It’s not just about love. Playing cards (and any other oracle) can be used to identify people, find lost objects and animals and many other things. Unfortunately, this type of reading is extremely complex, and I have a less than stellar track record in this regard (as opposed to the lady who taught me, who was sort of known for finding lost rings and describing thieves)

The reason for the difficulty is that the world’s complexity is almost endless, and we only have a limited number of cards at our disposal, so that there is always a need for combining card meanings in new and clever ways to signify everything. One of the subjects I want to touch on in a next article on the philosophy of divination is exactly the fact that the limits of our imaginations can also be the limits of our ability to make predictions.

Furthermore, the language of the cards is otherworldly, at least as far as making predictions is concerned, so that the oracle will not necessarily answer the question in a linear form that is readily understood. This is why my error rate by people descriptions and by finding lost items tends to be higher than in other readings. Sometimes I can’t so much as make sense of one of the cards, let alone the whole composition.

There is, however, a reading I want to share because of how clear the cards were, which makes this a good case study. A woman had lost her bracelet and, after looking for it everywhere, was beginning to suspect her niece of stealing it, possibly as a game. Here’s the spread:

There is one woman in the spread. She is next to the Ace of Clubs. This is extremely important. The Ace of Clubs represents initiative, and if you ask whether someone will or won’t do something, if their significator comes up next to the Ace of Clubs (or the Five of Clubs, representing action, or, sometimes, even the Two of Clubs, which means taking steps) it shows the person will do it.

In this case, though, we are talking about theft. So this woman took the initiative, i.e., she stole the bracelet. She is next to the Eight of Clubs, which represents work. So this is not the querent’s niece, but a coworker or superior.

Note, though, that she comes up as the Queen of Diamonds, not as the Queen of Spades, so there is no inherent ‘evil’ about her. Furthermore, we have the Three of Diamonds next to the Eight of Clubs. The Three of Diamonds represents all activities that are done part-time. Metaphorically, therefore, the woman is not a ‘full-time’ thief, i.e., she doesn’t have the habit of stealing. She probably just seized the moment to have something that caught her fancy. The Ten of Hearts closing the spread shows the possibility of a happy ending.

To be more sure, I asked the querent to pick another card for the Queen of Diamonds, and she chose the Four of Clubs. So this is a woman the querent speaks to habitually. Furthermore, even though the Queen is a Diamonds, and should technically be very fair, she is surrounded by Clubs, which represent a dark complexion and/or hair (but not as dark as Spades)

Well, some days after the reading the querent’s coworker, a woman of dark complexion and hair, came forward to her, wracked with guilt, and gave her back the bracelet, which the querent had left on her desktop unattended. The woman said she didn’t know what had possessed her to steal the item.

MQS