Live every day the tarot way
Archive for February, 2012
Double Dipping Technique & Client Reading
21 year ago
There is a great little tip/trick in tarot that can come in handy when you want to explore an issue through a different view point. It is using two (or more) decks in a spread. Pulling one card from each deck for each of the positions in a spread. Or using one deck for one side of the spread and another deck for another view on a second section of the spread. It is up to you, I don’t use this technique often but when the opportunity comes its way I will whip out another deck along with my Rider Waite to really spice things up.
Recently I had a client come to me with a few questions, one of the question had to do with their spiritual path. With my client’s permission I am going to share with you the question, reading and response. This will allow you to see my process, the technique in work and the response/feedback from the client. The client’s name has been changed to “Joe” for anonymity.
Their question was “Where am I going regarding my spirituality?”
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The Reading
For this question I will be using two decks to explore this issue. I will be using the Osho Zen Tarot which is the deck I use for matters such as this in combination with a traditional Rider Waite Smith deck. There will be four positions in this spread, which was made custom for this question and you got some very interesting cards showing up here!
1- Where am I spiritually at the moment?
2- Where should I be heading, spiritually?
3- What lesson am I here to learn?
4- How will I achieve this?
1- Where am I spiritually at the moment?
Osho Zen – Success & Rider Waite Smith – The High Priestess
The card “success” depicts a image where a person rides a lion in great joy and victory. There is a parade. All is well and happy. The lesson in this card is about enjoying the high (the peak of life or any moment) but understanding that a low comes after it and that we should also welcome the low periods as well. We cannot live always in a intense level of energy all the time. We need to have the balance of the low to relax us. The High Priestess shows us that you are listening or trying to listen to your inner voice. Be it through meditation or trying to recall and understand your dreams. This card is a psychic card and deals with everything of the unconscious. Together these two cards paint an image where I feel that spiritually you are focusing on your inner self while at the same time it is difficult because you also have your attention on other things in life (the “success” card). But it is a good start you are trying to find your inner guide and trying to silence and still yourself which is a good start. I just feel you should try and put more effort into things that could help you get in touch more with yourself.
Client Response -
I found it to be quite accurate. I am in a place of listening to myself and trying to find a “niche” as it were. You are correct that I have allowed other parts of my life to supersede my spiritual growth.
2- Where should I be heading, spiritually?
Osho Zen – Understanding & Rider Waite Smith – The Tower
I just love this combination! Wow, ok so we have here “understanding” and The Tower which is basically saying that you need to shift the very fundamental and foundations of what you believe in and how you understanding spirituality and the path you live or want to live. The card “understanding” shows us doves flying free away from a cage or some jail which is actually illusionary. It signals a new beginning of understandings and freedom. Think of the jail or cage as your current situation or framework of understanding life, god, ect and the bird as your soul. It is leaving the cage, becoming free from the confinements its been stuck in for a long time. Likewise The Tower is resonating a similar theme, The Tower shakes us to our core, it rids us of false beliefs, or strongly held ideas which we built our lives on. The Tower says you will need to rid these tightly held beliefs and this process won’t be easy it will be hard and you will feel like everything is lost. When we question everything we thought to be true it can cause a panic and a period where everything feels like it’s falling a part but what good spiritual growth is not painful? Real spiritual growth is hard and painful and through this destruction of the old it leave room for new beliefs to be developed. Overall these two cards speak about new understanding and liberation/freedom from things which hinder you.
Client Response -
The funny thing about this is that I don’t think I have been holding onto religious beliefs but rather telling myself that what I want to believe is “tacky” and will be judged by others – in other words, I believe that what my heart truly desires is “wrong”. This is where the story starts… I practiced wicca more than ten years ago. I dabbled, wasn’t too serious about it. Since then I have studied every religion except for wicca again, but my heart never left it. I’ve just avoided it and tried to be a fantasy writer so I could tap into that side of what I always wanted.
3- What lesson am I here to learn?
Osho Zen – Laziness & Rider Waite Smith The Emperor
The card “laziness” implies that just when you think you made it, that you have arrived and nothing more can be done that now it is time to sit back and relax there is in fact more to be done! lol There is always more to be done, your never “finished” when it comes to the spiritual. When you become lazy and say to yourself you have no more energy to do anything you really do have it. The lesson you are to learn here is not to be complacent with life, always do more. The Emperor comes in really as the issue or problem that we see in the “laziness” card, The Emperor is not lazy but what these two cards have in common is a desire to create something that is fixed or unmovable. The Emperor is fixed in one place and has an established way of living and does not want to flex, bend or change. Change is something The Emperor does not welcome and much like in the “laziness” card it also does not want to change, because it thinks well, why change? I have arrived, all is well! Again with The Emperor a lesson to learn is that that nothing is permanent. If you look at both cards they are similar, both figures are siting on on a throne of their creation. Granted the “laziness” card is much more comical but they both say, your lesson is to not become fixed in on spot, do not get complacent and to do more.
