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Posts from the ‘Tarot Reading Tips’ Category

Mar 31

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Living the Tarot: Doing the King of Cups

Yesterday morning, before pulling my two cards for the day, I asked myself how I wanted to feel during the day. I have several writing projects stacked up, so I wanted to feel focused and productive. I asked the cards what I could do to make it a productive day, and pulled the King of Cups and the Seven of Batons from the Ancient Italian deck.

This combo isn’t very compatible. The King is planted solidly in his chair, grasping a very large open goblet that shows his enormous capacity for imbibing whatever life has to offer. Those frothy feathers and red garters don’t bode well for the kind of focus and dedication that the seven batons require. Read more

Mar 20

three-card spread with Ancient Italian Tarot

An All-Purpose Three-Card Spread

Most of the questions we put to Tarot have the same basic structure: Subject-Object-Verb; or Querant-Question-Bridge. There’s the person asking the question, what the question is about, and what’s going on between them. We can use these three components as spread positions for a made-to-order layout that works well with the Tarot de Marseille.

For example:

Will I win the lottery next week?  There’s me, the lottery, and what’s possible between us. Read more

Mar 10

Justice Card Dotti Tarot de Marseille
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Giving Up on Yes/No Spreads

A few months ago, I endured several weeks where my life was out of control and my daily schedule at the mercy of other people’s decisions (also known as Jury Duty).

This seemed like a perfect time to test out some Yes-No spreads.

At the beginning of each day, I’d ask the cards things like: will the judge let us go home early today; will the prosecution wrap up its presentation; will the defendant go for a plea bargain and put us all out of our misery? I used four different yes/no techniques for each question employing just the forty pip cards. I recorded the responses and tallied how often each technique predicted events correctly. Read more

Mar 6

Moon and Three of Cups from Madenie Tarot de Marseille

Tarot History Rant #4: The 22-Card Deck (and why I read the TdM with a full deck)

You may have heard people say the 22 trumps were grafted onto a pack of playing cards for gaming purposes. Actually, the 22 trump cards and the four suits were always a set. You need 78 cards to play the game of Trionfi/Tarocchi/Tarot. The 22 trump cards were never sold separately until occultists put them on a spiritual pedestal while scorning the suit cards (minor arcana) as a vulgar fortune-telling tool.

Many contemporary French and Italian tarot books discuss only the trump cards. If they deal with the minor arcana at all, it’s with a few lines for each card in the back of the book, as if the author were embarrassed to be caught talking about them. Read more

Mar 3

Towards the Art of Reading by Camelia Elias book cover
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Marseille Tarot: Towards the Art of Reading by Camelia Elias

This exciting book by Camelia Elias is a new addition to our small supply of Tarot de Marseille books in English.

We hit the ground running on the first page with an actual reading done in a café. This sets the tone for the book, where every card, and every teaching, is accompanied by a three-card spread illustrated in color.

The essence of Elias’s technique is to tell a concise story with three cards, staying close to the reality of the images. When she amplifies her card meanings with another system, she goes to folk traditions in cartomancy, which she calls the “cunning folk” method. Read more

Feb 16

Pope Il Papa from Stefano Vergnano Tarot de Marseille

Tarot de Marseille for Modern Life: Five Webinars by Five Modern Teachers

This series of live webinars is one of the most exciting things to happen in my tarot life since I first learned to read with the TdM over a decade ago. Instead of registering for a conference and paying for transportation and hotel, I sat in my California living room with teachers from Chile, Denmark, Toronto, NYC and Tel Aviv, learning about their cutting-edge techniques for reading with the TdM.

Here are highlights from the five videos, which can be purchased from The Hermit’s Lamp (Link at bottom). Read more

Dec 31

The New Tarot Deck Magician
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The New Tarot Deck: Jack Hurley and John Horler

Before 2014 ends, I want to celebrate the 40th anniversary of The New Tarot Deck, as well as the “projective” reading technique, and two men who were at the center of the late 20th-century tarot scene in the San Francisco Bay area.

The counter-culture shock waves that rippled up and down the California coast in the 1960s swept Jack Hurley and John Horler into a three-year residency at Esalen in Big Sur. After falling under Joseph Campbell’s spell, they designed a radically new tarot deck and created a new way of reading the cards. Read more

Feb 21

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Reading the Tarot de Marseilles Suit Cards

One of the biggest hurdles for students of the Tarot de Marseilles is learning to read the suit cards fluently without memorizing a bunch of keywords. I’ve come up with some techniques that ensure you get lots of suit cards to practice with. In fact, I enjoy these techniques so much, they’ve become my favorite spreads.

In my reading style, the suits are the meat and potatoes of the reading. They tell you what’s going to happen, how it’s going to feel, and who’s involved. The trump card derived from the sum of the suit cards is the background situation, the underlying tone of the spread, the lesson, or the archetypal energy working behind the scenes. Read more

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

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