“Cheap Shots” #15: Moon Madness

No subject is prone to more mass confusion across various systems of divination than that of the Moon. In astrology it's the archetypal Mother, nurturing and emotionally effusive, connected with memory and the subconscious mind as well as psychic awareness. As one of the three main building-blocks of the personality, it has much to do …

The Art of Reading

Cartomancy is fundamentally a story-tellers art, in which each card in a spread forms a scene in a narrative that logically advances the story from the preceding card and segues neatly into the next. The true test of the raconteur's skill occurs when facing what at first appears to be a hopeless jumble of mismatched …

No Ads Here, Ever

I occasionally get a friendly nudge from people who think I should monetize my blog with ads (probably because they want to be featured). So i did a little investigating and found this interesting article that makes avoiding ads in favor of other monetizing options look like the sensible thing to do. https://smartblogger.com/blog-ads/ Offering personally-recommended …

A Celtic Cross Reading Example

Here is an example of a Celtic Cross interpretation I posted on one of the tarot forums I frequent, using my personal spread design and positional meanings. It's a bare-bones version of the CC reading I'm offering here. All images copyright U.S. Games Systems, Inc, Stamford, CT Card #1: 6 of Pentacles - Most of …

Swaggin’ It

At one time, tarot was used primarily as a tool for divination; its forte was getting under the skin of outward appearances in order to examine the roots of causality found within a querent's subconscious grasp of his or her personal reality. This was usually expressed in terms of the chance for occurrence of some …

Should We Empower or Should We Enable?

One thing I have always appreciated about tarot is its ability to speak the plain truth in difficult circumstances. Its advice is often bluntly constructive rather than comforting, and the reader must walk a fine line when imparting its wisdom to assure impartiality. It's a truism that "bad things" do still happen to "good people," …

Culling the Herd

In agriculture, threshing a wheat harvest means separating the kernels from the chaff, after which winnowing removes the hulls, leaving behind only the edible part of the grain. Facing the bounty of new, old and restored tarot decks on the market today, I feel like a lucky farmer confronting a bumper crop. The phrase “So …

Horary on Hold: Strictures Against Judgment

Horary astrology has a self-limiting feature that doesn't appear anywhere else in the practice of astrology: the concept of "strictures against judgment." There are certain conditions pertaining to a horary chart that render it "unfit for judgment;" in his 17th-Century English, William Lilly called this "decisions before judgment" and described it thus: "All of the …

A Horary “Journeyman’s” Test Case

I'm close to believing that I now merit the title of "journeyman astrologer" in the practice of horary divination. I've been working with John Frawley's methods for a few years now, slowly whittling down my more inclusive and holistic natal delineation style to zero in solely on the status of the "quesited" (the thing being …

“Cheap Shots” #14 – Tough Love

I generally prefer decks that hand out unvarnished truth rather than affirmative pleasantries (which excludes many oracle decks, and especially "angel cards"). The Thoth is the granddaddy of them all in that regard, and each of its various clones is no slouch either. For example, unlike the ambivalent 8 of Cups in the Waite-Smith deck, …