![]() 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!
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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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