This entry was inspired by Jack of Wands blog entry, the tag started in 2017 with Arwen Lynch. I’d love to see your answers.
1: What is your current favorite deck?
Currently I am enjoying the Old Arabian Lemormand from Malpertuis and on days when my brain fog clouds my reading ability, I pull the Trippin Waite, a 1960s style psychedelic edition of the RWS deck I’ve known all my adult life.
2. What Tarot card do you think stands for who you are now?
The Hanged Man, I am currently at home in quarantine, I only leaving the house for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing therapy. This therapy helps me heal past trauma by revisiting painful stuck points and using bilateral brain functions to file the memory into long term storage. It’s a lot about left to right tapping, tolerating coexisting and painful feelings and sitting with shame.
3. What card do you think stands for who you want to be?
I’d like the Sun or any of the 3 Aries decan cards – 2 3 and 4 of wands, so I can gain strength and skill in a new chapter of health. Maybe I am drawn to the Sun because we’re in the midst of a bitterly cold winter cold snap here the UK?
4.Draw a Tarot card and tell us how it answers the question: “What does the Universe want you to know right now?”
I drew the 8 of Wands from Mel Meleens Rosetta tarot app on by phone. It’s a freakin’ beautiful, energizing, high voltage boost to my energy and a reminder to write my ideas down rather than letting them flit through my mind. ”
5. Do you have any cards that you MUST love in order to work with a deck?
I always look to the 7 of wands, my birth decan, to see what the artist sees when they think of that iconoclastic rebel seven of wands heart! But generally, I need to have some kind of resonant response to all the cards to read with it. That might be I like or dislike the art, but to read well I do need to feel something. A ‘meh’ kind of deck will not do! If the artist has done a good job with the less popular cards like the Wheel of Fortune, Judgment and the more scary looking minors then I feel confident that the deck will be useable.
6. Why Tarot and not some other divination system?
I grew up watching my father read the I Ching with yarrow sticks and a relative give mediumship readings, so I never found divination to be a strange pastime. The adults around me did impress upon me how much knowing about the future can be a help or a hindrance, my grandfather was in the navy and used to tell me of a sailor who used a ouija board one night and learned he would die before the ship docked. That idea tormented him until he threw himself overboard. I am sure this was a folk retelling to scare me away from ouija boards but it worked! I can channel mediumship messages but chose not to do that; it’s not appropriate for where I am emotionally right now, trauma tends to distort what I get and determine who shows up to communicate with me. I love the Lenormamd, but Tarot is where my freewheeling love of esoterics, history, humanities and divination can jam happily!
7. What’s the first book you can remember reading about Tarot (other than the LWB [Little White Book])?
I wish I could remember, I had a brilliant book that went card by card to break down the myth and symbolism of each card in a full double page spread with pictures, I ended up giving it away to a friend and regretting it! I probably had the Tarot Bible as my first introduction book, but as a kid in possession of an adult library card and a thirst for the occult section of the library, I might have read something about tarot prior to picking the cards up. I grew up in the height of the 1990s new age wicca woo publishing craze.
8. What Tarot person would you like to sit down with for a chat about Tarot?
I’m going to be greedy and say a tea party with Freida Harris and Pamela Coleman Smith so I can get an uncensored feminist round table on what it was like to work for a difficult esotercist like Crowley or Waite! Can I have Etteila there too, rumours abound he was a hairdresser and my hair needs a trim. I’d be fascinated to hear Etteilas view on modern Tarot culture given how much cartomantic knowledge he had and how his tarot concepts predate the Golden Dawn iteration.
9. Tell me about one YouTube Tarot channel that you watch (and why).
Tom Benjamin’s channel is always high quality, funny, insightful stuff. I also enjoy Lucky Lynxs channel for another perspective on tarot and lenormand, he has been putting out fantastic takes on what tarot readers need to bear in mind reading clients going through Covid19 crisis life changes.
10. How many decks do you have?
Under 20. 20 is the sweet spot for me, enough to read and enjoy my decks without guilt over neglected regretful purchases and not so much I start spending cash I don’t have!
11. Do you mix Tarot and oracles when you read?
Yes, mostly in readings for myself. I find that including oracle or lenormand in a tarot spread keeps my mind working to interpret in new and fresh ways. I also think we underestimate what a meaningful affirmative statement can do for our mood. I have a deck from the Blurt Foundation, ’54 reasons why you matter’ that I used a lot in bibliotherapy groupwork and those cards generated a lot of honest conversation about what hope is, what is a platitude and what is the life saving phrase a very depressed and hopeless person actually can relate to. I’m not a big oracle deck user but I do think the right one can be a friend in a dark moment.
12. Have you ever created your own Tarot card or deck?
Nope! I keep imagining making a Lenormand deck based on my own rural Yorkshire regions history, but I am not an artist.
13. Do you read for yourself?
Yes, often. I have a daily draw practice that I chart in an excel spreadsheet. I can tell you right now that my most frequent pulls in 2021 are the Moon and the Queen of Wands and in 2020 it was the 4 of wands. I find it very hard to understand the minority who think a person cannot or should not read for themselves, I’ve encountered some people who are 100% opposed to reading for oneself and consider that unlucky.
14 What are your favorite questions to be asked when you do a reading for someone else?
I like a question that almost ask itself, it’s so important to the current moment, that question they really wants to ask but it afraid to. I snuck off to get a tarot reading as a teenager panicking over my unplanned pregnancy and while I didn’t name my problem, I showed up full of desire to know what my future was. That reading and the experience of a non judgemental reader helped me a lot.
Rilke wrote a beautiful section in Letters to a young poet about having patience with our unanswered question and living them. I think the act of phrasing a question is an act of magic that declares we are open to something happening. Sometimes a tarot reading can tell you that the unsolved things in your heart need your patience.
I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer
Letters to a young poet, Rilke, 1903.
15. What’s the craziest thing that’s happened to you during a reading?
I don’t have a crazy tarot reading story but I once did a mediumship reading exchange exercise in a psychic development class. The person I was working with gave me no clues and all I could discern was the word yogurt, a word consistently repeated by an elderly grandfather type hovering about in the room. I eventually just said ‘does yogurt mean something special to you?’ And the person said yes and told me all about the yeast infection she was suffering. My psychic mediumship teacher taught me never to interpret or try to make a message near, but use my wisdom to give information clearly and ethically. Sometimes you have to go with ‘yogurt.'(!)
Rifflin' The Mind Tarot. 