No, not me–science hasn’t come that far. I picked three cards for the day around a week ago.
A daily reading reveals news about a pregnancy
In a daily reading, these cards could indicate just about anything, although the tone is positive and it is connected with good news for sure. But two days later a friend in our group announced she was pregnant. The Hope card is strongly connected with maternity and nourishment, and is often present when asking about pregnancies, and the Child card speaks for itself. Also note that daily readings can come true even in the following days.
Here’s a quick one I thought was interesting. A querent wanted to know if her boyfriend would propose to him. This is the reading:
K♣️ – 3♦️ – J♥️ – Q♣️ – 2♣️
Notice that the two querent cards both come up in the reading. They are separated by the Three of Diamonds and the Jack of Hearts. I didn’t think the Jack could represent a literal child, but to be on the safe side I asked the querent and she said they have no children. If they did, it could have shown a relatively loose relationship but with children.
The Three of Diamonds represents small projects within the couple. It is not negative, but falling next to the querent’s boyfriend it made me think that he was still a bit immature (especially with the Jack) or at least that he didn’t have big projects in mind. However, we find the Queen followed by the Two of Clubs which represents some steps taken. To me it looked as though she would be the one to take action, either proposing herself or pressuring him to commit further.
What ended up happening is that the querent fell pregnant and told the boyfriend she wanted to at least move together. They are apparently making arrangements to find a place, and an engagement may be on the horizion in the next few years.
Could I have foreseen the pregnancy? Maybe, with the Jack of Hearts so central to the spread. Still, it didn’t feel like a pregnancy spread (and after all it wasn’t even the question).
What I find interesting about the spread is how it describes the nature of the querent’s relationship and who wants to take it to the next level
Getting things wrong hurts, but is part of the human condition. In fact, I would argue that if a reader says they are infallible, that’s a good time to put as much distance between you and them as possible. An infallible reader is either so delusional that they block out all negative feedback from their reality or so dishonest that they’ll constantly be looking for the right bridge to sell you. Either way, they are best kept at a distance.
Still, there’s no denying that getting a reading wrong is disheartening because, as much as we should keep the ego out of the equation, the ego always seeps into it. I think it’s fair to share our failures as well as our triumphs. Here is a reading I got wrong relatively recently.
The querent was asking about her recent pregnancy.
Q♣️ – 7♣️ – J♥️ – 3♠️ – 2♥️
Accepting the question was my first mistake, as such issues are way too delicate. There is no situation where “you will miscarry” is an acceptable thing to say, and if we can’t be honest there is no point in giving a reading. Even if I had interpreted the cards correctly I would never have told the querent.
Thing is, though, that I wanted to give her good news, albeit subconsciously, and so I ended up interpreting a clearly negative spread positively. The querent falls first in the spread, and there is a card of obstacles between her and the child (the Jack of Hearts). The Three of Spades in questions of pregnancy often leads to loss, but I interpreted the Two of Hearts as the solution of the problems, while in fact it was merely saying that the loss would happen soon (it was knocking at the door). In hindsight, I probably should have added some cards.
I told the querent the pregnancy would go fine, though with minor problems which would be solved, but that she should always listen to the doctor. In reality, the cards point to a situation that not even doctors would be able to salvage (the doctors don’t show up in the spread).
Two things can be learned: first, never accept questions you are not really comfortable answering; second, always keep your desire to give a skewed answer in check. It is human nature to want other people to be happy (or sad, if we don’t like them) but this gets in the way of our objectivity.
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.
I read somewhere that pregnancies cannot be predicted because it is impossible to bring someone into the equation who doesn’t yet exist. The cards (or any other method) supposedly cannot talk about inexistent people, and they may only be used to check on pregnancies that have already started.
I certainly agree that it may not be wise to use divination on health-related issues, especially on such delicate topics, since we diviners are fallible, and should never forget it.
That it *is* possible to use them to this end, though, is confirmed by experience. I believe I even discussed a spread where I predicted that a woman would become pregnant, even though the question wasn’t even about pregnancy.
The idea that the cards cannot talk about people that don’t exist, though, is poppycock. The child may not exist, but the woman’s body certainly does. If we can predict that the woman’s body will betake itself to a job interview, to the mall or to a date, it’s unclear why we shouldn’t be able to predict that an organism will start growing inside of it after a spirited round of nooky.
