queen,” it says to me (there is a deck I have that associates this card with Leo, which I’ve never seen anywhere else but it always sticks with me—and I’m a Leo sun), “are in spiritual collaboration with the client (3/cups). But you are not the boss of them (the two courts). The client has the enthusiasm and wisdom (queen/wands) and the ability to protect themselves (king/cups) and the responsibility (two courts) to manage their relationships (3/cups). They are the monarchs of their particular glens, they have or need their own community, and the “mommy and daddy” (two courts) attitude toward your clients is patronizing (the 3/cups in consort with the two courts, creating kind of an “aren’t you precious” vibe). Position 4, I chose the Six of Swords. When you’re communicating (swords) the reading (swords) in an even (six) way; when you’re telling all sides (six) of the story (swords). And when the client, not you, is piloting their boat (image). And there you have it! Let me know how it goes! I’ve reached full slug, here in the liminal space created by the Christmas holiday and the impending New Year. And while I find January 1 an entirely arbitrary page turn—“new year” has and continues to have different dates across different systems and calendars—I also feel mixing up my habits right about now will, if nothing else, prevent my brain from melting into complete atrophy. So rather than “what is lesson 27,” I’ve asked “What is on the divinatory horizon for 2025?” And we’ll just see what that reveals. For this, I’ve chosen the deck that seems to have had the most impact on me in 2024 . . . the Thoth. Go figure.
I thought I was going to be clever and, rather than using a spread, let the layout of each card I put down indicate to me where the next card should go. I imagined sort of a strange, circuitous array resembling the increasing likelihood of complete and total chaos next year. But the first card down was the Ace of Swords, which prompted a card above and below it . . . and then nothing. So I just “defaulted” to my cross spread. Oh, well. When we let the cards lead us, they take us where they want to go—not where we expect. Which, frankly, is kind of the point. The Ace of Swords as our central card presents us with a cleaving moment. I nearly used the word “awakening,” but that’s more of a Judgement/Aeon thing. No, this is a slicing-through. (Note from future me: not it isn’t and I never return to this concept again. Got the ball rolling for me, though, and sometimes that’s what we need.) But one card alone rarely gives me the feels, so we must contextualize it with the cards surrounding it. In this case, the card is crowned by the Universe and sits atop another ace, that of the suit of cups. Perhaps it’s my holiday malaise—lethargy mixed with apathy, but I don’t immediately find this springing to life in an interpretive way. So I’m going to put these cards aside for the moment and look at the other two: Nine of Coins and the Emperor. Given that we’re looking into 2025, it’s hard for me not to default to the Emperor as {tr*mp}—and I have zero doubt that we’ll eventually see the American political machine coming for divination at some point in the future, but I don’t think it’s necessarily next year. They have too much on their agenda. So I drew another card to contextualize the Emperor more and that produced the Six of Swords/Science. I did this mostly because people tell readers not to. But also because, hell, some more context can help! The Six of Swords only influences the Emperor, because I drew it with that intention. All the other cards in the spread influence each other, they were drawn to do that; but this one only has influence on the one it was intended to contextualize. So we’ve got someone with stable power (Emperor) in a Six-of-Swordsy mood. Sixes are beauty (that’s a fairly common association with that number), as well as rebalance, resettlement. That sort of thing. Even numbers frequently make me anxious. They suggest passivity and inaction, lassitude. They enjoy their stasis so much they become petrified. (Dear god all the $10 words today, christ.) The swords, ironically, aren’t a particularly dreamy suit—despite their governance of the mind—but sixes are. This is the “sweet dreams” card, you might say; or the “sweet nothings” card, which I like much more for two reasons. The Emperor can be seductive, that’s one thing, but the idiom “sweet nothings” is fun. It means little flirty comments, seductive comments, meant to flatter and charm. Or anyway that’s what I take it to mean. But the use of the word “nothing” implies hollowness—maybe callowness, too, in the sense of just being not very “good” at this whole seduction thing. This actually, weirdly, defines the Emperor in this reading in a more clumsy, playful way. Like a little otter, or something. (The animal, not the gé body category.) He’s most definitely not {tr*mp}, not here—and of course, this reading is about us, readers, so of course it wouldn’t be. What we’re presented with is someone who has somewhat conservative tendencies thinking beautiful thoughts and saying sweet things. That sounds flip, but I don’t mean it to. And by conservative, here, I don’t mean politically; I mean resistant to change—in this case, divinatorily. In essence, I take this card to represent those in the divinatory landscape who have done things a certain way, quite successfully, having dreamy thoughts. Of what? Why, the other two cards in this row, of course: the Ace of Swords and the Nine of Disks. The Ace of Swords remains muddy to me. Aces tend to, they’re so . . . fetal. So unformed. But drawing a contextualizing card (here, the Prince of Disks) doesn’t really yield much. It just makes my ass ache a little more. Court cards and aces, man. Sometimes . . . My Emperor is dreaming of the Ace of Swords influenced by the Prince of Disks in Partnership with the Nine of Disks. So lots of big disk energy. (Ahem.) Actually, I can’t help but feel like the Prince of Disks, today. Stuck. In the sense, again, of lethargic. The princes/knights are typically the doers of the deck, but when they’re “reversed” or “in shadow” or however you want to call it, then they’re prone either to wild, erratic movement, or complete and total stasis. In the case of stasis, it’s well to remember that their essence is movement, so when they’re held back—even by their own blah-ness—they get annoyed. The Ace of Swords colored by the Prince of Disks tells me I need to do something new, but I don’t know what! The Nine of Disks, Gain, comes along to suggest taking. Right? Its keyword is “gain.” How do we get? We take. We can’t get if we don’t take. If someone hands us a million dollars but we don’t take it, we don’t have a million dollars; we have an offer of a million dollars that we seem, for some reason, to be ignoring (which is what a lot of people think the 4 of cups suggests!—in this way, we could bring in that implied card. I don’t think we’ll need to, but we’ll find out). Nines are weird numbers. In a way, they’re made of the most “parts” — the most components. Three sets of three. The effervesce of three is implied, but is it present? Context leads us. Because nines can also be just worn-the-fuck-out. As the full number nine, rather than the sum of three sets of three, nine is nearing the finish line, but mayn’t have the energy to reach it. Ugh! How often have we felt this. We run into a wall. (This is reminding me of a Golden Girls episode. “Awe, ma, you ran into a wall . . .” “Literally!” Anyhoo.) Is this nine a flameout or a shimmering expansion? Is it Saturnine or Jovian? (Don’t I sound sexy when I use astrology references I barely understand?) I drew another card, because why the fuck not? And I mean that. Why not? I got the Seven of Wands/Valour. The appearance of fire tells us this nine is probably pretty damn effervescent. Take that, alka seltzer. The question now becomes, well what the fuck does that actually mean in the context of this reading? The Nine of Disks colored by the Seven of Wands connects the getting or taking implied earlier to our inner spirit, our passion. Why? Because that’s the 7/wands. 7=introspection and values, what’s important to us; wands, of course, fire/spirit/passion—spirit in the sense of fervor, not the spirit sometimes applied to the majors. If we can risk getting a little cosmological about it, I’d think of it this way: The majors are the kind of spirit that might be called the collective unconscious, say; while fire, when in spiritual mode, is giving pentecost. There’s a performative aspect of wands that makes me think of, like, poison-drinkers and snake handlers . . . but the snideness with which I view charismatic Christianity must be tempered by the realization that Haitian Voudou and plenty of other faithways around the globe and throughout history have experiences similar to the pentecostal traditions. Glossolalia (one of my absolutely favorite fucking words EVER!, which means “speaking in tongues”), possession, automatic dance, even faith healing—they all have wands-fire in them, and they all have a performative aspect to them. And just because we use the word “performative” today to suggest acts that are done for attention and without feeling, that doesn’t mean that performative things can’t be good. The kind of fervor we’re talking about here likely can only be achieved through acts of performance because it is through the revving up of the congregation that the energy is raised and shifted. Many of us who are solo practitioners sometimes experience the missing of this . . . but there are also others ways of generating similar energy. (It’s also true that performative shit can still be good even if done for attention—like much of social media—if it produces a positive result. We shit on “slactivism,” but if your Facebook screeds have actually changed a mind? That performance worked.) And, were I to read this row as one—the primary three, with their tinting agents—I might say the trend will bend toward reconnecting with divination in new ways, ways that connect the reader to deeply-held beliefs that have always been part of them, but that they’ve not necessarily brought into their divination practice. Of course, that interpretation is somewhat sketchy because I’m centering the 7/wands there more than the 9/disks, which is really the card that holds precedence. But that card, then, underlines that whole statement: this must be done in a way that gains in practicality--in other words, the work must both be spiritually enlightening but eminently useful in the work of divination. These two things must be true and coequal. This might be easier understood when told through a quick mythology: Once, there was a tarot reader (Emperor) who was good at their work and steady and had a strong, solid foundation (the Emp’s # is 4). But in the back of their minds (I placed the 6/swords behind the Emp), they’re starting to find themselves dreamily fantasizing about something new (ace/swords), something that blends their spiritual practices and beliefs with their ability to make life happen, to sustain themselves (9/disks heavily influenced by 7/wands). They have been somewhat lethargic of late (Emp+6/swords + ace+prince/disks) and need to cleave [trim] (ace) the fat (this is implied by the quality of the reading, so far . . . if we want to get toward something, that typically mean getting away from something else). To do this, they practicalize (not a word) their spirituality in ways useful (I don’t think I’ve talked about this much, but the “earth” suit is usually the “useful” suit—the suit of tools, so to speak) to their life. Get it? The trend in divination will be toward breaking free of superannuated tendencies, dreaming forward, and finding ways to make the spiritual practical—or whatever you take “spiritual” to mean; it could easily be psychology or anything else that is core to your interests and practice. Which sounds great, but, frankly, also sounds a lot like a pile of horseshit. I mean, I know that’s coarse—but doesn’t? I mean, isn’t that the whole point of divination anyway? (And is this just me languishing in the last week of the year?? Perhaps). Earlier, I referenced the Four of Cups, implied by the feeling of this row—the feeling that something is there, but what, and can I see it, and will I take advantage of it? Which reminds us that sometimes the thing that is most helpful also happens not to come with a thunderclap and choir of angels. Like, you may not like the message the reading delivers, but that doesn’t mean that’s not message. This is a thing we talked about in the Relearning Tarot workshop, which concluded yesterday. Sometimes clients or friends will complain, “well I already knew that.” OK, well, the question wasn’t, “tell me something surprising about X,” it was “tell me something about X.” Right? The answer is the answer, whether it’s sexy and exciting or it isn’t—which is one of the annoying things about having to brand what we do “entertainment.” Like . . . , sometimes it’s just not that entertaining. It’s also worth remembering I sorta fucked off on the other two cards in this spread, the Universe above and the Ace of Cups below. I did that because both of these cards annoyed me when I saw them. I already talked about how aces can sometimes be so fetal that it’s hard to even know where to start with them. The Ace of Cups is no different. The Universe, on the other hand, is a card that I tend to just interpret as “everything”—meaning “the whole lot.” Like if the question is, “what will I have to do to get this job?” The answer would be, “literally everything that you can think of—and probably more.” The universe is incomprehensible, which of course is not the title of this card in all decks (typically, we find The World), but we got the card titled Universe here and so that word is interesting. There are times where we reach a branch in a reading, and this is something I’ve never talked about before. I do this just about everything time I switch from reading the rows across in in a nine-card box spread to reading the columns up and down. It’s almost like a new act of a play is starting, or anyway a new scene. The same goes for my six-month forecasts. I typically don’t do year-ahead readings; I find that six months is a more reasonable and actionable amount of time to focus on. But I also find that the first three months are so dependent on what’s happening now--energies already at play—that there’s little movement clients can or will make. They’re “in it.” On the other hand, the energies in play in the second set of three months will be influenced by energies we’re not necessarily even seeing in the first three months. Or they’re there, but how they unfold will depend on how the client reacts to what happens in the first half of the reading. It’s not a completely different reading, if there’s a question that hasn’t changed, but it may be that we’re going to see different things coming into play. And so when I shift from act one of a reading to act two, I tend to sorta refresh my eyes and almost restart the reading. Not entirely, not from scratch, but I think about the cards I haven’t read yet as potentially unrelated to or unimpacted (so far) by the others. This is almost the opposite of how I treated the cards I added—they didn’t really have lives of their own; they simply colored the cards I initially drew. These cards, the ace and universe, are original cards—I just haven’t read them yet. Obviously. The Ace of Swords, the central card, can still be colored by the Prince of Disks, as it was in the first row—but it may not necessarily be that important, here. We won’t know until we find out. And so what are we left with? The Universe, the Ace of Swords, and the Ace of Cups. Meh. Fuck it, let’s pull more cards to tint each of those. For the Universe, I got the Ten of Wands/Ruin, and for the Ace of Cups, I got Art/Temperance. Let’s start with the Universe because it’s the card causing most of my restless leg syndrome, right now. (Seriously.) It’s another swords card and this one is titled ruin. This is a ruined universe, ruined by weapons (swords) and fighting, and ruined (one may disagree with this) by over-reliance on logic. Here, I’m going wide with swords. Swords > thought > intellect > the mind > thinking > logic. Why logic? Because I think about what I know from the first row: the spirituality aspect implied by the dreaminess of the added six and the heat and pentecostal nature of the wands. It is not uncommon to consider spirituality the opposite of logic, although that’s a logician’s perspective. What I mean, here, is logical fundamentalism—which I’ve talked about lots. The kind of science that isn’t based on asking “what if?” but instead on beginning with “that’s stupid and I don’t like it, so it’s not real.” (Which of course ain’t science at all.) We might say, then, that it is an over reliance on the societally accepted view of logic and reason that has ruined the universe—in the context of this reading. And I don’t mean the actual universe, I mean the divinatory one. An over-reliance on the swordsiness of divination may be the thing that’s impeding the expansion of our divinatory universes. And so the antidote to that becomes the Ace of Cups, now shaded by Art/Temperance. I’ve said it before, I’ve no doubt I’ll say it again, but there are some changes Crowley and Harris made that I don’t like—but there are some that I really do, and the change of Temperance to Art is one of them. I don’t mind Temperance and find it quite useful, but the use of the word Art is so exciting to me, even if I don’t give a flying fuck about the alchemical allegory they were attempting to illustrate in these cards. I have found in my practice that by thinking about the suit qualities can get somewhat narrow—even today. I have been reciting “cups are feelings, wands are desires…” for