Tag: tarot

#MonthofSpreads Day Six: The Reader’s Journey

1. What are my strengths as a reader/diviner?
Knight of Swords (Reversed)
Attention problems, uncontrolled energy and lack of focus, impulsivity, unrealised goals, burn-out, exhaustion

2. What makes my reading style unique and special?
King of Wands
Long-term goals, vision, living with purpose and intent, enthusiasm and positivity

3. What other skills/knowledge can I develop to help become a better reader/diviner?
XIII – Death (Reversed)
Stagnation, latent potential, a quiet time to regroup and set goals

4. How can I grow futher in my divination journey?
XII – The Hanged Man (Reversed)
Moving from a time of inertia into activity, suspension as a catalyst for change, positive movement

5. How can I become more confident in my divinatory skills?
VII – The Chariot
Balance, control, confidence, self-care, success through assertiveness and self-knowledge.

Thoughts
What seems like my burden – the negative aspects of my anxiety, ADHD, autism, and executive dysfunction – is actually my strength as a reader. My reading style is made unique because of my neurotype and because of my drive and commitment to learn and make tarot a positive tool in my life. I’ve been stagnated for a long time, and that is what it is, but taking the time to learn to use tarot to help me in my life is something I can do in this time. I can grow further by using this momentum to set up a routine, a pattern I can rely on. Though setting up a routine is really hard for me, I can do it. The ability to balance and control my life enough is – though undeveloped – already within me. Establishing and maintaining it will give me the confidence to achieve what I have previously thought was impossible.

til-beth-do-us-art:

It’s officially fall (even though it’s still way too hot to feel anything like it) and I’m finally beginning a project I’ve been thinking about for years. I’m designing my personal cartomancy (tarot-based) deck. Settling on appropriate suits for the Minor Arcana took a lot longer than I had expected, but I’m happy with my choice.

iamshadow21:

#MonthofSpreads Day Five – The Money Maker

The Shakespeare Oracle

I didn’t know what deck to use for this spread, and then I remembered The Shakespeare Oracle (actually a Rider Waite style deck, not an oracle at all) had coins as one of the suits, so. I don’t use this deck much because the cards are absolutely massive and incredibly difficult to shuffle.

1. Where do my financial problems reside?
Lord of Sceptres: Richard Plantagenet
Rushing into things, disregarding consequences, impulsiveness linked to excitement, inability so sit still and just be

2. How can I solve this issue?
Two of Coins (Reversed)
Skilled competent execution of tasks that be tiresome but necessary, fluctuating levels of energy, tolerance of indecisiveness or superficiality in others

3. Where should my focus be to start making money?
Five of Chalices (Reversed)
A spark of hope that should be cared for, healing rifts, letting go of the past, new friends or old friends returned

Thoughts
My impulsive behaviour without self-checking results in thoughtless overspending that has an impact on my finances. I can change this pattern of behaviour, but only with long, sometimes unpleasant work. I should focus on dealing with issues in my past and current life to make letting go of this harmful compulsion possible.

tarotprose replied to your photo post

I really like how the five of chalices was a spark of hope in this reading. That interpretation was so unique and I really admire your honesty. Thanks for sharing. 😀

Hey, thanks!
The ‘spark of hope’ reading was thanks to the LWB that comes with this deck. It’s really not one I’ve used more than once or twice – I inherited it, rather than bought it myself, and I’m not more than passingly familiar with Shakespeare, so I use the book a LOT. For the Five of Chalices for the upright reading the book talked a lot about giving up on hopeless situations and moving on, but for the reversal, it talked about there being hope and it was worth persisting. The challenging bit of this read was actually the Lord of Staves, because I struggled to identify if it was related to Wands or Swords, because the description was a bit ambiguous and nowhere could I find a straight up guide to which suits matched which Rider-Waite suit. (It’s Wands, btw.)

And yeah, the reason I took up tarot was as a substitute for therapy, which is a) expensive and b) has been pretty much useless for me since I was about sixteen and came to the conclusion that talking therapy wasn’t benefiting me any more. It wasn’t that I didn’t try therapy for the twenty years that followed – I absolutely did – it’s that it didn’t help me. This is helping me get some clarity that professionals seemed unwilling to help me find. So it’s brutal, and it’s messy, but it’s brilliant, and one of the best things about documenting some of this openly is that I’ve found other people who use tarot for pretty much the same reason I do, which is quite a comfort to know. When I stumbled across Tarot for Sad People, it meant so, so much to me, you have no idea. 🙂

#MonthofSpreads Day Five – The Money Maker

The Shakespeare Oracle

I didn’t know what deck to use for this spread, and then I remembered The Shakespeare Oracle (actually a Rider Waite style deck, not an oracle at all) had coins as one of the suits, so. I don’t use this deck much because the cards are absolutely massive and incredibly difficult to shuffle.

