A Creative Approach to Weekly and Daily Draws
A common practice recommended to tarot beginners is to randomly pull one card each day and contemplate its meaning over the course of that day, with the goal of gradually mastering the complex art of interpretation. Unfortunately, this approach to learning can continue long after its initial usefulness fades; the “daily draw” becomes institutionalized and often enshrined in detailed journal entries. This is sometimes even extended to a symbolic “card of the week/month/ year.” As I see it, a single card may reflect one’s present “state of being” but it does little to suggest an emergent “state of becoming,” the disclosure of which is tarot’s true strength. I’ve never been satisfied with single-card draws since they are entirely too static; there is no sense of movement or development over the course of the period in question. Here is my take on weekly and daily readings that go beyond the one-card pull. This spread is built on two assumptions of mine.
First and foremost, at their best the typical one-card daily draws have always seemed to be nothing more than “tone-of-the-day” indicators showing the steady-state mood or “pitch” that might run through our lives and activities. For me, three has always been the minimum number of cards to reveal where the day might be going because there is an observable opportunity for some kind of change-over-time in them. So in this spread each day is represented by a three-card “mini-tableau.”
Second, since the Major Arcana can appear in a reading nearly one-third of the time, in my experience they are seldom harbingers of momentous life-changing occurrences and more often serve as an archetypal backdrop or stage-setting for the actions and events signified by the Minor Arcana. Like pawns on a chessboard, we would all be in a perpetual state of mental, emotional or physical vulnerability if they were as intrusive as we’ve been taught to believe. Therefore, in this spread I use them only as weekly “tone” cards that show the underlying themes at work in the querent’s life, a background pulse or current that can be looked to for clues to the deeper significance of any circumstantial developments. I think of them as possible event motivators or cues that should be kept in mind as we go about our day and week; they may not actually trigger anything remarkable on their own but the potential is there for the Minor Arcana cards to tap into.
My long-standing belief is that the cards pulled reflect the auguries at that particular instant in time and, as that moment expires and another one takes its place, the precision of the initial outlook slowly starts to erode (although time-based spreads like the Celtic Cross are designed to accommodate that). Therefore, I prefer to draw my daily cards in the morning of the day to which they apply, and I allow for that here as long as the deck is reshuffled each day to capture any evolving conditions since the beginning of the week. The weekly pull should be more stable as a “theme” for the 7-day sequence, but it can be advanced by reshuffling the trumps and drawing another card mid-week if the first one is clearly questionable based on the early going. (I would include the original card in the shuffle since it may have been right all along and we just misconstrued it.)
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on February 21, 2022.