Client Response -
Correct, I don’t want to change because it means I have to question my entire belief system around what I have created for myself. I have reached my throne. (or so I thought)… I did begin studying all religion very aggressively this last year; however, open to whatever may come but thinking more “academically” rather than “practicing”. As you say, I would have to challenge my entire way of living if I listened to my heart and followed what I believe to be my true spiritual path.
4- How will I achieve this?
‘Beyond Illusion” is a heavy duty card in this deck and really goes sums everything up for your reading. This card is about going beyond the illusions of the material world and coming into contact with consciousness. Do not look outside for truth and reality, you need to look inside for these. If you loom without, you become caught up in judgments, of what is right or wrong, good, bad and between wants and desires. This leads us right into “The Lovers” which is a card which represented desires, this card does represent sexual temptation and desire among other things like choices and decisions. However it is the desires and sexual nature of this card which I feel is really being expressed here because the “Beyond Illusions” card speaks about removing the outer world and its judgments, The Lovers when looked at it’s sexual/desire expression represents this outer world of desire and judgments quite perfectly. Another astonishing connection between these two cards is doubt. Traditionally, The Lovers also symbolized doubt (between choices) and Beyond Illusion says that doubt is a gift, it allows us to doubt the illusions of the material world. So to tie this in two card two, the tower and understanding…. Once you doubt what you believe in, then you will enter in the time of spirtual awakening and upheaval that leads to better understanding.
Client Response -
What will stick with me is “removing the outer world and it’s judgements” and yes “doubt”, “sexual desire” (also something I connect with spiritually and as I have ignored my spiritual growth my sexual life has been unrewarding because I don’t feel a spiritual connection with previous partners). You said “once you doubt what you believe in, then you will enter in the time of spiritual awakening and upheaval”. This is exactly it, I need to doubt my beliefs around pagans.
Client Overall Response
Since this reading I have decided to be open to my roots in paganism. I am a lover of the earth and in my heart I know I am a pagan. I can’t deny it any longer, during this; however, I also realized that paganism is not likely the only path for me so I am going to mix in pieces of other practices that truly call to me. I feel like it’s the dawning of a new spiritual chapter in my life. I am going to change the image of wiccan from “woo-woo” so that it can work in the business professionals life. I have set up an alter and ordered some books and supplies. I’m truly ready to honour myself… I will not be a stereotype but truly challenge the “image” of wicca/paganism.
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As we have seen, the technique of adding a second deck to the reading was able to reveal additional information while at the same time both decks were reflecting each other in meanings and stitching together a fuller picture of what was going on.
Happy Birthday Pamela (16 February 1878 – 18 September 1951)
11 year ago
by Angelo Nasios
in Uncategorized
Today Feb 16 is Pamela Colman Smith’s birthday. Nicknamed Pixi, created the most famous tarot deck known as the Rider Waite Smith Tarot.
When Smith’s tarot was first published by Rider, in England, in December 1909, it was simply called Tarot Cards and it was accompanied by Arthur Edward Waite’s guide entitled The Key to the Tarot. The following year Waite added Smith’s black-and-white drawings to the book and published it as the Pictorial Key to the Tarot. In 1971, U.S. Games bought the right to publish the deck and published it under the title The Rider Tarot Deck (because of differences in U.S. and U.K. copyright law, the extent of their copyright in the Waite-Smith deck is disputed).[3] In later editions they changed the name to Rider Tarot and then Rider Waite Tarot. Today most scholars, in order to recognize the importance of Smith’s contribution, refer to the deck as the Waite-Smith Tarot.[4]
In the century since the deck’s first printing, there have been dozens of editions put out by various publishers; for some of these the Smith drawings were redrawn by other artists, and for others the cards were rephotographed to create new printing plates. Many versions have been recolored as the coloration is rather harsh in the original deck, due to the limitations of color printing at the time. One example is the 1968 Albano-Waite tarot, which has brighter colors overlaid on the same-pen and-ink drawings. Some recent U.S. Games editions have removed Smith’s hand-drawn titles for each card, substituting text in a standard typeface. Altogether, these decks encompass the full range from editions very closely based on the original printings to decks that can at most be termed ‘inspired’ by the Waite-Smith deck.
