The Three-Point Pull

One of the perennial beginner's questions is "How do you pull the cards from the deck to populate a spread?" There are many opinions on this: from the top (and occasionally from the bottom), from a splayed "fan," by holding your hand over the cards and taking the ones you intuitively "feel," etc. The old-school …

The “Gambler’s Cross” Spread

Although I understand why we do it, I've never been entirely satisfied with the fact that most methods of dealing the cards draw them from the top of the deck after the shuffle and cut similar to the way playing cards are dealt for games. Some readers circumvent this by pulling the cards from a …

Open for Business

I found out yesterday that my WordPress PayPal button does in fact work, and I've begun doing on-line tarot readings. The client in the most recent case shuffled and pulled her own cards, effectively putting her personal stamp on the reading, and e-mailed me the list to reconstruct the layout and read it at my …

The “Fountain of Truth” Alternate Trending Option

Even those of us who have spent decades reading the cards are sometimes compelled to come up with creative stopgap measures to "skin the proverbial cat" when our usual approach falters. Here I'm tackling what I perceive to be an inherent weakness in the traditional Celtic Cross spread: the interpretation of the "crowning" card as …

Dissecting the Celtic Cross

I've used the venerable Celtic Cross spread during most of my long involvement with the tarot, having first encountered it in Eden Gray's book The Tarot Revealed in 1972. At the time I didn't realize that Gray had taken a few liberties with A.E. Waite's original, and I found her version to be remarkably effective. …

Paired-Deck Reading #2: An Old Acquaintance

As I envisioned, the pocket-size Centennial Edition of the RWS "in a tin" is the perfect companion for Pixie's Astounding Lenormand in two-deck readings. The latter was adapted  by Edmund Zebrowski from Pamela Colman Smith's artwork, so there is an agreeable consistency in the images, and the size is roughly equivalent. I decided to do …

Paired-Deck Reading #1: A Family Matter

A few of the Lenormand writers I follow have mentioned the practice of merging tarot or oracle cards with a Lenormand deck, usually by drawing a handful of cards from an alternate pack as a postscript to the Lenormand reading. I've never found this particularly useful, but lately I've been thinking how it might be …

The Lagging Indicator

I figured I had better strike while the iron is hot on this thought. While considering the nature of divination in my previous post, it occurred to me that the "outcome" card in a tarot reading - the outward evidence of a predicted conclusion - may actually be what the science of economics calls a …

Parsifal’s Wheel – A Celtic Cross Variation

The famous (or as some would have it, infamous) “Celtic Cross” (CC) tarot spread popularized by Arthur Edward Waite in his Pictorial Key to the Tarot in the early 1900s and updated by Eden Gray and others in the last half of the 20th century is a mainstay of the tarot reader's art. In the …

Parsifal’s Bow Personal Destiny Spread

When working New Age fairs, I'm usually limited to brief reading sessions, no more than 20 minutes. My favorite spread has always been the venerable Celtic Cross, which I've tweaked to my own satisfaction over the years. But doing justice to one takes me a solid 45 minutes, and even trimming it to half-an-hour is …