1. Where do my financial problems reside?
Lord of Sceptres: Richard Plantagenet
Rushing into things, disregarding consequences, impulsiveness linked to excitement, inability so sit still and just be

2. How can I solve this issue?
Two of Coins (Reversed)
Skilled competent execution of tasks that be tiresome but necessary, fluctuating levels of energy, tolerance of indecisiveness or superficiality in others

3. Where should my focus be to start making money?
Five of Chalices (Reversed)
A spark of hope that should be cared for, healing rifts, letting go of the past, new friends or old friends returned

Thoughts
My impulsive behaviour without self-checking results in thoughtless overspending that has an impact on my finances. I can change this pattern of behaviour, but only with long, sometimes unpleasant work. I should focus on dealing with issues in my past and current life to make letting go of this harmful compulsion possible.

copperbadge:

iamshadow21:

copperbadge:

iamshadow21:

copperbadge:

copperbadge:

So, a few weeks ago, on a quest for something else, I tripped over the concept of the 78-card Tarot spread. For those who aren’t into Tarot, the standard deck has four suits of 14 cards each that comprise the Minor Arcana plus 22 extra “face” cards that comprise the Major Arcana, so a 78-card spread would use every card in the deck, which is a trifle unusual in my experience. 

There are apparently a couple of full-deck spreads floating around out in the ether, but the ones I looked at weren’t satisfying to me for various reasons – perfectly decent on their own, but none of them quite what I was looking for. I had been startled by the very idea of a full-deck spread, but once I looked around I decided it would be interesting to try and make one of my own.

I sat down and drafted out a chart (the hand-drawing in this post is the final drafting of that) and built up a structure around it. For the past week or so I’ve been shuffling and writing and preparing to give the reading a test-run. Now that I have (and it was very interesting reading), I’m ready to unleash it on the world in time for Halloween – or Samhain, or All Saints, or All Souls, or Dia De Los Muertos, or whichever Veil Is Thinnest Oh Shit Light The Candles holiday you prefer. 

You can read more about the spread, including an explication of how to read it and a few variances on the reading, at the link below. I hope you all enjoy it and have fun with it. 

The Four Royal Advisors

It’s that time of year again, so I figured I’d reblog, especially since quite a few people I know have taken up Tarot this year. 

This is TERRIFYING.

I mean, cool, seriously cool, but so, so many cards. I have never felt more of a novice than I do looking at this elder god of a spread.

Honestly, it’s only as complicated as you want it to be – The reason each row or column has a general theme is that so you can look at it in very general terms, or you can get super up close with each card. One of the reasons I did my own is that I wanted it to be more accessible than the ones I was seeing – that’s why it has a narrative attached, to pull the whole thing together very simply. 

Admittedly I have been reading Tarot (or some version of fortunetelling cards) for a really long time, more than 20 years now, but that’s been very off-and-on, and I think the most important thing I’ve learned is that there is no single specific right way, no step where if you do something wrong the whole thing won’t work. It’s an intuitive process, so I always think of it as a rather structured improv, like writing to a prompt. You might not be writing what the prompter expected, but you’re combining that input with your own voice to create something. 

This is a guidebook, not a rulebook. 🙂 

I’m just looking at it from an executive dysfunction perspective. I think doing that spread would be POSSIBLE for me, but I think it would literally take me weeks to analyse. Maybe when I have twenty years going for me it’d be easy, yeah, but not right now. 🙂 I’ll probably try it in the future, but it won’t be a Halloween thing due to the current complicating factors: Six cats (mostly mine) and three kids under eight (NOT MINE) in this house right now. Never mind tarot – all my jigsaw puzzles are screaming at my from the shelf to DO THEM and it is a complete impossibility. The seven year old klepto would steal them, the four year old would lose them, the eighteen month old would eat them, and the cats would play with them. I’m only able to do readings because I have a laptable I can lay out cards on when the seven year old is not around.

