The Tarot Association of the British Isles has a tarot blog (http://tabitarot.blogspot.com/2012/03/temple-of-spirit.html) which I often find thought-provoking. Today’s was about epiphanies, which started me thinking about what the word implies.

According to http://dictionary.reference.com, the use of a capital letter Epiphany refers to the Christian festival on January 6th, when according to scripture the infant Christ encountered the Magi from the east. The Magi themselves conjure up interesting associations, but that’s a digression.

What I find particularly interesting is the next definition in the online dictionary, which is that of ‘an appearance or manifestation, especially of a deity’. If we read the ancient scriptures – the Bible and the Sanskrit Vedas and Upanishads, for instance, or even myths from around the world, it’s apparent that people used to encounter deities regularly. Even today, in our rushed materialist world, there are a surprising number of encounters with other-worldly beings: angels, devas, faeries, whatever you want call them. While the communications from these beings is often through synchronicity – odd coincidences that are strangely meaningful to the recipient – it may be much more like a ‘sudden, intuitive perception or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something’.

We usually associate this sort of sudden revelation with The Tower. But if I draw a card, what epiphany does the tarot present me with today?

It’s the Temperance card – reversed.

Temperance is one of my favourite cards: an angelic being pouring liquid from one jug to another. It’s about being able to bring oneself into a deep state of equilibrium; and when it’s reversed it is probably about a lack of balance (yes, I can relate to that!). My book from The Intuitive Tarot suggests ‘Closing down on possibilities; refusal to see opportunities. Fear of being hurt; resisting life. Concentration on one aspect of life to the detriment of another; often an unwillingness to see anything but the outer form of material reality.’ I was going to say that the only thing that doesn’t apply is the very last bit – but then I began to wonder whether perhaps I am missing a trick here (something I asked to be shown this morning!) Epiphany doesn’t have to be something that knocks you off your horse and leaves you blind for three days (referring to Paul’s epiphany on the way to Damascus).
It can be as quiet and unassuming as a blog that asks what your epiphany will be today.

So it’s time to go back to the meaning of Temperance reversed, and look at where I’m closing down on possibilities and resisting life. We all do it, often without realising it. With the outside world so full of stimuli, noise and opportunities, it’s sometimes hard to stay open. And resistance in our everyday lives means we sleep badly, get ill, fight with our family and friends, project everything outwards.

Resist as much I please, though, an epiphany requires me to change. It does not allow me to return to my previous state of somnolence. So the appearance of the deity (through the synchronicities I described earlier, including of course the Temperance card – an angelic being in its own right) invites me gently to wake up, smell the new-baked bread, and revel in being alive. If I still continue to resist, I guess they’ll send the bigger guns in. Watch this space. I’m not planning to travel to Damascus anytime soon, though…

Epiphanies is a post from: Tarot Card Meanings - How They Can Help You Today

Epiphanies is a post from: Tarot Card Meanings - How They Can Help You Today

When I have difficult readings I often question whether (as all the sceptics say) this is complete happenchance. How can 78 scrappy pieces of card give valid answers to the really vital questions of life?

Well, today I’ve just done an email reading for someone who wanted to know if he had chosen the right site for a spiritual centre. To my surprise the cards drawn were all reversed – the Seven of Rods (Wands), Page of Swords, and The Tower. If they’d been the right way up it would have been acceptable (though The Tower would still have indicated that the idea would eventually fall apart); as it was, I interpreted it that it was not the right site, probably because he was thinking too small – playing it safe, following what made sense rather than what he dreamed.

The idea of expansion reminded me of the Jupiter card in my Devas of Creation deck, so I drew a card from it. To my amazement and delight, this was exactly the card which appeared.

(Jupiter, from the Devas of Creation)

This happens again and again, but usually I don’t make a note of it. This time I decided to record it.

