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Past-Present-Future
by Barbara Moore
"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."
–Lewis Carroll
Let's be frank. Most people use tarot cards to try and glimpse the future, right? Even when I'm using the cards to help make decisions, weigh the pros and cons of choices, find inspiration, or make a plan to achieve a goal, I usually always have a card representing a possible or probable future. I just want to know. Don't you?
Most of us believe that while the future isn't set in stone, we do, to a large extent, shape our future with our actions and decisions. It makes sense then, to look at the past and present as we try to determine our future. Even the simplest three-card Past-Present-Future spread does this. But many gifted tarotists have created exercises, spreads, and practices that go further than that useful, basic spread.
You've Made Your Bed...
As we explore these options, let's invoke the Justice card from Mystic Faerie Tarot. Also known as Karma, she represents a power that is a direct result of our individual actions. She holds the scales that weigh our actions and the sword that delivers our reward, whatever it may be. She is blindfolded, so she cannot help or hurt us. She can only mete out what we have earned. She would remind us, choose your actions wisely! Let's ask her to help us see how our past has shaped our present and how our present will affect our future.
The Distant Past
Some believe that your present life is not only created by past actions in this life but also by your experience in past lives. If reincarnation is part of your belief system, you may be interested in Mark McElroy's article in Llewellyn's 2008 Tarot Reader. In "Past-Life Tarot", Mark provides detailed instructions for exploring a past life. After some wise words of caution (such as, be prepared as not all past lives are pleasant), he leads us through the steps of preparation, meditation, a reading, and a follow-up exercise. Some areas explored in the reading include your gender, your family, your identity/personality, life lessons, and the influence on your present life.
Click here to read the full article.
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As a special holiday gift and salute to one of our most beloved annuals, included in this issue of Tarot Pathways are three articles from Llewellyn's 2008 Tarot Reader.
Click here to purchase Llewellyn's 2008 Tarot Reader on sale now.
While you're shopping, don't forget to put a few extra copies in your cart as holiday gifts for friends and family!
Fooling Fortune
by Janina Renée
Although tarot readers emphasize the positive aspects of the cards in a reading, there is no getting around the fact that the appearance of certain cards is alarming because of their potential predictions of bad things to come. Here, let me interject that, as someone who has written four books on tarot, I am certainly interested in prediction; however, I do not believe in such a thing as inexorable Fate–just in the tendency of our attitudes and habits to take us down certain roads, and our actions to invite certain reactions. Although karmic factors come into play, some bad karma can be mitigated or outrun. I also allow for genuine randomness and fortuitous turns of events.
With these principles in mind, we may note that finding ways to improve one's luck and change one's path of destiny has always been a concern of folk magic, so many magical principles can be used to turn things around when you get a disturbing tarot reading–likewise if you have been experiencing a sense of foreboding or a run of bad luck. Here, imagery from the Fool, the Hanged Man, and the Death cards can suggest folk magic techniques for disrupting fixed energy, thought, and behavior patterns and getting out of the negative feedback loops that make for bad luck.
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Pathworking
by Magenta Griffith
Pathworkings are a type of guided meditation based on the Major Arcana of the tarot. The idea of guided meditation for spiritual purposes goes back to St. Ignatius of Loyola in the sixteenth century, if not earlier. These exercises are based on the Tree of Life diagram, and derive from the Kabbalah, a school of Jewish mysticism dating back at least to the thirteenth century. Such meditations were performed by the Order of the Golden Dawn, and many of the versions in use today derive from Golden Dawn materials. Usually, these are located indoors in artificial settings such as formal temples, and involve angelic forms as messengers and guides.
The Tree of Life maps several symbol systems onto one representation. Tarot, numerology, and astrology are all interrelated by this system. The diagram consists of ten circles, representing the spheres, and twenty-two lines, the paths between them. The spheres correspond to the numbers one through ten, and therefore to both the tarot cards Ace through Ten and the numbers one through ten for numerology. The twenty-two paths correspond to the Major Arcana of the tarot deck, but are numbered eleven through thirty-two, because the numbers one through ten already represent the ten spheres.
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Past-Life Tarot
by Mark McElroy
Do you believe you've lived before?
At a party I attended in 2006, I met a middle-aged man who claimed to have recovered memories of a past life. After dinner, he pushed back his plate of bread pudding and announced, "In a former life, I was a black woman. I clearly recall giving birth to a baby in the middle of a cotton field behind the railroad tracks."
Earlier the same year, I met a woman known for her ability to help others glimpse their past lives. She darted around the room, peering into people's eyes and announcing what she saw: You were a fish. Yes, definitely a fish. And you–you were a horse. And you? You were a dancer in Russia, but you starved to death before you could make your first performance."
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Tarot and Creative Writing
The Healing Heart Meditation
Spell to Open Oneself to New Endeavors
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Arcana
Secrets or mysteries. Arcana is the plural form of arcanum, although its usage may be singular or plural. A standard Tarot deck features two sections, the Major Arcana (usually 22 cards with images on them) and the Minor Arcana (usually 56 cards with 16 being "face" cards similar to a pack of playing cards and the remainder being either number or "pip" cards or fully illustrated).
Dignities
Elemental characteristics of tarot cards (i.e., associations with water, fire, earth, or air) that interact with one another to weaken or strengthen particular cards in a spread.
Synchronicity
Originally a term created by psychologist Carl Jung meaning that the mind creates a relationship between two events when none exists. What the mind created to link the two unrelated events was considered psychologically interesting. For some researchers, magick is this same sort of acausal connecting principle because a ritual or magickal act seems to have no direct causal effect on the outcome of the ritual, and yet the desired outcome occurs after the magickal work.
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