more than twenty years, now, and sometimes in the act of reading I can get a little recital-y. But there is more to each suit than simply the keywords we assign to them, and it’s useful to come out of our assumptions sometimes and expand what we’re looking at. We already did that with fire and spirituality. And if there’s another suit that implies spirit, of course it’s cups. We said the majors were like the collective unconscious, the wands like pentecostal experiences, the cups would be more like . . . I might say, spiritual congress? It takes the spiritual into the emotional, so that here we land not in the performance of spirituality as we saw with wands, but in the experienced. You might think of it this way: Wands are what you are experiencing when you’re watching someone else in the throes of a divine possession; cups, what you experience being in the throes of spiritual possession. The ideal religious experience is the marriage of the two—so that what is performed is also experienced even by those not in the performer role. This would be akin to an actor and theatre audience being so fully in synch with one another that they’re all somehow having the exact same artistic experience even though they’re all performing different roles in the act. This would be akin to an entire Voudou temple becoming collectively mounted during the dance, rather than one or two folks. Unlikely, but not impossible. Of course, that’s not what this combo is all about—but I think it’s cool to explore how the combinations of elements can work together. Anyway, here cups is paired with a majors card—which sorta suggests the impulse (ace) of combining with (Art/Temperance) the collective unconscious (cups+majors). The antidote to overly logical, overly theoretical understandings of the universe is through attempts to blend the self with the collective unconscious—through the act of divination, because that’s the point of this blog. And so, then, the trend for the year becomes about diviners dreaming their way forward to a new blending of the spiritual and practical, an integration of the two, in ways that move both the reader and the diviner forward. This is achieved not through over-reliance on logic and philosophy, but through the blending of the self with the magical and the collective. And boy are my arms tired. Sounds like a lot of work? Well, it will be—but that’s where things seem to be headed, anyway, which means the energy is already pushing us there. It’s funny, I was sorta imagining that this reading would, like, talk about deck trends or something. Topics people would be interested in. Nope! Just a new spiritual exploration of divination in ways that blend the practical and spiritual. No bigs. And why shouldn’t it be? 2025 is a Hermit year, now that I think of it (2+0+2+5=9); that makes kind of total sense. And so, that done, I present you with . . . A read of one’s-- Actually before I get there, I do want to add: I doubled the number of cards in this reading for no reason other than impulse. But here’s the thing: it helped me. If I’d stuck with the original five cards I’d laid out, none of what I got here would have come through. In that case, I might have gotten something about, oh I don’t know, cutting off dogma or some shit. Who knows? I can’t go back and unknow what I know now. Tarot is frequently riddled with prohibitions on what you can and can’t, or should and shouldn’t, do. They’re (mostly?) all nonsense. “Beginners should start with the Waite-Smith deck.” Why? There were times when that’s all there was and most books are, yes, written to that deck. But it’s also a deck that has kept more people from studying the cards than anything else I can think of. “You should only use one card draws if you’re a beginner.” By all means, please deny yourself additional context if that’s what you’re into—but in my experience, the one-card draw nearly kept me from staying with it. I needed more. “Don’t add clarifying cards, it’s lazy and unprofessional.” Why? Again, if you’re into the idea of denying yourself context, more power to you. But if, like me, you’re a whore for intel, there’s no reason no to. For me, is spread is starting place. The reading isn’t in service to the spread; the spread is a way of achieving the reading. If the spread hasn’t yielded the right amount of context, get some more fucking context, baby! I understand that the admonition is really meant to prevent new readers from using the whole deck and drawing so many cards they get the answer they were looking for—confirmation bias—or getting themselves overwhelmed. But we rarely talk about the fact that new readers are frequently not dealing with overwhelm at all—they’re dealing with underwhelm, in the sense that they don’t have enough information to connect the card(s) to the question—or to anything, really. Yes, you can sit there and sweat it out, sure. That might help you deal with the experience of going blank during a reading. But it’s not pleasant and the only thing that experience has given me is wanting to prevent anyone else experiencing it! It sucks! And so if you need more information, go get more information. Why not? You are the fucking reader; you get to decide what the right thing to do is. The right thing is never what Tom Benjamin said is correct, or Mary K. Greer or Robert M. Place—and I don’t mean to class myself with them, only to say that everybody is only sharing what has worked for them. As readers, as new readers in particular, we have to experiment with those things and find what works for us. That’s the important thing. I don’t read like Mary K. Greer. I like her work rather a lot, but we’re different readers. On the surface I might read like Robert M. Place, because his three-card method forms the entire foundation of my method. But I also have zero interest in alchemy, which is a major influence on Place’s readings and books. The three-card method worked for me, the alchemy stuff not so much. I took the three-card thing and left the rest. That’s the point. Try things, even try prohibiting yourself from doing things, see how they feel and what they yield. But when you’re learning, don’t obey any fucking rules other than those designed to keep you and anyone around you safe. You will not piss off any divinities in that. You might harm the fragile ego of some crazy tarot teacher (hi there!), but you won’t suffer the wrath of the gods. What you will suffer, though, if you don’t experiment is the feeling that you suck at this and that you can’t do it “right.” There is no right. There is only experimenting and finding what works. And this, incidentally, we should do as long as we’re embodied. Never stop experimenting. Every reading is an experiment. And with all that said, now I provide you with . . . A read of one’s own Ace of Penties, Ten of Wands, Three of Swords, Nine of Cups, The Magician. 1. What logical lesson do I need to let go of? 2. What is an access point for me to dance with the collective unconscious? 3. What should I be looking for? 4. How will I know I’ve found what I’m looking for? Dear Tom . . . what the actual fuck is going on there? Excellent question, bambino! I wrote this post several days ago and I knew I had created a spread of four or five positions. But I couldn’t remember what they were. So before I went and looked at them, I named five totally random cards. I’ll now apply these to the positions I designed a couple days ago as thought I’d shuffled and drawn them from the deck. Why? Because we can do whatever the fuck we want! You’ll note I have one card too many. But since I drew it, let’s see whether it offers anything to the other four. 1. What logical lesson do I need to let go of? Here I “drew” the appropriate Ace of Penties! Funny. As always, I’d prefer to have 3 cards but I’m trying to keep this quick. What I think I take from this is the way that focus to date as a reader has been almost FULLY based on the banal, the daily, the “down to earth.” This is the topic of, like, all my books and videos. But that has gotten me where it needs to get me and now I must evolve from it. 2. What is an access point for me to dance with the collective unconscious? Ten of Wands. Whoa! I’m not that sorta into the ol’ CU, so to speak, but I did write this spread. Recall I talked about the pentecostal nature of fire. Ten really calls me to communal fire—but also really, really elevating the focus on spiritual fire in my work (yikes). But it’s fair; I’ve been noticing a lot of my clients’ questions are more focused on spiritual or magical concepts and I have been taking steps to better prepare myself to engage that. 3. What should I be looking for? Three of Swords! Oh fuck yeah! That’s hot. Everyone hates this card! Perception shifts are uncomfortable and there is a fair amount of intellectual discomfort I should expect as I wade into the fire, as it were. At the same time, threes are expansive—which means my own consciousness (swords maybe as a “higher octave” [I know] of intellect). 4. How will I know I’ve found what I’m looking for? Nine of Cups! 🤣 Oh, nothing big. Only the fucking WISH card. Quite amusing. Let us take this to mean a certain sort of emo-spiritual fulfillment that is rather gushing (9 in its expansive role as 3x3). The Magician was the final card and that of course sums all this up, and could easily be the summation of the whole reading. In 2025, we magic. See you next year, kids. Nine-card box:
Popess (2), Five of Swords, Two of Batons Pope, Queen of Batons (1), King of Coins Three of Cups, Seven of Cups, Seven of Coins Deck: Tarocchi ‘23, Gergely Bagaméry, Midnight Tarot Couple notes: The link to the deck above takes you to Tarot Midnight’s Etsy shop, but it’s currently empty. Just FYI, at the time I’m posting this. But Gergely’s decks are wonderful, so when the chance comes up, get one one! Second, this is an even more discursive reading than usual and I did had have to pause about 2/3 of the way through, so you can sorta feel the moment where I have to work to recall what I was saying and the last third of the reading gets short shrift. But there are some good nuggies in here, so I present it to you—flaws and all. Readings take as long as they take, it doesn’t matter what kind of reading it is or even how large the spread. If you’ve read this blog before, you know I can write hundreds of words on one card—so the theory would go that then it would take me thousands and thousands to read a spread this large. And that’s sound logic, to be sure. But what you may not know is that this is the spread I use for about 99% of readings I do, including the 15-minute-or-less ones I offer at fairs and festivals. When reading live, talking through the reading, this spread typically takes me from 10 to 15 minutes, depending on the topic, the deck, and the client. How can this be? Writing a reading is so, so difference from speaking one. I’m of the opinion both use completely different parts of the brain. It’s an entirely different skill. I mean, OK, that’s a little over the top—it’s obviously still reading. But the way the brain navigates the reading is different. If you don’t believe me, think about the fact that you’re typically not typing while you’re speaking through a reading. Typing, if you do it comfortably, is a near-automatic event—but not so automatic that your brain isn’t engaging different muscles and neurons and shit in order to make that happen. Further, the thoughts you’re experiencing are being expressed in a different physical way: through your fingertips rather than your throat. The mind needs to keep a completely different pace when typing than when speaking—and, in fact, needs to keep a different pace from typing and handwriting. All of these are dramatically different, though clearly interconnected, phenomena! I’m far less likely to pontificate in readings when I speak them. Which is good, because pontification is exhausting. I’m less likely to digress. That’s partly an active choice. If I take a digressive path in speaking a reading, I’ll likely lose my way and forget the original path. This happens to me a lot if I’m not careful. “What was I saying?” Because my brain went on a jag I wasn’t ready for. This is less the case when writing because I can go back and look at what I was already saying—and because of that, I’m able to connect the dots better. That’s one reason I let these posts get so discursive. Tangents are fun! And they shed light on things, detail interpretations in ways that you typically don’t get to experience when you’re trying to stay on message. Anyhoo. This is all to say that readings take as long as they take, no matter the size of the spread—but much will depend on the way you’re delivering it. And as a person who is fascinated by the brain, I find this delightful. Anyway, we have reading to do. Stop distracting me. I haven’t used a Marseille-style deck in a bit and I typically don’t use the box spread for this blog—so I thought, why not do both? When I read this spread, the first card that goes down is the center (in this case, Queen of Batons), after that comes the top left. Then the rest go down completing the remaining lines. I don’t know why I do this, but I do and it works pretty well for me. I start by pairing the first two cards to get a base level, theme, or confirmation—then read the rows and columns, often but not always using lenormand techniques such as mirroring and knighting. This puts us into a reading where our first two cards are the Queen of Batons and the Popess. It’s worth pointing out that all of the people cards look to the right (which I typically think of as “the future,” for what that’s worth), except for the Popess, who looks to the left—away, to the past. There’s a tension here, right at the start, and we love tension in readings! We have two opposing entities: first, the fiery, enthusiastic, somewhat egotistical teacher and mentor—she’s spicy, she’s “known,” she’s got energy. And in this corner, we’ve got more or less the exact opposite of that: the Popess, who is secretive, aloof, stand-offish, with a tendency toward defensiveness. Defensiveness may not be a concept you associate with this card, and of course I have more negative associations for it than post readers. But allow: Popesses don’t exist. They’re not real. Historically, in real life, it is an impossibility thanks to the conditions of the institution the pope leads. There are fictions, myths, and rumors—but no actual female popes. And yet, here she is in the deck!! WHAT’S SHE DOING HERE? HOW CAN SHE BE HERE IF SHE DOESN’T EXIST? “I don’t believe in female popes!” “Well there’s one right behind you!” The Popess is constantly having to prove she exists, and that makes her defensive. The second she encounters another person, she knows she’s going to be asked who she is, and she knows she’s going to have to tell them, and she knows she’s going to be told, “There’s no such thing!” So pardon her if she gets a little pissed. What are these two oppo figures up to and how do they set a theme for the reading? This is a deck with very little visual detail—one of the things I love about it is its immediate, bold, and clear images. I know exactly what I’m looking at right away and I get that pow of interaction. But that means I need to fill in the blanks, as it were. Here, I call upon what I know of these two cards. I’ve already given you a bit of a deep dive into the Popess and highlighted the main themes that strike me in this reading—in Marseille decks, generally, because it is in these decks where we have the most clear Pope Joan realness, and that’s when I’m reminded of it. Additionally, I associate this card both with gatekeeping, access, exclusivity, but also wisdom, protection, and safekeeping. I did a little number about the Queen of Batons above, but her Marie Antoinette-ish-ness in this image makes me think of her a bit as a dilettante. Which isn’t fair. I’m certainly not a royal apologist, but a lot of the nastier things said about Marie come from rampant misogyny, not only anti-royalism. The vitriol against her started well before the revolution. I’m not saying she was a saint, only that she was no more or less vile than any other entitled royal of the time and a lot of the criticism about her wasn’t about royalism, it was about the audacity of having been born with a vagina. And so, we might detect defensiveness here, too. And now we have two defensive queens (insert gay joke here), but who are defensive for different reasons and who manifest their defensiveness is very different ways. One, by cloaking herself in mystery and institutionalism and another with attention-seeking, creativity, and sex. And in this way, we’ve just discovered the main psychosis of all teens who grow up gay and Christian! Because this blog is about tarot reading, this “person” we’re describing—this bifurcated Betty—is us, the reader, the fortune teller. Torn between a fidelity to and an almost fetishy obsession with tradition and “correctness” (assuming the Popess wants to rule what popes rule, then what she’s ruling is a conservative institution) and a Lady Godiva-was-a-freedom-rider mentality, ready to throw off the constraints and expectations and gossip and judgment and just be the that bitch you think I am . . . kind of thing. Which I think is something that diviners face at certain points in our lives. The tug-o-war between tradition, doing things “right,” and the desire to break out and fuck around and find out. Even I, the most fuck-around-and-find-out fucker you’ll ever fuck with, has felt that. And sometimes I will use an old technique I’d long left behind, something “correct,” and wonder if all my fuckery has fucked things up and I should just doing it the right fucking way. Meaning: sometimes we (me included) find ourselves torn between tradition and iconoclasm. And this, I think, is a good thing. Let us expand our focus, though, and