Here’s a recent reading I did. The querent is a man in his early 40s
A work-related tarot reading
The most obvious thing that caught my attention is the Emperor next to the Lovers and Justice. The Lovers is also the center of the whole spread. It can show a meeting but also being in talks for something, and next to Justice it can indicate a partnership.
On the first line we have three bad cards in a row: the Tower, the Hermit and the Hanged Man (the Hermit is not necessarily bad, but it’s sandwiched between difficult cards, so they create a negative cluster together). There seems to have been a long period either of unemployment or of serious difficulties. The Empress could indicate the person’s money but upon asking him he told me that he’s gone through a rough patch in his work life which led his girlfriend to leave him.
Then we have the Popess and the Pope, which usually show an older couple. So I ask him if he’s going into a partnership with such people, and he said these are his aunt and uncle, who are offering him to go into business together. The Sun in the end shows it will be a good move.
I don’t believe I ever showed this spread. This is an example of a question by a woman who asked if she would get pregnant.
A Pyramid Spread with Playing Cards on a pregnancy
The first thing I notice is the Queen of Clubs, the querent, falling as the central card in the spread. She is in charge of the spread, and the spread describes her and her life. I also notice that she is mirrored by the Jack of Hearts as the point of the pyramid. This is encouraging, of course. Let’s dig deeper.
She is surrounded by the Ace of Diamonds, which can indicate conception, but it is also the card of news, and the Ten of Diamonds, which is a card of success, especially the success of a long effort.
The first row has the Five of Hearts in it, which is an important card in pregnancy readings. It is surrounded by the Six of Spades and the King of Spades: the doctor. I asked her if she’s been having trouble conceiving, and she responds in the affirmative.
The whole is prefaced by the Seven of Hearts, which can be negative when surrounded by negative cards, and the King of Spades tends to be negative. However, if we take the sequence K♠ 5♥ 6♠ not as something negative, but as a factual description, the Seven of Hearts shows a solution.
I feel suddenly inspired to ask the querent if she’s tried alternative methods of conception, and she nods. So suddenly everything makes sense. I tell her she will have success in conceiving. This supported by the fact that the triangle (7♥ 6♠ J♥) ends with a positive card.
But what about the 3♣ and J♦? Frankly? I don’t know. It is possible the cards were adding details I’m not capable of deciphering (for instance, they may repeat the idea that she would receive the news that ‘it took’). It is also possible the cards were talking about something else and I needed to open the spread to understand it. It is also possible the cards were just filling the spread with ‘filler’ cards, since the other cards gave the clear yes answer. It doesn’t really matter.
A couple of days ago I wrote that a user had pointed out some of my links were broken. It took me a significant amount of time to correct the issue, so this was definitely a significant part of my day.
As I have probably already mentioned, sometimes I draw three cards for the day to see how it’s going. For that day I had:
J ♣ – 7♣ – 2♣
I forgot all about the reading until evening, but then it made sense: the help (the Jack) in taking steps (Two of Clubs) on an issue (Seven of Clubs).
Furthermore, it is not uncommon for daily readings to cover more than one happening in your life. That day I fell on the street (Seven of Clubs on Two of Clubs) and people helped me get up and gathering my groceries.
This may sound silly, but our life is made up of these little things, and the cards can reflect them. It is not always that clear, but sometimes it is possible to see the immediate connection between cards and life.
My husband and I are the typical Millennials: if we don’t have an appointment with you, don’t come knocking at our door, because we won’t open it. Someone has been knocking quite persistently at our door for a couple of day, more or less at 12.30/13. I pulled some cards to see who that could be (because that’s more sensible than just opening the door)
2♥ – 2♦ – 2♠
The obvious thing here is that the Two of Hearts represents the door knockers. The Two of Spades shows that it’s some kind of nuisance, while the Two of Diamonds can represent letters and exchanges. Before discovering the truth, I thought it must be someone who needed to deliver some letter they’d gotten by mistake, although it felt odd, because they could have just put it in our mailbox.
