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A good tarot reading is often like a story, reconstructing, constructing, and forecasting relevant pieces of a person's life to bring understanding about a particular topic. While our tarot cards reveal the details of the story, it's the spread that provides the outline and asks all the right questions. You can find spreads in books or online, but the best way to make sure you get one to fully address your specific question is to create it yourself. The spread is the structure or the layout of a tarot reading. Each position in the spread gives you a context for how to read the tarot card that lands in that position. So, say you get the Three of Swords, the traditional card for indicating ...
When people ask about tarot combinations, the questions usually fall into one of two categories. The first is how to join the cards together in a reading to interpret the story they're revealing. The second often refers to the blended meaning of particular cards appearing together in a spread. One of the common misconceptions is that each card combined with another must have a universal and set meaning, like a fixed list that needs to be learned. As with most things tarot, there can be a good deal of flexibility within the interpretation, just as in language there can be more than one way to convey something. Just to slightly confuse matters, most professional or seasoned readers do tend ...
To understand the origins of tarot, we must go back to Greece and the ancient philosophies that underlie the occult traditions in the Western world. For instance, details such as the number of cards in the tarot deck were not determined by accident. In fact, this number is based ultimately on the numerology and musical harmony developed by the sixth century BC Greek mystic, mathematician, and philosopher Pythagoras. The modern tarot was gradually developed during the Italian Renaissance, when the works of Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, and other Greek writers were receiving intense attention. These works refer to Pythagoras's numerological theories, which caught the attention of Renaissance ...
Clearing and Charging a Tarot DeckTo clear a deck or any other magical tool is to remove or neutralize the energy that exists in it. To charge a magical tool is to imbue it or fill it with your own energy and with a special purpose or intention. Although you can successfully read with a deck that has not been cleared or charged, if you take the time to do these things you will find that the tool has become much more personalized and powerful since it is sharing your energy. It's like the difference between a toy you had when you were a kid that just sat on a shelf ignored and one you dragged with you everywhere you went. You want your cards to have the energy of your favorite toy (but ...
