Maura Murray: Third Time’s the Charm?
Maura Murray is (or more likely was at this late date) a young Massachusetts woman who went missing in 2004. I made two previous attempts to ascertain her fate and possible whereabouts using the tarot, one in 2018 and another in 2019. Neither led to any remarkable discovery, and I let the matter drop. I was recently contacted by one of the people who has continued to investigate the case, and decided to take another shot at it.
I devised a spread especially for this reading, combining the aspects of location and situation. First, I separated the cards into trump, court and minor card piles, allowing for reversals. I then shuffled the minor cards and dealt eight of them face-down into a wheel arrangement similar to a compass rosette; these were designed to show the situation at the compass point eventually identified by the next step. In this layout, North is at the top, South is at the bottom, East is to the right and West is to the left.
Next I selected a significator from the 16 court cards to represent Murray. Finding out that her birthday was May 4, 1982 (in the Earth sign of Taurus), and the fact that she would now be 39 years old, I chose the mature, earthy Queen of Pentacles as the significator. After shuffling the court cards, I randomly placed two of them face-down in each of the eight positions, on top of the eight minor cards. Finally, I turned over the 3-card packs until I found the Queen of Pentacles, which would define the direction in which Maura is now located. It turned out to be to the northeast of her last known position in Haverhill, NH.
The second court card in the pack is intended to show another person who may have had some knowledge of, or involvement in, her disappearance. In this spread it is the King of Swords reversed, reflecting a self-assured, tough-minded, overbearing, meticulous, possibly harsh or ruthless older man. It may describe a successful businessman, educator or government official — CEO, lawyer, judge, lawman, professor, etc (if not at that time, possibly now). The reversal implies that he did a very good job of covering his tracks.
The minor card sitting at the bottom of the stack was the 6 of Swords reversed. Traditionally, the Rider-Waite-Smith version of this card is often interpreted as “a voyage by water,” and the reversal could be construed as “under water” (or perhaps “under the cover of night”). In my first (2018) reading about Murray, I mentioned the likelihood that she was murdered and submerged in a lake or other body of water. If the suspect indicated here by the King of Swords was in fact a prominent small-town personage, he may have had a boat capable of ferrying Murray to a place of deeper, more remote water. It’s also interesting that both the 6 of Swords and the King of Swords reversed appeared in my 2018 reading for the disappearance of Trish Haynes; about that case I said she was most likely “in a wet place after being transported over water” or, if still alive, was at the mercy of a cruel man. Her remains were ultimately found inside an abandoned washing machine at the bottom of Grafton Pond in New Hampshire. All of this reinforcement of the watery theme implies that I’m on the right track here.
As a last step, I shuffled the 22 trump cards and randomly drew one to judge the reliability of the testimony derived from the spread. The Empress came up, which is one of the definitive “Yes” cards in the deck. I’m confident that the reading has put its finger on the truth as far as it can be known at this time.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on December 2, 2021.