So, why belabour the point? Well, after 40 years reading tarot I’ve been given hundreds of instances of the synchronicities (or coincidences, if you’re a sceptic [not that you'd be reading this article if you are, of course]) that happen with the cards – but I’m still sceptical! However, the synchronicities are doubled if I use both tarot and oracle decks, and that tells me it’s not just blind chance, there is a purposefulness and a consciousness that permeates the universe. It gives me a sense of the connection and meaning behind everything.

Doubt and trust: back-up from the universe is a post from: Tarot Card Meanings - How They Can Help You Today

Doubt and trust: back-up from the universe is a post from: Tarot Card Meanings - How They Can Help You Today

The problem with talking about the Shadow is that it expresses a very polarized way of thinking – i.e., black or white, male or female, inner/outer, happy/sad. It’s an insidious habit that we take in before we even learn to talk. We’re told ‘be a good girl, eat all your food’, or ‘bad boy, don’t play with that mess!’. Nearly everything we think, everything we say, expresses the same polarized view – it’s always either/or, never both. Indeed, the words ‘paradox’, ‘ambivalence’, which can be seen to deal with the uneasy balance between the polarities, are often applied in a derogatory fashion – we’re ‘sitting on the fence’, ‘indecisive’.

Things are beginning to change, largely driven by new physics which has begun to find that paradox lies at the heart of matter,while at the same time, querying everything we understand about matter. Some talk about quanta (energy), a few are beginning to see everything as consciousness. We have Schrodinger’s strange cat that is dead and alive simultaneously, light that is both wave and particle, and black holes that may be both the destruction and birth-place of matter. (Having said that, mystics have been saying something very similar for aeons.)

Of course, the great thing about the tarot is that the journey represented by the Major Arcana is not about bad or good, light or dark: it’s about wholeness. It’s a journey that moves through the archetypes of humanity, growing in understanding as the Seeker goes through life, and the World card, the culmination of the journey, represents the integrated human, the one who has resolved all opposites in an alchemical transmutation, and now dances in the centre of the spiral.

The figure is  androgenous, both male and female, the differences between the sexes transformed from either-or into pure humanity.

So The Shadow, as represented in the Tarot by No. XV, The Devil, is a major stepping-stone on our journey through to wholeness. The different levels of shadow I referred to in the previous post are merely to map out what we project onto the outside world. There is nothing wrong with shadow and darkness, depth and the unconscious – it’s merely that they scare us, as they threaten our need to feel in control. However, that idea that we can see all and therefore be completely in control of our lives is a fallacy. We can never see everything, nor do we really control anything much – not even our own behaviour.

At the entrance to Delphi, a sign over the doorway read ‘Know Thyself’. Much of what we do and think is hidden from us, so this exhortation is somewhat optimistic. Even if we engage with our dreams, analyze them and discover what our unconscious self is communicating, it is a major challenge to resolve the apparent contradictions, heal the dichotomies. No wonder The Devil has flies buzzing around his head (Lord of the Flies), and is testing the limits of his mental cage. At the same time, two small humans are imprisoned by his feet, though they are not in chains. Their fetters are their minds.

If we really take on board what the Devil tells us, when we look honestly at ourselves (at both our conscious and unconscious minds) we can begin to see our own Shadow, lurking behind us. When that happens, when in all humility we take off the masks, acknowledge our failures and difficulties, and have an honest look at our pain, anger, and fears, the Devil becomes our Ally, as we understand how profound its lessons are. It’s often said that we learn more from our mistakes than our successes. This is why – we take a break from our investment in The Successful, Correct Person, and realise that we’re fallible. Sometimes we are lucky enough to be challenged, which enables us to view ourselves from outside. If, however, we continue to hold onto the idea of The Rightness of Ourselves, refusing to take responsibility, we will continue to project all our Shadow onto the people around us. Thus we fail the lesson and progress no further. (Think of the Nazis, and their victims – reflections of their Shadow. Instead of processing that knowledge, they acted out it out, and ultimately they failed, both personally and culturally.)

