Lenormand Lost & Found

I have been working with the “location” guidance in astrologer John Frawley's Horary Textbook to come up with similar attributes for the cards of the Lenormand deck to be used in “lost object” readings. The following ideas are provisional and subject to change as I develop them further; because this is unmapped territory, in many cases I'm going with …

The “Break On Through” Rite-of-Passage Spread

The inspiration for this spread came from a couple of sources. I was watching a TV show in which a choir was singing that old "Do-Re-Mi" song from The Sound of Music  film (not the rap song of the same name). ("Doe, a deer, a female deer," etc. Don't ask.) I got thinking about the …

Stone Soup

I think it's time I start getting serious about bringing cartomantic (that is, playing-card) meanings into my approach to the numbered - or "pip" - cards when reading. The RWS minor cards with their built-in narrative vignettes are like "canned soup," the semi-scenic small cards of the Thoth deck are closer to "home-made soup" that you start with store-bought …

2019 Super Bowl: Rams vs. Patriots

UPDATE #1: The Rams won the toss, so even though they deferred possession until the start of the second half, I'll stick with my model and predict a win for Los Angeles. UPDATE #2: The anemic scoring envisioned for the first half proved to be prophetic, and the half-time score was even lower than predicted. …

A Guilty Pleasure

I admit to watching almost no television (in fact, nearly zero most of the time). I became offended by its growing insipidity (not to mention cultural and moral bankruptcy) back in the early '80s and pretty much weaned myself off it. The occasional HBO or Netflix fantasy series may still capture my attention (Game of Thrones, Westworld, …

Context Is King

Although this has been a recurring minor theme in many of my previous posts, I thought I would expand on it a bit. In a lengthy thread on the Cartomancy Forum titled "Is There Such a Thing as Bad Cards?" author Andy Boroveshengra (of Lenormand fame but equally accomplished in tarot and traditional astrology) made …

Paper Tiger

Those of us who post regularly (critics might say interminably) in online blogs run the risk of self-parody, becoming mere "cardboard cut-outs" of our formerly ferocious literary personae. Conventional wisdom asserts that a blogger must publish frequently to maintain an interested and engaged following, but this can sometimes mean unintentionally plowing (or, if you're British, …

Where There’s Smoke . . .

One objection that some tarot readers have to so-called "positional" spreads - those that typically bear a fixed positive or negative meaning for each card position in the layout - is that they can create  an uncomfortable setting where a nominally good" card must be interpreted in a "bad" way according to its position and vice versa. The Celtic Cross is a perfect …

“Two-Out-of-Three” Spread Tutorial Layouts

A Facebook conversation led to the recognition that it would be a good idea to post some example pictures of how the various card chains would play out.  I posed a hypothetical question: "How will this business initiative work out?" and selected the 3 of Wands from the Albano-Waite deck (Deck #1) as my Significator.  Since …

Craft, Career or Calling?

I sometimes wonder how many people actually make a living wage in the field of divination, much less a handsome income. There are notable exceptions, of course, mostly respected authors, teachers, lecturers, artists, publishers and the occasional shop owner (although those are rapidly disappearing or diversifying in the face of crushing online sales). But I would venture to …