I’m currently visiting my parents in Italy, so I’m going to keep this short and sweet. I lost my keys. As I probably already mentioned, I hate lost object readings because they are incredibly difficult to decipher, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try. The cool thing about playing cards is that most people have them at home. This is the reading that came up:
7♠️ – 8♥️ – 10♠️ – 2♦️ – J♦️
If I had to tell you I understood this reading I’d be lying. The one thing that seemed clear to me is that it was in a place made for people (Eight of Hearts), so the living room was an option, though it seemed strange, since I always keep my keys in my old bedroom. There were also those two diamonds indicating messages, which I didn’t understand.
Well, it turned out I suddely lost (Seven of Spades) the keys the previous evening (Ten of Spades) during a dinner (Eight of Hearts), and I was contacted by the owners through a friend of mine who knows them.
One cool thing about moving to our new place is that we now live much closer to the countryside. Although there are a couple of major cities around us, our district is basically a cluster of small pictoresque old German villages close to the woods. This is a very good place for a magic practitioner to settle down.
I also discovered that there is a small lake or large pond (depending on who you ask) nearby. It’s been my experience that old water places, just like old caves, tend to be stably inhabited by spirits. In fact, in a subtle way, these spirits *are* the place they inhabit.
Before visiting the place I drew three cards to investigate, and these cards came up:
A water spirit – Cartomancy with playing cards
Obviously, the first thing to take note of is the presence of the Queen of Hearts, which is a motherly figure or a positive female entity. This is confirmed by the Eight of Hearts which can represent a water place, so in the context of an esoteric / magical reading it would represent a female entity of a broadly positive nature tied to water. The Ace of Clubs represents power, dominion, rulership. It indicates that the spirit has power over the place, so while she is positive, she is not the airy-fairy pushover type.
After doing the reading, I started researching local folklore. If you know of any such place near where you live, it may be wise to research local legends, as they often contain romanticized but accurate hints about the nature of the spirit.
What I discovered is that there is a medieval legend tied to the place, according to which a mother (!!!) once brought a local duke a basket of vegetables, in exchange for having a new irrigation system dug near where she lived. This irrigation system became the pond. There is no narrative reason why she should be characterized as a mother. Her being a mother serves no purpose in the legend, which makes it a very important hint in understanding the spirit: she is essentially motherly.
“But” you may be wondering “this is an artificial pond, how can it be magical?”
We must not draw strict boundaries between the world of humans and that of the great powers of nature. What we know from the legend is that a water spirit wanted to establish herself in this place and convinced the humans around her to cooperate by being motherly and nurturing toward them, and the humans were intelligent enough to accept her offer. There is nothing strange about this: in actuality, humans cooperate with nature all the time.
Note how the reading hints at a spirit that is positive (Queen of Hearts) but not submissive (Ace of Clubs). Had she been a difficult spirit she could have simply flooded the zone. There is altogether too much mischaracterization of water in the spiritual and magical community as something weak, vague and mystical. Water can be devastatingly powerful, so it is a good thing our local water spirit is a positive member of the community.
Sometimes it is hard to predict your own future even while interpreting the cards correctly. In the past month, whenever I drew cards for my general future or to answer personal questions, I kept receiving this combination:
A♥ – K♠ – 6♠
The order of the cards changed, but they were always present, and if you’ve had a look at the meanings I use, it is quite clear that they refer to a health-related issue in the home.
This is where making assumptions is deadly: I know that my dad, being old, suffers from quite a vast array of issues, so I assumed the cards were talking about him.
Nope: it was me. Yesterday my wisdom teeth started screaming bloody murder in my mouth, so much so that I haven’t slept a bit. At 8 in the morning I dragged myself to the dentist, where I was given an appointment for tomorrow, likely to get those teeth pulled. This is probably going to be the longest 24 hours of my life.
Interestingly, the cards do not put my significator next to the combination of the doctor, so all I could say was that there would be a health issue at home, and I am, of course, part of my home.
NOTE: it is also fascinating that the teeth started aching exactly on the day before I was going to start a particular ritual work. This is not seldom the case: as soon as one approaches magic the whole of existence plots revenge.
