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INTRODUCTION

Have you ever wondered how you can bring greater depth and clarity to your tarot readings? Have you struggled to understand just what exactly is going on in a reading and how the cards relate to its object?

For the first time, I’m going to show you how the professionals use secret techniques that take tarot readings to new and exciting levels. We will go beyond the surface levels of the Tarot spread and explore hidden gems. Have you ever wondered why some parts of the reading make no sense to you or your client? Have you found yourself going around in circles in a reading? Have you felt ‘stuck’? What do you do when the final outcome card is the Ten of Swords or Death or some other ‘difficult’ card? I will show you how to overcome all these problems and more.

To do this, we shall analyse an actual tarot reading that was emailed to me by Catherine Chapman. She was having problems understanding it, particularly two Knights that appeared in the future positions. Together, over a period of ten days, we uncovered the tools and methods needed to transform the reading.

Catherine had used the Celtic Cross spread. Here are what the positions of the cards signified within that spread:

1 Heart of the Matter

2 Opposing Factor

3 Root Cause

4 Past

5 Attitudes & Beliefs

6 Future

7 You As You Are

8 Outside Environment

9 Hopes & Fears

10 Outcome

There are many variations on the Celtic Cross spread, but this does not make much difference once we have gone below the surface of the reading to explore its hidden depths. As we study the cards in the reading, I recommend that you have them laid out in front of you. Use a tarot deck you are familiar with. As you will come to see, the divinatory meanings of the cards are not as important as you might expect. If you have learnt the divinatory meaning of the positions differently from those described above, don’t worry! Our primary concern will be the relationships between the cards. As we work through the examples, you will soon become very familiar with these cards indeed.

Just like an iceberg, we see only ten percent of a tarot spread. The stunning visuals and layouts of the cards and spreads seduce the mind, which then becomes blind to what is going on underneath. Below the surface there is an intricate web of connections and interactions that can surface as insights and intuitive leaps. Sometimes we have no idea where these come from and may find ourselves unable to explain them.

A large part of the ten percent that we can see are the tarot meanings, which are often a hangover from a bygone age. Yet we still cling to them. How many times have we tried to shoehorn a recalcitrant or quaint meaning into the Ten of Swords in the future position when the client wants to know how a love affair will develop? The structure of the Tarot draped over the Tree of Life is another problem area—the nuts and bolts of sephiroth, pillars, and other technical concepts are too often meaningless when applied to the lives of our clients.

In hermeneutical terms the ‘meanings’ of the cards only appear when they are spread out for the client at that moment. Spreads like the Celtic Cross have an implicit direction of time, from the past through the present to the future. However, we are all of us a mess of contradictions once we stop to consider our notion of time. Some of us live in the future, while others live in fear of what happened in the past. How can we access all of this in the Celtic Cross?

To redress the balance, we will explore the hidden depths of the Celtic Cross spread. Catherine realised that her own interpretations of the spread were inadequate, and she supposed the technique of ‘Elemental Dignities’—which she had heard of—might help, but she was unsure how to apply it to the reading. As we worked on this together, Catherine encouraged me to write in more detail about the process of uncovering the hidden ninety percent of the reading. At first, we imagined we might simply convert our emails into a narrative structure. However, the complex layers of meaning that we started to uncover forced us to re-think. Even though I have been reading the tarot for years using these techniques, I had no notion that we would find so much to explore.

Whilst we re-wrote and restructured the book, transformations occurred within both of us. Catherine’s confidence at reading grew in leaps and bounds and the questions she asked became more complex, philosophical and insightful, so I was obliged to raise my own standards too. We wanted to capture this transformation as it expressed itself in our original emails, but this created its own problems. The exponential growth in our understanding created a messy and convoluted structure for the book, for this is the crucial problem with the orderly patterns of tarot spreads: they do not adequately reflect how we actually live our lives.

Our love lives and social lives, for example, are intimately bound up with our working environment—there is simply no separation. For many, home-life may be non-existent or something we try to avoid. Some of us live our lives backwards. Nothing is ever in its right place. Imbalance is everywhere.

Tarot readings should reflect the messy way that life is, otherwise how can we communicate with our clients? With ‘messy’ tarot spreads, perhaps? Well, we could indeed simply throw some cards onto the table and randomly pick one as the starting point, but then how could we communicate or teach the structure we personally found among the cards to another person? Some people can do this kind of reading to great effect, but is mirroring chaos really the best way forward? What if our client is actually very orderly? A reading of this type would probably not work in that case. And besides, the orderly aspects of the reader’s own mind would very likely rebel against such chaos.

To overcome the problem we may resort to applying a name or title to each position in the spread, but then we become confined by the surface meanings. Some people use the imagery within the cards to help them—indeed, many well-known tarot experts suggest precisely this—but again we are dancing on the surface. How can we get to the roots?

We need a balance between order and chaos. We don’t want titles and positions that trap us into a corner. We want the cards to reflect what is really going on, without trying to shoehorn a card into a position yet expecting it to tell us the full story. We want reliable and simple methods to get to the ninety percent of the reading that is hidden from both us and the client.