discover how the remaining cards fit into and shape this particular equation—shall we? In the top row, the Popess turns away from the Five of Swords and the Two of Batons. Ah! How very Popess-y. The Five of Swords is the ultimate pisser-offer of conservatism. It represents the entire revolution of thought process. The reason it seems to show conflict is because we find ourselves remarkably uncomfortable and even rather unhappy when we discover we’re in the throes of a major perception shift. And we cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel—which, in this case, comes in the form of the Two of Batons. What? Because batons are fire and fire is light, that’s why. Through the cage created by the Five of Swords comes a pair of torches showing us the way through. And the cage of the five isn’t even that cagey. You can get on through if you wanna. But you don’t wanna. Why? That two also creates an X—saying HALT! And reminding you that you cannot carry this mopey dopey Eeyore bullshit with you. Eeyore? Yes, my friends. The Popess, in this case, is Eeyore. Look at those Bette Davis eyes, baby. Look how she clutches her book and her key/scepter combo. “No!” she says. “Mine!” Pouty baby. (This isn’t always this card, but she’s giving tantrum here.) She rests atop her big daddy, the Pope. Is that why she’s so resistant to discovering something new? Probably. Do you know that friend who you just know would benefit so fucking much from going to therapy—and they won’t for some dumb reason, like they think their shrink will make them break up with their partner? And you’re like . . . “why would she tell you that unless . . . unless you thought you needed to break up with your partner?” That’s what she’s giving, here. If she knows, if she finds out, if she experiences the perception shift she’s avoiding . . . she’s going to learn the truth. And she’s worried (five of swords = worry, also) she’ll find out she doesn’t (the X of the two) exist (X-ist—little wordplay, there, leading to that—quite cool!) It’s a valid fear. I’ve found out I don’t exist before, metaphorically, and it’s . . . not fun. The middle row, where our center card—and the Popess’s nemesis (say that five x fast)—lives finds her flanked by two old fuckers: the Pope and the King of Coins. Well, well; if it ain’t the ever-lovin’ patriarchy come to wield their . . . scepters. And now we potentially begin understanding something new about the Queen of Batons, who I felt had so much freedom and fire earlier. She’s got ‘em, that’s for sure; can she use ‘em? No, because she’s hemmed in by the literal definition of patriarchy, and the tarot’s grampa (as the last card in the deck—who I’m normally not this mean to . . . it’s my significator, after all!) on either side. The Pope is like the neighbor who shows up and starts feeding your husband all that republican garbage that you have to deprogram from him from. He drags the King of Coins down into the conservative muck with him. Or does he? They are all looking forward, unlike the Popess . . . Actually, now that I look at the trio I’m aware of how the first two cards (pope, queen) are both holding weapons—seemingly to bludgeon the following card. The Pope holds two weapons! So what the fuck is going on here? There are times when seemingly competing interpretations and/or metaphors can show up, making it hard to know which to read. I say, why choose? Read both. Two things can be true. We can feel like we’re in one situation while really being in another — that’s one possibility. We can be simultaneously experiencing the same event from two minds. Why limit yourself to one being true? What if they both can contribute? On the one hand, this row suggests a fiery marginalized person being hemmed in by patriarchy; on the other, an old order showing up to murder the next—all three preventing any progress from being made and almost time-machining each other and the steps they made out of existence. Chaotic metaphor there, but hopefully it tracks. Here we have a situation where someone (us) may feel as though we’re just this bad ass progressive trying to break through all this old shit that’s holding us back—meanwhile we’re being hemmed in by these fogies, man, these squares. At the same time, we might be part of the chain of stuck-in-the-mud-ism in our own way, trying to bop-on-the-head anyone who might be experiencing things in a very different way than we are (coins vs. batons, in this case). Like, the desire to be one’s own “thing” is also somehow stopping someone else from doing their thing—at least without your super critical eye. The “you” in this reading isn’t you as in the sense that you reading this are this kind of person and I know because I did this card spread. It’s you in the sense of an imagined “you”—an us, really—that is both you and not you . . . or me. Ahem. A third way to look at this is as a progression, not unlike the Triumphs that were meant to be in the alleged parade that was supposedly but isn’t the original of the tarot trumps. This happens, then this happens, then this happens; there’s the Snoopy balloon, there’s yet another marching band (sorry), and look it’s the Santa Float Sponsored by Whoever the Fuck Finally Bought Santa. The Pope happens, then the queen, then the king. In this progression, we go from institutional and dogmatic, to fiery and free and iconoclastic, to down-to-earth and grounded—perhaps, one might say, integrated or engaged. . . as though the King of Coins transforms from, emerges out of, the queen—just as the Queen of Batons emerges out of the Pope. Again, weird visual, but there you go. And all of these things can be true at the same time because we contain multitudes! We can be progressing and holding ourselves back at the same time, we can be trying to bludgeon anyone who disagrees with us or makes us feel small, while at the same time understand that growing at something is merely the path of integrating all the things we learn into something we can use every day (coins). When we experience these kinds of dialectics in readings it can be frustrating. Which one is right? Try this: let them all be “right”! That’s not always the case, but sometimes more than one version of reality exists and you can see it in the reading. That’s not a limitation, it’s the ability to peel back the onion. (You can also let the client guide, too—though they don’t always know all the layers, which is why they needed the reading.) The point, rather, is that we see that these are all concurrent energies and really any one of them could take over. Knowing that we’re capable of (in this case) all three helps us then say, “ah, how do I make sure I’m feeding the one that yields the best outcome for me?” Which, again, is kind of the point of divination. The bottom row, the first featuring cups, offers us a three (growth), a seven (introspection and/or luck) and then the seven of coins—offering similar qualities as the prior seven, but in the realm of earth. Growth is good, this is what we’re after. We’re talking spiritual growth, emotional growth, even divinatory growth—as the suit of cups could easily be the suit of divination (clarity) (though I would typically pair it with swords [vision]—so that we get “clear vision,” so to speak. But that’s just a little factoid I felt like sharing), here the cups offer enough context for divination—given that this is a blog about divination. When we know (seven—the introspection) that we are really connected to what is truly important (seven again) to us in order for these growth to happen--but, and this is a place where order really can impact meaning, the fact the growth (the three) comes first reminds us that we’re already doing this. The necessary self reflection is going to happen because it’s been set up by the entire reading—meaning all the cards we’ve already talked about set the stage for those two sevens. If you were to lay out all the other cards in a row, using the order we laid these out in, the two sevens would be the final two cards and it would be maybe easier to think that way . . . but even so, that’s what this suggests to me. I normally don’t consider the nine-card box through that lens, but there’s no reason not to—especially because the shape is somewhat arbitrary. I mean, it’s not, it’s the shape I chose; but it easily could have been any other shape I use here, because this is also very impulse driven, anyway. So what this bottom row suggests to me is that everything that comes before, all the sorta self-flagellation and tugging-o-wars is fine . . . except you’re just doing what you’re supposed to be doing, which is moving through life and learning and divination by being where you are, evaluating what that means, and growing from it. In essence, this reading suggests that even when you feel like you’re at war with yourself and/or the rest of the divination landscape (or community, if you prefer to use that word — I can’t stand it sometimes), you’re really still right where you need to be and all the shit you’re going through is just part of the process of growing. We can feel at war even with ourselves when we’re learning because new information keeps coming in that should make us change our point of view. Like, that’s both the point of divination and learning! Looking at the columns quickly, the first (Popess, Pope, 3/cups), suggests that it is actually the marriage of our institutional and marginal selves, points of view, etc., that lead to our spiritual growth. And so it is by both learning and following the rules (pope) and trying to create some new system that we achieve divinatory/spiritual growth. In this trio, note how the Popess is taking on a very different tone than she did in the earlier conversation. The fact that she is now recontextualized with two different cards changes her, and thought she represented conservatism before, that isn’t the case here. The Pope, the most trad of all the traddies—just by existing—negates the Popesses reality, which makes her marginalized and now much more like the Queen of Wands from earlier. The middle column (5/swords, Queen of Batons, 7/cups) reminds is that our perception shifts are frequently achieved by following passions that really, really, really connect with who we are and what we’re most passionate about—the combo of swords, fire, and water can create an evangelical nature—but in this case, we don’t take that to mean fundamentalism; merely a deep, deep connection to spiritual depth. The 7/cups reminds of how important it is to be true to our values. The final column (2/batons, King of Coins, 7/coins) grounds us. Following cool shit that attracts us (2, attraction; batons, fire) is both imminently practical (king/coins) and necessary (7/coins, as important to our lives because sevens asks us to reflect on this.) Clearly I’m doing the columns much more quickly than I did the rows, and I find with this spread that isn’t unusual. In this case it’s mostly to keep the wordcount down, but by this point in the reading the central message has typically been received and the remaining combos add nuance, shading, and advice. And if we already got the answer, why keep going? Well, no reason, really—other than that we’ve got the cards and the time, so why not? I’ve never gone deeper into a reading and found it made things worse. A worst, it just tells me what I already know; but at best, it inevitably increases my confidence in the overall message and explore it in a more layered way. What’s not to love? A Read of One’s Own Here’s a spread about exploring the tension, living there, and benefitting from it. Position 1: Where you currently are as a diviner. Position 3: Where you’re going as a diviner. Position 2 (between 1 and 3): The tension between them and how to benefit. Super quick example: I chose Seven of Coins (again!) for position 1, The Lovers for position 3, and The Star for position 2. As always, I recommend three cards per position—but I’m being brief. Or trying to. It’s funny, though, whenever I use one card where I really know I should be using three, I can feel myself getting annoyed. One card is not enough context, dammit! The Seven of Coins suggests a divination that is focused both on the practical and the financial—readings that are interesting to and connect with the populace, as a way of winning the over. In essence, the introspection I typically see in the sevens moves outward . . . to, I guess, extrospection. Why am I getting that vibe? Intuition, mostly. It seemed sensible. There’s also the way of reading this where my readings are more focused on what’s important to me—but I know that’s not really true. There is the potential, though, for it to suggest my own world (earth) view being dominant, and that’s fair—because most of us do that. The Lovers almost suggests a more you centric approach — where my focus becomes less on the needs of me as a reader and my worldview, and more on the needs of the client. While Cupid, here, is of course blindfolded—this particular lovers card shows only two figures, and the arrow has already been shot. It hasn’t hit anyone. But what we do have are two people focused on each other. (See photo below.) The lover is focused on the partner, and so the focus may be shifting from me as a reader to the client in a new, deeper way. Again, I don’t think I’m a particularly self-centered reader; I work hard to make it all about the client, but what I think is a movement from the practicality of the coins to the more ephemeral nature indicated by the Lovers and the majors generally. Another major in the spread links the two, The Star. This is my direction card, so it’s fun to see it in the position of direction. In many ways, this card suggests example what the reading above—the lesson—did. You’re always moving in the direction you’re going on, so don’t worry so much about it .Tension is sexy and anyway you’re going where you’re going whether you want to or not, so go for the ride and don’t kick yourself around too much. Works for me! Have a great week. Line of three: Ace of Wands (2), The Fool (1), Nine of Wands (3)
Deck: Folk Magic Tarot, Ibiza Tarot It’s been a minute since I’ve done a three-card pull, and because I forgot to write this this weekend and I’m posting it tomorrow, I thought this was a good chance for simplicity. This is a lovely deck that I’d seen on Instagram and I’m so, so attracted to Eastern European sort of folk art that I had to pick it up. It’s really lovely. I don’t think we’ve seen The Fool much if at all on this blog. And to be honest, I rarely see Fools in readings. I wonder whether this has to do how care-full people are right now. Note the dash. Not a typo. Care-full as in full of care, not cautious. I think The Fool is a card we see during care-free moments, care-less moments; moments of innocence and moments of almost preternatural openness to whatever may come. I don’t know anyone who has had moments like that recently, not of any consequences anyway. Though there’s something fleeting about The Fool, too. We can only retain their state of innocence and lack of expectation for so long. We aren’t naturally suited to the state The Fool has come to represent in the cultural world of tarot. It’s a hard card to get hold of, and in a way maybe that’s apt; this card can’t sit still for long. It’s wily, slippery, evasive, quicksilver. Quicksilver is another name for Mercury and this reminds us that while the astrological association of the card is air, it’s not not also the card that follows: Magician/Mercury, who is also airy. There are esoteric theories that connect the two cards, almost suggesting that they’re the different emanations of the same thing. (If I’m not mistaken, this comes up on Fortune’s Wheelhouse.) I’ve never felt particularly inspired by “the fool’s journey”—this blog’s title, notwithstanding. The idea of it made theoretical sense, but not divinatory sense. First of all, the journey of the fool isn’t the cards that follow it because the deck doesn’t spend much time in order. Second, there’s something sort of negating about the entire tarot somehow being the journey fools take because it is also a card in the deck and has meaning and associations of its own. They aren’t a non-playing character, so to speak; they aren’t not impacting the game’s outcome. And this is true (I think) of the game the cards were made for. All that said, I’ve always loved this card and I’m sure I’ve shared how I used to wear it as a pendant when I began my tarot journey. I envied the freedom. But, as I’m sure I’ve always said, had I followed my “dreams” at that point, it would have been a fool’s errand in more ways than one. Frankly, there’s a good possibility that if I’d moved to New York and tried to make it in the theatre, I’d be dead by now. I know that sounds dramatic, but I had no idea how sheltered I’d been, how naive I was, how unprepared for the world—particularly the art world—I was. I operated from the very earnest but very dangerous desire to be approved of and loved. My dating experience of the time is, I think, a good way to imagine what my theatre career would have been: I was so desperate to be loved by a man that I went on dates with dudes I had no attraction to, allowed myself to be intimate with guys I wasn’t attracted to and didn’t trust, and twisted myself into a pretzel to make myself right for guys I didn’t really like because I was desperate. Now, apply those tendencies to a career where you’re constantly begging potential bosses and coworkers to live you. Apply them, too, to the fact that the theatre is a world of predators, grifters, and con artists. I mean that’s not the--well . . . I was going to say that’s not the basis of the industry, it’s just a problematic branch. But . . . That’s not entirely true. At any rate, I was easy pickings. A crush on the wrong director, an audition in a strange location and I could easily have wound up getting offed. I think so much about Venus Xtravaganza, queer/trans icon and known now from the documentary Paris is Burning. She disappeared and was found slain during the production of that film. And we know her name because she happened to be making that doc. There are so many other missing and murdered persons—queer, indigenous, women, etc.