Dodalisque reads for Max

[dodalisque]

Hi there. Do you have a question or something you want to know about?

[max]

hello dodalinque. First of all it is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.
Moving on to the question I would like to ask you, what could be the problem that does not make me understand clearly what road I have to take?
P.S
I have been on the tarot route for a short time. The strange thing is that it seems to be my life for all my life. I am a fish with ascending cancer, my moon is in cancer, so my sensitivity is very strong. I would say that I am very receptive, and I feel that the tarot road will bring me unexpected satisfaction! Coas can you tell me about it?
Wow, I wrote you a poem !!

[dodalisque]

Hi Max. Pleased to meet you. Thanks for your question. It might be a few days before I have time to complete your reading, but I will send it along as soon as it's done. I think the question you want answered is about your relationship to the tarot and how it will affect your Body/Mind/Spirit. You want to know if the tarot is the right path for you to explore. Is that right? The more time I spend doing tarot readings the more important I find it is to have a very clear idea of the exact question. The tarot wants to send us messages but gets confused if the question is not clear or if there are two or more questions tangled up together. You also asked a more general question about the difficulty you are having choosing your life's direction or the proper outlet for your spiritual sensitivity. It might be necessary to do two separate readings and if so I will pull some extra cards.Talk to you soon.

[dodalisque]

The question is: What does the tarot have to offer Max in his exploration of the inner world?

There are many ways for a sensitive, or psychic, to access the inner world and bring back information to help people better understand and organise their lives: tarot, runes, astrology, palmistry, a crystal ball, tea leaves, the flight of birds, the entrails of a sacrificial goat, to name just a few. It's hard to say what inspires us to choose one path instead of another. The most accurate and detailed reading I ever received was from a man of native Indian descent who simply sat across a table from me and read my aura, or energy field. An ayurvedic physician diagnosed a condition my doctor had missed by loosely holding my wrists and tuning in to several "pulses", not just the heartbeat, that she could identify in my body.

Even within the world of tarot there are many different ways of reading the cards. When I first started tarot I assumed there was only one way, or a best way, and set out to learn it. But as your confidence grows, gradually you realise you have started to develop your own style. Every card reader has different abilities and strengths. That's one of the reasons why I chose to shuffle just a 16 card deck, the Court cards.

Another reason is that part of your original question was about the difficulty of making decisions. This is always a struggle because we have many conflicting aspects to our total personality. Our consciousness is not an isolated, logical, decision-making machine but a number of separate voices demanding attention. The tarot proposes that there are basically 16 different energies, or "personalities", inside us. The Myers-Briggs system of Jungian psychology borrows this structure from the tarot. Also, even though it is possible to read cards for ourselves, usually we read for others, so the 16 Court cards might also represent the different types of people who come to us to ask advice. The deck I am using is the ISIS TdM (2010) made in Japan, designed by Tadahiro Onuma, a professor of Quantum Physics at the University of Tokyo.

King of Wands - Queen of Wands - Knight of Cups
Page of Wands - King of Swords - Page of Swords
King of Cups - Page of Coins - Queen of Cups

The 9 card tableau was supposed to have 3 rows dealing with Body/Mind/Spirit. But we are talking about different ways of reading the tarot, so the 3 rows here deal respectively with the 3 basic methods of interpreting the cards: The Visual Method/The Intellectual Method/The Intuitive Method. Clients are represented in this spread by the two outer columns, while the middle column features the reader. Hopefully this reading will help you to decide which method, or combination of methods, suits you best.

Row 1: Body - The Visual Method

The Page of Coins is a combination of youthful naivety and the element of Earth: someone with honest simplicity who focuses on undeniable material facts. He is the only court card whose title is written sideways on the edge of the card rather than in a box at the bottom. So his two feet are planted firmly on the ground. He is staring closely at a large gold coin that he holds in his right hand, and he has another green coin, like a seed he has planted, beneath his feet. He is even holding a tiny coin in his left hand, like the Magician, or Le Bateleur (I), as though he is performing a trick.

The leading exponent of the Visual Method is a Venezuelan artist who lives in New York named Enrique Enriquez, who has written widely on the TdM and is perhaps the most influential figure in the recent rediscovery and growing popularity of the TdM. He is also a stage magician. The Visual Method is very popular with those who read with the TdM. The reader looks at the pictures on the cards as though he is looking at a painting in a gallery, almost as though he is seeing the cards for the first time with fresh eyes. There are no lists of memorised meanings learned from books to tell the reader how to interpret each card.