Waite is often cited as the designer of the Waite-Smith Tarot, but it would be more accurate to consider him as half of a design team, with responsibility for the major concept, the structure of individual cards, and the overall symbolic system. Because Waite was not an artist himself, he commissioned the talented and intuitive Smith to create the actual deck.[5]
It is likely that Smith worked from Waite’s written and verbal instructions rather than from sketches; that is, from detailed descriptions of the desired designs. This is how illustrators often work, and as a commercial illustrator, Smith would probably have been comfortable with such a working process. It appears that Waite provided detailed instructions mainly or exclusively for the Major Arcana, and simple lists of meanings for the Minor Arcana or ‘pip’ cards, and thus that the memorable scenes of the Minor Arcana owe largely to Smith’s own invention. The Minor Arcana are indeed one of the notable achievements of this deck, as most earlier tarot decks (especially those of the Marseilles type) have extremely simple pip cards. One reason for the enduring success of the Waite-Smith deck may be the richness of symbolic signification that Smith brought to the Minor Arcana.
Smith and Waite drew on a number of sources as inspirations for the deck’s designs. In particular, it appears that Waite took his inspiration for the trumps mainly from the French Tarot of Marseilles (although the oldest date from the 16th century, his model was possibly a Marseilles deck from the 18th century). It is not unlikely that other Marseilles-type Italian tarot decks from the 18th or 19th century were used as additional models. For the pips, it appears that Smith drew mainly on the 15th Italian Sola Busca Tarot[6]; the 3 of Swords, for example, clearly shows the congruity between the two decks. In addition, there is evidence that some figures in the deck are portraits of Smith’s friends, notably actresses Ellen Terry (the Queen of Wands) and Florence Farr (the World). [7]
Smith completed the art for the deck between April and October 1909, a six-month period. This is a short period of time for an artist to complete some 80 pictures[8] (the number claimed by Smith in a letter to Stieglitz in 1909).[9]The illustrations were most likely done in pen and ink, possibly over a pencil underdrawing (the original drawings are lost so this cannot be determined with certainty at present). They were either colored with watercolor by Smith or colored by someone else after the fact.
-Wikipedia
Tarot Readers
11 year ago
by Angelo Nasios
in Uncategorized
An very funny Tarot Reader meme that hits it on the nail. ”I love the ‘what I think I do”
Shift in Thinking – Constant Introspection & The Hermit
21 year ago
I have said it many times over and over, tarot is an amazing tool for insight into your own psyche. Tarot allows you to step outside of your head to explore your life or a particular issue by allowing you to ask questions and receive answers through the cards via a introspective processess. This is a wonderful because it makes you really take the time to think and reflect on issues, feelings, thoughts and all sorts of things running in your mind.
It has been my observation that most people (not all but a large majority) seem to be unaware of the reasons why they act the way they do or feel the way they feel to situations. People seem to just react to events in life without any real deep thinking. What I am specifically talking about is the ability to actively think about our thoughts as they happen. To catch ourselves in the act of thinking. It is what many say that makes us different from animals, we can think about our thoughts. However it seems like many people are not thinking about their thoughts through introspection.
Many of us tarot readers think of introspection as something we do on special times of the day, possibly during meditation, during a tarot reading or some time we think we should just sit and think. However what I have noticed within myself because of reading tarot is I am introspecting more often through out the day during situations or dilemmas. Why caused this change? Tarot readings work off of questions asked, reading tarot for 10 years as I have it shifts your mind into a state of constant question asking. If I were to become angry I step back and ask myself why am I angry? What is causing this anger? I did a lot of this introspection when I was working full-time because of all the emotions and drama occurring I needed to reflect a lot on what was the cause so I could understand and not simply react.
I feel that if more people where able to introspect more often we would have a better world lol Seriously, it kind of feels like people are running around without any rhyme or reason to the actions they do and the feelings they are feelings. They think they know the why but they don’t, their is so much denial and self-justification for their actions. Now I am not perfect, I still do and say things that I may not want to. But I am now able to catch myself in the act of that thought or feeling and able to figure out where it is coming from and why I had that thought or feeling and say to myself no that thought is not really mine it was either learned (conditioned into me) from family/society ect. Which is a step in the right direction.