—whose names we don’t know. And had I followed my Fool-ish desire, there’s nothing saying I wouldn’t have gotten into a car with a man I thought would love me only to wind up stuffed in the trunk. I didn’t mean for this to get grim, and clearly that didn’t happen to me—but the point is what that we want is not always what’s best for us. I feel this acutely today and so it’s timely. I was reminded today that, though I still long for and miss my theatre life, every encounter I have with the theatre these days leaves me feeling shitty about myself. It doesn’t matter that I’m an incredible playwright. (I’ve got a gift, I don’t know why—but I can write a beautiful, hilarious play.) I want so much for it to work because I’m good at it! But truth be told, I haven’t enjoyed the process in years—well before the panny—and I really have had to accept the most garbage behavior from people in that world. Not from everyone, not by a long shot. Just from the people who have the most influence on my ability to get produced. This maudlin exploration may have turned you off. But I want to highlight that this is all part of this card. Listen, choices are great, freedom is great, making bold moves and damning the torpedos—all great. Except when it’s not. What we tend not to talk about with this card is consequences. The imagery in the deck and the esoteric associations have elevated this card to a kind of idealistic and totally imaginary non-reality that most of us, unless we’re extremely moneyed and free of any kind of burden (including self-doubt), will never ever experience in any kind of meaty way. Most of this people on this planet cannot experience the kind of thing readers typically say about this card. We interpret this card through wishful thinking. But it’s not necessarily helpful. Particularly in readings. And, frankly, even in pathworking or intention-setting. If you’re doing spellwork around The Fool and you are not setting careful fucking parameters, then you’re setting yourself for getting exactly what you want—and every single consequence that comes with it. Boy, he’s such a scold today, isn’t he? 🤣 I don’t mean to be. But a thing we have done with tarot—the collective “we” of . . . all this—is that we take the cards and make them into icons. Those icons become ideals and then those ideals become the gap between giving a reading and reciting a wishlist. Readers, particularly those who read for ourselves, want to know how we can tell that our readings aren’t being overly influenced by confirmation bias. I think one way to tell is if your readings tend only to highlight the best aspects of your favorite cards. If you’re never able to see this or any card through a darker lens, if you’re not able to detect the consequences of answered prayers, then you’re likely giving yourself too biased a reading. Of course, the other part of that is true. If you never get a good reading, probably you’re looking only at the dark side of the card. (This reminds me that one reason I don’t work with reversals anymore is that cards would show up reversed, but it doesn’t seem to make sense for the reading—the reversal felt haphazard or meaningless rather than nuancing the meaning. But, the benefit of reversals is that it stops us from being too hard or too easy on cards. And so if you find yourself giving readings that seem to be always too + or too -, try using reversals and see if that helps!) It’s worth pointing out that one reason people struggle with the court cards is that we will really like one particular card or rank or suit and use that to sum up our own personality—which makes it difficult to then use it to describe other people, or to see it in ways that reflect lives beyond our own. On top that, we can ID the other cards with people we don’t like, and then it becomes hard to interpret the better aspects of that card. The Emperor, The Hierophant, The Hanged Man, The Devil, and The Tower are often given over to this negativity bias. The Emperor and The Hierophant are understandable. We hate those guys. But of course there are times when The Emperor can represent just, like, a good dad. And there are plenty of times where The Hierophant can simply indicate faith or tradition. Every card has layers and shadows and highlights and nuances—whether we use reversals or not. And the cards as a set will influence each other so that we understand how each is behaving. Thanks for attending maudlin meditations with Tommy Bee. Anyhoo—let’s talk about context for a moment. The Fool stands not alone, here, but flanked by the Ace of Wands and the Nine of Wands. I had a similar spread this weekend while leading the Re-Learning Tarot course I’m doing. Our topic was Questions We Should Never Ask Tarot and to explore that topic I made everyone in the class read on the question “When am I going to die?” DON’T FREAK OUT. They didn’t read that for themselves, they read for a man we made up. And I didn’t tell anyone that this is a good question and that we should ask it. Instead, I asked the class to do the reading for a fake dude to see for themselves whether there was any benefit. What better way to know than to try? And doing readings for fake people is the safest way you can do that. But the point of that story isn’t the question as much as the spread I got, which involved the Ace of Gardens/Earth/Coins (I used the Japaridze for that), Strength, and the Ten of Gardens. And I explored with the group how there are two ways to read that: 1. They have the strength to sustain the entire journey of life, they will live a long one and die when there’s nothing left. (Strength carrying the ace—birth—through the “entirety” of a life well-lived, the ten.) 2. The client’s constant output of energy (Strength) will mean that go from 0 (ace) to sixty (ten) super fast—spending all their energy and dying young. (In this case, Strength as an entity using up their life force faster.) Which one is correct? Honestly, to know for sure I’d pull more cards. But because the first one—long life—was my first and strongest hit, that’s what I’d decide is true. Here, we could say that the Fool carries the ace through to the nine—the near-end, but not the end. What does that suggest, given everything we’ve discussed so far? We haven’t talked about the wands, yet. I don’t think wands has been a particularly heavy presence in this blog to date, either. Again, that feels apt: I have no fucking energy, anymore. Going back to my misspent youth, and the fact that I’m a Leo sun, I have major fiery tendencies and wands is the suit I associated with all my theatrical dreams. Luckily, and I don’t know how I managed this, I didn’t pin all my hopes and dreams on that suit. I just got happy when I got readings with lots of wands. “I’m going to be a star!” (As though there’s such a thing as a playwright who is a “star!”) Being young, though, I tended to sum the suit up purely as our meant-to-dos. In essence, I looked at this suit as our raison d’être. Our purpose. Because that’s what I needed it to be, what I wanted it to be, and that’s what I assumed everyone else needed it to be. I found myself quite limited by that, as time went on, as my skill grew . . . it was like my understanding of the deck improved, but my understanding of wands remained arrested. And I’m not saying that this happens to everyone, but I do know as a person who works with adult learners that when we assign too much import to things they can become impossible to work through or understand. We somehow psyche ourselves out, preventing us from making progress. And it’s usually because we can’t let go of something—a perception, a bias, a cosmology—that has moved from facilitator to barrier. That does happen. Things that helped once can hurt, as anyone who (like me) has in the past experienced difficult with over-indulging in alcohol (hi, lockdown!). Over-identification with things makes people very difficult to move or train. Look at so-called American “identity” politics: men who think everyone is always obsessed with race and gender have such fragile concepts of their own masculinity, they can’t see that by getting so foaming-at-the-mouth angry about other people’s bodies (for example) that they are the ones actually obsessed with race and gender—and they’re suffering for no reason over shit that has nothing to do with them. Not the most elegant metaphor, but you ideally get the point: the more intensely we feel something, the harder it is for us to see it clearly. In my teens and twenties, when I fell for someone I fell hard. I both saw none of their faults and became totally enthralled to the point of losing my identity, and desperately seeking their attention and approval. I was so profoundly insecure, so mooney, so dreamy, so romantic, that I would go to run and errand and find myself taking a route that took me past their houses so that I might “bump into” these various hims. It’s mortifying to think of, now; I hate that and revealing it ain’t much fun, either. But I was lonely. I say all the time I’m so thankful we didn’t have social media when I was that age—AOL instant messenger and later gay-dot-com chat rooms did enough damage to my psyche. But I can only imagine the kind of desperate shit I would have pulled on these apps back then. I shudder to think of it. Literally. Anyway, feeling too much of something can make it hard to see it clearly. And because of that I had a hard time really understanding this suit. But oddly, that experience I just described—feeling too much of something can make it hard to see it clearly—is a facet of this suit! And I only really just made that connection right now. But that’s a totally fiery tendency. Fire consumes. When we are at fire’s mercy, we may become consumed or consumptive (there’s a word with lots of layers). I had a tendency to become consumptive. And now that I think about it, my learning often takes this journey. I think about my reading habits. I will fully devour every fucking book on a topic that I’m suddenly interested in. I’ve done it with the arts, I’ve done it with tarot, I’ve done it with Hoodoo and Witchery, I’ve done it with the Thoth deck, I’ve done it with just about anything that strikes my fancy. And in these cases, these kinds of concentrated learning immersions, we can see the benefit of this kind of tendency. Becoming consumed by something healthy (a kind of intense hyperfocus, for my ND guys, guys, and nonbinary pals) is the same thing as the unhealthy tendency I had to, like, commit some mild compulsive . . . attention seeking. It’s just . . . good for you. Of course, too much of a good thing can make you cranky—we can get oversaturated, something I also have a tendency to do. But when it comes to learning, you just move on to something else. With people, that’s harder. Here, the Fool carries the ace to the nine, as we said. We could say, then, that they’re actually not starting from zero—they have a little experience (the ace) that they’re bringing on this heavy path (the nine of wands often shows us someone pretty bruised, and nines are “heavy” generally; they suggest a lot of something). If we want to bring that into our divinatory world, we might say to students that you’re never starting from square one, you’re never free of experience you can use, and when you think that way the path doesn’t seem as daunting. You’ll have more energy (nine wands) to carry you along. Which is true and quite lovely. We might say, too, that it is The Fools desire (ace) that sustains (nine) their journey. There’s lots of ways to interpret this and I think all of them are valid and true. But since I took you on that fucking sob story of my former life, it’s well for me to bring that into the puzzle, here, too. I misquote Yoav Ben Dov a lot and say, “nothing that happens in a reading is an accident.” That’s not really what he said, but it’s what I remember. He was saying, in essence, that everything that happens during a reading is part of the reading—from the time reader and client greet each other to the time the part, everything is part of the reading. The fact that these cards prompted/triggered me to share those stories is part of the reading. Sure, they were meant to illustrate aspects of The Fool that don’t usually get highlighted, but they were prompted by this trio, this spread, and the open question I ask at the start of every post: “What is lesson #?” We may start on a path (the ace) knowing and trust and believing (fool) that it will take us where we want to go (nine) . . . and after taking that long (nine) road (fool), we start to wonder . . . is this really where I wanted to go? The closer we get to our goal (nine), the more we realize . . . it’s too hot (fire) for me here. There isn’t enough air, water, or earth for me here. What I felt I wanted (ace) turns out to be a burden (a typical image on the ten, but that is well set up by the typical nine). The closer I’m able to see what I wanted (that implied ten + the nine), the more I start to recognize that this ain’t it. And only a Fool keeps going somewhere they don’t want to be. A reminder I really needed today. I cannot tell you how often I feel like the choice I made to give up on theatre has made me feel like a quitter. Like I couldn’t hack it. And when you’re starting out, the “pros” are always like, “If you can do anything else, do it. This isn’t for you. This is a hard industry. Not everyone can do it.” And, really, that’s true. But it also feels like pretentious gatekeeping. And I realize now that, like . . . I couldn’t hack it. I mean, I can handle the writing and the reviews and the actors’ egos and all that . . . but I can’t handle the industry. Not even the corporate bullshit. I’ve dealt with that my entire adult life. I can’t deal with an industry that accepts cruelty, predatory behavior, bullying, fat-shaming, femme-shaming, unpaid internships, the Ivy League-centricity, the racism, all the things . . . an industry in which that’s not only the norm, but just the cost of doing business. Totally fine. Totally acceptable. That’s what I can’t hack. And, for all the shit that corporate america rightfully deserves, I have been treated with more humanity and kindness there than I have in some theatre spaces. I want it, but I want the ideal (ace) and not the reality (nine). And to keep hoping that reality will bend to my will . . . is foolish. That’s not really a lesson about divination — but it is a lesson in letting go. And sometimes we as readers need to do that. Sometimes that means taking a little break, sometimes it means recognize that we’re burned out and need a long break, sometimes it means recognizing that the reality of being a diviner isn’t what we hoped it would be and we need to rethink our relationship to it. My example is extreme. I don’t want you to think you’re going to have to give up tarot the way I gave up theatre. And who the fuck knows if I won’t cave in to my ego and some point and go back? What I mean, though, is more like the experience I had when I “gave up” on tarot years ago: What I really needed to do was go back to “square one” (the ace) and start again. Because, and this is I think to the key to this spread, the Fool lacks ego. Despite being surrounded by fiery cards, The Fool doesn’t give a fuck if they have to start again, because they never were that married to any idea. “OK,” they say. “That happened.” Then they go back to one. Not the zero, but one. Because, though it didn’t yield the longed-for results, it generated experience. The Fool can never go back to zero again. In may case, that meant asking myself, “What do I really want from tarot and divination?” The answer to that became Tarot on Earth. And so there’s an example of how restarting a journey already begin can actually yield amazing things! (And this is something I’ve learned in my writing life, too. Often I’ll start a draft thinking I know what it’s going to be, and about a third of the way through I’ll realize that I’m actually writing something else. I’ll throw out everything and start again, but those “lost” pages aren’t for naught—they taught me what I was trying to do.) When I saw the Death card in the Wild Unknown Tarot, I realized that the card is about fertilizer. Everything we go through fertilizes everything we will become. Which reminds me how the astrologer Sue Thompkins (author of The Contemporary Astrologer’s Handbook) explains our sun sign as not so much who we are, but who we’re becoming. We could think of this three cards as saying something similar. Start again if you have to, or if you want to; what you’ve done so far wasn’t time wasted, it was lessons learned and experienced gained. That, incidentally, is a reminder I needed today, too. A read of one’s own Here’s a little spread to explore something you may benefit from starting over or “going back to one” as they say on movie sets. Position 1 - Something you’re working on that would benefit from a re-start. Position 2 - Why/how you’ll benefit Position 3 - How to deal with the ego hit Position 4 - Advice on how to restart Loop of 8. Starting top center and going clockwise, Eight of Coins (1), Two of Cups (2), Five of Coins (4), Nine of Staves (7), The Hermit (8), Nine of Cups (6), Ten of Swords (5), Justice (3). (As always, the numbers following the card name indicates the order in which the card was laid down on the table. In this case, like most when using a line, arc, or loop, I alternate left and right. For the sake of ease, I listed them clockwise. Either, both, or neither may prove worthwhile in interpreting the spread.