Yesterday I was cleaning in my office. I took my playing card deck (the one I use for divination) and was about to put it on the windowsill to dust my desktop, when it fell to the floor and the cards went flying in all directions.
So I gathered the cards without thinking anything of it and went on with my day. Later on I realized that one of the cards was the wrong way around: the Six of Spades, the sickness card.
Around an hour later my husband was on the phone with my mother-in-law, when she suddenly started slurring her words and being unable to move one side of her face. Fearing a stroke, we immediately called an ambulance and they were there a few minutes later.
We are still not sure what it was, but it was thankfully gone. She seems to be doing fine now, but the paramedics told her to remain in contact in case the situation presents itself again.
It is a good thing that we were on the phone with her when it happened, and I find the way the cards forewarned me endlessly fascinating, though I didn’t put two and two together until after the fact.
The Answer Spread was popularized by Regina Russell in her Card Reader’s Handbook.1 Here, Russell details a system of fortune-telling by playing cards that is different from mine, but still quite interesting as a reference. She also gives examples of some spread layouts, including a small one to answer specific question.
I have rarely used this spread, but I added it to my repertoire just for variety, and I have found it to be quite reliable. You’ll need to shuffle or have the querent shuffle the deck after formulating a clear question. Then, have the querent take out six cards from the fanned out deck (or pull them yourself, if you’re doing a phone reading). Lay the cards out in this order
1
2
3
4
5
6
Layout for Regina Russell’s Answer Spread
Russell explains that the cards are read exclusively in columns (1-4, 2-5, 3-6). Each column has a different meaning: the first (1-4) indicates the background of the question or the current situation; the second(2-5) answers the question; the third (3-6) adds information about the answer. The sixth card can on occasion be of special importance and may contain the answer or some information on which everything hinges, but I have generally found this not to be the case.
As you may have guessed, this is a very short spread to receive information quickly. Here is an example from the recent past with my husband as a guinea pig: his birthday was approaching and he wanted to know relatives would drop by unannounced to celebrate. These were the cards (note that I am not using Russell’s meanings, but those I am familiar with):
Will there be a surprise visit? Regina Russell’s Answer Spread
Since the question is so specific, you have the right to wonder why he thought they would throw him a surprise party. If we look at the column on the left, the one that talks about background information, we have the Jack of Diamonds and the Two of Hearts, an exciting message or a message from relatives. I didn’t know this at the time of hubby pulling the cards, but in talking to his family on his family chatgroup there had been odd remarks that had made him suspect something was being prepared. So this is the background information we need to understand the spread.
The answer, however, is somewhat disappointing. There are steps (Two of Clubs) being taken, so something is indeed being organized, but the Seven of Clubs causes trouble.
If we look at the right column, where additional information is found, we see a party (Eight of Hearts) and a gift (Three of Hearts). If these two cards had been in the center column, the answer would have been positive. As it stands though, these cards merely explains what steps had were being taken. So the answer is no, they won’t come on the day of his birthday.
It turned out that they did not come, though his brother would have liked to and was making plans for, because his mother was still recovering from a minor operation she’d had: this is the problem (Seven of Clubs). However, looking at this spread, I wouldn’t be surprised if a little celebration did take place next time we get together.
MQS
Which you may buy here if interested. I’m not affiliated with them, I just think the book is a good reference to have. ↩︎
As someone who advocates a grounded approach to divination, you’d expect me to scoff at questions that deal with more philosophical or spiritual themes. But this is not so. Airy-fairy is in the eye of the beholder, or rather, of the reader. Just like many airy-fairy readers can drown concrete topics in a deluge of commonplace spiritual-but-not-religious buzzwords, so can a grounded reader approach complex, ‘soulful’ topics from a grounded standpoint, while always following what the oracle says.
Someone asked me what was the goal of her current incarnation. Right off the bat we are confronted with a dilemma: firstly, the question presupposes that there is such a thing as reincarnation, which I don’t believe (at least, not in a sense that is compatible with what most people think of as reincarnation);1 secondly, it presupposes that this happens with a goal.
