into my clairvoyant skills. I have used these skills to help people work out their personal problems and to help see me through certain challenges and crossroads in my life. The cards are generally beautifully illustrated and it is with the imagery of the illustrations that the magic or power of the tarot lies. Learning about these symbols can take years of practice and reading but once learnt they are never forgotten.
Tarot Cards
GETTING STARTED
At first glance, traditional tarot cards appear difficult to understand. The cards were originally designed when most of the world’s population was illiterate, and much of the knowledge was passed down by Romany oral traditions. The pictures and the symbols told a story and gave inspiration to the diviner, so in essence the cards are simple to read as they work by triggering your own intuition rather than being based on a technical understanding of the symbology within the cards.
Many cards and their accompanying books are overloaded with so much information – including astrology, psychology, world religious symbols, numerology and so on – that I found it was best to choose a set of cards whose colour, texture and tradition I responded to. (I began my journey with the Rider tarot designed by A.E. Waite, a pack based on the European tradition, but now I work with Dakini Oracle cards based on Tibetan Buddhism – choose whatever suits you.)
If you are going to work with the cards on other people, they must be bought for you as a gift. So even if you have chosen them, ask your partner or a friend to buy them for you. Buy the accompanying book with the cards so at least you can study the meanings and format of laying the cards out. Keep your tarot cards in a soft, natural-fibred cloth, preferably red in colour, as this protects them and holds their power.
Before you start practising, get to know the cards. Look at each one and decide what it is trying to tell you. How would you interpret the card in a reading? What does it say about the emotional, spiritual or material conditions of a person? Devote a good deal of time to this before you look up the standard meanings of the cards from the book, as it will help you link your own intuitive response to the cards. When you have decided on your interpretation, compare it with the meanings in your book and you will probably find that your interpretation comes close to the established meaning. Practise on yourself and on close friends and family until you feel comfortable working with them without referring to the book.
THE CARDS
In the traditional tarot there are 78 cards, divided into two main groups: 22 Major Arcana, numbered 0-21; and 56 Minor Arcana, divided into four suits. The Major Arcana is the most powerful of the set, symbolizing the journey of the man in the pack, called ‘the fool’, in his encounters with the characters within the Major Arcana set. Some people prefer using only the Major Arcana cards and get to know these first before introducing the rest of the pack. The Minor Arcana is divided into four suits as in a playing card set – Wands, Cups, Swords and Coins.
The cards can be shuffled so that they are upright or reversed (when the cards’ meaning then changes). The cards contain an equal balance of positive and negative so reversing the cards adds little to the overall reading and most of the time I ignore the reverse and work with the meaning only in the upright position. You can do many different types of readings, from simple questions and answers to more elaborate combinations.
It is said that it is impossible to read the tarot for yourself, and unfortunately in some cases this is true as wishful thinking and inner fears and expectations can get in the way. Again, like all psychic gifts, divination skills are to be shared with others.
A true psychic doesn’t necessarily need the cards to tell them about a person’s life and future. They are simply a tool for accessing information and are secondary to the psychic gifts you have. Trust your instincts and eventually you won’t even bother looking up the meanings of the cards, you will just trust your clairvoyant skills.
PREPARING TO READ THE CARDS
Before you begin your reading, choose a quiet room and prepare yourself. Do some deep breathing and practise some of the exercises illustrated earlier to prepare yourself to connect with your psychic powers.
If you have invited someone to come and receive a reading from you, remember that they will be nervous. Reassure them that you won’t tell them anything that will frighten them and remind them that the things you will say are the potential for the future, not actual fact.
Learn the positions of each lay that you may want to use – there are many. The most well known one is the cross, but experiment to find out how you want to place the cards and how the position occupied by the card influences the reading. Have a lay for specific questions and a longer one for a character reading or life reading.
When your client arrives, ask them not to tell you anything about themselves until you have had a chance to begin the reading. Knowing too much about the person will distract your intuitive flow.
1 Ask your client if there is a specific problem they may want to ask about, or if they would like a general reading.
2 Choose your pack of tarot cards and let the client shuffle them, then lay them out face-down on a table or on the floor.
3 First look at the cards that dominate the reading and bring up the most potent feeling, i.e. what you’re getting from your initial reaction to the cards. These pointers indicate which subjects you should be talking about.
4 Look at the individual cards: start each card with an interpretation, feel into the card, the reason why it is in that position and the imagery. Dig deeper for the real significance of why this card has been chosen.
5 Touch the card, close your eyes and watch the images appearing in your mind. Extend your sensing of the meaning, letting yourself go into what you pick up – don’t hold back as the cards will tell you lots more than the surface imagery, and your own intuition will tell you even more.
6 As you move through each card, it is like telling the client a story about their life and the people in it.
7 Consider all the other cards and the meaning of the position they occupy before seeing how they relate to each other and their significance. Let your logical mind take a back seat and free your intuition to make the connection between the images and symbols you see before you. Combine this with the psychic impressions that you may be picking up from your client and you will give readings that astound people.
There are many other tools for divination, such as tasseography, the art of reading tea cups. This has been around for centuries. The gypsies have practised the art, the Chinese believe that they invented it, the Romans used to read the residue left over in their wine cups and even Catholic countries such as Ireland have their psychic cup-scrying grandmothers. Cloud reading, palmistry, I Ching, astrology, graphology, runes, sand reading, the crystal ball – these are just a few of the thousands of fortune-telling tools. The key to using these tools is to learn how to connect with your psychic sense, and practise with your chosen tool for a period of time. Do this and you can master virtually any oracle.
Psychometry
Some people have referred to psychometry as ‘seeing through fingers’. It’s all about reading energy vibrations left on objects.
Psychometric vibrations are left on everything: buildings, jewellery, watches; even plants, flowers and crystals – anything that has been absorbing energy from living things. For example, a watch you have worn daily
