Hi Victoria. Sorry this is so long. The subject is close to my heart and I got carried away. Your question was: What effect will my studies with Enrique Enriquez have on my tarot practise and life in general? So EE is central and should occupy the central column of the reading. His influence radiates outwards. Your life in general will be allotted to the left-hand column and your tarot practise to the right. Row 1, the past, will deal with the time before your studies with him; Row 2 to the studies themselves, which seem to have been quite recent and belong to the present time; and Row 3 to what the future holds.
Very often I find EE's writing and theorising extremely abstract and difficult to understand, so I chose, as an exercise in masochistic self-discipline, to use only the pips for this reading. Using all pips seems very egalitarian for some reason. 40 cards, including the Aces, to represent perhaps the 40 days and 40 nights of Christ's wanderings in the wilderness, since for years, until a couple of weeks ago in fact, the pips had been a total blank to me. The chosen deck is the Flornoy Dodal, which EE has made his own.
From his first appearance on the English-speaking tarot scene, EE declared war on the Golden Dawn, the Rider-Waite deck and its clones, and magic in general: "I suspect that deep down everyone who uses the Rider-Waite tarot wishes they owned a unicorn." "The creators of the esoteric tarot were all either madmen or liars."
He is, first and foremost a poet, an artist with a university degree in design, and has attempted to redefine tarot, concentrating exclusively on the TdM tradition, less as a magical tool than as a work of art - ink on paper - suitable for contemplation. He also uses the language of clinical psychology, linguistics, anthropology, art theory, cognitive science, and so on, all the jargon, to discuss the way it works rather than that of religion and mysticism. I am still undecided where my sympathies lie. To promote maximum scientific objectivity and randomness, and thus align myself with the universe, I closed my eyes to draw the 9 cards
The past: 7 of Swords/Two of Wands/3 of Swords
The present: 6 of Swords/8 of Wands/5 of Wands
The future: 3 of Cups/4 of Coins/10 of Coins
EE has said that when he uses an antique deck, or a photographic reproduction of a 17th or 18th century pack of tarot cards, now stained and battered almost beyond recognition from the sprightly package it once was, that it's "like touching a corpse." Here below, showing the 9 chosen cards, are two prime corpses. The Jean Dodal tarot was printed from carved pearwood blocks in Lyon in 1701. Just two copies have survived, now in museums, one in Paris and the other in London. The cards below are from photographic reproductions of those two decks. On the left is the Paris deck, the Dusserre Dodal (Editions Dusserre), a very difficult deck to find. This copy surfaced in a Japanese-owned corner store in Quebec City. On the right is the London deck produced by Lauren's Retro Repros in an edition of 50.
EE uses almost exclusively the Dodal tarot designed by Jean-Claude Flornoy, who peered through the grime of the two original decks, compared them, and made this clean, precise, best-guess copy of what he saw. The deck on the right below is the Flornoy deck that we will be using to answer your question. The Dodal on the right features another recent version by the Argentinian Pablo Robledo. The dark blue mottling on some of the cards seems to be an attempt to mimic the London deck.
The block of six black cards above the line of three golden cards looks like the curtain going up on a stage.
The past:
This is the time before you began your classes with EE. It addresses perhaps what attracted you to him and what prompted you to sign up online.
EE is represented by the middle card. Energy exploding outwards in all directions from a single point. A spark. The crossed staffs are also combative, pitting two tarot traditions against one another. The extravagant, gesturing upper flower is topped with the familiar jester's cap.
Your day to day life on the left and your tarot practise on the right, both Swords, share the same quality, intellectual. But there are fewer swords in your tarot practise, so it is a haven of relative calm. However, the sword in the middle of the 3 of Swords is trapped. The pommel is resting on the frame of swords, so you have not begun to push yet. You feel stuck and yearn to break free from your established ways of thinking about the cards. The hilt is oddly off centre as though you do not have a completely reliable intellectual grasp on what you want to achieve. The fumble-fingered interlacing of swords at the top of the 7 of Swords - sheer engraving incompetence - perhaps suggests jumbled thoughts. Or perhaps a breakthrough is happening and the mesh of swords is buckling.
The present:
These cards deal with the impact of EE's classes on you and your impressions of him.
8 consists of the solidity of 4 doubled. 8s are monolithic. But this monolith, the 8 of Wands, is made of fire. What you saw from a distance, the 2 of Wands, close up is many more Wands than that. He outlives your expectations. The 6 of Swords indicates that this period of your life is comparatively calm after the stresses of the 7 above. The flower in the centre is flourishing. The six swords could be six guitar strings making beautiful music. The person who carved the design for the 6 of Swords mistakenly tags the card IV rather than VI. So this harmonious 6 wants to be a stable 4. That is, you wish this time could go on forever. The perfect opportunity to concentrate more fully on what EE is teaching.
I notice that, in the card to the right, on starting the classes with EE your tarot style immediately shifts to Wands, following the example of EE's Wands in the middle card. In other words, you adopt his style. On the 5 of Wands there is the same aspiring, restless, odd-numbered wand thrusting upwards that we see on the 3 and 7 of Swords. You are always impatient to keep evolving. But where EE's wands produce flowers, your central wand shows blades, so you are still learning. If we go down to the next row, which deals with the future, we see that your 10 of Coins again matches the suit of EE's 4 of Coins. So his influence on you will extend into the future.
The future:
After all the struggle and excitement - those 6 black cards above - during which you meet EE and come to grips with the information from his classes, the bottom row representing the future is all golden. On the 3 of Cups the raised cup is a toast. The inward-curving heads of the two blossoms on either side of the top cup seem to moving towards each other for a kiss. The red, five-pronged jagged shape beneath the cup looks like a flame, and may mean that things are hotting up. Or at least that there is a growing warmth in your heart. The broad bases of the cups are stable.
The 10 of Coins is abundance. The leaves like arms are distributing your tarot wealth. You and a client are the two central coins sitting face to face, while others wait their turn around the walls of the room. Also your style is now Coins - earthy - based not on the abstract ideas you held in the past on the 3 of Swords, but in the physical reality of the lines and colors on the cards. "Rather than learn meanings, look for messages." EE in the centre as the 4 of Coins is established in the future as having made a permanent contribution to art and tarot. The shield is his badge of honour. The loopy doodle in the centre of the shield looks like the figure in the centre of the World card.
Finally, if we follow the diagonal from top right to bottom left we see that the 3 Swords have turned into 3 Cups. That is, your tarot practise, having passed through the classes with EE, will cause a shift in your consciousness that enriches not just your work with tarot but your entire life.