Modern Day Tarot Play: Know yourself, shape your life

Divination or Self-Realization?

This book is written to honour the higher function of the tarot, as a tool for greater self-awareness and realization, understanding that the powers of divination and future prediction are but by-products of this deeper process of psychic purification and refinement. Allowing yourself to be driven by the motive of attaining extra-sensory perceptive powers will have the opposite effect: like a fly caught in a spider’s web, the more forcibly the ego strives and struggles to get ahead, the more stuck or fixed your position in life becomes.

So the first and most crucial stage in seeking intuitive-level clarity is to unclutter your mind of any convoluted ego projections, motivations and agendas. Forging a completely honest, transparent, self-realized relationship with yourself is the only way to ensure you are a pure channel and giving absolutely accurate readings, whatever your purpose.

Reading the Cards: A Quick-Start Guide

When sitting down to read the cards, you should find a quiet space where you are unlikely to be interrupted.

You must then decide whether you want to do a general life reading, look only at a specific area of life or find an answer to a specific question.

Then, looking in the layouts section at the back of the book (here (#litres_trial_promo)), select a layout that you feel will provide the most interesting and relevant reading or answer to your question.

Now, taking the entire deck, shuffle the cards in whichever way you find most comfortable, making sure you keep the cards image side down so you see only the generic backs of the cards. Bear in mind, if you are reading the cards for someone else, that it is always the person asking the question and receiving the reading who must do the shuffling.

While shuffling, hold the question you want answered in your mind, be it general or specific, until you intuitively feel the cards are sufficiently shuffled and ready to be laid down.

Place the shuffled deck on the table in front of you (it’s best to find a flat surface large enough to accommodate the number of cards shown in your chosen layout).

Still holding your question or intention in mind, split the shuffled cards into three separate piles and, remembering the order in which you cut them, place them image side down. The piles don’t have to be made equal, but can be if that is your preference.

Then put the deck back together in a different way from how you split it.

Now the cards are ready to be laid, image side down, in whatever layout you have chosen.

To lay the cards, first choose a number between one and seven, or, if you are reading for someone else, ask them to choose this number.

Say the number you choose is seven, first remove six cards from the top of the deck and place them to one side, so it is the seventh card that you place in position one of your chosen layout. Then, to lay the second card in the layout, do the same again, removing another six cards from the top of the deck, so it is the seventh card that you place in position two of the reading. Keep discarding six cards and laying only the seventh card until every card in the layout has been placed.

Once the cards are in position, you can begin to turn them over, so the image side faces up and is the right way round. You can either turn all the cards over at once, or, if you are new to tarot reading, it may be more beneficial to follow the sequential order specified for your chosen layout and turn the cards over one at a time. If you are a beginner, turning the cards slowly and individually will help you to fully absorb the lessons contained within each card before seeing how the story unfolds by moving on to the next. It is easy for beginners to become overwhelmed and despondent when faced with the large amount of information present in a multiple card reading, hence it is best for those new to tarot reading to take the step-by-step approach rather than trying to read the cards as a synthesized whole.

Using the intuitive go-to statements provided in this book as a starting point, you can now start to piece together a narrative framework in relation to your posed question or area of interest. On each of the cards pages that follow you will find words and ideas that will form a gateway between your conscious and subconscious. Basic key phrases for each card are emboldened for the purposes of quicker referencing to help refresh the memory of those who are familiar with the tarot and to help new users to grasp the basic meaning of each card.

While analysing each card individually is the necessary first step in learning to read the tarot, the tone a specific card has, rather than the basic symbolic ideas it presents, can shift depending on the type of influence specific to the others surrounding it. Herein lies the art of reading tarot: reading the cards together as a synthesized whole, which is akin to viewing each card combination through a prism to assess any tonal variations, enhancements and augmentations of their basic textbook definitions. This is what I hope the connective structuring of book will help you achieve, via its synthesized and bracketed suggestions of how various card combinations can play out.

Bear in mind that the ideas on these pages that inexplicably resonate or provoke an uncomfortable, rather than flattering, gratifying, indulging or obliging emotional reaction, are those with the potential, if the guidance is integrated, to induce the greatest growth, change and transformation.

Major and Minor Arcana

The tarot deck consists of seventy-eight cards: twenty-two Major Arcana cards, ranging from the Fool as card 0 to the World as card 21, and fifty-six Minor Arcana cards.

Each of the Major Arcana cards, which represent the major forces and events at work in the situation, depicts an archetypal character or scene, as you might find when analysing the individual driving forces in a fictional tale. Each archetype is distinctly different, embodying a uniquely individual type of psychology, philosophy, spirituality or pattern of behavioural response. Archetypes might have diametrically different responses to exactly the same personal or professional life situation. For example, though the Devil and the High Priestess both deal in hidden matters, the latter is morally and ethically grounded in their words and actions, whereas the former is not.

