The “Chinese Menu” Tarot Timing Spread

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Recalling the raucous furor that attended the colloquial renaming of Covid-19 as “the Chinese flu” (in which many people chose to demean the source of the presumed gaffe and dismiss the mounting evidence), and the more recent rallying cry over “cultural appropriation,” I might have felt some trepidation about the political correctness of using “Chinese Menu” in my title. But I usually pay no attention to social-media hand-wringing over such picayune racial stereotyping unless I encounter it in “hate speech” or other bigoted content, so my understanding has always been that someone from China is technically (if not regionally) “Chinese” even though we often blur the international lines and homogenize them as “Asian.” I will continue to use the historical typology on that basis since it seems innocuous to me in most cases.

Anyway, off the soapbox and on to the spread! Although the format is no longer ubiquitous, most of us have had the experience of ordering from a multi-column menu in an Asian restaurant: “Let’s see . . . I’ll have one from Column A, one from Column B and one from Column C, with a pot of chai tea.” Some time ago I created a tarot timing method that used a similar model for broadening the approach to encompass elastic time-spans rather than discrete (as in “date-delimited”) denouement. Here I’m pressing it into service as a way to pin down arrival of the usual “turning-point” (aka “climax” or “crisis”) in the progress of any evolving situation. (All images are from the Waite-Smith Centennial Edition, copyright of US Games Systems Inc, Stamford, CT.)

It attempts to reveal not when the final outcome will drop but when it will become obvious to my client where the situation is headed (the “Aha!” moment when they realize what must be done to move the matter forward to completion). From that point on it’s up to them to make sure any predicted events and associated consequences earmarked for the period will follow the itinerary if they’re favorable or will be scrubbed from it if they’re not. My goal here is to bring together the best of my previous tarot-timing efforts into a single comprehensive routine; most of them have been included as optional steps refining the main thrust of the divination.

It’s a two-phase timing method: the first phase dials in the “Aha!” moment; the second phase is open-ended and depends entirely on the querent’s diligence in either making it happen or shutting it down. (I call it “giving them the ammunition and pointing them at the target.”) I see it being used in known circumstances for which the timing and details of the outcome are still uncertain, possibly as a follow-up reading to a forecast that was vague in its conclusions. In such cases it would be reasonable to use the ambiguous “end of the matter” card from the previous reading as the “significator” for this one.

With any event-timing technique, the result must pass the “giggle test” for credibility (if I laugh out loud when I see the answer, it’s probably not reliable). For example, whenever I’m asked to divine how soon a client is likely to receive word about a recent job application, I won’t torpedo my reputation by stating “The cards say 6-to-12 months.” If the reading shows considerable delay in notification, I might stretch the customary delay of a couple of weeks to cover an entire month (or two at the very most), while offering suitable caveats about the “squishiness” of such timing methods. It can eventually become a question of not “when” but “if” they will hear anything, and the only alternative may be to advise them “You won’t, someone else got the job. You should call the company to confirm.” Personally, I’d rather work creatively with the numbers I’m given (tweaking them but not totally fudging them) before resorting to that assumption.

The idea is to select a card (the “significator”) to represent the purpose of the reading and leave it in the deck. For mundane circumstances, a minor — or “pip” — card is recommended; a court card is best for gauging the participation of another person; and a major — or “trump” — card is preferred for “big-picture” considerations like marriage, divorce, relocation, career change, etc. (As noted above, using the outcome card from a previous cryptic reading will save you the trouble of deciding, if that happens to be a factor in the present situation.)

Shuffle the cards while concentrating on that objective and deal all 78 of them into the six “timing” positions shown (there should be 13 in each stack).

Search the stacks until you locate the significator; this column will identify the nominal duration between the date of the reading and the expected “turning point” beyond which things will begin to take shape.

Before going any further, examine the significator for various temporal characteristics and take action as follows. (These qualities may result in the window of opportunity shifting toward the present or receding farther into the future.) If you don’t want to bother blending them in, you can go with the basic temporal architecture of the model and “wing it” on anything that doesn’t look reasonable. In that case, skip ahead to the last paragraph before the example reading and perform the prediction. (Alternatively, you could selectively apply only the ones you like.)