However, if we successfully work through and integrate the Devil, we can continue on through the Tarot Journey. The challenges to the individual do not die away, though. Following on from The Devil, The Tower depicts a lightning strike of pure enlightenment – the paradox being that we have to survive its destructive force as well as its cleansing power.

The Star shows the breakthrough from the darkness of ignorance into the light of The Star, and the self-knowledge that connects us at last to the soul. Immediately following that, though, we encounter the ambivalence of The Moon, where (just as we think we’re getting to the end of the journey) our small human reason encounters the full siren-call of the collective unconscious. Some of us get lost in that realm, and never make our way back.

Even when we reach the understanding and ‘enlightened’ level of The Sun, the Tarot points out its destructive power. Step outside the magic circle, and you’re toast. Remember, always, it seems to be saying, when you encounter these archetypal powers you must do it with humility and as little ego as possible.

The Judgment card calls us home, challenging us to emerge from the grave of the old life, into the energy of Spirit. This level is truly a wondrous wake-up call – the way we see everything becomes more about energy and translucence, and we realise we can finally leave the ghosts of our past, our old ways of being, behind. This is not just a profound change of mind, it affects all levels: physical, mental, and spiritual. We have integrated all aspects of ourselves, and are drawn up into … something truly ineffable.

And finally, in The World, with our old concerns, ways, patterns, and behaviours left far behind, we find ourselves part of the cosmic dance – as Eliot has it, ‘At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is’. (from Burnt Norton)

The Shadow (part II) is a post from: Tarot Card Meanings - How They Can Help You Today

The Shadow (part II) is a post from: Tarot Card Meanings - How They Can Help You Today

I have been mulling over what the Devil signifies in the tarot and in the external world. To me, this is the Shadow, both the personal and the collective. (If you’ve not encountered this concept before, it originated with C.G. Jung, who saw the Shadow as the unacknowledged aspects of humanity. On a personal level these aspects would be socially unacceptable traits – anger, fear, hatred, jealousy, envy, greed, lying, arrogance, laziness, vengefulness – and so on. The most important of these, as I see it, are fear, anger, and envy.)

The concept of The Devil was gradually formalized through Christian dogma. St Augustine and other early Christians talked of demons disturbing their peace – particularly sexually – and most of us can relate to those inner demons. As time went on, though, the old pagan gods were demonized and coalesced into one uber-demon, so in the tarot Devil we often see the cloven hooves of Pan (and often his shaggy pelt), symbolizing an untamed sexuality and materiality. Women also became demonized, a fact we haven’t actually managed to get over yet.

If you need more contemporary examples of the collective shadow, think of Hitler and his Third Reich; Pol Pot; the Rwandan genocide; Serbia, Kosovo, Saddam Hussein, and now Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad. But the concept of evil and the Shadow is far more complex than this: I see the Shadow being multi-layered. We could draw a parallel between Jung’s dream of the unconscious as a multi-storied building, with increasingly deep basement levels depicting the levels of the unconscious. The deeper he went, the further back in humanity’s history, so the deepest levels were set in a cave with skulls and broken pottery – that is, dealing with the earliest collective memories of humanity (see his autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections). The Shadow could be conceived in a similar way:  the first basement level might be the archetypes we recognize from the tarot: those energies that empower, frighten, and inspire us – The Magician, the Emperor, Death, the Tower. Below that level would be the slightly darker energies – anger, fear, envy as stated above. Below that, in the depths, the twisted, applied forms of those dark energies at their most perverted and destructive.

Some consider such malign energies to be external entities, i.e. a separate force of evil, the polarity to the force of good. I am not sure about this. For a start I dislike this polarised way of thinking which tends to be very damaging, enabling us to project what we don’t like in ourselves onto others. This seems to be a basic human tendency, and if we are self-aware we can see it at work every day. If we consider someone else to be intolerant and impatient, it is a reflection of those characteristics in ourselves. The people around us can see those ‘hidden’ qualities quite clearly, but miss their own. So all of us are a mixture – light and dark, inner and outer, male and female, but most of us are oblivious of the interplay, and try to resist or suppress the things we don’t like. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work. The only way that works is to integrate the different aspects so that the Demon becomes the Ally.

