Cult of Tarot Forum

Hi there. I don't think we've met before. What's your question for the tarot this month?

dodalisque wrote: ↑13 Nov 2019, 23:03 Hi there. I don't think we've met before. What's your question for the tarot this month?

Hi, and thank you for your patience. It's nice to meet you.

This is my question. I am taking a temporary break from work, about a year due to some things related to my husband's work, and then when the year is over I will be looking to make a career shift. I have some ideas about what I want to do, but I want to make sure it is a good fit. My question is, what skills or characteristics of myself should I look to or focus on when determining what would be a good fit for me?

Thank you so much!

kare wrote: ↑15 Nov 2019, 00:27 [This is my question. I am taking a temporary break from work, about a year due to some things related to my husband's work, and then when the year is over I will be looking to make a career shift. I have some ideas about what I want to do, but I want to make sure it is a good fit. My question is, what skills or characteristics of myself should I look to or focus on when determining what would be a good fit for me?

The deck is the Flornoy version of the Jean Dodal TdM (1701)


You should make it a strict rule to separate (Justice) your public life (Le Bateleur) from your private life (La Pances).

Dance! (Temperance) Leap up! (Judgment) Turn cartwheels! (La Roue de Fortune)

What is holding you back? (Le Diable) The Empress (Imperatris), loaded down with robes and responsibilities, is looking enviously at the happy-go-lucky girl on the beach (L'Etoille).

Be prepared to bite (Force) and claw (La Lune) and scratch (XIII).

After years of searching high (L'Ermite) and low (Le Pandu) you will now find your proper place in the world (Le Monde).

Your big new idea (Le Soleil) will accelerate your transition from youth (Le Charior) to maturity (Le Pape).

You can now look back with fond amusement (L'Empereur) at shaky (Le Maison Dieu) decisions (L'Amoreu) you made in the past.

Time to get moving (Le Fol).


Your greatest asset is your readiness,
Impatient to transcend the effortless,
To learn to love what you disdain and fear.
The past is dust; it's time to get in gear.


OK, not the most illustrious example, but maybe this spread has potential. Using the whole major arcana, lay out 7 three-card lines in a block, with one card at the end to act as the period at the end of the sentence, so that it has the appearance of a poetic stanza of 4 lines. Then you make a sort of tarot smoothie out of those 8 hopefully very eccentric and unpredictable readings to produce a single 4 line poem. The Quatrain Spread?


*** "You do not have to drink the whole river to quench your thirst."***

dodalisque wrote: ↑23 Nov 2019, 04:10

kare wrote: ↑15 Nov 2019, 00:27 [This is my question. I am taking a temporary break from work, about a year due to some things related to my husband's work, and then when the year is over I will be looking to make a career shift. I have some ideas about what I want to do, but I want to make sure it is a good fit. My question is, what skills or characteristics of myself should I look to or focus on when determining what would be a good fit for me?

The deck is the Flornoy version of the Jean Dodal TdM (1701)

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You should make it a strict rule to separate (Justice) your public life (Le Bateleur) from your private life (La Pances).

Dance! (Temperance) Leap up! (Judgment) Turn cartwheels! (La Roue de Fortune)

What is holding you back? (Le Diable) The Empress (Imperatris), loaded down with robes and responsibilities, is looking enviously at the happy-go-lucky girl on the beach (L'Etoille).

Be prepared to bite (Force) and claw (La Lune) and scratch (XIII).

After years of searching high (L'Ermite) and low (Le Pandu) you will now find your proper place in the world (Le Monde).

Your big new idea (Le Soleil) will accelerate your transition from youth (Le Charior) to maturity (Le Pape).

You can now look back with fond amusement (L'Empereur) at shaky (Le Maison Dieu) decisions (L'Amoreu) you made in the past.

Time to get moving (Le Fol).


Your greatest asset is your readiness,
Impatient to transcend the effortless,
To learn to love what you disdain and fear.
The past is dust; it's time to get in gear.


OK, not the most illustrious example, but maybe this spread has potential. Using the whole major arcana, lay out 7 three-card lines in a block, with one card at the end to act as the period at the end of the sentence, so that it has the appearance of a poetic stanza of 4 lines. Then you make a sort of tarot smoothie out of those 8 hopefully very eccentric and unpredictable readings to produce a single 4 line poem. The Quatrain Spread?


*** "You do not have to drink the whole river to quench your thirst."***

Thank you for this reading. I was immediately struck by two things. Your first line to separate public from private life, and I think that has been something I haven't done well enough in the past, and it has increased my stress when working, all around. The fool as the final card, the period as you say to the quatrain, also seems very fitting since I will be embarking on something new, and happy to do so. Truthfully, you mention the past twice and the line about how it is dust is a comfort. I have worked hard to put some things behind me that have impacted my ability to make decisions about work.

