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Nov 7

Grand Jeu de Mlle Lenormand
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Agnes Varda on how to freak out a tarot client

Cleo from 5 to 7, The French New Wave film directed by Agnes Varda in 1962, begins with a lengthy card reading scene that’s a lesson in what not to do when you see bad news in the cards.

The film follows a woman as she wanders around Paris for two hours trying to distract herself while waiting for the results of a biopsy. Cleo starts her sojourn by visiting a middle-aged woman to get her cards read. The reader spreads out nine cards from Le Grand Jeu de Mlle Lenormand, three each for past, present and future. It’s nothing but happy news until she gets to the last few cards. As the message gets darker, the reader gets more flustered and distressed and is obviously not saying everything she sees; which, of course, makes Cleo suspect the worst. Read more

Oct 13

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Reading a Trump-Suit Combo with the Tarot de Marseilles

My favorite card-of-the-day draw involves shuffling the trumps and suit cards separately, then pulling a card at random from each stack. I like to flip the two cards over simultaneously so they hit my retina at the same time, setting up resonance between them.

Suit cards describe the details and address specifics. The trumps are like a color filter or a pinch of herbs – they bring out certain qualities of the suit card without altering its core meaning. Here’s an example from my tarot journal of several entries for one suit card in combination with different trumps. Read more

Oct 10

Card of the Day Practice

The best way to develop a personal relationship with a deck is to give yourself a short reading every day and record it in a tarot journal.

I like to do my reading first thing in the morning using two or three cards. I jot down a few notes in my journal about the cards’ meaning and how it relates to my life. Then in the evening, I review the spread to see how it actually played out during my day. Sometimes I’m surprised at how well the cards described an incident that happened.

A while back I pulled the 7 of Swords on the day of a dental appointment. I couldn’t help but see the vertical sword as a drill! Read more

Oct 10

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Setting up a Tarot Journal

My journal is a three-ring binder with a page for each card. Sometimes I wish I’d started my journal on a computer so I could do searches, but my mind works better when I’m holding a pen; and after more than a decade, I’m stuck with my current system. The advantage to organizing your journal by cards rather than chronologically is being able to see clusters of associations around each card. Sometimes a card will give you surprising insights, and sometimes the patterns that emerge over time will validate what you thought the card meant all along. Read more

Oct 3

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Tarot Waiting to Happen

We know the Tarot de Marseilles is established in the English-speaking world when North Americans start doing send-ups of the deck. Andrew McGregor’s sly and witty Tarot Waiting to Happen shows us what the figures in the twenty-two trumps were doing just before they were frozen in time as tarot images.

I laughed the most at the sight of the Emperor in his bedroom putting on his robe and crown. Unfortunately, I identified the most with the Devil tethered between a tray of cocktails and a huge cake. The cake appeared again as bait in the Hanged Man’s snare. Then there’s the Lover, slumped on a bar stool, a mug of beer at his elbow.

The black and white line drawings are spontaneous and lively. Titles are in French with Justice and Strength switched back to their original TdM positions.

The cards are 2.5 x 4.0 inches, lightly laminated, and packaged in a sturdy cotton twill pouch. The cost is $40 including shipping in the US and Canada. There are only 200 copies, so this deck is going to be a collector’s item.

See the entire deck and get purchasing information at TheHermit’s Lamp

 

Sep 15

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The Way of Tarot by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Marianne Costa

This is one of the most significant books in English on the Tarot de Marseilles. Jodorowsky is a Chilean surrealist filmmaker, therapist and tarot reader based in Paris who uses the Tarot de Marseilles exclusively. His background and tarot experience couldn’t be more different from mine, but I feel he’s a kindred spirit. Jodorowsky’s approach to tarot, which I heartily endorse, rests on the following principles:

  •  He does not apply external systems like Kabbalah or astrology to tarot. He uses the structure of the deck itself to discover its meaning. (He mentions Kabbalistic correspondences in some of  his card descriptions, but they don’t have much influence on his card meanings).
  • He uses tarot for counseling and psychological healing; does not use tarot to predict the future.
  • He does not confine the cards to fixed meanings, but reads intuitively by closely examining the card images and their interactions while in a trance-like state. Read more

Aug 27

BATS Logo

BATS 2013 – The Bay Area Tarot Symposium

BATS 2013, in its new venue at the Doubletree Inn near the San Jose airport, was one of the biggest and best ever. With a choice of three workshops in each time slot (a total of 27 workshops over the weekend) decision-making could be agonizing. Rana George gave a two-part workshop on the basics of the Lenormand oracle. Rabbit, Pamela Steele, Arisa Victor, Martin Azevedo, and Nancy Antenucci, among others, presented techniques for going deeper into the cards and into one’s connection with the people we read for. 

Several deck creators were on hand to share their creative process. Bill Haigwood’s Counterculture Tarot gave this aging hippie a flashback to her lost youth in 1960s San Francisco. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time for the Wildwood Tarot, the historic Oracle Belline, or Carrie Paris’s Magpie Oracle. For the historian, Major Tom Schick gave some background on the Minchiate deck with slides of trump cards from three different decks. Read more

Aug 26

The Kilted Rubber Chicken Tarot

As proof that Tarot de Marseilles readers are not always obsessed with historical correctness, I present my favorite purchase from the 2013 Bay Area Tarot Symposium (BATS): Beth Seilonen’s Kilted Rubber Chicken Tarot de Marseilles. Evidently, this deck started as a joke on the oh-so-naughty Daughters of Divination Facebook page, where someone posted the photo of a hunk in a kilt cradling a chicken. Thus was born one of the most delightful TdMs to cross the road in recent times.

Every card cleverly incorporates a yellow rubber chicken sporting a kilt. What’s more, the deck can double as a Lenormand oracle. Seilonen has incorporated traditional Lenormand symbols on the trump and court cards, like the boat and snake shown below. Just pull those cards out of the deck, et voila, you have a Lenormand. This deck was self-published in an edition of 35, so don’t procrastinate if you want one. The cards are 2.5 x 4.0 inches, laminated, sturdy, and very easy to shuffle. Read more

Jul 23

Knight of Swords, Visconti-Sforza Deck
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Happy Birthday Francesco Sforza: July 23, 1401

Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan and the most successful condottiere of his time, gave the world the Visconti-Sforza deck, and contributed immensely to our knowledge of Tarot’s origins.

Francesco’s father-in-law, Duke Maria Filippo Visconti, commissioned two gold-leaf tarot decks in the 1440s, but so many cards are missing, we can only speculate on what the complete deck was like. Francesco’s deck, painted with precious mineral pigments on gold leaf, is nearly complete, showing us that the familiar 78-card deck existed in the mid-15th century.

Throughout the 1440s, tarot decks were mentioned in account books and correspondence from Ferrara, Bologna and Venice; but we have nothing from Milan because the castle and all the court’s records were destroyed during the political turmoil of 1447. Two letters Francesco wrote in 1450 are our earliest written clues about tarot’s place at the Milan court. Read more

Jul 17

Knight of Wands from Tarot AC Visconti-Sforza deck

Tarot AC – A New Visconti-Sforza Deck

An exciting new Visconti-Sforza deck is on the scene — a faithful reproduction hand drawn by librarian and organic farmer Alice Cooper. Ms. Cooper created this deck out of pure love, as her own personal copy, with no thought of reproducing or selling it. The care and attention she lavished on this deck during the year-long creative process gives it a magical feel that photo-reproductions of historic decks don’t conjure up. Fortunately for us, her friends persuaded her to print the deck in a limited edition of 200 and sell it on Etsy. Read more

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