The first problem (reincarnation) we may circumvent by simply asking what’s the goal of the querent’s life. The second question (the goal) is trickier, but as I show in the example, it is not unanswerable.
What is my life’s goal? Playing card divination
Since we have absolutely nothing to go off on, we can start by noting that the querent’s significator shows up (the Queen of Clubs), though not in a very good spot. She comes after the Five of Spades which is the card of sacrifice, imprisonment and the inability to move. So we can already sort of guess that the querent is feeling trapped in some form or another.
The spread ends with the Six of Diamonds, which represents worry, insecurity and the like. Often it shows financial problems, but not necessarily: it can be a card of general nervousness and uncertainty. The spread is now starting to reek of psychological hang-ups.
Usually, the Two of Clubs after a person card indicates the person taking steps. Toward what? Toward the Ten of Spades. This is the card of secrets, of the night and of unknown situations.
At this point I asked the querent if she’s someone who never leaps into unclear, unknown situations. She said that that was one of the things keeping her from enjoying life, since she always prefers to avoid risk or put off taking it until she feels prepared, which is never.
Bingo. This is the answer: she must learn to step into the dark, take risks and be ok with not having everything figured out. She must learn to swim by swimming rather than by reading up on how to swim. If she doesn’t do it, she will spend her whole life by the poolside waiting for every condition to be perfect.
So, have the cards talked about the purpose of the querent’s whole life? You may disagree with me, but I don’t think so. I do not think that this is the purpose of her whole life (I think there is much, much more to anyone’s life), nor do I think that this is the reason she was born or has reincarnated (if you believe in reincarnation at all). And I told the querent as much, in the spirit of transparency.
What I do mean is that, at least at this juncture in her life, this is a recurring pattern that weighs her down and that needs addressing because it influences her general quality of life. That’s already enough to be worth being mentioned by the cards.
Ultimately, almost every airy-fairy woo woo question is the voluntary or involuntary corruption and modernization of some kind of longing that is deeply seated in the human soul. Questions about the purpose of one’s life may be often answered with the usual mix of mind body spirit platitudes, but the human desire for purpose is not to be lightly dismissed, whether the purpose is really there or not. And divination can address this desire in some form or another.
I believe that divination should be able to run the whole gamut of the human experience, from the most concrete questions to the most abstract, because this is the extension of the human soul. The problem arises only when we try to reduce one order of problems (Will I the chicken cross the street?) to another order of problems (What kind of psychospiritual drama do you think caused the chicken to want to cross the street?)
MQS
I will probably discuss it more at length in another section, but my belief is that there is only one, universal soul that is constantly incarnating and reincarnating through everything. ↩︎
This is a super-quick reading I did for a friend of a friend. She doesn’t believe in the cards, which is fine, but decided to try them by asking a silly question. She asked if her ex would come back to her. Here are the cards:
K♣️ 3♣️ 10♥️
On the surface of it, the cards seem positive: they show the man she’s asking about, they show a union (the Three of Clubs) and they show happiness (the Ten of Hearts).
Unfortunately, what the cards seem to be saying is that he has a marriage going on, and he is happy in it. When I told the querent, she confirmed that they haven’t spoken in years and he is married and has children.
This is not the first time someone asks me a fake question, either purposefully or out of self-delusion, and it is not rare for people to ask about old sweethearts who have moved on.
It goes without saying that we, as diviners, must always come to terms with our finitude and fallibility, but the more the querent is deluded or insincere, the harder it becomes to interpret the cards. This time I was doubtlessly lucky that the cards came up very clear.
NOTE: if the querent had told me that the man she was asking about is not married, then I would have asked if they had just broken up. In this case, the spread would have probably meant that their relationship was still going on strong, and that the break-up was something so fleeting the cards didn’t feel the need to describe it.
Occasionally, people throw questions at you that clearly they’ve been trained to ask by other readers. One of these questions is “what do I need to hear right now?”
The question is tricky, because, strictly speaking, we never ‘need’ to hear anything. To suggest otherwise is to imply that the universe is some kind of paternalistic (or maternalistic) minister of welfare with a moral compass that somehow overlaps with that of modern coastal elites.
