tower

When Death Means Death

Don’t we talk in spiritual terms in this community? We talk of death as if it is a beautiful experience. Some also play down the Tower while it’s been nothing short of devastating in my life.

We tend to do this with the Death card too – “Death doesn’t mean death, it means transition, or the end of something.” And so it goes on. But sometimes Death does mean death and more importantly, it is a part of life we cannot escape from. Like the Tower, when it comes crashing down around your ears. If you’re not already on your Chariot ready to drive through the devastation like a phoenix rising from the ashes, you will find yourself in the rubble, scratching your head and wondering what on earth just happened and where do I go from here?

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Retrospective Tarot Reading

Using the Celtic Cross Spread to Explore a Past Event

We mostly use tarot to find out about the future, or explore a current event in our lives or that of our clients. Tarot is also an excellent tool for exploring past events too. All we need do is tweak the positions of our favourite tarot spread and we have our very own questionnaire built to explore the past! I’m going to use the Celtic Cross Tarot Spread in this post as it lends itself well to customisation.
(See my free tutorial on the Celtic Cross for a deeper understanding of its use.)

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Journey Through The Major Arcana – Part 3

The Fool’s Journey as 3 X 7 Theory

In my Part Two of Journey Through the Major Arcana, I talked about Rachel Pollack’s presentation (in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom) of the Major Arcana Trumps as a sequence, or progression, of an individual’s journey to individuation and enlightenment.

The Trumps (minus the Fool, who represents the individual taking the journey) are divided into three lines:  

  • Cards I-VII are seen as consciousness (the outer concerns of life in society)
  • Cards VIII-XIV are seen as subconscious (our inward search to find who we really are)
  • Cards XV-XXI are seen as superconscious (development of a spiritual awareness and a release of archetypal energy).

Darkness and light are the duality that is expressed through the Tarot. Where there is one, you will find the other. The darkness is expressed through our unconsciousness and is accessed through our intuitive self (as represented by the High Priestess and the Moon). To truly understand ourselves, we need to move into our deepest core. It is within the line of the superconscious that we develop our spiritual awareness, and open up the archetypal energy of the cards and our lives.

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Deck Review: the Illuminated Tarot

Illuminated Tarot
Review by Valerie Sylvester
The first deck most beginning tarot readers encounter when starting out on their tarot journey is the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, (which I’ll refer to as “RWS” after this initial mention). It’s often the “default deck”, the one that people learn the basic meanings of the cards from. It also serves to illustrate many tarot books and websites, and most experienced tarot readers have some familiarity with it, even if they don’t use the deck regularly. Many new Tarot decks are published each year; quite of few of these decks are based in some way upon the RWS deck.

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