Wrapping up January

So far, January has been pretty good to me. I recently finished an illustration job doing a series of speculative covers for some children’s books, as well as a handful of commissions for random designs for people. I’ve been to see some fantastic movies - Black Swan, for instance - while others, such as Season of the Witch, were just terrible (I‘ll go into that in another post).

My relationship with A’jm has been through some odd little patches - nothing I’d even go as far as to describe as ‘bumpy,’ but things feel… restless. I just feel sort of ’bleh’ lately, and I’m not completely sure why. Though I don’t believe in Tarot telling the future, I do like sitting down to do ‘year’ reading now and then. Curious about what the cards may have said about this month ahead of time, and looking for some perspective, I looked back to one such reading, which I did in August of 2010 and recorded the draw from. January was drawn as such: 

1) Moving behind me: The Knight of Pentacles
2) In love and relationships: Judgement
3) In Worldly issues: The Nine of wands
4) In Spiritual issues: The Ten of Cups
5) Things to come in February: The Knight of wands
6) The overall tone of January: The Nine of Pentacles

Spreading the cards out once more, I took a look at the reading for January a second time.

Tarot

At the beginning of the summer, I was at Colossalcon in Ohio. When I started to get bored between bigger events, I decided to walk around with my tarot deck, and get some practice doing readings for profit (read: $1 a reading). I only got a few bites, but the people that got readings were across the board impressed. Two of the girls I did readings for ended up crying by the end of the reading, shocked by how accurate the things coming up were.

However, following a reading where the guy I reading for was particularly impressed, a guy that had sat down to watch made some comments.

Grinning and scoffing, he said something along the lines of;

“Well yeah, but see the descriptions of these cards are so vague that it could fit anybody. A few key words that could work with anybody make it seem true, it’s all fake.”

I let him go on for a few minutes about how buzz words - words that affect everybody - were being used to make it seem like I knew things that I didn't about the guy I was doing a reading for. He was right and wrong at the same time.

When he was done, I just smiled, and explained to him something that I think anybody who wishes to use tarot needs to understand.

“First of all, Tarot does NOT tell the future.”

Tarot in the Student Life Center

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.

*there are different interpretations regarding what position in cross/staff means what, but I use this:

1) the key issue of the reading

2) Obstacles in the way of resolving problems related to the issue

3) Subconscious traits

4) Conscious traits

5) Past

6) Present

7) Who the questioner is to the people around them

8) Who the people around the questioner are

9) hopes and fears

10) Probable outcome