The Shadow – the things we don’t like in ourselves – is natural and essential. It just makes us human. However, the deepest levels of the Shadow are a different issue altogether. Our amazing minds make us vulnerable to fear, greed, and envy, and out of that can emerge the darkest of all energies. For me, what makes evil is a human capability – the ease with which we hook into the Shadow to harm, to pervert, to exploit. We seem to have a tendency (based on greed or fear or both) to slide into the Shadow route very easily, rather than to stay fearless, honest, and unperverted. And unscrupulous leaders know this and use the tools of fear, anger, and projection to manipulate us.

So where does that leave us? Are we honest, and courageous, enough to look within? Can we remember our dreams and see the messages there (our dreams usually compensate for our ego-filled waking hours where we try to tell ourselves we’re in the right)? If we find ourselves justifying some action, beware: there’s shadow stuff around.

Then we can begin to integrate the unconscious, Shadow aspects of ourselves. (See the next blog post on how to do this.) This is not a path for the faint-hearted, but it is the only way for those who want to become whole – which is, surely, the underlying purpose of the tarot, and the Devil…

The Shadow is a post from: Tarot Card Meanings - How They Can Help You Today

The Shadow is a post from: Tarot Card Meanings - How They Can Help You Today

Please be aware of a rather nasty scam in London involving people who call themselves tarot readers. They will offer a very cheap reading (around £10), probably giving some accurate information, but then will say you’ve been cursed by someone. They’ll offer to lift the curse and say prayers for your wellbeing – if you pay for it. The price I was told about for this ‘service’ was £350!!

As a professional tarot reader, I wouldn’t usually deal with curse-lifting, though I would certainly be able to see from the cards whether there actually was some dark energy around. Lifting a (real) curse would be carried out by a reputable ritual magician, and would never cost that much – at most it would be around £50-£75 for a session.

The person I heard this from was sure it was a scam, but was naturally still a little concerned, so she came along for a reading to double-check. She was a lovely, outgoing woman who looked like she would have a very successful, creative life. She took a Deva card to see what the higher levels around her were, and was very happy when she got the Archangel Michael: the warrior angel, he would be all the protection she needed!

TAROT SCAM is a post from: Tarot Card Meanings - How They Can Help You Today

TAROT SCAM is a post from: Tarot Card Meanings - How They Can Help You Today

The Tarot Association of the British Isles is having their 10th Anniversary Conference in Birmingham, England, on the 23rd and 24th July. Cilla Conway will be doing the opening talk on how to read with tarot and oracle decks simultaneously, Emma Sunerton Burl will provide a workshop called ‘Intuition with the Thoth’, which will be a workshop exploring a meditation technique to access the information contained within a Thoth card. John Matthews will talk about the Wildwood Tarot, Mary Collins draws both strands of her highly successful career together to demonstrate how to make your Tarot business as successful as possible, and finally Emma Sunerton-Burl provides a second workshop to explore key counselling skills that will lift your Tarot skills to new levels. Places are still available, if you’d like to attend. Check out the Conference link...

Tarot Conference is a post from: Tarot Card Meanings - How They Can Help You Today

Tarot Conference is a post from: Tarot Card Meanings - How They Can Help You Today

Like everyone else, I’ve been watching the news recently with interest. At the moment attention is split primarily between Japan and Libya, so I decided to draw some cards about the situation.

First, Libya: Asking about the outcome for the Libyans – Eight of Discs.

That looks fairly good to me – the card of the apprentice, of carrying out the work you love. So here we have the Libyan people realising what their role is to be – maybe in the outside world. They’ll have to learn how to function in such a new set-up, so I wonder if this is militarily or diplomatically – but the card itself looks positive. I have to say at the moment only the NATO intervention is keeping them afloat.

