An Unlikely Prediction

On February 2, 2017 I performed a predictive tarot reading on the outcome of Super Bowl 51 (aka “Super Bowl LI”). For many in the country, the New England Patriots were the “black hat” contender because of the “Deflategate” scandal, even though the football pundits considered them a convincing favorite to win. One of the …

And Now for Something Completely Different

I warned you some of my other passions would creep in here. Below is my recipe for an Ultimate Irish Peach Sour. While traveling back from Florida last May, we stopped at an Applebees in western Virginia. They had a new mixed drink on the menu called an "Irish Peach Sour." I put my whisky-savvy …

Thoth Court Cards “By the Book”

A while back, as a service to the on-line Thoth community, I went through every paragraph of the Court Card section of the Book of Thoth, trawling Crowley's "moral characteristics" for words and phrases that could be compiled into a robust keyword list derived from his own words. After tabulating that, I created a second, …

“Cheap Shots” #2: Intuit This!

"I don't need no steenkin' books! My intuition sees all." (Alternatively, "I talk to angels.") Frankly, as a story-teller, if all I gave my Muse to work with was my presumptive groping after what I vaguely supposed the people in the cards might be up to within the context of the reading, she would run …

The “Train to Nowhere” Missing Person Spread

I created this spread as a result of on-line discussions about "cold case" missing person investigations. The one and only time I've used it so far, a young lady in California turned up in Car #8, the Dead Letter Office. She was in fact discovered drowned in a local river. Not the kind of validation …

Fortitude and the TdM Master Layout

Before anyone flees for the exit, this 78-card extravaganza is NOT a spread for divination, it's a systematic way to assign interpretive meaning to the suit cards of the Tarot de Marseille (TdM) by “borrowing” it from the “trump” cards of the same number (up to a point). Finding meaning in the numbered small (or …

The Crosstown Traffic Series

Here is something that will be of absolutely no practical use to anybody except those of us who think deep, convoluted thoughts about tarot as a "system" (and maybe not even then). It falls off  the far edge of theoretical thinking even for me, but I do like the visuals. (And I always did admire …

Trump Cards for Timing

In the temporal scheme of all things tarot, the card suits and numbers work reasonably well together to create a model for estimating the timing of future events. Although it is deeply flawed (for example, no reply to a job application is likely to take "years;" the more practical answer is probably "never"), the rule-of-thumb …

Astrologically Rethinking the Major Arcana

If you're like me, you don't swallow every spoonful of generally-accepted wisdom that's pushed at you; at least you take a sniff first, and if it doesn't pass the "sniff test" (never mind the "giggle test"), you are wary of ingesting it. So it is with me regarding the astrological correspondences given to the Major …

“Cheap Shots” #1

"Tarot is the new "blind date" for the emotionally timorous, without the trepidation of actually having to follow through. It's safe, it's not emotionally messy and it doesn't require nerve or opportunity." In my curmudgeonly way , I have a large store of acerbic observations about the world of tarot as we presently know it. …