Deck: Sirena by Mr. Friborg. Typically I use a loop like this when drawing an arc of five or seven cards and deciding a few more cards would benefit the spread. You can see an earlier post on how I have no issue drawing additional cards in a reading, usually when reading for myself. Today, though, I felt like mixing things up, so I started with the loop. Here’s a case where it feels like a lot of cards, even though my typical spread is actually nine—one card more than here. When I make spreads, shape doesn’t mean much to me—but I think it’s worth pointing out that shape can make a spread seem larger (or smaller) than it is. And often, especially for new readers, it’s not so much the number of cards in a reading that becomes daunting; rather, it’s the impression that there’s too much info. Fair. Especially for those of us who fall easily to overwhelm. I’m often among those folks. And so I think it’s worth saying that if you lay out a spread and you look at it and you just think “oh fuck” when faced with interpreting it, it may not be the cards that are triggering that reaction, but the arrangement you chose. And I do think that if you can find a new or adjusted shape that preserves the interrelationship between the cards, there’s no reason not to move them around. By this I mean that the way the cards interact with one another, their relative position to each other, should be preserved because that is part of the reading now. But if you can even, say, close the gap between the middle top and bottom cards, it may make the spread feel less daunting—without shifting the card relationships too much. Anyway, I don’t feel particularly cowed by this spread yet—I just wanted to point that out. And it occurred to me that this felt like “a lot” of cards at first glance, even though I typically work with nine. Size may not matter, but shape does. Anyhoo. Here we are, lesson twenty-four. This a new deck, one I backed on Kickstarter, by a creator whose work I really admire. And one of my favorite decks of 2023 was Mr. Friborg’s Tarrochi, which I took with me to New Orleans. So, though I’m not well-versed in mermaid lore, I needed to back this and I’m glad I did because it’s quite striking—and quite dark, compared to my other mermaid deck (another one I love, Dame Darcy’s). In fact, it’s the darkness of Friborg’s decks that I am so drawn to. The Tarrochi, which features all skeletons, manages to somehow achieve a certain kind of left-handed, memento mori kind of sexiness that this weirdo appreciates. When we have a large spread, particularly one that could begin and end anywhere and can be read in multiple ways, the reader has basically two choices: start with the most “logical” spot to them (in this case, the first card I put down would make sense—the Eight of Coins), or the card that seems most relevant to the situation we’re reading about (where we know a theme) or that calls most strongly to the reader (where we’re unsure what the reading will cover). In this case, both cards are the same—that eight. Reason being, this is a blog about the craft of reading cards, and this is a card that is also typically about craft. This is an a unique depiction of the card. We have a land man doing some work on land while some merpeople frolic. And this immediately makes me think of the insecurity I sometimes feel as a reader because I’m “not magical.” This is what I tell myself in the moments when I’ve over-consumed media (books, videos) from people with skills I lack. For example, I spent a lot of time reading about mediumship for some research recently, and because I’m not one I started to find myself feeling less-than. Not unlike this mortal normie doing the hard work while the magical creatures in the world go off and play. In my better moments, I recognize this as insecurity—and to a degree the direct result of choosing to eliminate spiritual practice from my divination for so long (a necessity, in my case, and I don’t regret it). But there are times when I just feel “not cool enough” for the divcom (a term I just made up for “divination community”). I know that might sound nuts for someone who has such a big fucking mouth and such a strong opinion about everything, but my innate understanding of myself in the world is that I’m always the least cool, least interesting, least attractive fucker in the room. One reason I don’t whine about that more is because I recognize that I’m not, you know, totally pointless and because there are plenty of folx who would give their eye teeth for my YouTube subscriber count. But we tend to see ourselves not in terms of what we have, but what we lack. And as someone who has been making YouTube content since about 2012, I can’t help but notice how many people who started well after me who have twice or even three times the subscribers I do. This is of course why we shouldn’t compare our selves, but I’m not going to pretend I don’t feel shitty sometimes that for the last two years my count has hung in the same place and I still can’t break 10,000. Luxury problem, of course. And yet, this is how the brain works. And it doesn’t help us, because—and now we return to a favorite topic of mine—that’s all ego. Here’s another example, for you. I recently read at an event and I was the last reader to be approached for a reading and I wasn’t really particularly busy most of the night—unlike the other readers, who were. Sometimes that happens, and it easily could have been that I chose a table toward the back of the small area we inhabited. It also happened to be a long event (for me, anyway) and I worried whether I’d have enough energy to read all night. But none of that mattered. For the first twenty or thirty minutes, while I sat trying to look adorable and unbothered, I internally regretted applying to read and chalked it up to yet more evidence of my worthlessness. This is a lifelong journey, folks, and I have to tell you I’m fucking sick of it lately. Especially because the world keeps finding new ways to make us not like ourselves, and while the ensuing armageddon that Trump and Israel and Putin and others are rapidly pushing us toward (much to the delight of the mentally fucked up “Christian” right, who fetishizes this shit) reminds us that our self esteem may not be the most important thing—it’s also not going to get any better, because for those of us in typically excluded communities, we’re once again going to find ourselves the object of ad hominem attacks from the people running the world. This is as it’s always been, of course, and those of us in the so-called US have been unfairly spared a lot of the worst that the world can offer, so my nihilism is fairly privileged—but I’m also fairly convinced we are in a sea change moment and while it’s probably necessary, I do not believe it will be pretty or inspiring. Love and light, I guess I’m saying, need not apply. What got me out of that doldrum was a mantra I occasionally return to: “This is about them, not you.” By this I mean, that I’m going to these events—asking to go to these events—to read for clients, not to validate my own ego. To put it another way, and I’m fairly sure I’ve written about this before, I remember a quote from my acting days from the noted teacher Stanislavsky (founder of the famously misunderstood, misused, “method”—which is one of the foundational fuckeries of theatrical training and one reason why the theatre industry is so toxic . . . not that what Stanislavsky taught was so bad, though it’s often inscrutable; no, it’s the Americanization of it that turned too many heterosexual men into Brando wannabes who treated their coworkers like shit in the name of “realism”—and still do). He said (allegedly), “love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art.” It’s the same thing. A play isn’t about the actors, the writer, or the director; it’s about the audience. A reading isn’t about the reader; it’s about the client. When I get in my head about my relative coolness (or lack thereof), I’m not focused on my mission as reader: to give real, practical readings to clients. Instead, it’s focused on validation. It’s self-centered rather than client-centered, and if you know Your Tarot Toolkit, you know how evangelical I am about client-centric reading. But of course our progress isn’t a straight line (which now makes me happy I used this loopy spread), and even though I know that I sometimes have to work at reminding myself of it. And I think this iteration of the Eight of Coins really sums that up for me. The card is flanked by Justice and the Two of Cups. I take this as a reminder that the “right” thing to do is focus on the giving (not taking) nature of divination. When faced with Justice, I often overreach with clients. When it shows up early in a spread, I frequently ask clients if they’re involved in social justice work—and ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, they are not. And so frequently I just read it as “correct” or “right,” not in the legal or common sense, but in the moral sense. In this case, not the morality of a society controlled by wealth, but actual morality. If John Valjean, prisoner 24601, got a reading from me asking, “Should I steal this bread to feed my family?”, the Justice card would say “yes.” The moral thing is to feed the hungry. But does it mean there won’t be consequences? Not at all. There often are—and certainly, the story of Les Miserables, which I’m referencing here, is set off by that act and the conflict between the “law” (Javert, the cop whose black-and-white, Christo-colonial vision of justice causes him to devote his entire life to destroying Jean Valjean—ultimately (spoiler) leading to his own demise) and morality. These are not new conflicts. The Justice card is “right” thing or the “correct” thing; not the legal or socially acceptable thing. (Of course, there are also times when the card represents the exact opposite, contextually—the power of the elite and the oppression of the marginalized. How do I know which is which? You guessed it! Context!) In other cases, though, it needs to be read without this grandiosity. Sometimes, it simply means “the correct thing to do.” And in this reading, that’s what it is saying. Paired with the Two of Cups, it reminds us that the way out of that feeling of missing out (in the eight) is to focus on giving, rather than taking—focus on the client rather than feeling validated. That’s not bad advice, of course. It’s not easy, but it’s true. These two cards are flanked by the Ten of Swords and the Five of Coins. Ruh-roh, Rhaggy! These are no bueno. If we’re focusing on the client, why then do we have these doom and gloom around us? Well, kids, I think it’s partly because that’s the gig. Like, deciding to become a reader who offers services to clients (paid or not), we are essentially going out into the chaos and saying, “yes, please dump your traumas at me.” That sounds glib and I don’t mean it to. But it’s the reality. Particularly when we’re reading in public or at events that have a fairly steady flow of customers. You’re simply going to be encountering person after person who is in some kind of a state. Sure, many folks are simply curious, but that doesn’t mean darker topics won’t come up in the reading. And many others are carrying something that they’re struggling with and that’s why they want the reading. This underscores, really, the necessity of de-centering the reader. If we’re doing readings to feel good about ourselves, we’re not reading for clients. That’s it. Pure and simple. (You can feel good about what you do—you should! But if your brain energy is focused on you and how you’re feeling, that’s a sign you’re not focused on the client.) And I wonder whether the times where I struggled reading for clients was because I was centering myself. Maybe divinity said, “well, Tommy, if you can’t focus on the client, we’re not helping you get an answer.” (I actually think it’s purely that our brain can only focus on one thing, and if we’re focusing on our valuelessness then we can’t focus on interpreting cards. But there’s nothing saying I’m right, and as someone who has seen first-hand the impact of bad-but-earnest readings on clients, I’d like to think there’s some safety net in place where my guided might stop me before I give a crap-ass reading. But I guess I won’t know until I know, ya know?) Anyway, these two cards—the ten and the five—bookend the spread. We can think of them as parenthesis, containing the whole thing. And together they’re saying, “People often want readings because their brains and lives are in states of fuckery, and they want clarity—so you need to get your own fuckery out of the equation, because it’s not the point of doing this. It’s not about you; it’s about them.” When we remember our mission, why we do what we do, we have an easier time forgetting to care about our ego validation. What’s your mission as a reader? Mine is clarity. I want to give clear, precise answers that make sense based on the client’s life. That’s it. I have tangential missions (cost accessibility, for example; I tend to believe that divination is spiritual work for the masses, not the elite), but ultimately I want to give clients clear, honest, true answers. That’s it. That’s my mission. C’est ça. What’s yours? If you don’t know it, no worries—the spread at the end of today’s post will be all about that. Regardless, focusing on your mission is a good way to get out of your head and move away from the “nobody loves me, I think I’ll eat some worms” mentality that so many of us have been taught to dance. We have three more cards to look at! Yeegad! By this time we have a pretty good answer, is there any point in going on? Of course, but that doesn’t mean that these three cards will add anything new. Or, what I really should say is that they don’t have to. But—and this is where things get crazy!—they certainly could. Could I stop here? Yeah, I can do anything I want. Would that be “bad”? No. We got an answer. There’s no fucking law saying that if you don’t interpret every card in a reading that you’re going to hell. Do whatever you want. But since we drew them, why not use them? We have two nines, and that’s always fun—when we have repetitions. Nines are numbers I associate with tiredness, with burnout (as you probably know by now). Cups/water and wands/fire are the two suits most prone to overwork, overextension. So of course that’s what they’re saying here, right? I don’t know. Actually, at the moment, I’m more drawn by The Hermit who sits directly between those two and directly below the Eight of Coins. The Hermit is, one might say, a “higher octave” of this eight. Not all Eights of Coins, but this one, in this reading, with this image that produced this interpretation. The Hermit recognizes that he’s something other than a mermaid (in this deck, he’s part crab—a clever joke) and does his business. In fact, the very act of being what he is kind of demands that he stay somewhat apart. Of course that’s the nature of the Hermit, right? But in this context, he’s not a “hermit”; he’s us, he’s a fortune teller, a reader. He understands that doing this work, at least doing it well, requires a certain protection from the normal world (see his shell) and/or from the common way of doing and seeing things. I’ve said before that divining changes you, but I can’t remember where I said that so I don’t know if you’ve read that yet or you will read it when my book comes out (Did I mention I have a—never mind.) Dedicating yourself to the art and craft of divination will change you. It will change your outlook, it will change your politics (or it should), and it will change your cosmology. If you’re not prone to cynicism, you might discover that you find yourself having moments of it that you aren’t used to. If you are a cynic, it can get worse. But on the other side of that self-same coin, if you’re a non-believer (as I am/was/am), you’re going to find yourself marveling at things you can’t explain. If you’re a hopeless fuck (as I am/am/am), you’re going to—against your better judgement—feel like we’re not entirely alone out here and that there may be someone(s) or something(s) dancing with us, guiding us, helping us, loving us. If you’re a believer already, your understanding of what you believe in and how it make sense to you will change. Devoting yourself to anything has that effect, and because divination is such a communal practice—it requires engagement with someone/thing other than us, even when just reading for ourselves—it’s going to demand that we look at the world differently. For those of us allergic to “love and light,” we’ll find times where we’re giving the most amazing news—over and over again; and for those who are “good vibes only,” if you’re doing it well, you’ll eventually start to find stretches of bad news that will make you question your commitment to optimism. