The rationale behind this spread is fairly self-explanatory. None of us “live, and move and have our being” in a total vacuum. Even if other people have no direct or apparent involvement in the circumstances of the reading, we may still have cautionary feelings about them from a “what if”…

“You hold me up and you let me fly Givin’ me a sweet kind spirit to swing by” from “Jazzman” by Pure Prairie League No particular reason for this quote other than that it captures the joyous “spirit of tarot” I’m trying to invoke here. As diviners we spend a…

Novice tarot readers frequently ask online which deck would be good as a first-time buy. I’ve written several detailed essays on this subject in the past, but thought a “punchlist” format might be useful in answering this question. …

As an astrologer of long standing, I’ve always been fascinated by the internal or secondary structure in my tarot readings offered by the symbolic architecture of the astrological correspondences developed by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn at the end of the 19th Century (see the chart below). Some…

Sometimes (well, actually, more often than not) I think people just starting into the practice of tarot reading expect far too much from it in the way of precision. I was talking to a frustrated individual online who admitted to being extremely analytical and getting little encouragement out of the…

. . . little dog, gold necklace, missing brother, true love?” There has been a recent uptick in questions on the social-media pages about the use of the tarot to locate anything that has gone missing or has yet to be found. The first thing to point out in this…

The subject of time is a fascinating one. In some quarters it is believed that time is not linear (if I recall correctly, some theoretical physicists say “curved” as a kind of wave-form, some say “cyclical,” some say “synchronistic”); in the last one, any conceivable event is likely to occur…

To test this spread I chose a real-life situation in which acquaintances have just started the process of trying to sell their current house and move to a bigger one. The deck here is the RWS Centennial Edition in a Tin (copyright U.S. Games, Stamford, CT, used by permission) that…

Many of my ideas about Lenormand reading spring from my numerous fertile conversations on the Aeclectic Tarot forum with authors Andy Boroveshengra and Mary K. Greer before they both moved on — and then we all did. This one is no exception. I’ve written on this subject before (links below)…