As promised, here is the first installment of my "test drive" for the Weekly Situational Blueprint spread. I used the Tabula Mundi Colores Arcus deck, with reversals. All images © 2015 M.M. Meleen The weekly draw produced the 4 of Cups (Moon in Cancer) reversed for Monday, the 4 of Swords (Jupiter in Libra) for … Continue reading “Weekly Blueprint” Pull for Monday
Tarot Techniques
Cheap Shots #17: Tone vs. Substance
One complaint of the tarot novice that comes up quite often on the forums is "Nothing happened the way the cards said it would." This is sometimes accompanied by a profound loss of faith that drives the discouraged neophyte away from the practice of divination entirely. Even the trite remark that "the cards weren't wrong, … Continue reading Cheap Shots #17: Tone vs. Substance
A Simple Yes-or-No Spread
Answering straightforward yes-or-no questions in a clean, simple way has never been easy with the tarot because the cards are highly nuanced, telling complex stories rather than pronouncing clear-cut verdicts. Different approaches have been tried, including single-card pulls that rely on the general positive or negative nature of the card drawn, or - even more … Continue reading A Simple Yes-or-No Spread
Air Travel by the Numbers
In addition to casting astrological event charts, one thing I like to do when flying is to numerologically massage the flight numbers to see which Major Arcanum card will set the tone for travel safety on each leg of a trip. For our recent journey, the outbound flight numbers were 2606 and 2615. Both of … Continue reading Air Travel by the Numbers
Daily Draws: My Back Pages
In the 1964 "political apostasy" song My Back Pages, Bob Dylan's refrain perfectly nailed my evolving attitude toward drawing one or more cards on a daily basis for anything other than learning purposes. "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." Back in "the day" (mid-1970s), only a couple of … Continue reading Daily Draws: My Back Pages
The Professional’s Toolbox
I returned to professional public reading around a year ago, after many years away. The first thing that struck me is the number of new decks that are available now, mostly Waite-Smith (aka "RWS") clones. As a long-time student and reader of Aleister Crowley's esoterically profound Thoth deck, I wasn't entirely comfortable using it across … Continue reading The Professional’s Toolbox
Correspondences: How Much is Too Much?
Funny thing about esoteric correspondences. Sometimes you don't need them at all, other times you can get nowhere without at least a cursory nod to them. They're especially useful when a spread serves up a disjointed mish-mash of contradictory meanings that resists all tactics of intuition, inspiration, imagination and ingenuity. The analytical skill required to … Continue reading Correspondences: How Much is Too Much?
The Art of Reading
Cartomancy is fundamentally a story-tellers art, in which each card in a spread forms a scene in a narrative that logically advances the story from the preceding card and segues neatly into the next. The true test of the raconteur's skill occurs when facing what at first appears to be a hopeless jumble of mismatched … Continue reading The Art of Reading
The “Fool in the Middle” Spread
This is a slightly cheeky poke at workplace dynamics (and by extension, politics). The "boss" (Fool) is at the center of the corporate universe, and there are up to twenty options to represent co-workers, either as second-level supervisors (Aces) or peers (court cards). The idea is that you only need to populate as many of … Continue reading The “Fool in the Middle” Spread
The “Second Opinion” Moving Line Spread
This is a "Majors-Only" spread in which only four of the cards are drawn from the 22-card deck; the rest are derived from the card first drawn in each row. It adopts the concept that all of the Major Arcana cards except the Fool as "0" have one or more "numerological counterparts" based on the … Continue reading The “Second Opinion” Moving Line Spread
