T his chapter deals with the nuts and bolts of my approach to tarot as a language (like French or Spanish) and the way you can see for yourself how this works. I think the following little exercise will help you understand what I was getting at earlier.
Take four small pieces of paper. On the first, write house. On the second, write yellow. On the third, write ranch-style. On the fourth, write intersection.
Now line these papers up, upside down, in a horizontal row on the table.
Now turn over the first paper and read aloud, “House.”
Now turn over the second and read, “Yellow house.”
Now turn over the third and read, “Yellow ranch house.”
Now turn over the fourth and read, “Yellow ranch house [at an] intersection.”
From now on in this chapter, take the cards I’m talking about, place them where I say, and speak aloud what I write.
Take your cards and remove the Seven of Cups, the Five of Pentacles reversed, the Three of Pentacles, and the Ace of Cups. Line these up on the table from left to right.
If you turn these cards over one at a time, you can read: Dreaming of/finding a job/that is a high-level job/that I will love. See? It’s as clear as day! And there’s no guessing.
But if you’re looking at only one card, the Seven of Cups (dreaming), how are you going to have an accurate idea of what the dream is? The answer is you’re not. And so you’re going to try to guess, and you’re going to call that “psychic” work. Well, I call it “guesswork,” and I know it happens all the time, because too many readers out there tend to be vague. Or downright wrong. And that’s why.
But by continuing to add cards beside a card until you have a complete thought, you’ll be right on the money in terms of what you can tell your client. My clients say they’ve never seen anyone else do this. As I’ve said, it just kind of came to me one day, like pretty much everything else I’ve discovered about tarot. So far, anyway.
Sometimes I start with the basic seven cards, and by the time I’m done, I have as many as thirty or forty cards on the table, because I needed them all to give me the whole story in detail. Also, when the reading starts, I try to speak for a while without interruption. The client gives me the first seven cards, and I just keep taking more cards and talking from that point on.
When you finally let your client ask a question, you should already have a good general idea of his or her life and situation. So now you have a context for the details that come next. Not to mention that if you get good at this, you can sometimes answer every question at the very beginning before anything has even been asked. After that it’s all about detail and depth, elaboration and clarification. But the basics you’ve probably already touched on. Nailed.
So now, one thing about that first card:
Card 1 is the issue at hand. For the purposes of this exercise, let’s say our client is asking about her job.
Card 1, the issue, is the Four of Rods/Wands. What this means is that she’s looking at the job from that point of view. The client sees it as a nice, collegial environment with nice coworkers. So the issue is this: she sees it as a “good” job really just because of the people there.
Card 7, the outcome, is the Six of Swords reversed. So now you know that the nice environment (the Four of Rods/Wands: the way she’s looking at the job) is leading her to choose to stay in a lousy situation (the Six of Swords reversed).
Card 2 is the King of Rods/Wands reversed: maybe she has a bad manager or disloyal manager, or her husband is not committed to her or supporting her somehow when it comes to her job.
Card 3 is the Seven of Swords: there’s politics in the workplace, deception; she’s somehow being ripped off at the job.
Card 4 is the Page of Pentacles: she needs to study something if she’s going to be able to make a good change.
Card 5 is the Ace of Cups reversed: there is no gratification or satisfaction for her in this job.
Card 6 is the Ten of Rods/Wands reversed: on top of everything else, she’s burned out.
Now you can say this aloud: Because your coworkers are nice, you’re staying at a lousy job that doesn’t pay and isn’t satisfying; you have a disloyal boss; and you’re burned out.
At this point, you need to think like a logical person. If something were going to change, what would it be? If you, the reader, were in this situation, what would you do?
Well, one of the first seven cards your client chose in this case is about something she can do while staying at her job.
The one card that tells you she can take action? The Page of Pentacles (the student; study).
So you lay a card beside this and you get the Eight of Pentacles (a challenging job with a learning curve that pays okay).
Then, just out of “curiosity,” you add a card to the Four of Rods/Wands and it is the Tower (something’s going to happen to shake up that nice working atmosphere).
So then you add a card to the Ace of Cups and it turns out to be the Three of Swords. For this client, not having a gratifying job is the pits, if not downright painful, regardless of how nice the colleagues are.