Everything the reader sees using the Visual Method can be seen by his clients, the King and Queen of Cups. In the other two methods, the Intellectual and Intuitive, the reader has information about the cards - their symbolism or mysterious suggestive power - that is not obvious to his clients. The client must to a certain extent trust that the reader is reporting truly on what the cards say rather than just making things up. So the Visual Method has tremendous persuasive power.

The King and Queen, who are both much more important than a mere Page, take priority in the reading and are given the power to apply what the reader sees on the cards to their own lives. The reader is simply reporting details in the pictures rather than interpreting them. This method works because there is something in the way that our brain interprets data, especially in the context of a tarot reading, that will inevitably map connections between a random piece of information and our own life. For example, if the reader points out that the King and Queen are wearing golden crowns whereas the Page has an ordinary floppy hat, the reader does not need to say anything else. He is just reporting the facts. But the client automatically knows that the real subject under discussion is "wealth, status, importance" rather than just "hats". Metaphors are everywhere.

Notice how the Page of Coins is focussed only on the coin, that is, the visual details on the cards. He is not looking directly at either of his clients. So he is not reading their body language to help him guess something about their state of mind or give him clues about how to craft his message. It doesn't matter to him whether the King's heart is as open as his cup, or the Queen's heart is as closed as her cup. He will read for them both in the same way.

In fortune-telling, reading the clients rather than the cards is called a "cold reading". It has a bad reputation in the tarot world because it suggests that the cards themselves are unnecessary, and that there is an element of deliberate, cynical manipulation of the client's gullibility. But I personally believe there is an element of so-called "cold reading", usually unconscious, in all tarot readings. I just object to the term and prefer to think of it as a form of acute sensitivity or telepathy. There is a degree of mystery in all 3 methods of reading tarot in spite of the analytical way in which I pretend to describe them.

The Visual Method gives the impression that there is zero "cold reading" content in a reading, but who is to say what draws the reader's attention to certain details on the cards rather than to others. The tiny magic-trick coin in the Page's left hand implies that the apparent simplicity of the Page is actually a bit deceptive. He understands the trick about how the brain processes analogies and metaphors. What he cannot predict is the exact content of the stories his clients create when they apply his observations to the vast library of their own history. The client makes the connections. However, even readers who use the Visual Method need to be skilled with language and compassionate, to make sure they leave their clients with a positive and energising message. The green coin in the ground suggests that the popularity of The Visual Method is growing.

Row 2: Mind - The Intellectual Method

This method is associated with the most popular deck in the English-speaking world, the Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) deck, which was created in 1910 by a group of occult enthusiasts called The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. They redefined the tarot as a magical tool incorporating many esoteric disciplines like astrology and the Jewish kabbalah, whereas the original, much older TdM began simply as a gambling card game. It is ironic that occultists, the champions of the unconscious, should have been responsible for creating a deck that typifies what I call The Intellectual Method of tarot reading.

The Golden Dawn definitions of the cards are brilliant and beautiful, and you would certainly learn a great deal of information about the inner world if you studied them, but over the years they have become established as dogma or doctrine, a complete system. It has become the shared language of the entire English-speaking tarot world, and the vast majority of readers love the system and find it a great stimulus to the imagination.

Many card readers, myself included, worked for a number of years with the Golden Dawn system - with the RWS as well as a large number of other modern decks that borrow the system while changing the artwork - before they felt ready to attempt to read with the TdM, which is generally considered much more difficult. The truth is that using The Visual Method, which requires a different sort of originality and creativity, is more challenging for most of us than constructing readings from a complex network of learned meanings. On the other hand, many people immediately find the TdM and The Visual Method perfectly straightforward and more fun to use than The Intellectual Method, which requires study and book learning.

The influence of the Golden Dawn system is so strong that many readers simply apply RWS definitions to the readings they do with TdM cards. Others think this intellectual approach, based on the memorising of information, limits the potential suggestive power of the TdM, and that The Visual Method is, arguably, more open. In fact Yoav Ben Dov, another professor of Quantum Physics from the University of Tel Aviv, published a wonderful book about the Visual Method with the TdM called, "Tarot: the Open Reading".

In our spread, the King of Swords represents a reader who uses The Intellectual Method. Most of the people you meet on this website will resemble this person in some way. Their readings are often difficult to understand, like a secret code. Writing a reading is a very different skill from communicating with someone about their life with the cards on the table between you. Tarot for them is not just a way of accessing the inner world and helping others, but also a hobby, or passion, a subject we like to explore from many angles and think about. For some, using the cards to do readings is less important than the history of the tarot deck, or the work of a particular tarot artist or cardmaker, or some aspect of, say, the tarot's connection to Jewish mysticism.