However, this is not to say that the question is unanswerable. The cards describe situations, and we can, using common sense, derive healthy tips for our querents from them. We can also make the following assumptions about the querent, when we hear something like this:
The querent is not necessarily looking for a prediction.
They are more or less lost and in need of some guidance.
Even if they aren’t lost, they are missing something or something isn’t clicking into place in their life.
(more rarely, they are missing nothing, but they still want to invite an element of supernatural guidance into their life. This still implies a level of dissatisfaction.)
The answer they prefer is probably formulated in terms of ‘oracular advice’ similar to the one heroes get by the Gandalf figure of their story (for instance, in the theory of the monomyth)
Assumptions can be deadly, but we need to start somewhere. So here’s the spread I got when I got asked the “What do I need to hear right now?” question by a querent:
What do I need to know right now? Cartomancy with playing cards
To refresh people’s memory, the meaning of the positions is:
Up: What’s on his/her mind
Down: what the querent treads on (they don’t like, causes trouble)
Left: leaving behind
Right: going toward
Center: in his/her heart
To the side: for him/her
Since we have nothing to start our analysis from given the vague question, let’s take a quick note of something obvious: except the cards the querent is leaving behind, all other packs end with a Spade, signifying trouble (the cards she treads on end with a Heart, but the position itself is one of trouble).
The fact that the querent is leaving behind the only good thing in her life is not encouraging. These cards speak of a happy family. Clearly this is no longer the case, at least for her. And look at what’s on her mind! Double Spade! She is not in a good place mentally at the moment. She feels isolated and impeded at every turn.
There’s desire in her heart (the Nine of Hearts) but she cannot express it (Spade on the Four of Clubs, the card of words).
The two little fans regarding the future talk about various problems, both economic and marital, but we need not delve too deeply into them. As far as the cards below her are concerned, it turned out during the reading that her dad has lost much of his mobility and is in need of assistance.
Clearly, this is the spread of a frustrated, borderline depressed woman. it could be a very good jumping-off point for more spreads, each one analyzing the various situations going on in her life. But that is not the point. The querent doesn’t want to know about each of them separately (notice how the cards seem to talk about various themes in a very cursory manner). She wants to know what she needs to know at the moment.
So, what do we tell her? First, we remind her that life is made of ups and downs, and that she doesn’t need to despair; Second, in times of hardship she must not let go of the few things that she derives (or derived) joy from; Third, there is no shame in asking for help, including professional help, and she must not exaggerate with the self-abnegation, or she’ll run herself into the ground; Fourth, she must try to make space in her life for what she desires (hobbies, passions, etc.) no matter how little time she can dedicate to it, because it will keep her sane, and when the situation improves, she’ll be glad she has planted those seeds.
I’m currently still doing readings in exchange for recommendations for when I decide to start offering readings from this site. After a short reading with a querent we began chatting about the process of divination, and he asked me if fantasy is required to interpret the cards. I thought this was a really great question. I’m taking fantasy as a synonym with imagination, that is, the ability to conjure up images in one’s mind.
First off, we need to distinguish fantasy/imagination from (true) intuition. True intuition is relatively rare and it does not originate from the limited structure of the personality. It is, for all intents and purposes, otherworldly. Before being appropriated by boss babes on TikTok, intuition was rightfully considered a gift of the gods. It is hard to obtain and even harder to train, although the practice of divination, as it leads to the divine, does allow for the development of intuition.
Fantasy or imagination is mostly the product of neurons bouncing together, and it is at least in good part under our control (though whether imagination is also merely a personal power is up for debate. Many occultists think it isn’t, and I agree.)
Imagination plays a large role in modern magic, and, it could be argued, in the magic of all times (though with different implications and within different frameworks), but I’ll leave this discussion for another time. The point is that imagination is one among the many legitimate sources of understanding that we have at our disposal, including in the occult world.
Ordinarily, if someone asked me what’s the one thing that is required in order to become a diviner, I would answer that they need to understand the vocabulary, grammar and syntax of what is essentially a divine language.