Your line about my greatest asset being readiness also strikes home. Since leaving work, a career that was stressful and involved very long hours, I have felt such burnout that I have had a hard time imagining what I would do next. I have been concerned that this lack of readiness would make it hard to find something that fits and to embrace any position I might take. But lately the burnout seems to be wearing off and I do feel this sense of readiness and positivity returning. And I think taking the perspective that this will be my greatest asset is not only helpful, but also makes success very attainable. It isn't so much about skill sets as it is about my readiness, and that does make so much sense. I can focus on resting, putting things behind me, and returning to a sense of adventure in the search.

I love the quatrain. First, it was super fun the way you wrote it, but also, it really helps to condense everything into a concise narrative. And I do have the sense that after all these years of different jobs, I have refined my ideas about what I can do and want to do, so your line about that gives me hope--you have a couple of lines about that. And I do sometimes feel pulled between responsibilty and the desire to play, but your reading has clarified the importance of separating private from public life, offering a solution and a way to focus.

Your lines about dancing, leaping and doing cartwheels versus bite, claw, and scratch, are not ways I have used cards before, but I find it fun and a nice way to jostle my perspective on cards. Each of these has at times described my relationship with the job search and also wth my previous career. But the series about dancing has an air of moving on, and that is a joyful thing for me. That even fits with the death card. Maybe trusting my intuition there (Stregth, Moon) will lead me to the change I desire.

Thank you for your reading, I really appreciate it.

Thanks for your lovely response. Now the reading makes much better sense to me.

The technique of picking out concrete details in the graphics, or drawing attention to other odd aspects of the cards, and using them as parts of speech such as adjectives and verbs, etc., is something I've been working on since I saw the movie "Tarology" about the work of Enrique Enriquez, a Venezuelan artist/tarot reader now living in New York. He has written widely about the tarot as well.

It's a way of looking at the graphics as images you might never have seen before, rather than as receptacles for a vast body of symbolic knowledge. Using both approaches together can take the cards off in interesting directions. Suddenly they have sounds and smells and movement. The readings of a member of this site, Charlie Brown, has also opened my eyes to the application of techniques usually associated with Lenormand cards to TdM readings, such as "blending" cards and coming at them from different angles. I used to be quite snobbish and dismissive of Lenormand but I've found it helps to develop greater imaginative flexibility when I'm reading with tarot decks, especially the TdM.

The advantage of using actual details in the art is that the client doesn't have to take anything the reader says on trust. A hat is a hat. It's undeniable. But then if the next card has a crown instead, just to point that out is actually a discussion about class and wealth and respective positions in society, not just hats. The English language is full of symbols and our interpretive intelligence connects the dots without any explanation about the symbols being necessary. It's a function of the way consciousness works. A word like "blood", say, carries a lot more associations than that messy red stuff you find in hospitals.

I'm really so glad you tried this reading method on me . It did remind me of Lenormand, something I myself was not interested in until deciding to collect all of Will Worthington's decks for the art. But I have found real pleasure now in trying out all sorts of reading tools to keep my perspective flexible and to avoid over-familiarity that breeds laziness in interpretation. I so appreciate your reading. It was truly a new experience and so fun.

dodalisque wrote: ↑29 Nov 2019, 23:55 Thanks for your lovely response. Now the reading makes much better sense to me.

The technique of picking out concrete details in the graphics, or drawing attention to other odd aspects of the cards, and using them as parts of speech such as adjectives and verbs, etc., is something I've been working on since I saw the movie "Tarology" about the work of Enrique Enriquez, a Venezuelan artist/tarot reader now living in New York. He has written widely about the tarot as well.

It's a way of looking at the graphics as images you might never have seen before, rather than as receptacles for a vast body of symbolic knowledge. Using both approaches together can take the cards off in interesting directions. Suddenly they have sounds and smells and movement. The readings of a member of this site, Charlie Brown, has also opened my eyes to the application of techniques usually associated with Lenormand cards to TdM readings, such as "blending" cards and coming at them from different angles. I used to be quite snobbish and dismissive of Lenormand but I've found it helps to develop greater imaginative flexibility when I'm reading with tarot decks, especially the TdM.

The advantage of using actual details in the art is that the client doesn't have to take anything the reader says on trust. A hat is a hat. It's undeniable. But then if the next card has a crown instead, just to point that out is actually a discussion about class and wealth and respective positions in society, not just hats. The English language is full of symbols and our interpretive intelligence connects the dots without any explanation about the symbols being necessary. It's a function of the way consciousness works. A word like "blood", say, carries a lot more associations than that messy red stuff you find in hospitals.