Yet Another Tarot Blog

I love projects that combine the arts and the sciences (you should check out the #sciart hashtag on Twitter if you haven't already). This Science Tarot deck is so wonderful, I might make it my Christmas present to myself.

Each card, from the Majors to the Minors to the court, has been associated with a scientist (courts), a scientific concept (Minors), or a "science story" (Majors). Care has obviously been taken to align the energy and meaning of the card as best as possible with the concept. Each suit has its own theme that in turns tells the larger story of creation: Wands as creation, the nuclear fusion burning in each star; then Pentacles as exchange, elements forged in the star now coalescing into matter; Swords as scientific observation, the higher thinking of conscious life and the beginning of abstract, scientific fields like mathematics, chaos theory, and physics; and finally Cups as the integration of the scientific consciousness into a more holistic picture of life and the return of the scientific observer to a participant in the system. The deck creators also employed Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey to tell the "story" of the Minor Arcana suits, for that extra layer of meaning. For example, the 2 of Swords:

Sitting under the apple tree, we contemplate a choice to be made. The tree branch lifts an apple high in the air, and gravity continuously pulls it toward the ground. These equal and opposite forces hold the apple in place. But soon the balance may shift and the apple may fall, releasing the branch from its burden and shaking the leaves as they swing upwards.

Isaac Newton observed that every action caused an equal and opposite reaction and so reasoned that every reaction could be predicted from the action that triggered it. Like a game of billiards, Newton's world is a predictable knocking around of objects: the force of the impact equals the mass of the moving object times its acceleration. To send an apple flying in a specific direction, we only need to know where to hit it and how hard. To move a gigantic apple, we'll need to hit it with a great deal of mass, or we will need a running start.

A decision is hanging over your head. You can choose to leave the apple suspended in the tree, or you can apply enough force to bring it down. Either decision may bring good results, but if you wait too long, the apple may fall on your head.

Hero's Journey, Step 2: Refusal of the call. The hero is reluctant to use this new power.

The court cards are all illustrated with famous scientists; Page, Knight, Queen, and King are all associated with Helen Fisher's work in personality and attraction. Pages are the Explorers of their suit, Knights are the Innovators, Queens are the Storytellers, and Kings are the Visionaries.

There is obviously just so much thought and attention to detail in this deck—but then, would you expect anything less from a science-themed Tarot deck?—and I am just in love.

It's been a busy few months for me. My online presence everywhere has suffered, not just this blog. I will probably continue to be absent until the middle of July, but I wanted to take the time to share this post from Benebell Wen: Mah Jong Divination. I mostly wanted to share it because I am a Mah Jong fiend but knew nothing about what the images represented. I'd always wondered, and now I know! And now you do too. :) You can also read more about divining with Mah Jong, Serena Powers has a tutorial. If you don't have a set of tiles, the Wen article above is a review of a card deck designed for play—but pour que non los dos?

People have lots of different opinions on how to best shuffle a Tarot deck, mostly with an eye towards preserving particularly lovely and/or rare decks. Preservation is a concern for me with some decks (I would prefer that my Victorian Romantic keep its gilt edges!), but also of importance to me is the matter of focus. In a typical riffle-in-the-hands-and-bridge shuffle, I tend to get lost in my thoughts; unless I make a point of focusing, my attention is directed away from the matter at hand, mostly because I'm so good at shuffling cards I can do it without thinking. Does that affect readings? Who knows. But I think Tarot at least deserves focus, especially if the matter at hand is important. So I feel better, both about my focus and about preserving my nicer decks, using my Klondike method.

I haven't seen anyone else describe this particular method of shuffling ("shuffling") and perhaps with good reason: it's not truly random—or at least, it's not as close to "truly" random as a riffles shuffle is. (Though, side note: it takes a deck about seven tries with a riffle shuffle to be truly randomized. How many times is your dealer shuffling in between rounds of poker?) My Klondike shuffle method is just a variation on pile shuffling. Pile shuffling is what it sounds like: dealing out cards into a certain number of piles, and then stacking them all together for a "shuffled" deck. While it's probably one of the safest shuffles in terms of preserving cards, it is fairly easy to manipulate. Plus, this is a shuffle that doesn't account for reversed cards. Reversals don't matter much in poker, card tricks, or Magic: The Gathering tournaments, but they can matter a lot in Tarot readings. The randomization (or lack thereof) is a problem I have yet to solve, but reversals is easy enough.