Outcome for Colonel Gadaffi – the Knight of Cups reversed.

A surprising card, but one that makes a good deal of sense. Up to now Gadaffi seems to be doing relatively well in the different battles raging up and down the coast, and has been reported as blustery, self-justified, and full of denial. The reversed Knight of Cups is self-indulgent to a fault, looks for support and whines when he doesn’t get his own way. He may look impressive and strong when you first meet him but he’s really a broken reed. Today’s news (10th April) reveals him sending a letter to Hilary Clinton calling the President ‘our son’, and ‘his excellency’, and asking what Obama would do if he found Al Qaida controlling American cities – ‘tell me, so I can follow your example’. Whatever else, he should know that sarcasm is the lowest form of diplomacy.

Japan:

The outcome here is a bit problematic. This is the card of creativity, with someone looking at this wonderful object they’ve made. Out of this beautiful object comes the double-helix of life. But this reversal blocks the energy. Japan itself must be the beautiful creative object, but its energy is being blocked at the moment through fear or concern. Some of the stories coming out of Japan over the last few weeks – of how people have helped each other, and the heroes fighting to keep the nuclear reactors from melt-down – show that humanity is at its best when faced with survival issues. On the surface I wouldn’t have called it a particularly creative situation, but in the longer-term maybe it will change things for Japan which has been in a fairly confused state for a while, both politically and economically.

The Two of Discs reversed – some choices to be made that presumably aren’t being made because of unspecified difficulties. (Again, a slightly surprising card. With the scale of the tragedy I’d have thought some Major Arcana cards would have been more appropriate.) Still, the tarot seems to be concerned with practical stuff here so maybe this is more about the relief effort, clearing up, still looking for the living and the dead, attempting to get food and water in. The situation with the reactors and leaking radioactivity has stabilised – even with the latest earthquake danger, but there is still a real need for practical help, and apparently the rest of the world has been less forthcoming with assistance than with previous disasters.

The Ring of Fire:

Here’s where we get the big guns coming in.

A month or so ago a Youtube clip showed a scientist predicting another quake, this time on the west coast of California. (Check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQXDt4VdS0E) The point was that earthquakes often seem to be galvanised by the moon, and given the ‘Supermoon’ and our satellite’s proximity to Earth, the Ring of Fire could well be gearing itself up for some more action. With a sequence of New Zealand and Japan the scientist saw the instability moving around clockwise, and of course that’s the San Andreas Fault. So far, that prediction has been incorrect; there was a small earthquake near Thailand and we’ve had another tremor near Japan, so I’m not sure about the accuracy of these two cards…

The Tower is the lightning strike of God, destroying outworn forms – the towers falling, and the interpretation is a traumatic event that seems to offer no resolution or light – and failure of vision that leads to undoing. I can’t help feeling our present lack of vision and over-concern with the material are leading to disaster. There’s not much we can do to prevent earthquakes and tsunami, but our blindness and greed don’t help. The Nine of Swords shows depression, the mind overset with problems, loss and despair.

In both cases, though, I would tend to read the reversals as lightening the darkness. Sometimes The Tower reversed is about dismantling a situation rather than having it destroyed. Perhaps forewarned is forearmed: buildings in San Francisco, for instance, are built to withstand earthquakes, and the effect on Tokyo was also quite limited. What else can be done? With the Nine of Swords, the reversal is about acceptance in the face of pain, a gradual return to the world. If these disasters cause us to revise – revision – our priorities, and force us to realise that we are custodians of our beautiful planet rather than exploiters, that will be a major turning point.

Predictions… is a post from: Tarot Card Meanings - How They Can Help You Today

Predictions… is a post from: Tarot Card Meanings - How They Can Help You Today

Tarot reading still has a slightly disreputable reputation. Readers are often seen as charlatans, without adequate training or quality control. As for the idea that bits of coloured card can give people an accurate glimpse into their lives and future is illogical, even a little crazy.

