lesson 27: in which we add additional cards like no one’s watching and learn stuff along the way—and see what is on the divinatory horizon for 2025

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.