Anyway, enough setup. The Klondike shuffle!

I was a card games and solitaire fiend as a kid. I don't know why. I guess I didn't have a lot of friends? But like everyone, the first version of solitaire I learned was Klondike (thanks, Windows). I found the layout very aesthetically pleasing; honestly my favorite part of the game was dealing out a new hand. So all the Klondike shuffle is, is dealing out a few new games of Klondike, right on top of each other (without turning over any cards). I use 5 piles, or tables, because I have a small space for readings. If I had room to spread out I would probably use 7, like a proper game of Klondike. In other words:

1. Deal out 5 (or however many you like) cards to make 5 (or X) amount of piles.
2. Skipping the first card on the left, deal out 4 (or X - 1) cards in a second row.
3. Move another card to the left and deal out 3 (or X - 2) cards in a third row.

And so on. I like to continue until I've dealt out the whole deck, so once I reach the last pile, I just start another "game" right on top of the first one. But maybe you'd prefer collecting each "game" into a stack to keep things from getting messy.

I find that counting out the cards I'm dealing in each row helps me focus. Counting is weird like that, isn't it? Almost hypnotic. "1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 1 , 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3. 1, 2. 1." And repeat.

When the whole deck has been dealt out, I stack the piles together (sometimes starting with the "5" pile and putting the others on top, other times putting them under) and then cut once. I turn one half the deck like I would if I were going to riffle shuffle (to ensure that more or less the same amount of cards end up getting reversed or unreversed; it strikes me that you could also reverse the card you'd turn face-up in a proper Klondike game to add another layer of random) and then start dealing out another set of Klondike games. Once I've done this three times, I consider the deck shuffled enough to read. I cut it twice, then stack, then cut once again, and I read.

Do you have a favorite or unique way of shuffling your cards—Tarot, oracle, or otherwise?

It seems that after I finished that 30-Day Tarot Meme I immediately dropped off the face of the Internet. Truthfully there are a few things I'm thinking of writing on:


*unsung women of Tarot (Pamela Coleman-Smith, Lady Freida Harris, Florence Farr et al.)

*history of the Celtic Cross (if there's much to dig up; it doesn't seem like much)

*a whole series of each card (more for my own reference than for public consumption, not sure if I'll make those entries public)

*maybe more???? ideas??


But now that my job has picked back up again, it will take a while for these posts to get underway.

A resounding "no." My resources on the Tarot have been books, both new and "classic," Tarot communities (Aeclectic), and a dash of blogs here and there. While I envy anyone who managed to come into the practice under the guiding wing of a beloved elder, I think I've done fine on my own.

Nope. Any place quiet will do. I have been known to just throw cards on the top of my laptop keyboard—no altar, no sacred space—and gotten perfectly good, coherent, and accurate readings. My only caveat is that I have to be alone, without fear of being disturbed. Stress about someone walking in on me or wanting to talk about something unrelated can really take me out of the Tarot headspace.

You'd think after all these ("all these," just a dozen or so) years I'd have some kind of breath-taking, OMG reading that I did, but honestly? No. 

(or, ask on behalf of another?)

When I read for myself, it's usually along the lines of: what is the best way for me to approach this situation, what do I need to know about this situation, etc. But a lot of times when I'm reading for myself, I don't even have a question. I just draw a card on the fly when an issue is on my mind. I get some eerie results that way.

Questions I ask on behalf of others, on the rare occasion I get them, tend to be what I consider "bad" questions and as such I massage them a bit myself, working with the querent to forumlate a better one.

What do you believe makes the cards “tick”?

Wow, this is a head-scratcher. I think a lot of the wisdom we can gain from Tarot involves our own reaction to a randomly-generated set of images and the connections we make to a particular situation, as well as being meta about it: thinking about WHY we might have jumped to that particular interpretation instead of another one.

But you can't help when a spread has *just* the right cards, either. Is that chance? Is that something else? In any case, thinking of a deck as a person who is trying to communicate with you is a useful little shortcut when reading.