What Tarot Card are you?

I found the Quiz - What tarot card are you? and how could I resist - I had to do it! This is just for fun, I'm not vouching for it's accuracy, but with no manipulation of the data, here are my results:

You are the World

Completion, Good Reward.

The World is the final card of the Major Arcana, and as such represents saturnian energies, time, and completion.

The World card pictures a dancer in a Yoni (sometimes made of laurel leaves). The Yoni symbolizes the great Mother, the cervix through which everything is born, and also the doorway to the next life after death. It is indicative of a complete circle. Everything is finally coming together, successfully and at last. You will get that Ph.D. you've been working for years to complete, graduate at long last, marry after a long engagement, or finish that huge project. This card is not for little ends, but for big ones, important ones, ones that come with well earned cheers and acknowledgements. Your hard work, knowledge, wisdom, patience, etc, will absolutely pay-off; you've done everything right.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

Enjoy!

The Empress rules

I’m far more drawn to the Empress than the High Priestess (which probably says far more about me than the cards!) I find her one of the easiest cards to interpret correctly, no matter where she falls.


The Empress is the earth mother – often in tarot cards she’s drawn as pregnant – and she is pregnant – with ideas, with creativity, with the very fundamentals of creation.


Of course, Mothers can smother as well as mother – so the Mother Goose aspect, too fretful, too concerned, not giving space, also works for her. Giving birth is also about letting go…

But like all women, when she’s good she’s very, very good. When people are worried about whether relationships or jobs will prosper, the Empress is a very good assurance. It tells you that you can have whatever you want from your new romance, new business, new creative venture, but that it’s still in utero, and needs time to gestate. Take baby steps and give it time to grow, and you’ll get what you want (and who doesn’t want to hear that in a reading!)

Following the High Priestess

If you do enough readings, it follows that after a while, every card should turn up equally. But as I mentioned in the previous blog, Tarot is not about the odds; and if you live in a place like New York, certain energies flow more freely. I don’t actually get the High Priestess in a lot of my readings - which kind of makes sense - she’s opaque feminine energy, the yin to the Magician’s yang. Where he’s all chatter and motion, she’s meditative and mysterious. I see Manhattan as a very Magician kind of place, so I'm not surprised that the High Priestess would appear less often here.

She’s all about things like the Tarot – arcane mysteries, psychic energies, secret knowledge and insights. She knows things about you and your life that are not always clear to you. And when she appears in a reading, some of that knowledge is about to be revealed. Once in a reading a girl got it and I talked about quiet introspection and new knowledge being revealed and she just frowned and said she was all excited about being reunited with her large family at a cousins wedding, and it was going to be all noisy and social. So the reading didn’t go all that well. But later she contacted me (thank you, thank you – I love it when people email me to clarify or tell me how readings are unfolding!) and told me all sorts of family secrets came out during that wedding, so while it wasn’t at all quiet or mysterious, it was certainly all about secrets that she, for one, had never suspected.


In the normal course of events, when I see the High Priestess I tell people to slow down, things are getting too hectic and they need more quiet time. Listen to your intuition, meditate.
But if I get it in a complicated relationship spread, I warn about using secrets for control, about emotional blackmail.


The High Priestess is that unique feminine wisdom, but it’s the wisdom of the moon, cool and detached (unlike the empress, the next card who is all warm and fertile) The inner child cards actually warm her up to make her the Fairy godmother, power but with limitations, knowledge, but not always given to you...

What are the odds?

For those more mathematically inclined than me (99.8% of the population) the fact that I use 2 packs when I give a reading raises the question - what are the odds of getting the same card again?

The first time you have a 1/78 chance of any single card appearing. But if you open a second pack, you have already used your 1/78 chance. To get that card again, it’s 1/78 x 1/78 or a 1 in 6,084 chance. So theoretically, your chances of getting a repeat card are quite low. I said this to a client recently, and then gave the caveat that I would say I would get a repeat card in a reading maybe one in every 10 readings, which is way higher than statistically likely. So we deal her cards, and after her second shuffle, not only one but two cards repeat. I told her that was a one in thirty six thousand chance, but having done it on the calculator twice now, I see it’s a one in 474,552 chance. (I told you I wasn’t mathematically inclined) Weird odds.

I can faithfully promise that I haven’t done 400,000 readings. In fact, I can swear that I haven’t done 200,000. But I have frequently (one in every 20? Now I’ll have to keep count!) had 2 cards repeat. This just goes to show, there’s more than face value math happening here. But I knew that anyway, this just impresses the math skeptics amongst us.