Yet, in philosophy of language, and even more in philosophy of science, there is a concept called underdetermination. In its most frequent use, the principle of underdetermination states that, given a number of facts, there exist more than one theory that can explain those facts and account for them. How we then choose the most appropriate theory has sparked a debate that largely goes on to this day between scientists, philosophers, psychologists and anthropologists.
Something similar happens with divination: given a spread of cards, or a chart, it is often the case that more than one explanation might appear plausible at first. True, the more cards we string together, the fewer the possible interpretations are, just as a single word out of context might mean many things, but the more words there are, the more we understand the sentence.
But take a sentence like “we saw her duck“. Was she avoiding a bullet or does she live on a farm? This is a form of underdetermination, because the possible mental images evoked by the sentence cannot be reduced to the sentence itself.
Probably if we had a perfect understanding of the language of divination we would get unambiguous results, but we don’t. We must therefore use logic and context to weed out the less likely predictions, yet even so we might be left with more than one possible image of the future in mind. The word image here is key.
Can we predict a future we cannot imagine? That is, can we predict a future (or reveal a past) that we cannot put in the form of a picture or series of pictures? If one asks me: would you be able to understand a sentence you’ve never heard before? The answer is: if I know the language, yes. We hear sentences we’ve never heard before everyday and we rarely have problems. But going back to “we saw her duck”, if I didn’t know that duck can also be a verb, I would interpret the sentence univocally, as I wouldn’t be able to create a mental image corresponding to the interpretation of “duck” as verb instead of noun.
In real world languages the ambiguity is often removed by clear context. But in divination context is not always clear, meaning it is harder to exclude possible interpretations, and we need to be capable of creating mental images of all the most likely interpretations of an oracle before choosing which one is the most likely.
We need to be able to extrapolate the many possible meanings a spread can have before submitting them to inquiry. The ability to construct mental images or scenes from the divination tool we are using is consequently incredibly important. In other words, yes, imagination is key in divination.
But the imagination I am talking about is not the unbridled imagination that so many mistake for intuition, and which usually leads either to error or to unverifiable predictions. Imagination is the ability to create possible images derived from our (limited) understanding of the medium we are using, so that we can then see which one is more likely to be accurate by finding testimonies in the spread or by asking the querent.
Like all other occult arts, divination therefore requires the cooperation of both sides of the brain (to which we may add the importance of bodily grounding, but that’s a matter for another post).
Certain topics are exceedingly rare, and they should remain so, because people otherwise tend to see the supernatural at play everywhere. Traditional divination takes these topics very seriously, which is why it rarely discusses them. In most systems, a vocabulary is given to describe most situations in life, including encounters with ghosts. We are, of course, free to disbelieve, but the cards can still talk about it.
A querent asked me if there was a ghost in her (very old) apartment complex. As I said when talking about curses and hexes, the answer is almost invariably no (although, to be fair, ghosts and other entities are far more common than competent witches). Here’s the spread (it started as a three card spread, I kept adding cards until I was satisfied).
I asked the querent an open question (to avoid influencing her), that is, I asked her to describe the ghost she thought she saw. She said she thought it was the spirit of an ugly, angry woman moving in the hallways of the building. This fits very well with the Queen of Spades and Two of Spades. The Ace of Spades, aside from indicating death, is also a card of great evil.
What about the rest of the spread? Usually the Heart court cards indicate either positive spirits (God, etc.) or religious people. I asked the querent if she was planning on contacting a priest, shaman or other such figure. She said she wasn’t really thinking about it, but another tenant was.
I said that it was a good idea. Look at the King’s action: he is taking steps (Two of Clubs) by uttering words (Four of Clubs) which are positive (Nine and Ten of Hearts). But what about the Five of Spades? My sense is that the presence will not be eradicated or banished for good, since the Five of Spades is a card of imprisonment, but it will be contained in some form (the two Hearts hemming in the Spade).
The interesting thing was that, according to the querent, the other tenant (who had been living in the building for much longer than the querent) told her that many years ago they had had a problem with the same presence and had managed to somehow exorcise it.
My view is that even this time the situation will not be remedied completely, but the situation should improve by calling in someone to perform a religious ritual.