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve said to clients, “Against all my better judgment, I have good news—yes, he’s coming back and yes he has changed” or similar. “Yeah, you’re going to get the job.” I once said to a guy, “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but yes: quitting your job to focus on your music is a good idea.” I WOULD NEVER SAY THAT TO SOMEONE OUTSIDE OF A READING! I’m the most overcautious fucker you’ll ever encounter. I’m terrified of everything. But the cards said, “this is right for him.” I have to turn off my pessimism. “I can’t believe how much good news I’m giving,” I said at one event shortly after the election. “I expected to see nothing but gloom tonight and everyone I read for seems on the edge of totally thriving.” And then I have to turn off my jealousy. Woof. We never think of that, do we? Or I don’t, anyway. But after giving a bunch of randos good news all night, I started to feel fairly shitty about my own lot—given what I’ve been going through the last couple years, including a handful of things I haven’t told anyone about. (Believe it or not, there are dramas in my life that I don’t use as examples or whine about on the socials.) There’s another self-centered thing, feeling like crap because you’re giving too many people good news you know you’re not going to get. Woof, indeed. That’s something nobody prepared me for. I don’t think I’d have believed it if someone told me when I was starting out that I’d one day have to come face-to-face with my own bitchy jealousy at my own clients’ good fortune. Granted, I also wouldn’t have believed you if you told me that I’d be reading cards for money in public where anyone could see me doing it. I’d never have believed this would become so central to my life. And, really, that part is one of the things I personally have to recall when I do start to feel crappy (because my stupid clients are all happier than me) (I’m kidding, I love my clients): I have to remember that tarot has come into my life in a way I wasn’t expecting and it’s been able to do that because the thing I thought I was here for didn’t work out. Anyway. this really isn’t meant to be all about me, but I am such a good example. Wink. While my interpretation of the nines is generally fairly negative, the tarot influenced by Waite-Smith does not agree. The Nine of Cups is “the wish card.” The Nine of Coins/Penties, not in this reading, is somewhat nebulous—but its often among the most stunning paintings in a deck, so it often gets interpreted positively. It’s really only the other two nines that are “bad.” But even though I’m fairly mean to nines, that doesn’t mean they’re actually bad. Or that they’re even only nines. Nines are made up of other numbers, in this case three threes. And Mr. Friborg’s Nine of Cups actually looks a lot like many Three of Cups in the W-S trad. I think this reminds us of the expansive nature of the card, particularly in this case where burnout isn’t quite the interpretation that feels contextually relevant. In fact, I start to think of water, suddenly, in its rolling, wavy way—the way that water (and our emotional state) can come in big waves, ebb, be relatively still for a bit, and then return with maybe another large wave or a trio of smaller ones. I’m thinking about how our feelings aren’t straight lines, either, and that the way the nine breaks down into threes, here, makes me feel like the PULSE of feeling--I’m feeling THIS WAY NOW and then its gone AND THEN I’M FEELING SOMETHING ELSE and it’s gone and maybe a little bit of this, this and this, AND THEN A REALLY BIG ONE—and it takes a while to—OH GOD THERE’S ANOTHER ONE. . . . and then it’s gone. Like the ocean. That’s how this Nine of Cups feels to me. So what of the Nine of Wands? It takes on a similar quality, but in this case it’s giving martyr. And that makes me laugh because of the somewhat pretentious way I described the diviner as having to stand outside life, a little. We have to see life clearly, but we’re not always allowed to do life the same way “mere mortals” are (to get super pretentious). I think that’s true, but it’s easy to get a complex about it—either a delusion of grandeur or of martyrdom, which both feels strongly wandsy. Here, I think it’s both in part because the martyr clearly has delusions of grandeur, too; it’s the single thing that would allow someone to sacrifice themselves for a cause. It is working against every natural instinct humans have. We are built to avoid danger. The martyr not only welcomes danger, they give themselves to it knowing, or being pretty certain anyway, that they will die. It’s operatic, really. Quite dramatic. The Hermit needs to be careful about this grandiosity—but I don’t think we (we, us, fortune tellers, readers) need to avoid it. Like my video on the ego recently (and the concept of “ego death”), I don’t think we can or should necessarily turn off the part of our brains that say, “OMG, you’re such a saint for doing this work. You’re just so good.” I mean, not in the way that that fucking annoying dame in that racist-ass Gone With the Wind movie does. What’s her name? Mel? In a film full of issues, she weirdly irks me the most. (I never liked the actress. I preferred her sister, and they hated each other. The sister, Joan Fontaine, was in Rebecca with Laurence Olivier, and she’s excellent in it. Olivia de Havilland, who played Mel in Wind, is the proto Becky [in my humble opinion]). Anyway, what was I saying? Oh, yeah, I don’t think we need to deny ourselves some indulgence in the sainthood we canonize ourselves with. That might sound objectively insane, but listen . . . Back when I believed in government and wanted to be White House press secretary (a la CJ Craig), I used to say of politicians whose dicks got mashed into the news cycle, “To believe that you can fix this country implies a certain kind of hero complex and narcissism that probably only exists in the kind of men who also feel like everyone wants to see their disembodied richard.” (This is what I call dick pics, incidentally: disembodied richards.) There’s a certain kind of egotism necessary to think, “I am someone who can resist the super PACs, the lobbyists, the obstacles, the opposition and really fix this country—with all its deep, deep fuckeduppery. I can do that, because I am a stud.” Ya know I mean? I mean, that’s very hypermasculine, and it’s not at all what I’m suggesting we emulate, but to get the gumption to do it at all requires a certain amount of belief in the self. Jesus, can you imagine if you had to beg voters for your job? I can’t even ask my doctor for a prescription refill he makes me take because I don’t want to bother him. And to lose in public? (OK, well, as a writer, I do have some experience with that one—and I also have some narcissistic tendencies, due being born with my sun in Leo and my moon in Cancer.) For readers, we weirdly do need to see ourselves—sometimes, and just a little—as a sainted being, doing “the lord’s work.” And I really mean just a little. Like, please. I cannot with smuggeries who think they’re god’s gift. Fuck you. I mean, really, you’re gross. But—and this does tie into the confidence/humility discussion from my recent video--you gotta believe you can do it in order to do it well. Because insecurity will distract you. And you also need to believe that you can do the impossible, because, if you think about it, divination is kind of a miracle. If you subscribe to such words. (I do not.) But, you know, by the definition of miracle (from Dictionary.com, a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency) we’re getting pretty literal here. Ain’t nothin’ about divinaysh that doesn’t fit that description. Saux . . . . Ya know. We gotta know, deep down, that we (in very tiny, tiny text and a mumbly voice) make miracles. But just a little bit. OK? For fuck’s sake, diva. I wasn’t going to do this because this is already too long, but: I just noticed that pairing the cards above the two nines creates an interesting counterplay. The Justice card with the Nine of Cups sorta brings playful sainthood to the table, if we think of Justice as being the martyr in the other card—and because many people who engage in justice work also have a tendency to think of themselves as saints, and again that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Listen, if you don’t believe in your nads that you can hit a baseball thousands of feet out of a major league ballpark, you cannot do it. That’s probably why so many athletes are such pricks (although I don’t actually think it’s that; I think it’s that we elevate atheletes in this country to a status of value that they don’t deserve—so the ego and entitlement majorly kicks in). When we pair the Nine of Staves with the card above it, the Two of Cups, we sorta bring the lovey dovey hippy vibes into the martyr card, again sorta softening the edges and making it a little more playful. The cups cards both, in this case, soften their mirrors—even if that’s not always the case. Sometimes water can be quite destructive, as we know; but here, it’s simply eroding sharp edges and softening things to make them gentler. In a good way. These final three cards were almost another reading, and that’s OK. It added to what we’d already discussing, reminding us that we can indulge in self-centeredness sometimes—and that there’s a certain amount of self-regard required to read the cards—but that it’s not the only thing, that we have to focus on the client, and though we’re sometimes saintly we are not saints. What a fun reading. I enjoyed this, even if I didn’t have any idea where it was going to take us. I think it’s exciting to not only let the cards guide us (something I didn’t used to enjoy) and also allow the clues in a unique deck to guide the tone of the reading, too; particularly in cards we often “think” we “know.” A read of one’s own This week’s spread is about our mission— mission, purpose, whatever word you want to use; mission is definitely loaded—as readers. And it’s simply drawing cards to answer the question, “What is my mission as a tarot reader?” or “What is my mission as a fortune teller?” However you’d like to phrase it. Initially I thought this makes sense only if you don’t know, but if you do know there’s something quite cool about validating that with a reading. First, you might discover that what you thought was your mission really isn’t; the reading reminds you that there’s something else going on. Or, it might tell you what you already know, but it gives you the opportunity to show how the answer appears in cards—a good opportunity to explore how your tarot communicators work with you. I think there’s something quite cool about reading a question you already know the answer to, even if only to work backwards from the answer and “make” the cards give you what you already know is true. I’ve mentioned this before, but my early YouTube videos were all inspired by Tarot Tells the Tale by James Ricklef. I did readings for characters from books and movies. I always got a totally—amazingly—appropriate spread that described the story in incredible ways. This stuff works and doing that is another way you can see how the cards communicate with you. And if you do the same question with several decks, you can see how different decks communicate the same answer. Again, quite cool! A quick demo: I pulled three cards to answer the question and wound up with Art/Temperance (2), Knight(King) of Swords (1), and Queen of Wands (3). (Thoth Tarot) I always smile when the sorta weirdly “right” cards show up, and what made me smile in this case was Art. I’ve said it before, but I do give Crowley a wee bit of credit for two of the main changes he made to the majors. Art/Temperance—though I don’t really read it as he intended, I love that adjustment. And the other one I love is Adjustment/Justice. I like it in this case because I do believe art is an art. Anyway, let’s see . . . The Knight (King) of Swords is probably the card I’d choose if I were picking a significator (sometimes it’s the queen of the same suit). He’s not my significator, though; not in the esoterica sense. The King of Pentacles is. I was born in the third decan of Leo, which he rules. The Knight of Swords is very “me” though in that I’m quite speedy as a reader. (The knight in the Thoth carries the normal knight’s energy—a thing I typically don’t associate with Waite/Marseille kings. Because the Princes in the Thoth deck have the “regal” aspect, they get the kings’ laziness—in my way of doing things.) I want readings to be sharp, clear, precise, and not go on so long we forget what we’re doing. But I want them to be beautiful, artistic, poetic (Art). I want them to be integrated, by which I mean I want the client to be able do something with or about the reading (also Art in the way Crowley intended, as the integration of parts of something). Finally, I want (most of) my clients to feel like bad-asses—and, frankly, I would like to feel that way, too (Queen of Wands). That’s pretty in line with what I said before! Yay me. But also, it’s not always easy to read on these kinds of questions—so if you don’t find an answer as easily as I did, know in part that I am a speedy reader and also that I was absolutely distracted while doing things—which sometimes, I know this sounds crazy, but sometimes can help with a self-reading because we don’t have the time to get in our heads about what things are “supposed” to be. Try it. You may find it really useful! Until next week! Cards drawn, a line of five:
Ten of Wands (4), Ace of Coins (2), Queen of Wands (1), The Devil (3), The Tower of Babel (5) Deck: La Corte dei Tarrochi by Maria D’Onofrio (published by Il Meneghello) You can divine with anything if you want to. For example, does it mean anything that I dilly-dallied all day in writing this, then when I finally got up to do it I went into the office and opted not to use either of the decks I’d planned on? Both are decks I haven’t yet had a chance to shuffle. And I’ve been craving new decks lately, mostly out of boredom. I keep going to bookstores hoping to see something worth taking home, but not much of interest has crossed my path. Still, when I selected today’s deck, I looked at my chaotic shelves and thought, You know: You should pick a deck you love and haven’t looked at in ages. Of the three I considered (The Hoi Polloi, the World Spirit, and this), the one I chose is the one I’ve forgotten to look at the longest. I sorta “knew” it was the deck as soon as my eye fell on it. And so what of this choice? If I were to describe this deck, might it say something about me or my life at present, or the season I’m entering? This indie deck is unique in so many ways and remains potentially my absolute favorite tarot ever made. Its shape is long and thin, not unlike a bookmark; it’s not like shaped any other deck I have. And he’s a thicc boi. The stock is also unlike any other: rigid, deeply textured, flecked with pulp. It feels handmade, though it must have some machining because it’s also tightly woven and quite strong. Its sharp corners give it “bite.” It’s stocky, it’s solid, it’s experiential—visceral. I love shuffling these cards, though I can only overhand them. That’s something of a paradox because I typically loathe when I can’t riffle-and-bridge. I’m rough with my decks. I like them to obey my rules. This one doesn’t do that. I have to bend my will to it. Artistically, it’s charming, oddball, very European, and I think very Italian specifically. It’s a pip deck, but not Marseille—not like any other pip deck. Happily, its pips are hand drawn and each is unique, even if the decoration doesn’t necessarily aid in interpretation, it’s quite nice that the artist really made the cards. I so resent pip decks with lazy-ass pips. The deck itself is modern, from the last thirty years or so—definitely within my lifetime—but it harkens back to Marseille and even Visconti imagery, with simple figures, odd faces, delightfully contorted postures, and the maybe more of an Imperial/Romey vibe than I’m typically into. But it works. I wouldn’t change anything—except for maybe bumping up the saturation a little. It’s a deck of anomalies. And I think that this suggests a certain amount of dichotomy in my own life. I for sure could stand to let someone else take charge for a little while, that’s for sure; I’m always interested in things with bite; and, given that it’s rapidly heading toward the winter solstice, I also crave the familiar and the cozy—even though my version of familiar and cozy is somewhat oddball, somewhat contorted, somewhat out of character. And that all sounds about right. We can read anything. This came up in our session of Re-Learning the Tarot, the four-week workshop I’m hosting right now. Everything and anything can be used for divination once you start seeing the world like a diviner. That’s a term I mentioned in my most recent videos about the art and science of interpretation and the blend of confidence and humility needed to be a good reader. Seeing the world like a diviner also happens to be a large chapter in my forthcoming book, The Modern Fortune Teller’s Field Guide--have I mentioned that recently? (Spoiler: yes. Coming autumn, 2025 . . . if there is a autumn 2025). And I thought it might be cool to focus the reading around that concept today. Although I also broke my own rule. I only decided to do that after I’d already shuffled