Ruling Cards: An I Ching “Hand-off”*

*In US football, a "hand-off after the snap" means that the quarterback hands the ball immediately to one of the running backs behind the line of scrimmage, hopefully advancing it downfield on the play through the element of surprise. (I won't get into the even-trickier "double-reverse" here.) Humor me while I stretch the analogy a …

The Pentacles Court: Strategy Over Tactics

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I was just reading a Quora essay that described George Washington as a lousy military tactician but a brilliant strategist. It seems he lost all six of the major battles in which he participated, but his goal wasn't to win, just to preserve his army so it could remain a thorn in the …

The “Moving Card” Idea-Development Spread

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I've just come up with a notion that intrigues me quite a bit, and I credit metaphysical author and blogger Benebell Wen for taking me there via the discussion of "moving lines" in her book, I Ching, The Oracle: A Practical Guide to the Book of Changes. Its ideal application may be in …

Two Approaches to Tarot Triangulation: The Quintessence and the Midpoint

AUTHOR'S NOTE: There is a technique used in navigation and surveying called "triangulation," the technical definition for which, in its simplest form, is "the process of determining the location of a point by forming triangles to the point from known points." While navigation encompasses distance as well as direction and position and surveying only defines …

Interstitial Tarot Reading: “Piercing the Veil”

AUTHOR'S NOTE: In a non-tarot-related Medium post I came across the word "interstitial" (a term that describes the transitional space connecting two related objects or ideas, much like a short hallway linking adjacent rooms). It brought to mind my previous comments about having to rely too heavily on intuitive guesswork in order to bridge the …

“Getting It Wrong”

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Tarot novices often ask more seasoned diviners (with almost palpable dread) "What should I do if I get a reading totally wrong for one of my sitters?" The puzzling thing for me is why they assume they must be infallible when that's an impossible feat in a practice as fluidly impressionistic as card-reading. …

Boundaries, Fences and Neighbors: Drawing a Line in the Sand

AUTHOR'S NOTE: In his poem Mending Wall, Robert Frost gives the impression that he is rudely baiting the neighbor who keeps telling him earnestly "Good fences make good neighbors" as they work on repairing their shared stone wall. ("Something there is that doesn't love a wall." Hmm. Why do I feel that Frost would have …

An Accident That Never Happened

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The fascinating thing about this reading is the direct validation I received early in the period regarding its chances for occurring as predicted. As of mid-April, the prediction is over eight months old and nothing drastic has ever happened, but it still makes for an interesting case study. Notably, I did experience some …

“Dividing the Chaos” – Reconstituting the Trump Cards

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Here is another oddball experiment (I have a few of them queued up) in which pairs of trump cards are collated numerologically (similar to the "quintessence" calculation but with pre-selected components) to intentionally yield the numerical value of a third trump. The goal is to create a three-part dynamic with two "modifying" cards …

Qabalistic Constellations: A Reading Template

AUTHOR'S NOTE: As does religious mysticism with its unproven "origin" theories and moralizing allegorical themes, esoteric metaphysics exhibits a long history of "making stuff up." In the world of tarot, the British "Occult Revival" of the late 19th Century produced the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, one of the chief proponents of such inventive …