Oddly enough, I think I’ve owned tarot for twenty years, but my teenage deck got misplaced/destroyed and I didn’t replace it until this year. So I am certainly NOT a fluent reader. I’m a LWB-in-one-hand-while-I-stare-at-the-cards reader. 😀

Yeah, that makes sense – both the executive dysfunction aspect and the more physical “cats and toddlers” factor. I didn’t take notes during my Halloween read, but my trial read I was definitely writing stuff down, because it was a lot of information intake, and I was still working at remembering some of the cards (I have a system for the suits, but there are about six major arcana I can’t keep straight even after working at it). So I can see how it would be difficult to manage that level of data without a mediating factor of some kind. 

I think part of it was I was seeing a lot of people going “Shit this is too complicated for me, it would take hours/days, I’d give myself a headache” and I don’t want it to be that intimidating – I want people know that this is literally something a guy in Chicago made up for fun, and they can take it as lightly or seriously as they want, remix it, mess around with it, do as much or as little as pleases them. 

I guess I just wanted people to know that a long, intense, detailed reading has its place in this spread, but it doesn’t have to go like that. 😀

I write every card down I draw – the book meaning (or meaning I find on a site, if it’s too ambiguous), and then my thoughts on the spread at the end. So any spread over about four cards takes me ages to write. It’s the way I’ve chosen to help me learn the cards. Writing is one of the ways I’ve found helps me to retain information a little better than just hearing or seeing, but it’s been at least a decade since I did any study, so I am super slow and my hand cramps like crazy and my handwriting is SO BAD it’s a joke. But I’m enjoying it. If I do the 78 card spread, I’ll probably need a whole notebook for it! 😀 Fortunately, cool nice hardback notebooks are pretty easy to find for under $5, so even I can afford that. Maybe if I spread the draw out over a few days, doing a handful of cards at a time, it’d be cool. But not this month. I’m doing #monthofspreads right now, so my reading time is booked.

copperbadge:

iamshadow21:

copperbadge:

copperbadge:

So, a few weeks ago, on a quest for something else, I tripped over the concept of the 78-card Tarot spread. For those who aren’t into Tarot, the standard deck has four suits of 14 cards each that comprise the Minor Arcana plus 22 extra “face” cards that comprise the Major Arcana, so a 78-card spread would use every card in the deck, which is a trifle unusual in my experience. 

There are apparently a couple of full-deck spreads floating around out in the ether, but the ones I looked at weren’t satisfying to me for various reasons – perfectly decent on their own, but none of them quite what I was looking for. I had been startled by the very idea of a full-deck spread, but once I looked around I decided it would be interesting to try and make one of my own.

I sat down and drafted out a chart (the hand-drawing in this post is the final drafting of that) and built up a structure around it. For the past week or so I’ve been shuffling and writing and preparing to give the reading a test-run. Now that I have (and it was very interesting reading), I’m ready to unleash it on the world in time for Halloween – or Samhain, or All Saints, or All Souls, or Dia De Los Muertos, or whichever Veil Is Thinnest Oh Shit Light The Candles holiday you prefer. 

You can read more about the spread, including an explication of how to read it and a few variances on the reading, at the link below. I hope you all enjoy it and have fun with it. 

The Four Royal Advisors

It’s that time of year again, so I figured I’d reblog, especially since quite a few people I know have taken up Tarot this year. 

This is TERRIFYING.

I mean, cool, seriously cool, but so, so many cards. I have never felt more of a novice than I do looking at this elder god of a spread.

Honestly, it’s only as complicated as you want it to be – The reason each row or column has a general theme is that so you can look at it in very general terms, or you can get super up close with each card. One of the reasons I did my own is that I wanted it to be more accessible than the ones I was seeing – that’s why it has a narrative attached, to pull the whole thing together very simply. 

Admittedly I have been reading Tarot (or some version of fortunetelling cards) for a really long time, more than 20 years now, but that’s been very off-and-on, and I think the most important thing I’ve learned is that there is no single specific right way, no step where if you do something wrong the whole thing won’t work. It’s an intuitive process, so I always think of it as a rather structured improv, like writing to a prompt. You might not be writing what the prompter expected, but you’re combining that input with your own voice to create something. 

