Today's Card--The Magician!

People who have known me for a long time are often surprised when they learn that I read Tarot cards.  It’s a relatively recent development—I picked up a set when I’d been approached to write a romance novel with a tarot theme.  I knew enough about Tarot to understand that it was something you can’t fake. 

Getting Tarot wrong is sort of like writing a Regency romance and putting the courses in the wrong order at dinner or addressing a Viscount incorrectly—the author gets hate mail.  Just as there are people who have memorized and hold dear every detail of early 19^th century English social convention, there are those who can recite the Fool’s Journey backwards and take it very, very seriously.

I was always a good student and I’m pretty good at fact absorption, so I figured it would be easy to learn Tarot.  I bought Tarot For Dummies and a Rider-Waite deck, and started at lesson one.

And I did learn.  I learned there were 78 cards in the deck, including 22 Major Arcana (unsuited) cards and 56 Minor Arcana (suited) cards.   I used various mnemonic devices and other learning tools to memorize the cards.  And I did readings, lots and lots of readings.  My friends, my family, my coworkers and my neighbors must have gotten tired of me chasing them around, deck in hand, begging them to let me read their cards.  One card readings, three card readings, Celtic cross readings...I tried them all.

But it just wasn’t clicking.  I’d lay the cards out and ponder the meanings, progressions, reversals and combinations, often having to resort to reference books.   I’d recite the memorized meanings and people would look at me blankly. 

So I went back to the text books—by this time I’d accumulated a stack of them—and found that I was supposed to not only read the cards, I was supposed to “interpret” them.   I was getting frustrated and about to hang the whole thing up when something happened.

Several of my text books and a couple of readers I consulted had all given me the same piece of advice:  If the cards aren’t “speaking to you,” then try a different deck.  And, oh boy, did I.     Buying Tarot decks became an obsession.  At one point I had a couple of dozen. 

Then, one day I was looking on line for some hints about a puzzling configuration I’d drawn in a reading, and I came across the image of a single card.  It was the Fool, the zero card in the Major Arcana, and wasn’t even one of the cards in the spread I was trying to interpret.  A reference in the article told me the name of the artist who had drawn the card, and I went to his website and ordered the deck.

From the moment I held this new deck in my hands, everything changed.  The spreads made sense.  The progressions were as clear in my head as if I had GPS.  The blank looks of my victims  subjects were replaced by expressions of startled recognition.  And, suddenly, I was really enjoying doing readings.

Like most readers, I am more or less unable to do a reading for myself, as I tend to put the spin I want to see, rather than the spin I need to see, on the combinations.  But I do draw a single card, sort of like checking out your horoscope.  I have found that, on those days I don’t like the cards message, shuffling it back into the deck and drawing a new card does not work.  About half the time I draw the same card again, and the other half I draw a card that means substantially the same thing.

My beautiful deck, the Gilded Tarot by Ciromarchetti, is no longer being produced, but you can still find cards out there.  The artist has a new deck, the Tarot of Dreams, that I find almost equally compelling.  

I do free 3-card Tarot readings at all my book signings.  Stop by!  I’d love to do one for you.

Oh! oh! Do me!!!!

Actually, I want a full reading the next time I see you - be prepared!

Yes, it really is all about me in my head. This cannot surprise you.;)

This is so cool! Will you read my cards at RWA?

Awesome intro to Tarot...for book research! Great story about how it took the right deck for things to "click."

I delved deeper into Tarot this year for book research, too. I wanted to be able to reverse engineer spreads related to the future of the story, and while I took the less obscure roads to card meanings I realized some reader mail could still be in store. There are so many decks, schools of thoughts, and individual interpretations...none "thee one" right answer. But I have cruised sites where practitioners have a more focused viewpoint. Good luck to us both!