and drawn on my usual question, “What is Lesson #?” But I’m all about iconoclasm, and if I can’t break my own fucking rules, than what kind of rebel am I? Maybe even the feel of the deck itself, as described above, will have something to add to this chaotic equation! In the draw, the Queen of Wands sits flanked by, on the left, the Ten of Wands (her own suit) and the Ace of Coins, and, on the right, by The Devil and The Tower. I love this. This suite of cards is spicy, aromatic, resinous, luminous, and kinky. And that, dear reader, is the revolutionary costume for the day, children, OK? Tongue pop. (I can’t actually do that.) If we take this array to explore the concept of how we might see the world as diviners, we find ourselves sitting right at the center of a crossroads—a place Mr. Diavolo quite likes. The Ace of Coins reminds us that our divinatory gaze must be practical and down to earth. We are talking about life; we are talking about today and tomorrow, not some eventual nevertime or some once-upon-a-when; we are exploring what being human on this planet at this moment involves; we are spilling tea, we are prying through NDAs, we are saying what needs to be said—the things the clients (us) need, not necessarily what they (we) hope for or want, but what they (we) need. And these things are big! That’s what the Ten of Wands is doing here. Reminding us that these daily things, these tiny things, these trips-to-the-pharmacy things, these is-he-cheating-on-me things, these will-she-come-back things, these are the things that people really care about. We have to be rooted in reality—particularly if we offer our divinatory services to others, regardless of whether or not we charge. I am so, so, so, so evangelical in my belief in this, and it actually came up on Instagram this morning, so I’m also very present with it. Someone posted something I have said before--something I have not been immune from feeling: that tarot can explore all the great mysteries of the universe, but most people want to know if their ex is coming back. Dear ones: this is a triggering statement to me, precisely because I once felt that way. I felt that way just before I was about to give up tarot for good! I’ve written about this elsewhere; I’ll spare you all those gory details. And if you’ve followed me for any time you know I’m good at giving things up forever that don’t always seem to have given me up. Hashtag my toxic trait. I felt that way because I was burned out on tarot and because I had absorbed a huge amount of snobbery about divination. I’m not saying the person who posted that is a snob. I might be saying they could be burned out. But that’s not my job, here; my job to say, NO! Friends, for the person in pain, “Will my ex come back?” is one of the great mysteries of the universe! We don’t get to decide what our clients, friends, loved ones think is a mystery worthy of divination. Everything is important enough to be divined if the person asking about it really cares and really wants to know. I say all the time, you get to draw the lines wherever you want them. You get to decide what you read about. Absolutely. I would never tell a reader otherwise. And there are many reasons for not reading about a variety of topics. But I feel in my core that just because we won’t read about something, or just because we don’t enjoy reading about something, doesn’t mean that it’s not worth reading about. The things that people care about, the things that rile their minds, those are the things that matter. When we say “great mysteries,” we seem to be indicating that there is something more important than life we should be focusing on. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t. I’ve come to believe that the daily is sacred. But either way, we can’t focus on the great mysteries if we’re depressed and lonely and wondering why the person who we thought proved our value to us decided to ruin everything by leaving? If you’ve never felt that way, I’m jealous. If you have, maybe it feels like the person thinking this way needs therapy, like you got. But they’re not there yet. What matters and what is important to an individual is important to them--and so it is important to the reader--regardless of whether or not it is objectively “worthy” of exploration. This is one of my major issues with standard issue esotericism. The focus of our lives can’t be solely on escaping from them. Otherwise what’s the point? And if we’re offering readings to others, we are required to have an understanding of life on the ground. Those are the lives our clients are living. We are in the service industry. I believe that strongly. I don’t think the customer is always right, but I think the customer’s question is always more important than anything I could possibly come up with. Does it need clarification? Maybe. Could it be worded better? Often. Will it break an ethical boundary? If it does, I must decline. But is it unimportant? Never. Our clients, paying or not, know what they need to know more than we do. And it is an honor to be able to help them achieve intel. It’s the whole gig, really. Bit soap boxy, innit? And I’m not throwing shade; I’m not grilling beef. (I just made that up. You’re welcome.) I’m sharing a deeply-held part of my cosmology and mission as a diviner in language designed to show how strongly I feel about this and how important it is to me. There is no mystery greater than the one dogging the client. Full stop. And scene. Anyhoo. Point is: the banal things people care about are really important to them, so they’re important to us. On the other side of the spread we discover The Devil and The Tower of Babel. In this case, D’Onofrio titles the card specifically; that’s not me interpreting the image. I frequently ignore a lot of what artists do on their cards, but not because I don’t love artists. Because I’m . . . me. But being me, sometimes a small change to a card can be quite revelatory. As I recall it, the story of the Tower of Babel involves humanity wanting to climb into heavens to come close to divinity. God, being constantly surprised by the things “he” made doing things “he” doesn’t like, decides that humans must be punished for this act of hubris. He destroys the growing tower, sending the people climbing/building it plummeting all over the earth, landing in new locations and suddenly speaking different languages. Prior to this, evidently, there was only one race and we all spoke the same langy (short for “language” . . . made that up, too. you can use it, but I get credit). Cool! This is the version of my childhood Catholic school religion classes, anyway; I imagine it has more nuanced, probably darker versions. But it’s the way my educators (indoctrinators?) explained why we all speak different languages. (Did it explain why we worship a god who does shit like that? No. Did it explain Christianity’s lengthy history of racism? Also no. Weird.) We learn the tower as a tale of hubris, or my classmates and I did anyway. Dumb humanity, always fucking shit up. Fuck around and find out, silly mortals. Trix are for kids! And yet . . . it really is a story of curiosity. Humans want to understand god, that’s the whole point of esotericism and, really, like . . . most world religions. Congress, communion with divinity. People understand divinity to be located in the sky, and in this story they seem to be on to something, otherwise diva—I mean divinity--wouldn’t have gotten so P.O.’ed. They were curious, they started building a tower, they thought “hey—why not?” I mean, metaphorically, it’s sorta what Kabbala is about (at least in my very limited understanding of it): climbing the ladder of enlightenment to achieve congress with G*d. So, either our human desire to understand the divine better is wrong and we shouldn’t be doing that, or . . . . : it’s not divinity that doesn’t want us coming closer to it . . . it’s that religion doesn’t want us coming closer to divinity, because then we won’t need religion—organized ones, at any rate. Which is of course the reality. Religion, and by this time we can accept that we’re talking specifically, or at least originally, about “Christianity,” doesn’t want us to be curious. Religion wants us to be obedient and to pay for the intercession on our behalf that the priests somehow only have access to . . . even though we’re, like, also told to pray at lot . . . , so who knows . . . ? Anyway, I say it’s just another biblical example of gatekept knowledge—which the foundational texts of the Abrahamic faithways are full of. “Do not ask questions, do not seek knowledge, obey the teachers, obey the leaders, obey obey obey.” Meanwhile, the bible is all riddled with divination. Divination is an act of curiosity, and so it is the antithesis of obedience. It is also the antithesis of the Tower of Babel story. Divination IS the tower of babel. The esotericists love to say what the tarot “is” — it’s a language of symbols, it’s the book of Thoth, it’s the royal road, it’s this, it’s that. It’s none of those—and all of them. And so it is (and isn’t) the Tower of Babel. It is an attempt to get close to the divine, to shake hands with sky daddy, to talk to the gawds, henny. Except, like, the point of that story is that the divine doesn’t want us ringing the damn doorbell . . . ? Apparently . . . ? What kind of divinity does want us to bother him in the middle of the night? Oh, right. The antithesis of a god who hates curiosity. The god of curiosity: Diavolo. That stud who keep showing up around here lately, giving us the lusty gift of his presence once more. Hey, big boy! In the OG story of punishment-for-knowledge, he shows up, too. Actually, he doesn’t. The serpent in the Garden of Eden is never specifically ID’d as the devil, because the devil as we know him today (small-d devil, not Big Daddy Devil) didn’t exist that. The Devil, weirdly, is the creation of Christianity designed to hurt those of us who refuse conformity . . . and somehow they managed to create an icon that shows us how to transcend their limitations. Odd. Anyway, the devil is not who tempts Eve in the bible, but like the tower of babel, it is a myth of control. And anyone with even the tiniest rebellious brain is asking why knowledge is such a bad thing by the time they’re making first communion. And we could get into all the theological shit about translations and what’s really happening and what the original versions of the myth really are—but that’s not the point. The point is that the devil—or the implication of him—shows up wherever Abrahamic allegories present the human with a choice. Whenever someone is asked to choose between knowing and not knowing, they devil tempts to them know. The ideal, somehow, is to choose not knowing; to defy the essential nature of being a person on this planet—a nature presumably built into us by the god who supposedly doesn’t want us asking questions? This god would simply prefer that we accept ignorance to suit the ego of this loving god who . . . I’m sorry, wait. Doesn’t it sound like these stories have it backwards? In this corner, we have “God,” sky daddy, who, like, gave you curiosity but doesn’t want you to ever use it. And in this corner, we have the “evil one,” who didn’t make you and didn’t give you curiosity but has the ability to help slake that need in such a way that navigating life is, like . . . , easier? What’s going on here? Who do we choose?The egotistical prince of ignorance? Or the one who gets it and wants the answers, too? Which of these is really the villain and which the hero? Point belabored, point made. Point is: The Devil is the god of curiosity. He wants to know and he wants us to know. And so what the hell are these two cards saying? “You don’t need to climb to impossible heights in order to get the answers you seek. That way lies ruin. No, you stay down here on earth, and you ask the divinities that will tell you.” Knowledge is power. Too many of us are powerless. So we turn to the entities willing to give us what we need: guidance, guideposts, atlases, compasses, the whole nine. But I think there lies a warning, here, too. We can, if we get too addicted (a word regrettably saddled onto the Devil) to knowledge, or to getting readings, or to knowing, or even to being a provider of answers, we can wind up climbing that tower and getting stuck there—and then pushed from its heights. I think there’s a warning about ego here (don’t get too big for your britches, bitches) and also a reminder that not everything requires divination—and/or that not everything requires a diviner. Which is another way of saying the britches thing, but has to do more with kind of a collective sense of import. We can’t take ourselves too seriously, even if what we do is good and divine and maybe even sacred. We’re just fools at the end of the day all moving in the same direction, whether we like it or not. Be curious, but don’t, like, get crazy about it, y’know? That’s what it’s saying. You don’t need a reading on what to make for dinner—though most days it sure fucking feels like it. I think the pair also reinforces what’s on the left side of the spread: chaos is chaos, even if it doesn’t feel that way to the outside observer. The Tower and the Ten of Wands mirror each other and in doing they reinforce each others’ intensity. What’s big in a client’s life is big, even if it doesn’t feel that way to us. What’s mysterious is mysterious, even if we’re not personally interested in solving that one. The mirrored pairing of the Ace of Coins and the Devil is fun, because they’re appropriately earthy and in their way rather well-suited. I think it reminds us that life can be burdensome, even when only perceived that way. And here I’m thinking about the Devil as a misunderstood entity. Even today, tarots create him in a Christian way despite the reality that as diviners, we’re doing the “devil’s work” in the sense that we’re embodying a task that Christianity reviles. Anything Christianity hates is Satanic. They say it themselves! The reputation burdens the card, even though it’s only a perception of it—in the same way that clients can perceive something as more important, more burdensome, than it is. And the reading may help them see that. Which is A-OK, because it means they can move on and start healing and eventually focus on other things. I’ve said before and I’ve no doubt I’ll say it again: maybe one of the main gifts we offer as readers is the ability to help people make sense of things they don’t understand so that they can ultimately focus on the “important” stuff, too. That runs the risk of sounding loftier than I mean it to, but really it’s . . . if we can help them sweat the small stuff, they can find space for the “great mysteries” we’re all supposedly so in need of exploring. That’s snark, not shade. I’m being silly. (Mostly.) I said at the start of the interpretation that I could call on the deck choice to see whether it added anything to the reading. In this case, absolutely: the choice of the tower’s title changed everything about this interpretation. Its cardstock and quality I don’t think says much but the way I interpreted the choice of the deck above is also reinforced when a reading confirms something I already think. Smiley face. But I really enjoyed this reading and the little exploration of how the deck describes my current needs was fun. I encourage you to do the same next time you’re called to use a deck you haven’t in a while. There’s great coolness to be found in divinatory experimentations like that. Now, on to your spread: A Read of One’s Own I struggled developing a spread for this lesson, because the lesson is somewhat simple: don’t judge clients’ questions, including your own. Don’t be a snob about import. What matters to someone really matters to them, whether or not it seems to your view as pointless. How do you read about that? But here we’re presented with the topic of bias, which is really what this amounts to. Bias against a particular kind of divinatory need. And we’ve all got biases. It’s helpful to remember that, particularly if—like me—you enjoy getting on your justice high horse. We’ve all got biases. And it’s not easy to detect them because they’re so ingrained in us. What I propose for this weeks spread is a three-card pull exploring the question, “What is a divinatory bias that I’m not aware of but that is making my readings less effective?” Full disclosure, this will not be an easy one to read on for the simply fact that if we knew what the bias was, we’d do something about it. Biases are really hard to see, and when we’re reading cards we tend to rely on little links between what we know about a situation and what we see in the cards. That means that we’re looking for evidence of something in the cards what we can’t actually see—yet. It’s not easy to do. It requires a certain kind of ruthless self-reflection many of us will find challenging. But give it a go. See what you can come up with. And if you’re really struggling, recognize that this is hard and trade readings with someone else. That’s probably the easiest way to go about this, honestly. But it still requires self reflection. Ew. Arc of 5.
