Queen of Tarot

Ritual Salt Bath for Tarot Cards

Tags: cleansing tarot cards, techniques, salt bath

An effective method of removing all energy, including negative energy, from a tarot deck.

Numerological Tarot Methods

Tags: numerology, techniques, interpretation, tarot card meanings, tarot analysis

Any numerological system is essentially arbitrary. I'm making one up, and I hope it'll be internally consistent. This is how I plan to assign divinatory meanings to the cards, in the hope of someday making my own deck. The general idea is that you combine the suit significance with the numerological significance in order to obtain a more specific meaning. If you are using a pictorial deck, you should also combine this with the impressions left by the card itself. If you look at the various schools of thought on divinatory meanings of cards, it is evident that many of those people used this same method. Please note that this is a work in progress, so your comments are triply appreciated!

Newly updated with additional numerological suggestions as of 5/22/13!

Consider the Source

Tags: paranormal, basic concepts

In various places around this site, you will hear me throw around the words divination and cartomancy as if they were interchangeable. They aren't. In my opinion, before you trust any advice you receive from the cards, you should be very careful to decide where you think that information is coming from.

Consider the Querent

Tags: intuition, perception, basic concepts

It's a very interesting question whether one should cold-read one's querent when performing a reading. Some might say that it's a little like cheating, because the cards themselves ought to tell the whole story. To me, there is a very fine line between cold reading and second sight; perhaps it is simply a matter of degrees.

Personally, I disagree. I think that as fortune tellers, we should bring all of our minds to bear on what we are doing, and make use of all of the talents god gave us, including the ability to read people or any other form...

Handling the Cards

Tags: basic concepts, techniques, shuffling, layouts

This article describes how to shuffle and lay out the cards.

Framing the Question

Tags: questions, techniques, basic concepts

I remember teachers in school insisting that there was no such thing as a bad question. I disagree wholeheartedly with that idea. I can think of many examples of bad questions, starting with those that trap the listener: "When did you stop beating your wife?" When it comes to reading tarot cards, asking the right question is crucial. Let's start with bad examples, and move up to good examples.

Centering

Tags: basic concepts, techniques, prayer, meditation, focus, centering

There are several different methods of centering oneself before performing a tarot card reading, each of them valid: meditation, a moment of silence, prayer, or even taking a moment to focus on the breath can help to provide the ambience you want when delving into the secrets of the cards.

The function of this behavior differs greatly depending on what you believe. For materialists, it can help to achieve a state of heightened awareness, remove the influence of negative thoughts, connect with the collective consciousness, and allow the mind to focus on what is directly in front of it; the reading.

Taking Tricks, Making Books

Tags: techniques, tarot analysis

In the original games played with a tarot deck, taking tricks of cards was often the entire point of the game. It is appropriate, then, that we should look for the same tendency to form sets that the cards possess through their nature. In some readings, you may find that you received a large number of one suit, or a large number of one designation. There are varying viewpoints on what this might mean.