New Worlds of Body, Mind & Spirit Since 1901
You can enhance your interpretation of the Tarot (and other Oracle cards), as well as frame readings around special topics, by taking special notice of central and incidental picture images in the cards. While some of the images featured in the card illustrations may seem like window dressing, just stuck in to add visual interest, Tarot designers do have to think about the backgrounds and other symbols that they incorporate, and are no doubt operating on both conscious and subconscious levels when they do so. Although I always consider a card's weightier archetypal meanings first, and I don't normally expect to find too much in the incidental images, when items in the illustrations do ...
In our latest book, Tarot Time Traveller, you will take an exciting journey of discovery through the vivid history of cartomancy—card-reading—an adventure that we have long wanted to share with our readers. As you travel through time with us, you will learn how the cards got their meanings, the reasons for their particular illustrations, and practical ways of reading cards—whether they are playing cards, Lenormand, Tarot de Marseille, or modern tarot cards. Each of the eras in the book, from the early pioneers of card-reading to late Victorian occultism, all the way up to modern approaches such as tarosophy, are brought to life with story-vignettes imagining what it ...
As a long-time Tarot user, I'm kind of set in my ways when it comes to the variety of layouts I favor for reading. I primarily use the basic Three Card Spread or The Celtic Cross. However, when I want more information and clarification on a card or cards that have come up in a particular reading, I have found what I call "the card tracking technique," effective for amplifying meanings, as well as fishing for advice. I also refer to this as "the card search technique." Suppose you have done a Celtic Cross reading to address some personal issue, and you find that the outcome card [or any other card in the reading] is ambiguous; you aren't sure what it means and how it applies to your own ...
About a fifth of the cards in a standard Tarot deck are court cards, and these are commonly used to designate personalities. An individual Tarot user will often relate to one of the court cards more than the others, and use that one as his or her stand-in or "significator" in different card spread contexts. However, because we have to be many different things to different people over the course of our lives—and even over the course of a day—we also find ourselves acting through various sub-personalities, and so experience additional court card types as facets of our larger selves. By applying special card search techniques to the Tarot court, we can gain insight into how we ...
