The Seeker and the Spirit

Spiritually, I tend to define myself by what I'm not: that is, not religious in any conventional, monotheistic sense. Not Christian, Jewish or Muslim (although my ancestry is almost certainly Middle Eastern by way of southern Germany), not Hindu and not Buddhist (although Buddhism definitely has its appeal). After reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, …

A Matter of Trust

When I returned to professional tarot reading in 2014, my second client was a young man who clearly had some preconceptions about how his session should proceed. His wife had bought the reading for his birthday from the proprietor of the shop where I operated, but the owner is an oracle-card reader who is less …

A Proper Gander

When I was in the US Army in Germany in the late '60s, I was co-editor of an anti-establishment underground newspaper called Proper Gander. The title was a puckish take on the government "propaganda" to be found in the military's official news organs, the Stars and Stripes and the Overseas Weekly. Needless to say, we …

Welcome to the Jumble*

(* With apologies to Guns N' Roses for pinching their song title "Welcome to the Jungle") As I mentioned in a previous post, every spread of ten cards that uses all 78 cards in the deck as its starting point offers over 4 quintillion (in the US that's 4 followed by 18 zeros; 4 trillion …

The Diviner’s Quiver

Many seekers who begin their journey into the esoteric arts with one favored method of prediction and conscientiously develop their skill over an extended period of time eventually feel the urge to stretch out into other forms of divination, if only to be able to wield a "quiver" of techniques to fit any situation. It …

The Sticking Point

sticking point (noun): "a point, detail, or circumstance causing or likely to cause a stalemate or impasse." For those with enough cartomantic experience to instantly spot what is working in a reading and what isn't, there is often one card (and frequently more than one) that stands out by defying meaningful connection to the matter …

2018 Midterm Election Revisited

Back in January I performed a Lenormand Grand Tableau to examine the circumstances of the upcoming Congressional election in the United States that is scheduled for November 6. That reading projected a thin margin of victory for the Democrats, but a number of things have changed since that time such that an update is warranted.  …

Unto the Breach

As promised, I erected a mundane horoscope to examine the implications of Mars being singularly bright in the evening sky at the time of the Congressional mid-term elections in the United States. The title of this post alludes to the famous lines from Act III, Scene I of Shakespeare's play Henry V, which conclude with: …