The Tarocco Bolognese is famous in Italy for relying heavily on combinations of cards. Rather than each card being a full picture, the cards are like small tiles in a mosaic, and need to be interpreted as a whole. No individual card can tell us much of anything. Let’s take the most favorable card in the deck, the Angel. In itself a wonderful card of protection and solution. Yet, alone, the Angel merely says “protection” or “solution” or “friendship” or any other keyword. We still don’t know if this protection exists, is longed for, is missing, is crumbling, or what effects it will have.

In this, the Bolognese tarot is much closer to the Sibilla or Playing Cards or other traditional oracles than to how tarot is often read nowadays (but regular tarot did use to be read in a combinatory manner in the past, before the Waite deck became popular and people started focusing on illustrations).

Since each individual card doesn’t say much by itself, the spreads tend to rely on a larger number of cards. The smallest traditional spread done with the Bolognese tarot is the thirteen card spread, which I have already shown, and which I will cover again. This is a small tableau of three columns of four cards (or four rows of three cards) plus one at the end. In this small tableau, the cards are interpreted in their interaction with one another.

Often, therefore, it is necessary to be able to see the big picture when interpreting the Bolognese Tarot. Occasionally, all cards are important and need to be considered. At other times, one or two cards come up in the spread that we don’t know how to interpret and don’t make sense to us, and there is no point in banging our head against them, trying to fit them into the interpretation at all costs: we should be able to see where the answer to our question lies, where the cards that are clearly forming a message are clustering, and go from there.

Look at the spread as if it were a bunch of people in central square. Some are there to meet other people and discuss something important or go somewhere interesting together. Others are simply sitting there because their wife kicked them out so she can finish waxing the floor in peace, so they just sit alone. They don’t have much to add. They are just there. Or, if you prefer the image of the mosaic I used earlier, some tiles go together to show the cool angel warding off the horde of demons, while other tiles are just vaguely blue and form the sky in the background.

This sounds complicated but it isn’t necessarily, once we have developed an eye for which cards tend to go together. Don’t fixate on rigid 1+ 1 + 1 + 1 +1 = 5 kind of combinations. In cartomancy, 1 + 1 +1 + 1 +1 often equals a bunch of crap if you are not careful. Who says that it’s 1 + 1 +1 +1 +1, and not 1 + 1 on one hand and then 1 +1 +1 on the other? Or 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 and then one left over? Who says the cards add up, instead of detracting from each other? The Angel is good, but followed by the Hermit and the Tower it is diminished. Strength makes you strong, but Strength followed by the Moon? Not so much.

Look at the flow and apply logic to it. See how the small meanings of the cards cluster together to form one coherent bit of mosaic. That coherent bit of mosaic may be next to another bit that is coherent in itself, without the two going together: in one corner you may have the scene with the angel warding off the demons, but right next to it you could have God creating Adam and Eve. Mix them the wrong way and you’ll have the angel warding off God, while the demons create Adam and Eve. Not good on the angel’s resume.

Also, don’t fixate rigidly on methods like “the first card is the noun and the second is the adjective” that were popular some time ago in the Lenormand community. I don’t use Lenormand, don’t know if that’s how they work, but it certainly doesn’t help with the Bolognese tarot. Again, the big picture is essential. Once we have that down, we can carefully add the details.

Finally, go for concrete life. The cards can talk about many things, from the most mundane to the most deep, including spirituality, psychology and so on. Do keep in mind, though, that the card readers of yore didn’t ponder too many questions we (often deludedly) consider deep. Not because they were dumb (they weren’t) but because they had other priorities: they were too occupied seeing if they could put away enough food for the winter or if the doctor would be able to come in time from two towns over on his rickety buggy to see what was wrong with little Guido.

Ordinary life is our starting point. It is in it that more spiritual or introspective topics are nestled. Without real life, spirituality falls into the void, failing to manifest, and it therefore remains an abstract collection of feel-good statements. But just because we start from real life doesn’t mean the tarot can’t talk about it in sometimes strikingly deep or metaphorical ways.

The tarot is highly metaphorical. Never forget that the old card readers had entire poems, folk songs, stories and even Bible books committed to memory. They were often capable of seing meaning in things we consider bland. Again, they were practical, not dumb. Life is highly metaphorical and symbolic if you know how to look at it, and the tarot is a good lens. Of course Truth (Queen of Coins) and Love can mean a true love, but what does it mean that your job is true? Think about it.

MQS