Seeing the Signs
Divining by Playing Cards
As the sun gains strength moving toward Imbolc, the increased light shows all the dust and dirt that hid within the shadows of Yule’s darkness and it is time to clean. Mercury’s retrograde provides perfect opportunity to reorganize our closets and our drawers, getting rid of what no longer services us and finding ways to recycle old things into new. After a day of cleaning, quiet time with a cup of herbal tea and a fragrant candle can be productive while re-reading one’s Book of Shadows. Mine started as a small notebook and is now divided into three giant loose-leaf notebooks. Last night, I was looking through the largest one, my Tarot and Numerology notebook. I have always had an interest in numbers and cards. I received my first Tarot deck in 1988, but I read playing cards as a child. To be honest, I didn’t know anything about it but I “knew” that the Queen of Hearts meant love and the Ace of Spades was death. The rest of it I made up as I went along, partly based on the card games I played with my grandparents – deuces were wild, whatever that meant – red threes were lucky, that came from Canasta – and so on.
After I got the Waite-Rider deck, I was totally fascinated with the Tarot and I forgot all about using playing cards for anything other than playing card games. I read every book I could find on the subject and took page after page of notes, filling numerous notebooks. I collected hundreds of spreads and tried every single one. I visited every Tarot website I could find and printed out whatever information I could find, which was added to my ever-growing Tarot notebook. Some of the information I found was contradictory but that made it all no less valuable. In almost 30 years of reading the cards – I own six decks and an oracle deck – I have found that the most important thing to know is to simply let the cards speak to you. Still, I value all my notes and all the time it took to collect them. I enjoy reading them. I always find some notation or something I printed out from the internet that I’ve forgotten and it’s a revelation.
Last night as I was looking through my Tarot notebook, I came across an email I received two years ago from a Yahoo group I was in about “Gypsy Witch Cards” which used playing cards for divination, pairing Clubs with Wands, Hearts with Cups, Spades with Swords and Diamonds with Pentacles. There was also a listing of what each card “meant”. (This posting about “Gypsy Witch Cards” had nothing to do with “Gypsy Witch Fortune Telling Playing Cards” which are a type of Lenormand Oracle Deck sold by US Games and other venders). I looked in The Fortune-Teller’s Workbook: A Practical Introduction to the World of divination, by Sasha Fenton and she has a chapter on playing cards, as does Gillian Kemp in The Fortune-Telling Book: Reading Crystal Balls, Teal Leaves, Playing Cards, and Everyday Omens of Love and Luck. Naturally, the meaning of the cards in each book overlapped and diverged. None of the meanings really spoke to me and I felt like whoever wrote them was working off a Tarot template.
I think using Numerology works better when using playing cards for divination. If you can remember the characteristics of each number and the meaning of each suit, you should be able to read the combination of both. It’s rather like psychic math! Of course the court cards have faces and they do refer to people. And deuces can still be wild! Look for pairing of cards – a Jack of any suit with a 2 of Diamonds, for instance, might mean a business partnership with a young man. The 9 of Hearts paired with a King or a Queen means you wish for a new lover. The more cards you put together, the more you can see.
I usually do a simple 3-card spread with playing cards or a 5- or 7-card spread, each card laid out in a straight line, left to right. If I am reading three cards, I use a “Past”, “Present”, “Future” format. The 5-card spread asks me my five best options for the situation I’m in. If I lay out seven cards, I’m really confused about what’s going on and I am looking to see what kind of pairs show up.
As someone who has been reading Tarot cards for almost thirty years, reading with playing cards is really refreshing. It is certainly a challenge to read a situation with cards that don’t have pictures. It requires a different kind of brain work, and I like that. Perhaps you will, too.
References
Fenton, Sasha. The Fortune-Teller’s Workbook: A Practical Introduction to the World of divination. Wellingborough: The Aquarian Press, 1988.
Kemp, Gillian. The Fortune-Telling Book: Reading Crystal Balls, Tea Leaves, Playing Cards and Everyday Omens of Love and Luck. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2000