Cards drawn: Emotions (XIX, 21); 4 of water; 5 of earth; 9 of fire; 9 of air Deck: Dream of Gaia Tarot by Ravynne Phelan I’d intended to use a different deck today, but I saw this one sitting out on my table as it has been for ages now. I rarely use it but I quite like it. It’s barely a tarot, I call it a “taroracle,” but it’s also an exciting thing sometimes to break with the familiar. In fact, it’s an excellent way to keep our brains sharp, active, and experimenting. The main reason I didn’t use this deck for ages after getting it and liking it is that it is so far from tarot. The minors are “situational” but not Waite-Smith or Thoth. They’re their own thing. And the majors are entirely remade. Then at a certain point last year I thought, “Well, you know, you’ve managed to read all kinds non-tarot of systems, now; why not return to this deck and see what you can do with it?” And I did, and I have had some good readings. Weirdly, using non-traditional tarots seems to be particularly effective when reading for myself because it forces me to not be lazy. I can’t rest on my own tired knowledge; I have to dig and actually divine, rather than reciting. I never phone it in for clients but I typically do when reading for myself. But what’s this reading have to say? Starting with the central card, the one that went down first, we find the Five of Earth. This deck uses the elements in place of suit objects, not a big departure. The numerology that Phelan uses is completely different from mine, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use it—that doesn’t mean I can’t unite her images with my system. And in some ways, that’s maybe the first lesson of this particular entry: how to read with non-trad tarots without throwing everything you’ve learned out the window. Fives are unstable numbers. Perhaps the most unstable. They reject the status quo, a particularly Aquarian tendency in my opinion. Earth, of course, represents money, day to day life, and that which grounds us. This is a time where the earth for many of us is particularly unstable, particularly . . . swampy. It’s quicksand. In this case, Phelan’s image offers a host of potentials. The card seems to suggest trickery, con artistry, and the loss that comes from it. See the sobbing, ghostly image in the background and the devlish figure in the fore—a particularly queer being, if you ask me. I can’t guess the author’s intent, but this feels very much to me a non-binary person. The eyebrows, the jawline, the shape of the eyes—these all suggest AMAB facial structure; the hands, the ears, the lips, the hair, the posture suggest AFAB tendencies. Then there’s the rash of red we see at the hairline and on the hands, along with the horns and the sharp finger nails. These suggest to me an animal or otherworldly entity. So not only does this person defy gender, they defy species. In that way, one might hold them as a sibling of Baphomet, who is similarly non-binary. My first thought when seeing this card was our old pal, Donald J. Trump and his con-artistry taking over the planet. I rejected that out of pocket, though, mostly because I don’t feel like giving him any fucking credit and also because that’s not really contextually relevant in a blog about divination. Yes, his hucksterism may well cause us losses—that’s pretty certain, in fact. On the other hand, I refuse to let this queer image represent such a revoltingly straight entity. In fact, I think this foreground figure represents us, dear ones: fortune teller, diviners, readers, witches, and anyone vilified for our lack of “acceptable” tendencies. The figure turning away isn’t the victim, no no; this figure is white bread, cis het trad wife society that makes itself the victim any time anyone takes it upon themselves to say, “Fuck your norms, I am fucking magic.” For folks who step out of the cis het paradigm of acceptability, everything is unstable—everything is very five. In fact, we are the destabilizing force that earth needs at the moment, because the status quo isn’t going to save us. The so-called “US” has made it very clear that we can collectively go fuck ourselves so that ugly, boring, mean, entitled straight white men and their equally ugly, boring, mean, and entitled handmaidens can feel safe in their incredibly ugly, boring, mean, dull, entitled lives. But their victories don’t mean we’re less interesting; it means that we’ve got to hold on to our destabilizing vibes harder. (For what it’s worth, I do not think the other electoral outcome wouldn’t have done much but play out the same way the last four years have—which was also unsustainable. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have preferred something less scary, but I’m also not saying I’m not furious about the DNC’s staggering ineptitude. I have left that particular cult for good. I have zero hope in politics, anymore. Thank god I didn’t major in poly sci, as I intended to. I’ve already got an MFA in an industry I can’t stomach anymore.) It’s fun that I’ve been reading so much about the Devil in modern trad craft because this card shows up as the central image and displays some devilishness. And this is yet another reason why I decided the “victim” isn’t white tears Becky in the background, but the non-binary being in the front. “Ouch,” the lady in the background cries, “Your cards are hurting me. Did you steal those jewels? I’m calling the cops! Waahhhh Rickyyyyyy.” So many moments over the last few weeks have left me saying to myself, “This is what you’ve been training for.” All of us in the divination spaces are this foreground figure, being fucking magic despite constant admonitions not to. (I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned this before, but as a young Catholic boy, I was a red-headed, left-handed fembot; it’s odd to me that it took me so long to see, despite even what people told me growing up, that I am “of the devil.”) Let’s expanded our scope for a moment. The Five of Earth is flanked by the Four of Water and the Nine of Fire. Fours are not unstable; fours are conservative as fuck. That’s one thing that makes the fives so relentless. They are fed up with being held back, with being restrained. The Four of Water suggests “emotional stability.” Nines, like fives, are also unstable (all odd numbers are). Nines of Fire in pretty all version of tarot can suggest burnout. You’ve likely heard me talk about that before. It’s “too much” fire. But in this case, I think it’s creating an antidote to the four. Before I get into why, let’s actually look at the two cards to the left of the center (ironic—or not?—that the conservative card shows up “left of center,” eh?) The Emotions card has no cognate in trad tarot. As I mentioned, all the majors in this deck have been remade. But there were times we didn’t know what the “normal” majors meant as well, so this is no issue for us. I tend to take the majors more-or-less at face value more or less most of the time. Except for when I don’t. Which also happens more or less most of the time. By which I mean, I don’t really know how often I do that—but I do. Anyway. What are emotions? If you look up the word in a dictionary, you can see lexicographers have a hard time defining it. In order to tell us what an emotion is, they name emotions. But they can’t tell us what they are. They’re “sensations” of “feeling.” But they can’t really say what that means. It’s like attempting to define a color. What is “red”? What is “blue”? And how do I know that what you see as red is the same as what I see? We don’t know; we have no way of knowing. Which means that emotion, like color, is something we think we understand—something we get conceptually, philosophically, but not something that we’re able to truly “get.” I might make the argument (though I’m not sure I’d defend it that hard) that emotions are simply the names we give for our current state of being, sort of our base level mood at any given time. I’d also argue (though, again, not that forcefully) that emotions are a way our body warns us about our present state of danger or safety. When we feel “love” or “happiness” or even “boredom,” our body recognizes that it is safe. When we feel “angry” or “sad” or “anxious,” our body recognize that we are not safe. It doesn’t know for sure, it’s doing its best to suss out our environment and use its natural receptors to do this. For those of us who live with anxiety and depression, our body is somehow more prone to telling us that we’re unsafe. Usually we’re not, not these days, but there are definitely times when we’re in danger. But our bodies can’t really tell the difference between a real trigger--an actual danger—and an imagined one. If, like me, you also have some form of neurodivergence, you’re also more prone to over reacting to things. Everything is magnified. So that an objectively small trigger might yield a major meltdown. This happens to me when I feel rejected, for example. Also when I fuck something up, even something unimportant, like dropping a fork while doing dishes. Anyway, a slight digression—perhaps. But the thing that I take away from the Emotions card partnered with the Four of Water is, in some ways, we’ve (not everyone, many of us) been in a bit of a day dream. Now, the images on the Emotions card aren’t really yielding much. But they’re intended, I think, to depict the gamut. The Four of Water could be said to “rhyme” with the Five of Earth, thanks to the ghostly hue of the female-presenting figures thereon. You might even detect that the Four of Water figure holds a necklace not totally unlike the foreground figure in the five. What I see is someone who has been lulled into a false sense of security suddenly waking up and facing a reality. That “someone” can both be the Becky I saw in the five prior, but also the figure in the front. “We” (us, reader) are also being awoken as the four transforms into the five. “You’ve been led into a lull, but that will not help you. Be sad about it if you want, but it’s time to let the Devil out.” Everything solidifies. Like a spiritual erection. A sentence I never imagined writing, but there you have it. We are forced into reality, forced into facing things as they are, and recognizing that we may be about to face some Becky tears, too. Not our own, but we will probably be accused of being indifferent to the “pain” of the privileged. (I don’t doubt that privileged people have pain. I just think they don’t really know what their pain actually is. I keep thinking about that meme of the white lady with a sticker of a bull’s eye taped to her forehead. Her caption reading, “What it feels like to be a conservative woman in America today.” But the best part is the response from someone else, who says, “I actually love this post, because that’s a fake bull’s eye and you put it there yourself.” Like, if privileged people could pause and recognize that the very fact they make themselves into victims is a sign of how massively psychologically fucked up they truly are, they’d spend less time worrying about trans boys playing baseball and more about the fact that they’re teaching their children to be callous fucking assholes. But whatever.) Anyway, let’s return to the Nine of Fire. The reason I wanted to come back to this is because I recognized that the two cards to the right of the five are both nines. So we have the projective suits (fire, air) and the weight of nine. Nine is an interesting number because while it can be “too much” of something it can also be thought of as rapid expansion (3+3+3). Major expansion of energy, of fire; major expansion of intellect, learning, of air. One might, if one were of a mind, say that the combo of fire and air creates magic. The spiritual energy of fire meeting the conductive energy of air. What do I mean by “conductive”? Air “conducts” things in the sense of pushing them in certain directions. It also conducts whatever the temperature is. When it’s hot out, the air is hot. It may vary from spot to spot, but when it’s hot, it’s hot all around us. So it “conducts” heat. Which basically means it puts it into action. Bit of a stretch, but who cares? It makes sense. I think this suggests that it’s time to start making some big, bold, energetic, conductive shifts to the stasis we’ve experienced. And I think we can think about this from a divinatory viewpoint in a few ways: first, likely we’re going to have take this attitude toward our divantory work. People are going to need different things as they experience bigger, more dramatic (more projective) emotions and states of being (the Emotions card mirrors the Nine of Air, and air is closely connected to emotion because our mind often dictates what we’re feeling—or attempts to make sense of it). This means that our usual ways of doing things won’t work, or at least may have to be adjusted, expanded, and/or recalibrated. Another way to look at this is in a more broadly spiritual way: we may need to expand the work we do. I think about the potential threats of the incoming administration (and based on my own readings, I feel pretty strongly we haven’t seen the end of drama around this election—but I don’t know anymore), education and healthcare could become dramatically more difficult to come by. There’s also nothing saying more “spirituality” won’t be forced on us, because of course the “American” right wing loves to pretend it gives a flying fuck about Jesus but shoving laws in our faces Jesus wouldn’t have given a flying fuck about. People may need spiritual alternatives, and diviners may be able to provide that. In many ways, diviners may be called upon to do things that we’re not used to because the world needs that. This sounds awfully self-aggrandizing, but I don’t mean it that way. I simply mean, what clients (and when we read for ourselves, we’ve clients) need will change and we would do well to adapt to those needs. The presence of the two nines, though, does remind us that we can also become easily burned out, spiritually and mentally, if we’re not careful. Of course you know that theme is a trend in this blog, but it is inevitable that when we feel like we’re at war, we’re going to fight all the time. That doesn’t leave us any rest and recuperation, and we can make ourselves sick. Given that healthcare may be impacted, that’s not great—so we need to make sure that we’re measuring our sense of energy, our output, etc., so that we’re getting back what we put out. This may all sound somewhat dystopian. Well, I’m not an optimist by nature. We easily could be in for some massively dystopian stuff quite soon. But I also think that the devil figure, that horned being in the Five of Earth, reminds us: this is what you’ve been training for. (Quick context observation: Note that I didn’t even consider the images on the two nines. That’s not to say they don’t matter, only that they weren’t the first thing I needed in this context. The number and elements really gave me the intel I needed. If I wanted to, I could keep going and use the images to deepen the reading—but I don’t need to, and I’m trying to keep this relatively brief. Also please note that if I had blue eyes and long hair, I’d bear a strange resemblance to the figure on the Nine of Fire.) A Read of One’s Own I regret that the week got away from me and I didn’t have time to create a new spread and write a demo of it. But I think the content of this post warrants a spread, so I’m going to create one now. Though I won’t provide an example, I’m confident you’ll figure it out. Position 1: In what ways may my divinatory practice need to evolve over the next few years? Position 2: What things might my clients/querents/self need out of readings that I’m not currently versed in? Position 3: In what ways have I already been preparing myself for this? Position 4: Where in my practice should I start thinking about exploring aspects of my art that I don’t currently use—or, what blind spots do I need to be aware of as I’m evolving? Position 5: How can I check my progress? = As always, I recommend using at least three cards per position, but this is of course up to you! Have a good week, friends. See next time. |
AboutEach post is a tarot reading about the tarot, a lesson about the cards from the cards. Each ends with a brand new spread you can use to explore the main concepts of the reading. Archives
February 2025
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