It’s been a while since I’ve done any tarot-posting and I thought it was high-time that I opened up the floodgates since I’d like to pull down a little extra scratch to buy a 3D printer. Mention doing readings on Twitter and it’s like all these people have nets out to catch posts offering tarot readings. I got a bite almost immediately.
If you’re in the mood for a little insight and guidance, pop over to ko-fi and drop me a line. I don’t charge for readings, I only ask that you consider tossing a coin to your Witcher if you feel like I provided any value to you.
This particular querent had never had a tarot reading, which struck me as odd since they came out of nowhere, asking me if I would read for them. I explained my process, four cards drawn. I can do a general interpretation of the cards or you can ask a question. I often do best when a question is asked because it focuses the symbolism a bit more than me just kind of groping for meaning in the darkness. I do four cards because I feel like elaborate spreads tend to muddy the waters and when I’m on my a-game, four cards is all it takes to pull significant guidance as was my read today: a reminder of the joy that comes from just helping someone heal or find the start of the healing path.
She asked: Is there evil around me?
This threw up sirens and flares and red flags and I knew that just pulling some cards wasn’t going to cut it. This was a genuine emergency. I went down to the temple and grabbed the box containing my Rider Waite Smith deck. I keep that on the altar for ritual purposes but in this moment I needed something soaked in all the divine energy that I’ve been pumping into the temple. I spoke some prayers with the Masonic Tyler’s Sword in hand and asked for divine guidance and strength to drive away the evil. I grabbed some stones, the image of Michael the Archangel, the censer, fresh charcoal, the purifying incense and some white sage. I threw down the cloth, performed the LBRP and invoked the Holy Guardian Angel and Michael, then I dropped the cards. The Emperor was the first to fall.
Oh god. This was going to be one of those readings that make me feel weird. Like I know too much about the intimate details of this person’s life.
The Emperor
My initial impression was that this card was this person’s father but I didn’t want to say that right out of the gate. If I’m wrong, it casts a shadow over the entire read. So I interpreted this as a paternal authority figure in their life. This was a husband, a father, a guardian of some sort. The Emperor is typically a stoic protector, the face of authority and can be a source of safety and order. But this card repped her anxiety and worry and so it spoke to me in a way that told me that there wasn’t a diabolical presence messing with her life, she was just haunted by a male force of authority that left her with a lasting wound of some sort. At the same time she, the querent, is The Fisher King. She has sustained some wound that can never heal. She holds on to its influence. It’s an infection and the infection has spread to other parts of her life. In many ways the pain and trauma of this experience causes the fire of The Emperor to burn out of control, damaging everything it touches.
Page of Pentacles (Reversed)
This Page card is angry. It’s a child bearing a weapon, turned on its head, having no idea where to turn or what to hit. The Page holds the sword awkwardly. They don’t know how to use it. Eventually, they will when they are the Knight but that takes training and discipline and that lingering wound has made it so that this Page can’t grow up and learn how to use the sword in a constructive way. Now, The Page swings the sword wildly at ghosts and invisible monsters but strikes only the people around them closest to them. The sword can be honed. Its edge can be used to cut away the excess baggage of this endless childhood and it can cut the ties that bind them to this ghost. This Page is the querent’s wounded inner-child doing everything it can to let the world know that they’ve been hurt but it only looks like a tantrum to everyone around them and makes things harder for them than they need to be. It’s not fair and it’s not their fault but the unfortunate truth is that it’s their responsibility to do the work and let it go.
8 of Swords
Could this draw possibly be any more on the nose? Long ago, this person set up defenses all around them to prevent themselves from getting hurt like that ever again and the defenses work. They keep the beast at a distance but they also keep everyone else at a distance. The beast isn’t dead, though. It just stalks the outside of the perimeter. Waiting. She can hear it, too. Among the many reads of this card is the thought that whatever your situation is, it doesn’t have to be this way. The woman in the bindings is only loosely restrained and her feet are not bound. She isn’t even really surrounded by swords. They’re just sort of there and she can shuffle off the bindings and walk away from the nest of swords she’s set up at any time. The sword represents her anger at this wounding and the blindfold represents her blindness to the truth that this just isn’t her fault. She needs to stare that beast down, though. It needs to be brought to heel. There’s a powerful lesson to be learned here that she’ll never see for as long as the blindfold is on.
9 of Pentacles
If she takes the blindfold off, she has the potential to be the woman on the 9 of Pentacles. She’s a woman of luxury, fearlessly holding a falcon, surrounded by bountiful harvest and plenty. The cards leading up to the 9 are about tending to your garden and doing the work to perfect a craft. Having done so, she stands tall as a healed and fully-realized woman, the product of hard healing work. 9 being one short of the 10 implies that there will still be work left to be done in the end but there’s 3 by 3 symmetry in the 9. It’s a magical suggestion of the full three dimensions of reality, fully formed and no longer weighed down by someone else’s baggage.
Afterward she asked if I wanted to know what I’d tuned into and I told that I’d be fine with that if she were comfortable sharing. Then I braced to learn the true fullness of grief. I was worried that I was about to get two barrels full of childhood sexual trauma given that I’d zeroed in on serious bad-daddy energy here and I’ve dealt sometimes with people who comfortably overshare when looking at words on a screen rather than an actual person on the other end. Thankfully it wasn’t anything like that.
I reeled from how hard I hit the bullseye. When I do these readings for people and I’m properly plugged in the words just flow out of me and I am on. point. It’s like I’m channeling something higher up the spiritual chain than me because there’s no pause. I used to worry about doing this for people and then having to spend long bouts of time meditating on the cards, thinking about their meanings, considering the context, but I’ve learned that I just have to be in the zone and let it come. That’s what intuition is. It’s an innate knowing. Ego tells you that it’s not possible to know these things about people without first being told, but learning to take your hands off the wheel and let your intuition speak is when the magic happens.
We talked next steps and I recommended finding a therapist that she could fully trust and work with, processing of all this junk. But not everyone is as lucky as I was, where I could talk to my therapist about astral travel and speaking to gods and angels and not have her throw me in an institution. So I also referred her to my friend, Katy Swallow, who is an actual professional reader and a super-powered psychic. Katy specializes in family and ancestral work and can definitely hold this woman’s hand during some of the healing work that a clinician or a doctor is going to dismiss as mystical nonsense.
I likely won’t be paid for this insight since I just let folks do it on the honor system but there was a genuine sense of pleasure that came from doing this. Their emotional response was real. There were tears. But it was freeing. To look at this haunting from a new perspective and see it not as this oppressive horror to be warded against with amulets and symbols but as a this old wound that she’d forgotten was even there, it was rewarding enough to see a person freed a bit from that weight and with new direction and purpose. That on its own is a powerful reward.