That’s the left-brained, rational, scientific view. Or – is it?

Einstein, one of the greatest scientists ever, was wonderfully open-minded. He understood the role intuition could play, and was awake to the marvelous. In his wake, quantum physicists are proving that the impossible is, in fact, probable, and questioning everything we think of as ‘reality’. They’re even beginning to explain consciousness and the mind through quantum physics, as well as other strange phenomena such as ghosts, telepathy, mediumship, psychic power etc.

This strange, illogical science can probably explain how the tarot works – watch this space for more articles on tarot and quantum physics.

But the intermediaries, the mediums, the psychics, and the tarot readers – their ability, or lack thereof, are what gave tarot its difficult reputation. Having said that, all the readers I know have high ethical standards and wouldn’t dream of cheating, lying, or carrying on a reading when it’s obvious they’re not getting anything right.

But, unfortunately, there are readers who do lie, cheat, say they can lift curses, etc. I heard one at a psychic fayre piling on the flattery so thickly I was amazed that the client didn’t burst out laughing. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she repeated the same thing to the next one. And there were people lining up to see her! Perhaps bad tarot readers just attract bad clients, the sort that want to be buttered up and told that everything is going to be fine…

Talking of bad clients – one gay man pulled out a wad of money from his pocket and began peeling off ten pound notes, placing them on the table. He indicated that this was a bonus for me. I smiled sweetly and continued reading the cards, which were basically saying that he’d treated all his boyfriends really badly and needed to make reparation. When I got round to that, he said, ‘You’re going to be really angry with me now.’ ‘Why?’ I asked, curiously. ‘Because you’re not going to follow any of my advice?’

‘No,’ he replied, picking up all the money he’d placed on the table. ‘Because I’m going to take back my money.’ And at that he got up and left. I was in hysterics, figuring that the tenners must have been a bribe to tell him what he wanted to hear!

If the cards appear just too good to be true, they probably are. Perhaps the reader is flanneling and trying to tell you what you want to hear (without a bribe), or lying about their meanings for some reason – perhaps because they aren’t very good readers! There is one other alternative which I’ve experienced only a couple of times in the forty years I’ve been reading: that you yourself are psychically powerful and are somehow influencing the cards to say what you want to hear.

Back to bad tarot readers. If the cards (or interpretations) are completely wrong, a bad tarot reader will carry on regardless, ignoring the fact that the energy between you is mismatched or missing. A good reader will say ‘this doesn’t seem to be working, is it’ and give you the option to continue, or return your money.

A quick point about being asked questions. Clients often think that the reader is trying to pump you for information if s/he asks questions. But the cards only offer a general landscape, not a specific landmark, so the questions are to see whether different aspects of the card meaning would be more appropriate to your circumstances. However, there are exceptions: I was shocked recently to hear about a reader in the west of London who spent the whole reading attempting to get the client to interpret the cards, instead of doing it herself. Apparently she charged a fair amount for her readings, too. I find this rather strange – if she couldn’t make head or tail of the reading, perhaps she should have offered a refund.

Finally, the reading is about you, no-one else. A reader who starts talking about her- or himself is bad news. You may get a reader illustrating a point from something they’ve experienced themselves, fair enough; but it should be kept to a minimum.

So what makes a good tarot reader? Someone who uses their psychic gifts to intuit through the cards what is going on for you, and what possible futures you have in store; someone who listens to anything you have to say; can put their ego to one side and concentrate totally on you for an hour or so; someone with good life experience and perception. Tarot readers are counsellors, not predictors, who use their cards as a window through which to gaze on your possible future/s. Your job is to walk out into those future landscapes, using the tarot reading to ensure you notice the opportunities to blossom and grow.