Today I finally opened the door and it was two (note the three twos) salesmen trying to peddle some scam. Note that the reality of the situation fits the meanings of the cards much better than my half-assed guess. One of the topics I’ve been thinking extensively about is how sometimes what limits our ability to predict is that our fantasy is limited. I don’t mean ‘fantasy’ as in pulling stuff out of our ass, but as in being capable of following the cards precisely in picturing a possible future. If you can’t picture it, you can’t predict it. Definitely gonna write more about it.
The cross spread I use is often used to get a general picture of the querent before them asking questions. It is useful because people don’t always know what’s really important in their life: they may come to you with a pressing issue which ends up being of no consequence: you can’t find a job, but the cards say it doesn’t even matter because you’ll inherit from an unknown uncle tomorrow. The bottom line is: our perspective on our own life is always limited. The chief use of divination is to give us a wider bird-eye view of our life.
This is a spread I did for a friend of mine I hadn’t seen in a while (note that it is possible to take out the significator of the person, as I did here, but it is not necessary)
General card reading with the cross spread
The first thing I noticed, which ended up not having anything to do with the rest of the reading, is the past position, with the Ten of Clubs, the Ten of Hearts and the Two of Hearts. Upon asking if she’d traveled with family (the Two of Hearts) she said she’d been to Japan with her brother. Clearly this was a journey she’d wanted to go on for a while because the Ten of Hearts is a card of great fulfillment.
The cards over the head and those under the feet are often to be connected (though this isn’t a hard rule). In this case she’s thinking about a woman from her family (Queen of Hearts with Ace of Hearts) in a surprising way. This is not very easy to interpret, so we look under her feet and we find the Three of Spades, the Nine of Clubs and the Nine of Hearts. She’s not happy (Nine of Hearts below) about their interaction, she feels like taking some distance from her.
Upon asking my friend, she said she’s been very disappointed in realizing her mother is starting to have occasional senile moments, which she has reacted to by cutting off contact, not because she doesn’t love her, but because she doesn’t know how to deal with the stress of her realization. I explained to her that the cards in her head still show a great deal of love (three heart cards) so the best course of action is to talk openly about it.
As I was saying this to her, the cards in the center or heart position suddenly made sense to me (I had skipped over them initially because I didn’t know how to interpret them). Contact (Two of Diamonds, Four of Clubs) is going to resume (Six of Hearts) quickly (it’s in the center)
As for the two futurepositions, they talk about financial/work issues. The right fan (what’s coming to the querent) shows something that should be given to her by an authority figure but there are issues. Looking at the other fan I ventured a guess that it’s money. My friend said she’s waiting for a loan to be approved to refurbish the store she owns. This will be hard and long and she’s probably going to have to jump through absurd hoops (Nine of Spades, Jack of Spades) but the money should come (Seven of Diamonds closing).
As I said in my other article, I had a reading on my real estate adventure ready. I was waiting to publish it to avoid jinxing it. Since today we have signed the papers, I can safely discuss it 🙂
Will we buy the house?
The question was simple. We had seen a nice house in October and I wanted to know if we’d manage to buy it. The first thing that caught my eye was Justice, Tower, Lovers, Wheel. Justice and Tower, in this context, indicates a real estate (Tower) contract (Justice). The Lovers card indicates an agreement and the Wheel, aside from showing the flow of money, indicates the agreement is positive. Next to Justice is the Empress. This can be neither the owner nor the agent because both were men. This is a woman who would help us get the positive deal. And indeed a female friend of ours who knows a lot about this stuff helped us negotiate a lower price.
We come to the first row of cards. I usually interpret the Popess or Pope next to the World card as a married person or a family member. In this case we have two married people in the family. The Hermit shows their distance, but the Strength card indicates that they are somehow active or present. At the time I interpreted this as my parents helping us. It was a good prediction, as my parents gave us some additional money for the down payment. In short, we are home owners!
I said some time ago that my husband and I are looking for a home (I have a tarot reading ready for that). I also wholeheartedly believe that once you are interested in something, everyone else who has the same interest tends to show up in your life, and real estate questions have been common lately. Here’s the spread for a woman who asked if she would manage to buy a house she was interested in (it started out as a five card spread, but I asked her to draw two more cards, for reasons that will become obvious shortly, and then a third I forgot to take a picture of)
Real estate question with the Vera Sibilla Italiana
The first cards that caught my attention in the original five cards are the Five of Hearts and the Eight of Diamonds. Traditionally this means an engagement ring, but in this context it shows the proposal of a down payment (which is basically your engagement ring with the house you want to buy). According to the Peacock card between the two, this is a very high down payment, so I asked the querent, and she said they are (understandably) trying to pay off as much as possible in advance, almost half the total price.
