I see that The Cartomancer, the magnificent (and singular) high-quality tarot journal has changed hands again. Arwen Lynch acknowledged that she was having difficulty keeping up with production demands and schedules, so she sold the quarterly glossy magazine to 7 Stones Publishing with Lori Barbieri Ross at the helm. The following message was posted on … Continue reading The Cartomancer Redux
Tarot Resources
A Valuable Resource
Although it's far from comprehensive given the explosion of new tarot decks in the last few years, there is a "tarot-card gallery" website that offers complete scans of numerous popular and historically-significant decks. My understanding is that the German owner of the site has authorization to publish the images from the copyright owners of the … Continue reading A Valuable Resource
No Question? No Problem
Most diviners have occasionally encountered sitters who are too shy, nervous or confused to come up with a single question to put to the tarot. My practice has always been to have them concentrate on what they want to know while shuffling the deck in a form of silent communion, although my goal hasn't been … Continue reading No Question? No Problem
Alike But Different: The Two and Three of Wands
In her book The Tarot and the Tree of Life, Isabel Kliegman goes to some length to justify why we need both the Two and Three of Wands in a pack of tarot cards when - at least in the Waite-Smith deck - they seem to be almost identical in appearance. For me there has … Continue reading Alike But Different: The Two and Three of Wands
Numerological and Archetypal Counterparts: A Visual Tableau
I decided to turn my previous post on trump-card counterparts into a graphic display. In addition to visually aligning the cards according to their numerical and archetypal values (both natural and derived), this tableau allows for drawing more imaginative correlations between cards that answer to the same number. In the case of the court and … Continue reading Numerological and Archetypal Counterparts: A Visual Tableau
Cosmobiology and the Chaldean Decans in Tarot
The German cosmobiologists of the mid-20th Century held that the "soft" aspects between planets (the sextiles and trines along with the less prominent quintiles and bi-quintiles) were largely a waste of time in that they seldom show anything "visible" happening. These astrologers focused on the "hard" aspects - squares, semi-squares, sesquiquadrates and oppositions - when … Continue reading Cosmobiology and the Chaldean Decans in Tarot
A List Of My Tarot and Lenormand Spreads
NOTE: This list gets out-of-date with alarming frequency since I have to print, scan, edit and import a new set of pages every time I add a spread to my inventory. The Dropbox link at the sidebar location that most likely brought you here is the best way to see the current list. You can … Continue reading A List Of My Tarot and Lenormand Spreads
The Skinny End
We've all seen the Hollywood version of the investigative psychic: the brow furrowed in concentration, the eyes squeezed shut, the hands to the temples, proclaiming "I think I see the letter 'B' . . ." One thing I've learned during my pursuit of missing-person situations is that the number of unsolved homicides far outweighs incidents … Continue reading The Skinny End
The Quick, the Dead and the In-Between: A “State of Undoing” Table
The fundamental quandary in any missing-person reading is whether the cards describe the absent party as alive, deceased or somewhere in-between (injured, ill, captive, physically abused, etc.) Most tarot professionals consider the very idea of contemplating physical death to be borderline unethical, but any extended missing-person scenario must inevitably confront the possibility, if only in … Continue reading The Quick, the Dead and the In-Between: A “State of Undoing” Table
A Horse of a Different Color
To my knowledge, other than the small dog in Le Mat, the lion in La Force, the two canines in La Lune and the two horses in Le Chariot, there have been few attempts to rope the Tarot de Marseille animals into the narrative of a reading and give them a starring role. I was … Continue reading A Horse of a Different Color
Parsifal's Wheel Tarot & Astrology 