The same client asked if there were tarot books I recommend. I’ve read so many over the years, and the various books gave different support – sometimes you want to know more about one specific card, sometimes about how suites and numbers interact, but an excellent all round beginners (and experienced) practitioners book has to be Rachel Pollack’s Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Book of Tarot which has beautifully detailed explanations for every card.

The Magician

After the Fool (numbered zero) comes the Magician (the card numbered 1, in the Major Arcana.) The Magician is the male power of creation - creation by willpower and knowledge. But is it genuine creation or sleight of hand? Sometimes it’s hard to tell, and sometimes it doesn’t matter…

(I love this clever card set which shows the traditional rider waite images, imagined from behind:- you can see the Magician at work, and the monkey behind the scenes)

If people are asking me about a new business and the magician appears, I advise to approach with caution (but not necessarily run away!) There is ambiguity - is this a genuine business opportunity or a scam? There is magic and there are tricks, and I would use the rest of the reading to try and sort out which this situation is, and why does the querent feel as they do. The Magician is an omen symbolizing the importance of new enterprise and that you, the Querent, have the willpower and initiative to succeed.

If the Magician stands for a person then that person is charismatic, clever, witty, inventive and persuasive. People listen and agree with the Magician. If you are the magician, you can make things happen in your life, and you don't always feel the need to color within the lines...


In the Inner Child pack the ambiguity of the Magician is beautifully summed up as the genie from Aladin, and the moral, be careful what you wish for...

What is Tarot, and what can it do for you -

Before I go deeper in the Major Arcana, it occurred to me that I hadn’t even laid out the basics of what tarot is – so let’s have a quick explanation here:

What is Tarot?

Tarot is a method of divination that uses cards as its basis. The Tarot consists of 78 cards split in 2 groups:

The Minor Arcana, holds 56 cards (sometimes referred to as pips): 40 cards in four different suits of ten — traditionally wands, cups, swords and coins, and 16 court cards of four per suit – traditionally the page, knight, queen, and king.

The more exotic Major Arcana, holds 22 cards, starting with the Fool at Zero, and ending with the World at 21.

It is my belief that although many tarot cards look mysterious or exotic today, when they were first developed in the Middle Ages, most of the images and symbols would have been easily understood by everyone. That’s why I like the Inner Child cards I use, which base the Major Arcana on fairy tales – using complex images that most people have a relationship with today.

The person having the reading is often referred to as the querent (the person asking the questions.)

and what can it do for you?

The Tarot is a way of looking at where you are at - psychologically, emotionally and spiritually - by the cards that come out after you personally shuffle them. By infusing your energy into the cards, they start to describe where the energy in your life lies right now.

The Tarot can describe what is going on right now for you. It can predict patterns and show you how current actions are going to shape the future. What it can do is illuminate and help make sense of things. What it can’t do is tell you things you don’t know at all (ie which lottery numbers should I chose. Though the question – is my partner having an affair is almost always answered accurately, because inevitably the person asking the question knows the answer.)

Not to sound ominous, I would still like to give one warning here – if you ever go to a Tarot reader (or any psychic) who starts to talk about curses and how you have to buy candles or charms to lift these curses, please leave quickly. At best these people are stealing your money and at a worst they are putting negative energy into your life.

Next blog – we continue to explore the major arcana.

Stepping right out...

The first card of the Major Arcana is the Fool - the most common image is from the Rider Waite pack, and there are many variations on this theme:


but basically, it shows someone who doesn't know where they are going, head in the air, hope in their heart, unaware of the difficulties ahead. Often, that's the energy we need to start the journey, or we'd never leave the house!

I came across this cool dude version of the fool (whose imagery may speak more to you)


When you get this card in a reading, it's about the start of things. Sometimes it can mean that you should look more carefully at where you are going or what you expect to find. What I like about this card, unlike, let's say the 8 of cups, that this journey is all about movement, and it shows understanding that the journey is the destination. Sometimes we are so focused on where we want to be, that getting there is some negligible annoyance. But how we get to where we want to be, is actually what defines us (are we calm, flustered, organized, ruthless, corrupt or loving?) And the fool, although blithely stepping out, is also taking action.

In the second pack that I use, the inner child pack, the fool card looks like this:


and I like the warning of it - into the woods dangerous things can happen, but red riding hood is no fool, and she gets to save the day (depending on the version you choose) And sometimes you have to get through the woods to find your loved ones...