Sometimes the Sibilla’s chattiness is exasperating: there you are, trying to get a straight answer about whether he loves you or not, and she just wastes your time telling you about what his aunt thinks about the whole thing. At other times, though, the Sibilla is a drama queen in the type of language she uses. Here’s a simple example of the latter behavior.
It’s an old reading from at least ten years ago, when a friend and I were relatively fresh out of college. She had been desperately looking for work for some time but without success, and, like most desperate people, she’d started looking in unconventional places. She’d answered an ad that would require her to move to Poland or the Czech Republic (can’t remember) for a stage followed by a part-time offer if all went well.
The first contact was by phone, yet she had some suspicions. She didn’t seem to be able to get a straight answer out of the guy interviewing her. So she asked me to pull some cards on the dude, and here’s what came up:
I don’t think we need much interpretation to see that there’s something fishy at best about the offer, and at worst it’s a total swindle. The Thief and the Enemy can obviously show anything from an actual thief to a mobster to an assassin, depending on the other cards. Here we have no hint of violence, so we’ll stop at swindle.
The most interesting card here, though, is the reversed Six of Spades. When it is upright, the Six of Spades represents someone who sighs after someone or something, whether because he or she longs for it or because they have pangs of conscience about it.
When it is reversed, the Six of Spades can be a good card if surrounded by positive cards: it can indicate letting go of an addiction, for instance, or of an unrequited love. Broadly speaking, it indicates not sighing anymore.
In this case, though, the reversed Sighs card is surrounded by terrible cards, cards that indicate someone who would hurt others, at least financially, for his own profit. Therefore, the Six of Spades reversed simply shows he has no pangs of conscience about it, which in turn makes him even more dangerous.
Well, my friend did some snooping around and she soon came into contact with other people who had answered the ad. By piecing together the information they had, it turned out that it was a swindle. I am not sure what would have happened, had they gone to the “stage”. Probably they would have been duped out of some money. Anyway, I’m sure glad she didn’t go.
MQS
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A very interesting post… I don’t work with this oracle, nor do I with classic card decks, but I also take the surrounding cards into consideration while working with Tarot, thus determining the positive or negative message of a given card.
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thank you! Yes, that’s a quite traditional way of reading cards, including tarot. One interesting thing is, if we look at how the tarot was read until the early XX century, including the GD, the surrounding cards were very important in determining the ‘dignity’
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I’m not sure if I wasn’t influenced by the Golden Dawn in this respect, as I was really obsessed with this order some time ago (especially I. Regardie’s perspective). I think I still carry a lot of its influence in my approach to spirituality, magic and divination…
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That’s understandable. Their synthesis of magic has been very influencial during a very important time in the history of occultism
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Yes! When I read Tarot, I’m sometimes told I’m „reading it like Lenormand.“ But looking at combinations, proximity, etc. is just how card readings were done, at least until Waite popularized the Celtic Cross and made ten one-card readings of it instead of one ten card reading. Or at least that’s the takeaway people got, whether it was Waite’s intention or not.
When you remove interaction with nearby cards, you’re not left with much information. That’s why so many people these days insist on always using spreads with named positions. They even insist that lines, boxes, and tableaus without named positions are „not spreads.“ Um, excuse me, the cards are spread on the table.
Modern Tarot trends have done so much to obscure card reading techniques. But the method is hiding in plain sight in parlor oracles like the various Sibillas, Lenormand, etc., and in playing card reading.
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Absolutely agree! 😁 I’m currently learning to read the Bolognese tarot under the guidance of a traditional practitioner. It’s a deck with a very old fortune-telling tradition stemming from before the Napoleonic period, and in it the cards are read in large spreads with all the cards on the table, or in smaller tableaus for more specific answers. There is a cross spread, which is almost exactly like the one I was taught with playing cards and the Sibilla, but each position has three cards, and I must say still this kind of spreads is the exception rather than the rule.
As for Waite, part of me thinks he was trolling. The celtic cross spread was given to GD novices to tinker with until they were ready for a more complex spread where the cards were read in lines. In part, I think, Waite wanted to avoid giving away a secret of his old order, and in part he probably didn’t care much for divination, but felt he had to throw a bone at the poor rubes who believed in it. But if one reads the old GD document where Mathers gives an example of a tarot reading, it is pure traditional fortune-telling with none of the psychic onanism that tarot readings have become later 😁
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