If we abandon spreads, positions and meanings, then what do we have left? Actually, a huge amount.

When we deal the cards for a Celtic Cross spread, we always put down the same number of cards in the same order. This sequence of ten cards is the only constant between readings. At the time they were written, the original instructions for the system of divination I will present in these pages emphasised that the order of the cards should not be altered in any way. The reason for this was that back in those days everyone played cards for entertainment. When people played gin or rummy, for example, they would instinctively pick up their cards and sort them by suit or number. It was this instinctive behaviour that the instruction not to alter the order was seeking to curb.

A tarot spread is, then, the sequential placement of a string of cards. The places are assigned a name or title that gives meaning to the relationship between each place and the card in that place. But from our point of view the application of names or titles becomes arbitrary. The techniques we will explore in this book depend only upon the primary sequence of the cards. The first thing we will do, then, is to restore the cards used in Catherine’s Celtic Cross spread to that simple, sequential order:

The cards are now touching each other in a line. But there are two additional methods of interpretation available to us from here. Firstly, we can look at how each card relates to its neighbours by assigning one of the four metaphysical elements (earth, water, air and fire) to each. A few simple rules allow us to do this and then arrive at a picture of the relative strengths and weaknesses of each card.

However, this elemental approach is static. Dynamism is lost. To restore it, we need a way of ‘stepping through’ the cards to build up a story. To achieve this we take each card in turn, using the previous elemental rules to help us, but to bring out even greater depth we assign each card a number from one to twelve, according to some simple esoteric principles that I shall describe. Then we count on from each card using this number, missing out those in-between. We can count from any card in either direction to see how it is linked to other cards through its number.

The subconscious mind works on the elemental associations, plus the counting and the linking into pairs in order to synthesise the entire process into a coherent reading. As we work on the reading some cards assume greater importance than others, and so now —everywhere we look—these same cards will keep cropping up. All the client sees, meanwhile, is us, scanning over the cards, uttering pronouncements on what is going on, most likely using very few of the words associated with the traditional divinatory meanings. This new approach can be gained from just a few logical rules and the ability to count to twelve.

This system proves particularly beneficial with respect to the court cards, which are notoriously difficult to interpret. We can now see how each court card interacts or ignores the others, just like people do in real life. One reason Catherine contacted me was her difficulty with understanding two Knights in the future positions of her Celtic Cross spread. We shall devote a lot of discussion to the subtle meanings of these cards.

Just as the ability to count is second nature, the simple laws applied to the elements also eventually become inherent in the mind. Learner drivers have difficulty coordinating the clutch, brake and accelerator pedals. Experienced drivers, on the other hand, find themselves having to think really hard if you ask them what gear they are driving in. In the same way, once the counting and elemental laws have become inherent, your mind will be left free to explore and interpret the combinations that appear.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

In the first section of the book we shall discuss the Celtic Cross spread as it applies to the original sequence of cards in Catherine’s reading. We will keep the meanings of the positions as Catherine herself learned them from the Joan Bunning Tarot Course—and you might also like to apply your own meanings to the positions, if you use them differently.

The synthesis of counting, elements, and interpretation that happens within the reader’s mind is by definition impossible to replicate exactly on paper. Our first attempts at writing the book reflected this and—frankly—it soon became a mess. Structure had to be imposed, which meant separating out and describing each part of the process. When I first wrote about these techniques on my web site and in my book, Tarot and the Magus , I tended to discuss the elemental techniques first. Here, we shall start with Card Counting, then the Elemental Dignities, and finally Card Pairing. There are good arguments for starting with Elemental Dignities, but both systems are complete in themselves. It’s your mind’s ability to synthesise them that is always the key.

Card counting reveals how the cards connect to each other so that a story can be told, but we shall also add to this some extra techniques that mirror what readers often do with the Celtic Cross spread. Firstly, we shall add a significator, and then an extra card. We shall examine in depth how both cause further changes in the dynamics of the spread.

The number of permutations provided by the four elements requires some additional theory—another good reason why Card Counting is presented first. The simplest permutations concern two cards, and this is known as ‘Card Pairing’. In the normal course of a reading, pairing is usually applied after Card Counting and Elemental Dignities. We shall extend this technique to include three cards, with example interpretations from both Catherine and myself. A further technique is also introduced with the inclusion of the elemental base.

There are of course times when a reading gets ‘stuck’. One trick that helps with this and can create a breakthrough is to change the counting of the Aces. So we shall also examine what happens in Catherine’s reading when we count eleven for the Aces.

Exploring a Tarot reading in as great a depth as this creates transformations deep within the psyche. Using the techniques described in this book, you will be in a position to offer clients readings that are out of this world. Traditionally, working with the spiritual powers associated with the Tarot has been very risky, particularly when using Western magical techniques. However, working with Card Counting and Elemental Dignities results in a natural growth in spiritual awareness. The insights that Catherine gained and which are presented here are a graphic indication of this.

The collaboration on this book between Catherine and myself was conducted entirely by email. To give a flavour of our correspondence, I have included direct quotations from Catherine’s emails where appropriate.