Looking at Tarot, The Hermit the one card that comes to mind when I think of introspection. Someone would say The High Priestess is also introspection but I disagree, The HP is intuition and instinct, finding inner knowledge to situations and having a connection and grasp to your emotions. The Hermit goes beyond and using logic and reasoning and applies it to the intuition. The Hermit is able to think about his thoughts and ask the questions ‘Why am I thinking this” “Where does this feeling come from” “What is making me react like this”? The Hermit looks for answers and understanding and as Tarot readers we all are like The Hermit, we are on a quest to find answers to questions. Over time this state of consciousness becomes natural to us to ask questions, to seek answers, to probe our psyches with or without the cards. Has anyone else noticed this? Does anyone else feel tarot has had the same affect on yourself?
Whitney Houston & Celebrity Drug Abuse
11 year ago
by Angelo Nasios
in news
Music lengend Whitney Houston has died, she was 48. It is reported Houston was pronounced dead at 3:55 p.m. PT at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. The cause was not given but sadly it is most likely a drug related death. Houston has had a history of drug abuse with cocaine. However some are calming her death was from prescription drugs and not cocaine. Never the less prescribed or not drugs seem to be the leading cause of death for celebrities.
Normally with a death of a celebrity I pull cards on the event. For Whitney Houston I pulled The Chariot as her influences around her. The Chariot is a very fast moving card so I can say that I feel her death was rather quick, the events that took place in her hotel room were fast. Probably from the time she took the drugs to the time she passed was quick. Because we are reading into a death the card should be looked at in a reversed/ill-dignified manner. The Chariot can signal inter conflicts, battling two aspects/sides of her Self. Houston may have felt out of control in her life, she could have felt under a lot of pressure and just caved in. It could be that the only way in her mind she could get some control or release the tension was through drugs.
Moving beyond Houston I wanted to ask a general question of why do celebrities die from drug overdoses? The list of deaths due to drugs is extensive. So what is the common denominator? I pulled the 5 of Swords. With the 5 of Swords it points to a few things, firstly we are looking at the mind here, thoughts and mental processes are at the core of this issue. Secondly, the main thing in the mind of most of the celebrities is self-intrest, looking at their own needs and wants. Then on an inner or outer level in their lives there is a level of discord and hostility that pushes them to do drugs. This can be inner as a mental issue or outer as a environmental factor (people around them, etc)
RIP Whitney Houston
Lets remember her for her music and amazing voice. Here is one of my favortte songs (remixed)
Super Bowl 2012 Prediction Patriots Vs Giants
01 year ago
Its that time of the year again, Super Bowl Sunday is tomorrow. This is one of those events that I use tarot to test its ability in predictions. I have been doing this since 2007 and have only been wrong once. This year it is the New England Patriots vs. New York Giants. We had the same match up back in 2008 to which I predicted the Giants would win and they did. Will we have the same thing happen this year? Lets see what Tarot has to say.
I shuffled the deck and asked who would win, pulling on card for each team.
Patriots – The Tower
Giants – King of Pentacles
The Tower in situations like this will indicate failure and ruin as it did when the Tower came up for the Cardinals when they went to the Superbowl against the Steelers. I see that Giants will win the 2012 Superbowl.
Homeowners Bill of Rights – Tarot Reading
01 year ago
I heard President Obama on the tv today, only for a little. He was talking about mortgages and something called the “Homeowners Bill of Rights”, which would create simple mortgage disclosure forms, and protection for homeowners from inappropriate foreclosures. The new proposal would establish a quick refinancing plan open to people whose mortgages are owned by banks or held by investors in mortgage-backed securities.
Sounds good to me. What does tarot have to say about this bill of rights for homeowners? What impact will this have on the people of America? I shuffled my cards to find out.
I pulled three cards, Death 4 of Pentacles and Queen of Pentacles
Seeing Death here shows certain things will come to an end and be removed. This bill wants to simply forms and other things to help people when purchasing mortgages and help people in foreclosure right now. Death can indicate a end to bad practices by the banks. Overall, change will come as a result of this bill. I think the change impacts the people with the most financial control. The 4 of Pentacles can be see in two ways, either as the people with the control and influence over money (the Bankers) or the it can reflect the people of American at large. Death is changing the system of power and control from the Bankers and giving people more control over their finances. It will also help people save money. The Queen of Pentacles shows that this bill will be very resourceful for people as it gives them a way to solve problems. The Queen also indicates this bill is very gentle, that its purpose it simple and a no brainer. It’s only beneficial.