By the time you finish answering the job question, you can have progressed the current situation into the future by adding cards to each basic card and going where they take you.
And so you can tell your client the situation is going to change around her (the Tower), but if she studies (the Page of Pentacles), she can move on to something better, something that’s challenging and pays well (the Eight of Pentacles).
Listen, it takes a lot of practice to do this stuff, but it can be done. Once you start actually doing it, you’ll just get it. It makes so much sense. I can’t picture house, but I can picture a yellow ranch house at an intersection.
Also, I am a natural-born reporter. In my head, as I’m reading, I’m always asking why? and what? This is what I mean by “curiosity.” You need to want to get all the details so you can tell the most complete story you can. (It’s a yellow ranch house, not a blue split-level. It matters.)
Finally, as I said before, always practice aloud. There’s something about speaking what you see that either reinforces your logic or tells you, wait, this doesn’t sound right. Speaking always forces us to put our thoughts into coherent communication. So begin now, and from now on, always practice aloud.
One Small Point That’s Kind of Big
When It Comes to Translation
Translating Chinese into English is a challenge. In that language, there’s no word for “the” or “a.” But in English, it’s all about connectives. This is a big word for usually small things we use every day, all day long, without even thinking about it.
In reading tarot cards the way we read sentences, we can do the same thing just as easily.
Here’s what I mean:
At the beginning of this chapter, I asked you to write four words on pieces of paper.
The result was yellow ranch house [at an] intersection.
No, you didn’t write “at an” on a piece of paper. But what else could the four words mean? A yellow ranch intersection house? No. So if you think about it, it has to be a house at an intersection if it’s going to make any sense.
In a reading, for example, sometimes you’ll have someone putting out a résumé (the Seven of Rods/Wands) sitting next to no money (the Six of Pentacles reversed). Once you know the meanings of the cards, you’ll simply say, “Putting out a résumé because there’s no money.” You won’t even think twice. The logic of the sentence will simply happen.
Would you have a woman in love leave a man in love? No. So if she’s going to do this, there has to be a reason. There has to be a because.
It’s the same with next to, about, from, but, and, and whatever other connective comes to mind as you’re doing a reading and need it to make sense.
A man has a job but he has a house? Well, that makes no sense, right? So it must be: A man has a job and he has a house.
In my system of understanding tarot as a language, this is the only thing you’ll ever have to add, really, to make sense: the connectives. But again, I have a student who suddenly just started doing it: making sense as she connected the cards. It just started happening.
And since the cards will always make sense, it will keep becoming easier to know the meaning of a card. A woman is happy because she’s in a bad marriage? No way. So look around at the cards on the table and see if you can find the card(s) that can tell you why she’s happy.
To make sure you have a good grasp of what’s going on here, in chapter 20 I give you a list of clauses, phrases, and sentences in English. Your job is to “translate” the English into tarot cards. To do this, you won’t be reading cards. But you’ll be understanding them.
I invented this exercise, and I think it’s a really important part of your training. My students love it. They love the challenge of expressing ideas in pictures, even though most of them don’t know most of the card meanings yet when I start asking them to do this. They use the book, they find the right cards, and they learn.
And once you’ve exhausted the list in chapter 20, take any sentences or logical strings of words and try to translate them into cards.
For the purposes of this exercise, you might say that the sections on definitions of the cards in this book are a kind of tarot-to-English dictionary.
Language Barriers
I’ve learned about this issue the hard way. The most difficult thing for me to do as a reader is to try to work with somebody whose grasp of English is not too good. I have to try hard sometimes to tell people what I’m seeing when they don’t have a vocabulary. I can speak in simple terms to people without much education and we may have successful sessions. But even simple words and terms can elude somebody for whom English is a second or even third language. This makes it impossible for me to convey nuances, big ideas. It’s utterly frustrating for both me and the client. So now, when I believe I’m hearing a really thick accent on the phone when an appointment is being made, I ask the person how good his or her command of English is. I mean, I don’t want to take money from somebody I know in my heart I’m not really going to be able to help.
So all I can say here is that if you’re confronted with this situation, just do the best you can to be clear and make yourself understood.