Five Tarot cards and a bunch of doubts

In which I work through my favourite ‘specific question’ layout, get very personal and see where it takes me, all the while questioning if I should be doing this at all.

OK, I’m very late with this one. You can blame the bank holiday or Mercury retrograde or just the general late August ennui.

Before we get into the five cards I pulled earlier, I wanted to share my thoughts about ‘for the collective’ type readings in general. I confess I always feel a bit uneasy about them. With astrology, you have the empirical fact of the planets’ journeys through the heavens (or at any rate, their apparent movement. But it worked for the Babylonians). There are long standing traditions of how these cosmic interactions operate at a macro level as well as an individual level.

But tarot has always felt different to me. The heavens and their play with the world continue to exist whether anyone’s looking or not. But the cards require a consultation - they’re all about dialog, between the pack, the reader and the querent. So setting out a reading ‘for the week’ doesn’t always sit very well with me. This is a personal thing! I know it works wonderfully for lots of people - most of the writing around tarot I see here and on instagram seems dedicated to this sort of reading. But the pieces that interest me are the ones where I learn something new about the cards, about the esoteric or am nudged to think about my life and practices from a different angle. The readings that say ‘it’s going to be like this and you should do that’ - I’m not sure how useful they are. And - full disclosure - I’ve done more than my fair share over on Instagram and a couple of times here, in my new Substack space.

So I have…questionable thoughts, as Roy Batty might have put it, were he a tarot reader as opposed to a tragic but sociopathic android.

But. (There’s always a ‘but’.)

In this case, my ‘but’ is another aspect of my approach to reading - that tarot provides us with information. It helps us understand a situation and make better decisions. It’s also, in the most material of ways, a sophisticated practice of sortilege, divination by the random casting of lots. So there really isn’t any reason why my pulling five cards and describing them can’t create a meaningful story for a complete stranger on the other side of the world. Or a lot of strangers perhaps. We’re pattern making creatures and if the pattern makes sense and helps you navigate the world, then go to it!

So in the spirit of ‘there may be something useful here but don’t worry if there isn’t’, here are five cards in a layout I use for quite specific questions. When reading, I find that I need to shape the layout I’m using very much in line with the question I’ve been asked. So if someone asks a “What should I do?” question with quite an immediate timeframe, we need to explore what the issue is, where it’s coming from (and going) and what the querent needs to do to get there - and what not to do. This last point (and card) often turns out to be the most illuminating

Five cards for specific questions

I’m using the extraordinary Haindl tarot, created back in the 90s by the German artist, Herman Handle in collaboration with that grand dame, Rachel Pollack. Pollack also wrote a two volume manual purely devoted to this deck - more than 400 pages! It’s unsurprising. The Haindl is a deck of distinctly uncompromising vision, taking in a global array of pantheons, deities and symbols. It is, however, a fundamentally kindly deck. Not something one can say of Thoth, perhaps, but that’s another story.

Here are the cards. The question is a pointy one and a very personally relevant one - why is a particular relationship in trouble? And the natural corollary - what can be done about it?

In the middle, we have the situation - the Two of Cups reversed. Haindl included an I Ching (or Ji Ying) hexagram on this card and a number of others. The hexagram is called Qian, number 1 in the sequence of 64. Qian is formed of six unbroken lines and forms the purest distillation of positive energy expressed in the I Ching. This also makes it the most unstable and discovering it attached to the thoroughly destabilised 2 of Cups is wholly appropriate. Someone has been trying too hard. The underlying root of the matter is represented by the reversed Son (or Prince) of Wands - the dashing warrior-playboy, Krishna. Young men suffer from a certain sense of entitlement, especially in relationships. Unchecked and unaddressed, this can all too often turn towards sociopathy and misogyny as a man ages. The energy of the phallic Wand turns inwards, becomes a source of frustration, arrogance and pettiness. The royalty of the suit of Fire become little tyrants.   

What, then, is the answer? The right hand card looks towards a goal for the future - the Father of Wands - Brahma! Haindl characterises the Kings as Fathers. If you want to put things right, you need to grow up. But how?

This is where the last two cards come in. Above, the Star suggests an action that the querent must commit to undertake (perhaps this layout is more of a magical act than I’d thought) and the Empress, below details an action or path not to be taken. Odd - who could imagine not wanting to follow the path of the Empress?

The Haindl Empress is a wild forest of competing symbols. There is a hint of Venus but the nude figure stands on a lunar crescent, not a half-shell. There is a hint of the Strength trump in her effortless command over the serpent wrapped around her right arm and she bears the thyrsus of the Bacchae. The card carries the Hebrew letter ‘Daleth’ which means ‘door’ and a door to blinding illumination is open behind her. She is receptive, nurturing and perhaps…a lot?

People often miss how pragmatic the Tarot can be. Here, the cards are saying “Don’t smother people. Give them space. Let them come to you. Love-bombing your beloved isn’t going work on this occasion.”

Above, the Star provides an interesting contrast. Note that the Star here is clothed, her face covered - the opposite of the normal version of this trump. There are no goblets transmitting the energy of the cosmos to earth - she’s simply washing her hair. All is quiet, peaceful, the opposite of the crowded excess of the Empress. But above her, a single, five pointed star glows all the more fiercely - a reminder that all distant stars are suns in their own right. Haindl affirms this through the rune he chooses to attach to this card - sowilo or Sun. The Hebrew letter is tzaddi, translated as faithful or righteous one. We also need to remember the most foundational of the keywords long associated with the Star - Hope.

So there it is - a rather aspirational ‘to do’ and a complicated question - how can one achieve ’kingship’? This is regardless of gender, of course. There is a marvellous children’s book by Patricia C. Wrede called Dealing with Dragons where a female dragon wins the title of ‘king’. ‘King’ is a job, a set of behaviours that demand a lot of someone and a female dragon is perfectly qualified to carry them out. I’d assert that righteousness, modesty, a willingness to cede space to others and a capacity for hope are the qualities one wants to see in a king. There is a time to be an Empress. And there is also a time to be a Star

Let’s try and wrap this up. In the centre, we see an emotional crisis - an attitude to a relationship as much as a relationship unravelled. Circling this event, we have four states of mind. One might have caused the issue and is certainly exacerbating it - the reversed Prince of Wands and his laddish failings. Another is represented by the Empress who is this instance might risk putting herself at the centre of events, a benign, well-meaning but still self-aggrandising approach. Then there’s the noble King of Wands as the equitable, lordly state of mind that the querent aspires to. Finally, we have the Star - a call for humility, stepping back and shifting power, for giving another the gift of space and having faith that things really will work themselves out.

Clearly, dear friends, I was reading for myself and seeking an answer to my own insecurities. Is it the answer I want? Well, it’s the answer I’ve got. Is it a reading suitable for anybody else? Perhaps for someone, somewhere. There’s always a surfeit of insecure men in the world.

If, after all that, you want your own reading, let me know. I’ve been doing this for forty year or so. I’ve learned a few tricks.