What Makes a Bad Tarot Reader? is a post from: Tarot Card Meanings - How They Can Help You Today

What Makes a Bad Tarot Reader? is a post from: Tarot Card Meanings - How They Can Help You Today

This very early fresco by Agostino da Vaprio (born around 1457, possibly in Pavia) shows five obviously well-born (and slightly overdressed) members of the nobility playing Tarocchi, an early card game. The shape and size of these cards show them to be tarot cards (though whether they included what we called the Majors or not is an open question). The first written rules of Tarocchi appear in a manuscript written by Martiano da Tortona well before 1425 (we know cards had appeared by 1377, as a sermon was preached against them in Bern that year).
The original painting is quite large, as shown below:

According to Tarot Passages, this fresco is at the Palazzo Borromeo in Milan. It was shown in the catalogue accompanying an exhibit of early Tarot art in 1999 at the Pinacoteca di Brera museum in Milan. There is also a reproduction in the Encyclopaedia of Tarot II (Stuart Kaplan), with a few changes – for instance, there are cards on the table in the version shown in the Encyclopaedia.
I have recently produced an egg-tempera version using animal hide as a base. I’ve used the more familiar aspect of the painting, focusing on the players and omitting the background. This is not complete, I hasten to add – I’ll repost once it’s finished.

The Tarocchi Players is a post from: Tarot Card Meanings - How They Can Help You Today

The Tarocchi Players is a post from: Tarot Card Meanings - How They Can Help You Today

There seems to be a feeling that you must either use a tarot deck or an oracle deck in your readings. But why is it either/or? Why not both?

Since I completed the Devas of Creation – an oracle deck of higher-level energies (Devas are the Shining Ones of Sanskrit tradition, like angelics but more primordial) – I use the tarot for the basic spread as usual, and every now and again I draw a Deva card to look at the higher-level energies around the person, or what will be coming in to help or challenge. It helps that I’m using two decks I painted myself – The Intuitive Tarot and Devas of Creation, because I know them so well, but at the College of Psychic Studies tarot seminar in July, Emily Carding used her Transparent Tarot and Transparent Oracle in a similar way; I’ve also used the Mirror Cards and the Intuitive Tarot together.

The information / clarification that comes from this multi-dimensional approach is usually very helpful – sometimes astonishingly so. For instance, a client drew the 3 Swords which I see as confusion or being split.

She was disinclined to admit she was running away from the problem – until she drew the Deva card I call Storm Crow, which is about splitting / denial.

Another example: the tarot Moon appeared for the client’s son. I sometimes see the Moon as crossing over from sanity to insanity and it certainly is about the deep unconscious intruding into everyday life. I said that it looked like her son was wandering into the Otherworld of the unconscious.

But when I asked for the Devas to clarify what was going on for him, the Moon of the Devas also appeared.

This double whammy indicated to me that he had made a choice to stay in that realm. (Most people see this realm as insanity. I personally think if we had a more enlightened approach to the conscious and unconscious mind, we would be able to help many return from ‘insanity’. The so-called primitive shamans can move at will between these realms; but we have no idea how this works. We say it’s all mumbo-jumbo, and leave the lost souls to wander around between the worlds, never mind that the world needs their insights.)

Still, this is way off the subject, so let’s return to using an oracle deck in tandem with the tarot.

In readings for people who are psychic or very self-aware, I often switch the emphasis to use the Devas as the main deck, with the tarot as clarification. Here the tarot gives the more mundane focus of every-day issues as counterpoint to the spiritual level of the Devas. Obviously, other Oracle decks might have a different focus – the Mirror Cards I mentioned above would concentrate more on relationship issues. And of course it’s possible to do full readings just with an Oracle deck, though you need to know the meanings well in order to do it.

Try it out. Any oracle will work with your tarot deck, it’s really what works for you and what you feel comfortable with. If you have any questions, post them and I’ll do my best to answer.

Oracles vs Tarot is a post from: Tarot Card Meanings - How They Can Help You Today

Oracles vs Tarot is a post from: Tarot Card Meanings - How They Can Help You Today