AUTHOR'S NOTE: Bear with me here, this moves quickly from subconscious meditation to the utilitarian aspects of cartomancy and should be worth your time. It is, however, aimed at professional diviners and won't be understood or appreciated by dabblers in the "pop metaphysics" of online tarot reading. I had a dream recently where I encountered … Continue reading The Five-Beat Measure: A Tarot-Reading Prep Routine
Tarot
The Solitary Way
"Who has vocation hears the voice of the inner man; he is called." - Carl Gustav Jung AUTHOR'S NOTE: In recent years I haven't been much of a "joiner" since I usually find both the quality and the availability of the communal experience to be lacking. This wasn't always the case, since at one time … Continue reading The Solitary Way
Jumping the Gap: Multilayered Tarot Reading
AUTHOR'S NOTE: In the past I've written about the fact that every tarot card contains several layers of meaning, and reading one can resemble peeling an onion. If a practical, action-and-event-oriented approach fails to illuminate the matter, a deeper cut could reveal the psychological angle of "attitudes and behaviors" to be adopted or avoided by … Continue reading Jumping the Gap: Multilayered Tarot Reading
Old Wine, New Wine, Wrong Bottle
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Although I've been studying and working with tarot for over 50 years, I still occasionally dip into the literature. My chosen subject matter is most often from the traditional canon but once in a while the material is of more recent vintage just to assess how the world of tarot is evolving in … Continue reading Old Wine, New Wine, Wrong Bottle
The Lover and the Devil: Trump-Card Bookends
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I've been playing around with the 7x3 array of trump cards (minus the Fool because zero adds nothing to this exercise) by running out the numerological expressions for each row and column. I used both Theosophical reduction (adding together the digits of any sum larger than 21) and "casting out nines" (subtracting increments … Continue reading The Lover and the Devil: Trump-Card Bookends
2024 Celtic Wheel of the Year Layout
AUTHOR'S NOTE: For the next solar cycle, I chose not to pull random cards to represent the Celtic year, but rather to use the tarot trump cards associated with the eight Celtic holidays and the four zodiacal ingress dates for the Sun, thus creating a universal layout with slightly more irregular sequencing than the typical … Continue reading 2024 Celtic Wheel of the Year Layout
Red and Blue: “Living and Knowing”
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Except for the traditional block-printed Marseille decks, I get very little mileage out of color symbolism in the tarot. Even then, I stay mainly with the three primary colors red, blue and yellow (along with black and white), scarcely noticing the uncommon secondary hues of green, orange and purple, and even less so … Continue reading Red and Blue: “Living and Knowing”
Moon Mastery: Making the Darkness Conscious
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Although not alluding directly to the tarot Moon, Carl Gustav Jung wrote the following observation that has a bearing on the subject: "One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." In other words, we must draw it forth and examine it, not try to hide … Continue reading Moon Mastery: Making the Darkness Conscious
A Tarot Reckoning: Descent into Impressionism
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Lately I've been spending some time on the r/seculartarot sub-reddit, and after viewing numerous posts I've concluded that they categorically reject any kind of unstructured approach to the tarot (as one might suppose from the title of the sub). I find myself wondering "If you stifle creative inspiration, imagination and ingenuity in tarot … Continue reading A Tarot Reckoning: Descent into Impressionism
The Lover as Morality Play
AUTHOR'S NOTE: It struck me today that the image of the four characters on the Tarot de Marseille "Lover" card might be viewed as a composite of the first six cards that precede it in the series of trumps. If we lay out those cards according to the scene in the Lover, we have the … Continue reading The Lover as Morality Play
Parsifal's Wheel Tarot & Astrology 