The fifty-six Minor Arcana cards are divided into four suits: Wands, Cups, Pentacles and Swords. They depict the minor events that occur as a result of the Major Arcana’s life-force archetypes.

Just as the knocking over of the first domino in a line will knock down the rest, so the Major Arcana cards set off a chain reaction to produce the situations and events depicted in the Minor Arcana. Therefore I have extended the twenty-two Major Arcana card sections to incorporate a deeper study and analysis of which key human interest areas will trigger a particular response from each unique archetype. These sections are broken down as follows: personification and psychology; spirituality and philosophy; personal life; professional life; property, finances and resources; health and well-being.

The four suits of the Minor Arcana need no such breaking down, as each, by design, deals specifically with one of the four key areas of human concern: the Wands, physical energy and action; the Cups, feelings and emotions; the Pentacles, money and material acquisitions; the Swords, thought processes and intellect.

Advancing your Tarot Reading

As the English poet and cleric John Donne said in 1624, ‘No man is an island,’ and by finding similar themes and symbolism repeated throughout the cards, you can begin to form a mental web or network of connections between the different narrative themes, scenes and characters of the Major and Minor Arcana. For instance, the symbols of the upright sword, Sun/daylight and Moon/night are featured many times throughout the deck, so in grasping the meaning of these symbols and seeing and forming connections between the cards, you can begin to understand how the cards, when read in combination, work together as a whole.

For the advanced practitioner, who already has a good understanding of the meanings for the individual cards, I have placed abbreviations for all seventy-eight cards, embedded within brackets, throughout the card interpretation sections. These can be used to assist the reader in realizing the links between the cards and understanding how it is possible to quickly produce refined, succinct and wholly synthesized interpretations from the huge amount of raw symbolic information contained within a set of cards.

SUITS KEY CODE

W: Wands

C: Cups

P: Pentacles

S: Swords

An example of a key coded suit:

1C: Ace of Cups

2C: Two of Cups

3C: Three of Cups

and so on until the …

PC: Page of Cups

KnC: Knight of Cups

QC: Queen of Cups

KC: King of Cups

NB Only the suits are abbreviated; the Major Arcana card names appear in full.

Reading the Cards in Combination

While it is necessary for those who are new to tarot to first grasp the basic meanings of the cards, there will come a time when the beginner will hit a wall. Every tarot reader will reach this point, when they find that the simplistic style of reading the cards individually, without taking the relationship they have with any neighbouring cards into consideration, will no longer do. It is natural to want more depth and complexity from a tarot reading, for, after all, humans are complex creatures, made so by the dynamic tensions between the vital forces at play in their lives. This is where reading tarot cards in combination can become most useful and enlightening, by showing a fuller picture of all the influences, compulsions and impulses at work. Only by reading the cards in combination can we clearly see how the dynamic tensions and interplay between harmonious and inharmonious aspects of our psyche have a direct effect on our external reality and everyday life.

To really grasp the meaning of the cards in combination, it’s important to remember that every card in the deck has its own unique relationship to each and every other, in the same sense that our energy, drives and impulses can be either compatible or incompatible with those of another individual. For example, by looking at the modus operandi of the Sun card, representing light, visibility, publicity, expression and autonomy, together with the regulatory reclusiveness of the Hermit or the conformist restrictions of the Hierophant, we can see how diametrically opposed are the overall ‘game plans’ of these archetypes. Thus, their combined energy in a reading will denote some significant and dynamic tension in our life.

Some archetypes are natural friends, others natural enemies. For example, the Sun surrounded by friendly, supportive or motivationally aligned cards, such as the King of Wands or Queen of Wands, with their naturally compatible outlook, can constructively empower our life and fuel great and positive growth, change and transformation.

When two oppositely motivated cards land next to each other in a reading, such as the Sun (purity, innocence, transparency) and the Devil (impurity, transgression, collusion), we can see how the latter can corrupt the former, creating the sort of difficulties and challenges that impede our growth and success in life.

When the cards placed next to each other in a reading have little or no relationship, being neutral or indifferent to one another, such as the Hermit and the Hierophant, this denotes a mixture of often lesser benefits but no impedimental difficulties, challenges or obstructions.

The key to understanding the role each card has to play in a synthesized multiple-card reading is remembering that the archetypal Major Arcana cards act as agents of, or lend agency to, their neighbouring cards. Taking the example below, you could read the combination of the High Priestess, the Sun, the World, the Eight of Wands and the Ace of Swords as: taking a contemporary, new look (1S: Ace of Swords) at an ancient spiritual system (High Priestess) of how to live a joyful and abundant life via self-realization (Sun) has led to the successful international (World) publication of this book (Sun), with the help of a quickly effective PR and marketing campaign (8W: Eight of Wands).