This is a guidebook, not a rulebook. 🙂 

I’m just looking at it from an executive dysfunction perspective. I think doing that spread would be POSSIBLE for me, but I think it would literally take me weeks to analyse. Maybe when I have twenty years going for me it’d be easy, yeah, but not right now. 🙂 I’ll probably try it in the future, but it won’t be a Halloween thing due to the current complicating factors: Six cats (mostly mine) and three kids under eight (NOT MINE) in this house right now. Never mind tarot – all my jigsaw puzzles are screaming at my from the shelf to DO THEM and it is a complete impossibility. The seven year old klepto would steal them, the four year old would lose them, the eighteen month old would eat them, and the cats would play with them. I’m only able to do readings because I have a laptable I can lay out cards on when the seven year old is not around.

Oddly enough, I think I’ve owned tarot for twenty years, but my teenage deck got misplaced/destroyed and I didn’t replace it until this year. So I am certainly NOT a fluent reader. I’m a LWB-in-one-hand-while-I-stare-at-the-cards reader. 😀

copperbadge:

copperbadge:

So, a few weeks ago, on a quest for something else, I tripped over the concept of the 78-card Tarot spread. For those who aren’t into Tarot, the standard deck has four suits of 14 cards each that comprise the Minor Arcana plus 22 extra “face” cards that comprise the Major Arcana, so a 78-card spread would use every card in the deck, which is a trifle unusual in my experience. 

There are apparently a couple of full-deck spreads floating around out in the ether, but the ones I looked at weren’t satisfying to me for various reasons – perfectly decent on their own, but none of them quite what I was looking for. I had been startled by the very idea of a full-deck spread, but once I looked around I decided it would be interesting to try and make one of my own.

I sat down and drafted out a chart (the hand-drawing in this post is the final drafting of that) and built up a structure around it. For the past week or so I’ve been shuffling and writing and preparing to give the reading a test-run. Now that I have (and it was very interesting reading), I’m ready to unleash it on the world in time for Halloween – or Samhain, or All Saints, or All Souls, or Dia De Los Muertos, or whichever Veil Is Thinnest Oh Shit Light The Candles holiday you prefer. 

You can read more about the spread, including an explication of how to read it and a few variances on the reading, at the link below. I hope you all enjoy it and have fun with it. 

The Four Royal Advisors

It’s that time of year again, so I figured I’d reblog, especially since quite a few people I know have taken up Tarot this year. 

This is TERRIFYING.

I mean, cool, seriously cool, but so, so many cards. I have never felt more of a novice than I do looking at this elder god of a spread.

#MonthofSpreads Day Four: The Intuitive Reading

When I saw the prompt, I thought this one would be really interesting to do with a deck that’s all about intuition and spirit and creativity in a very brilliant and unconventional way, so I chose to use my copy of Brian Froud’s Faeries’ Oracle. I just took out the deck, drew, and formed some vague thoughts about the cards. I did peek at the book afterwards, but what I wrote up reflected what I thought initially.

Keyword: Serenity

14 – The Maiden (Reversed)
The Maiden or infant represents innocence and unknowing, the time before learning and wisdom. Inverted directly would imply that I need to seek out the aspects of the crone, that serentity comes from growing and learning, not from remaining stagnated in a prewisdom state.

62 – The Glanconer
This card at first glance seems very dark at first to me. The figure has a raw power, but that allure seems like it is laced with hidden thorns. I take it that this means that serenity comes from trusting our instincts in situations and around people who have the potential to be dangerous, despite their surface charm.

0 – Faery Guide
This card is blank, and by its very blankness it suggests the unknown and unknowable. Serenity comes from learning and discovery but also from the wisdom to discern what is unable to be known. Otherwise we may strive fruitlessly towards the unreachable, like Ahab for his white whale.

Thoughts
Seek knowledge and learning, but do not neglect wisdom. Use this wisdom to guard against dangerous thoughts, people or situations. Find peace in the fact that some things are just unknowable, and experience is the key to accepting this and finding a measure of serenity.

#MonthofSpreads Day Three: My Personal Development

1. How can I develop more self acceptance in my life?
Daughter of Pentacles
You have to put in the work. Even if it is tedious, difficult or humiliating, it must be done, and done right. There are no shortcuts. It will be worth it.

2. How can I develop more clarity in my life?
Five of Pentacles (Reversed)
Life has been hard, but things are getting better, and the further you come, the brighter the light at the end of the tunnel will be. You’ll get there.

3. How can I develop more security in my life?
0 – The Fool (Reversed)
You need to listen to yourself more, and give value to your own feelings and needs over those of others. Your opinions and feelings have value, and you need to start to treat them as if they matter. As if you matter. Because you do.

Liking this spread a lot, even if I did have to dig deep into the internet to find the reversals that fit. 🙂