The Thought card gives us some insight into the querent’s psyche: since it is followed by the Ace of Spades, she is worried, preoccupied or pessimistic. But the spread clearly isn’t complete, so I asked her to draw two more cards, and these were the Eight of Hearts, Hope, and the Six of Clubs, the Surprise. Clearly things will end up well, because these two cards together indicate the receipt of the hoped for money or the receipt of awaited money – for instance, money you’ve loaned or invested.
So I asked the querent if she’s waiting for money to invest into the home and she confirmed that she has some money tied down in an investment and she’s waiting for her bank to agree to free that money ahead of time. I was 99% sure this was possible, but to be on the safe side I asked her to draw a further card: this was the Seven of Clubs, the Realization (gran consolazione). Everything will be fine.
Sometimes a spread doesn’t give us enough information and we need to dig deeper. I know that there is a number of way to do it. The way that has been taught to me is called ‘opening the spread‘ and it simply means adding one to three cards in one point to obtain further information. At this point I should say that I try to use this technique only when I find it is strictly necessary. The cards are fickle friends, so they are best kept on a short leash, lest they start confuse us. Here is an example. A querent asked me about his career. This is what came out:
Career reading
He didn’t ask a specific question, but the first two cards, the Six of Diamonds and the Five of Diamonds, represent worry about change. The center of the spread is occupied by the Jack of Diamonds, which indicates messages. Note, also, that the spread is ovverrun with Diamonds.
At this point, I asked him to draw two cards to add to the Jack of Diamonds, and we got the Four of Clubs and the Eight of Diamonds, clearly an interview. Then I asked him to open the spread again on the Eight of Clubs, the job card, and the Ace of Clubs and Seven of Clubs came up, indicating the overcoming of obstacles.
The question I asked him was if he was waiting for a message about some change, possibly to do with a raise or another positive change, where he would need to solve new problems, and he said he had applied for a promotion with came with new tasks, and he was waiting for an answer. I told him he’d get it (Ten of Diamonds and Eight of Clubs). Yesterday he confirmed he got the promotion.
When you pull three cards to describe a person (as I just did) and you get:
9♦ – J♠ – 3♠
This is a meddler, someone who interferes in others’ lives (J♠, 3♠), not out of self-interest or to get something, but due to a bloated belief in themselves (the Nine of Diamonds following the negative Court card). If the court card were positive, it would still be meddling, but out of love (Hearts, for instance)
This spread is proof that we always need to have good communication with the querent, because sometimes readings are deceptive.
Sometimes spreads don’t answer the question at hand. This happens in two cases: when something more important is going on (or about to happen) in the querent’s life or when the cards want to give us details about the question that we haven’t asked for. This latter case requires great care, especially if the question is of a delicate nature.
A woman asked me if she will get pregnant. This is the spread (this is a rather old reading):
A pregnancy question answered with playing card divination
You’d probably think (and you’d be right) that my first instinct was to say “no” due to the horrible mesh of Spades following the Jack of Hearts, which is the child card.
However, something didn’t sit right with me about this spread. I wasn’t at all convinced the spread was answering the question directly. The reason is that the cards Ace of Spades, Nine of Spades and Ten of Spades can show bereavement, and bereavement can only happen if there *is* a child.
The King of Spades could be a doctor performing an abortion, but this isn’t confirmed by any other card (e.g. the Six of Spades). In this case, the King of Spades seems to be more like a priest celebrating a funeral.
I asked the querent if she already had a child, and she said that she unfortunately had a miscarriage in the recent past when the pregnancy was already relatively advanced.
So the cards were not saying that she wouldn’t have a child: they were merely reflecting a recent trauma. With that in mind, I interrupted the reading, telling her the cards were telling her to take time for herself. This was an excuse, of course: I could have done another reading, but I didn’t want to risk having to predict another miscarriage.
Fortunately, today the woman is the happy mother of two twins.
