Practical Magic: A Beginner's Guide to Crystals, Horoscopes, Psychics, and Spells - Nikki Van De Car 2017
Tarot
Casual Clairvoyance
CASUAL CLAIRVOYANCE
Tarot, astrology, palmistry, and dreams… allow the unknown to guide you, and learn to interpret messages from within, as well as without.
TAROT
HERE’S THE THING ABOUT TAROT—IT CAN BE GENERALLY TRUE OR it can be creepily on-the-nose. There’s no reason why it should work—it’s just a deck of cards with pretty pictures on them—but somehow, every reading has something accurate to say, something that makes you nod your head, laughing a little as you recognize its truth. And frequently, the feeling you get after a reading is a sense of relief, an acknowledgment that what you thought was going on really is going on. Tarot cards tell you what you hope or think or fear, and then they advise you: What do you want to do? What should you do? How will it all work out?
The first tarot decks surfaced in the mid-1400s and were originally used for playing card games. It wasn’t until the late 1700s that tarot was commonly used for divination; before that, fortune-tellers used simpler decks with less precise meanings. Like our current deck of playing cards, tarot cards have four suits: Cups, Pentacles, Swords, and Wands. Cups represent relationships; Pentacles cover work and money; Swords discuss conflict; and Wands, of course, are all about magic and creativity. They number ace through ten, and the “face cards” include the page, knight, queen, and king. These are known as the Minor Arcana.
A tarot deck has twenty-two additional cards, which are known as the Major Arcana. They move in a cycle, beginning with the Fool, passing through Death and the Tower (which don’t mean quite what you think they do), and ending with the World—a card of fulfillment.
The wonderful thing about tarot is that anyone can do a reading, because it’s all about intention. The cards can tell you nothing you don’t already know, because you are giving your energy to the cards and they are merely reflecting it back to you. If you ask the cards a question, they will simply confirm what you already know to be true—whether you wanted to admit it to yourself or not. Remember, they’re just pieces of paper with pictures on them. Any power they have comes from what you bring to them.
Learning tarot can feel like a lot of memorization—each deck comes with a book explaining the meaning of each card, and that’s very helpful. But as you practice, and as you get to know your deck and how it speaks to you, you’ll find that each card has a slightly different, specific meaning that can only be interpreted by you. Say, for instance, that your tarot reader is a mother, and she associates the Fool card with her child. If she pulls that card, she won’t interpret it to mean that you are an idiot. Since this is her deck, and since she is the one doing the reading, then in this case the Fool card means innocence and possibility.
In order for the reading to be as powerful as it can be, you need to have a deck that provokes specific associations within you. But when it comes to choosing a deck, there are so many options it can seem overwhelming. The traditional Rider-Waite and Aleister Crowley Thoth are the most common, but that doesn’t mean that they will be the best for you. Look for a deck that attracts you, that is evocative, that makes you want to do a reading. A deck that you like is one that will respond to you, one that will speak to you.
Interpreting tarot requires balancing knowledge and intuition; the archetypes in each card provide history and grounding to your reading, but as a reader you can go deeper than that. Listen to your instincts and you’ll find that you can learn and see so much more.