Note that if the significator turns up reversed this creates a “sticking point” in the timing scenario (traditionally known as a “blockage” in fundamental terms) so no additional assessment of “slippage” in either direction based on suit, number or rank is necessary; the original sub-pack containing the significator remains relevant and you can just skip ahead as above.

Optional Steps:

If the card is a “pip” (Ace through 10) of the suit of Wands, it brings on more timely progress so move the cards in that column one slot to the left while maintaining the as-dealt sequence (first remove the incumbent sub-pack). If it is Cups or Swords leave the cards where they lie, and if it is Pentacles, move them one column to the right (showing increased delay) while keeping them in series. The significator and its retinue can only move right or left if they don’t occupy an end column that precludes the transition. Note that the displaced cards from the “destination” column are irrelevant to the reading so they can be set aside; all that counts is the column designation of the cards in their final resting place.

If the “pip” card is of a denomination from Ace to Three, move the group one column to the left; if the card is a Four through Seven; leave it as-is; if it is an Eight through Ten, move the array one column to the right. This iteration will be cumulative with, or counteractive to, the previous move, either doubling it in the same direction or canceling it completely. For example, an Ace of Wands group will move two columns to the left (if possible), one for suit and one for number, dramatically shortening the “wait time;” a 5 of Wands series won’t change columns (its suit says “go” but its number says “no”); and relocation of a 10 of Wands set will also be negated by the suit-and-number offset (the suit being inbound and the number outbound in their influence). On the other hand, an 8, 9 or 10 of Pentacles sequence will move two columns to the right (if possible), substantially dragging things out due to suit-and-number collaboration.

If the significator is an energetic and mobile Knight of any suit, move the ensemble one column to the left, indicating a faster turn-around in the matter. If it happens to be the Knight of Wands, move two columns but assign only one jump to a Knight of any other suit. The Pages, Queens and Kings of Wands, Cups and Swords are depicted as stationary and remain in place; however, the rest of the Pentacles court cards will slip their column one slot to the right as a result of their considerable inertia.

If the card is a trump, conventional wisdom (apart from the Golden Dawn’s calendar-based model) is that it is immune to timing convolutions because it defines an archetypal environment that is operative throughout the duration of the reading. Therefore, leave it where it first landed in the temporal continuum. We might see it as a “gravity well” (aka “black hole”) that overshadows and erases any incidental timing phenomena from other sources. (As an aside, I’ve found the Golden Dawn’s zodiacal approach to be inaccurate in many real-life situations — it fails the “giggle test.”)

All of this shifting around is intended to recognize that tarot timing is extremely fluid, so the temporal nature of the significator card is introduced to firm up the basis for judging relative duration. The combination of baseline time-frame, suit and number (or rank) is not supposed to be prescriptive but rather to loosely frame the inception of the “post-crisis” run-out.

The Prediction:

Once the array of cards in the significator’s column is considered to be the final configuration, create a row of the five cards immediately following the significator and read them as a narrative describing development of the matter, beginning within the time-frame specified by the column of record. (If there are insufficient cards following the significator to populate a five-card line, continue the pull at the opposite end of the sub-pack.) This evolution should kick off somewhere during that period, and its eventual conclusion will depend on how rapidly the querent is able to bring the situation to closure; but at least the “starting gate” has been spied and some hope for advancement has been instilled. The five-card spread is designed to offer a roadmap for working out the details.

Here is an example reading to illustrate the process:

The question was “When can I expect to see an improving trend in the success of my long-range plans?” I chose the 6 of Wands (“Victory”) as the significator, and it surfaced in the fifth sub-pack, showing a “very late” shake-out ranging from six to twelve months into the future. Its reversal “locks in” that projection so no further adjustment is required.

The narrative itself will only be pertinent if the cathartic “crisis” actually materializes according to the schedule identified by the “timing” column. Here it starts on an uneventful note, but with the last three cards it progresses into the realm of Fire, with the upright 4 of Wands making me think I’ll be able to “bring home the bacon” (one of my “tarot euphemisms” for this card) in good time once all of the hurdles (reversed cards) are jumped. Although the rapid-delivery Fire cards wrap up the tale, two-thirds of them are reversed, which impels me to tack a month or two onto the far end of the long-range outlook, making time-to-closure on the order of 15 months, all things considered, unless I’m extraordinarily persistent.

Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on September 11, 2024.