I was sitting in the student life center at the college I go to, relaxing with my boyfriend as we waited for my class time to roll around. I took out my tarot deck and did a quick reading for myself – the results told me for the second time in two weeks that I needed to turn to my boyfriend for help with my bad dreams and worries – and was about to do a reading for him, when;
“Hey, what is that, a tarot deck there?”
There was an older man, latino, with a bushy mustache with a few threads of white in it. He was smiling, and seemed curious.
“Yeah,” I smiled back.
“You know how to do it?”
“Yeah, but I just started doing it earlier this year.”
I described the kind of spread I was using*, and he responded by telling me the style he used.
Pictured: Celtic Cross and Staff layout - aka, the style I use.
“How long have you been doing it?” I asked.
“All my life,” he responded.
He explained that his mother had taught him and his siblings, and that her mother had taught her, and so on. Grinning, he moved to our booth and asked me to do a reading for him. When I finished, he seemed pleased, and told me I’d read correctly. He then asked if I’d mind if he did a reading for me.
I was more than happy, and handed him the cards.
He then spread the cards out, flipping a card up every four cards. A top row of cards was my past and present, and the next three told my future. He used the entire deck in the reading, and used a method that depended almost completely on the face image of the card, rather than the symbols in the picture. But still, he touched on key points –
“Your father is worried a lot about you… he wants to protect you.” Another card – “A man in your family who loves you is waiting for your call.” He also made references to marriage and fortune coming my way.
Overall, it was a very strange and unfamiliar way (to me) to read the cards, but the things he said still made sense to me.
I couldn’t help but think of my dream – tarot cards with meanings I’d never heard of before, with images and values I’d never seen or thought of, but still having meaning nonetheless. I understood, then, the lesson I was supposed to learn:
There are many valid methods of doing a reading, or interpreting the cards – many of them are traditional, and blend different beliefs (he had me make the sign of the cross on the deck before the reading) but all work. It just depends on the person.
In my dream, the new form of Tarot was handed from one practitioner to another, who then inadvertently handed it to me.
The man had pointed to one card, and told me: “Someone old and wise will send you a message, in a dream - or already did.”
Smiling, and wondering what his grandmother and mother looked like in their youth, I nodded. Maybe they already had.
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