Grazing the Group-Chat Channels
AUTHOR’S NOTE: In August I will have been running this blog for seven years and will soon pass 2,100 divination-related posts. I try my best to throw a new twist into each of my daily essays but I catch myself repeating topics when I’m not mining a new metaphysical book that has captured my interest and sparked my imagination. Lately I’ve taken to roaming the reddit subs and the various Facebook sites, looking for inspiration by answering questions and offering my experience and insight (even when not asked).
Many of these forays I bring back to my blog in the form of published articles and the occasional new spread design. I don’t spend much time on other writers’ blogs since they’re basically trying to do the same thing I am: inform and entertain. Frankly, after 50 years of working with this stuff I don’t have a whole lot to learn from them except the occasional epiphany that never crossed my mind (although most of those come from tarot literature and not from social-media engagement).
I love helping beginners with learning the “whys-and-wherefores” of tarot reading along with the “how-to” of its main techniques, but I have little appetite for advising then on the context-specific meaning of the cards they pull or mentoring them in more detail via chat (such instruction is the purpose of my writing for this platform and I’d rather keep it at that level). I tried for a long time to set up face-to-face training sessions and presentations but in the first case people didn’t want to pay what I was asking, and in the second they were only seeking free readings and had no intention of learning anything. I was having some local success with reading the cards and also lecturing at a regional venue near our old home but then we moved out of the area.
The upshot of these abortive efforts is the full set of “Tarot 101” learning material that I’ve included for free as installments in these essays (although I’ve also compiled it in two inexpensive e-books — one fundamental and the other more esoteric — that pull the subject matter together in neat packages). In the various online discussion groups, rather than typing out my responses at length, I usually point inquirers at this content when they’re trying to figure out specific cards that I’ve already spent decades pondering. One person who bought my Tarot Hermetica said it’s his “favorite Thoth book.” I’ll take all the encouragement I can get!
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on June 13, 2024.
