Tag Archives: divination with playing cards

Card Reading, Cartomancy, Divination, Divination Master Post, Fortune-telling, Playing Cards, Reading Example

A Cross Spread with Playing Cards

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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 future positions, 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).

MQS

Cartomancy, Divination, Divination Master Post, Fortune-telling, Geomancy, I Ching / Yi Jing, Occultism and Esoterism, Playing Cards, Spirituality and Psychology, Tarot, Vera Sibilla

To Understand Divination You Need to Understand Its Place in the World

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While in Italy for the holidays, I retrieved my first notes from when I had started learning cartomancy from the person who taught me to read playing cards and the Sibilla. It’s just a couple of loose sheets on the basic meanings of the playing cards, the main combinations and two spreads (the row of cards, hardly a spread at all, and the cross).

This brought back so many memories of that period, but most of all it reminded me of how eminently practical divination used to be before its current glamorization. Of course, over time I learned a lot more from that lady than what is on that couple of now yellowed sheets, but the core of the system is there, and I believe she must have passed it on to me in no more than two sittings, if not just in one.

People who spend their time musing on the arcane meaning of the splotch of color on this or that card in the latest glossy and overly ornate oracle deck may laugh at how bare-bones that system is, but they would forget what significance divination had for the regular folks that used it to solve everyday matters.

Folk systems of fortune-telling, especially by cards, were designed to be quickly memorizable in their main lines, because they formed part of every housewife/househusband’s toolkit of remedies to the difficulties and uncertainties of life.

When an elderly person passed their meanings on to you, they did so not to introduce you to a different world detached from the real one, where you could dilly-dally with pleasant platitudes, but to send you into this life with another string to your bow. In principle, they revealed their system to you for the same reason that they taught you how to make preserves and liquors and how to best cultivate your garden.

Folk fortune-telling, in a word, was just another traditional remedy to the complexities of life. It did not involve stepping into a different plane of existence, because the everyday one was already enough, and it was looked on with the same pragmatic, solution-oriented gaze that was cast on all other problems people faced back in the day. “Don’t forget to add a small pinch of sugar to your tomato sauce. The Ace of Spades is a thorn in the heart.”

This is an attitude toward life that is hard to recapture nowadays. The idea of divination being useful has been so utterly eradicated from our mind that, when we approach it again, we do it as if it were an exotic, quaint, arcane world separate from our own. Our immediate reaction is therefore to keep it separate from our life, divorcing it from veriafiable prediction.

This stance is fatal, because it implies that our world is not inherently meaningful as it is; that meaning is found elsewhere and cannot be reconciled with our real life; that in order to find it, one must learn to look at one’s everyday struggles as illusions or as silly preoccupations not worthy of the attention of those in the know about the cosmic mechanism. All this ends up debasing both life and divination, because once life is debased, divination, which is the language of life’s drama, becomes a meaningless mirror only reflecting vague vapors.

MQS

Cartomancy, Divination, Divination Master Post, Fortune-telling, Playing Cards, Reading Example, Uncategorized

A Career Reading and How to Open the Spread

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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.

MQS

Card Reading, Cartomancy, Divination, Divination Master Post, Fortune-telling, Playing Cards, Reading Example

A Deceptive Pregnancy Spread (Card Reading Example)

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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.

MQS

Card Meanings, Cartomancy, Divination, Divination Master Post, Fortune-telling, Numerology, Playing Cards

Playing Cards – The Ace of Spades VS the Five of Diamonds

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I was asked in a private message about the difference between the Ace of Spades and the Five of Diamonds in my way of reading playing cards, since both seem to signify change. This is a nice question, so I thought I’d write an article about it. Maybe I’ll write other comparative articles if I feel inspired to.

First off, let’s start with two obvious facts. The Ace of Spades belongs to the Suit of Spades, which is the most negative in the deck. Spades have very few redeeming qualities. They represent the dark side of existence, pain, grief and sorrow. The Suit of Diamonds, on the other hand, is neutral, with some positive undertones. It is a symbol of energy, change, progress. It is connected to technology and science, to money, wealth, intelligence. Broadly, it shows impulses and new impulses. This fact alone indicates that the Ace of Spades must have more negative connotations than the Five of Diamonds.

Furthermore, the Ace of Spades is, well, an ace. Aces have a powerful impact on any reading, as they can show the manifestation of new currents of destiny, new life phases, etc. They indicate the beginning of something. Even when they don’t, they are still very dominant cards, and we must always pay close attention to them. Fives, on the other hand, are roughly in the middle of the sequence, so the change they indicate is more akin to a transition within the same sequence or current of events.

This is, of course, somewhat vague and needs to be understood within the context of each reading. However, when we combine the suit with the number, we do have a general picture of the Ace of Spades as a very drastic card, whereas the Five of Diamonds, unless supported by drastic cards, tends to show a smoother transition, which is also less all-encompassing.

There is something else to take into account. Calling the Ace of Spades the card of change is somewhat reductive, as if we were trying to neutralize it. The Ace of Spades is, for the most part, a negative card. One of the ways my teacher called it, in addition to ‘the Death card’ was also ‘a thorn in the heart‘ though I don’t remember if I talked about this in the post. Perhaps I, too, have been guilty of playing it down.

A thorn in the heart is something that makes us suffer beyond words. It symbolizes grief, bereavement, sometimes even trauma. Even when followed by positive cards, the Ace of Spades represents painful changes that take a toll on our psyche, changes we are likely to perceive as some kind of great loss. The somewhat sterile concept of ‘change’ pales in comparison to this description.

The Five of Diamonds has, by itself, none of these connotations. It shows transition in the most neutral sense possible. For instance, when found next to the Ace of Hearts, i.e., the house, the Five of Diamonds can show renovations or changing the place of some piece of furniture, depending on the accompanying cards. The Ace of Spades next to the House can show grief in the family or coming from the family, and if it does indicate change, it is more likely to indicate an eviction or an unwanted change of residence.

Again, this is rather vague: we need to understand the cards within the context of a concrete reading, but by and large that’s my experience.

MQS