Tarot is a complex subject, amazingly complex, but not everyone is interested in this kind of stuff. Increasing your store of knowledge about the tarot can make you a better reader, and give you more ideas to apply to readings, but it is by no means essential. I think some of the best readings I ever did were when I was new to the tarot and I had an immediate intuitive feeling for the cards. Looking at cards then was perhaps a more powerful emotional experience then than it is now that I know more about how it works. We will talk about this when we look at Row 3: The Intuitive Method.

Unlike Row 1: The Visual Method, where the reader in the centre is a simple Page, in Row 2: The Intellectual Method we see that the reader is King, and the two Pages, who are much inferior in status, are the clients. The reader is demonstrating his knowledge and mastery of tarot symbolism, his ability to make fine distinctions, symbolised by his sword, while the clients are passive observers admiring the subtlety and ingenuity with which he connects the ideas behind the cards to the question asked. The King of Swords is elegant and there is a degree of display using this method, a tendency to show off.

Notice that the King of Swords is facing the Page of Swords rather than the Page of Wands, who with his raw club looks like a caveman. This is because the King is an expert about tarot, perhaps a bit of a nerd, and his readings are best enjoyed by another member of the Swords suit, a fellow expert. It is like a chess game where only another skilled player can appreciate the brilliance of a certain move. There is even an element of competition between fellow tarot experts. The King has a dagger as well as a sword. The two faces on his armored epaulets make us think of the prince on the major arcana card Le Chariot (VII). For me they bring to mind the two faces of the tarot tradition, the RWS and TdM, separate yet the same.


Row 3: Spirit - The Intuitive Method

When we first begin to read tarot we are all users of The Intuitive Method. Some readers do not need to study the cards at all to produce insightful readings and astonishing predictions. It is hard to say where we get our ideas from during these readings. We trust what drifts through our mind when we look at the cards. We just get a feeling from somewhere and a story seems to form in our mind about the client and his life situation. In the Intellectual Method and Visual Method we can always point to a particular detail in the artwork or talk about an esoteric concept to explain why our reading moves in a certain direction. But users of the Intuitive Method do not need to have a specific reason for saying what they do.

In the Intellectual and Visual Methods the question that the client asks is absolutely crucial since it limits the suggestive power of the cards. Without a question, the Tower card, say, can mean ten thousand things, but if the question is about, say, golf, then the Tower could mean a flagstick struck by the ball or a weathervane on the clubhouse struck by lightning. The very narrowness of the question is what makes the tarot work.

But in an Intuitive reading a question is not always necessary. The cards are simply a way for the reader to tune in to the client and fall into a light trance. Reading a crystal ball is a little like this - we have no control over what images appear. Not much can be said about it. My own teacher used The Intuitive Method and seemed to barely look at the cards. She would spin through the entire well-shuffled deck and then start to talk.

The Queen of Wands here represents the reader who uses The Intuitive Method. Fittingly, this is our first female reader in the spread The Queen of Wands says, "Look, there is nothing up my sleeve. No trickery." Wands are associated with the element of Fire - energy, a spark, an intuitive flash of insight. Her Wand is green, like something alive, and carries enormous power. She looks like the Papesse (II), when the Papesse lets her hair down. The Papesse is known in the RWS as The High Priestess, the guardian of the mysteries of inner experience, the companion to the Pope (V), who is responsible for the organisation of the church, the formal aspect of religion.

The Queen is facing towards the Knight of Cups, who is approaching with an open cup balanced on his open palm. Notice how broad the mouth of the Cup is compared to the King of Cups in Row 1.The young Knight is more receptive than the King, and more eager to participate in the reading because he is approaching on a horse rather than sitting passively like the King.

The Queen and Knight look like two young lovers. Indeed, in an Intuitive reading there is often a very intimate communication between the reader and client. The Knight is more innocent and trusting than the King of Wands, whom the Queen ignores. His wand has a spike on the end as though he is prepared to be critical, and he is wearing armour. The face of this King of Wands looks disdainful to me. Magic can only happen when we believe in magic.

Every tarot reader, I think, uses a combination of all three Methods when they are reading cards, but in different proportions, according to individual taste and talent. Usually when a client goes to a reader, the client asks a question and the reader designs a spread that best answers that question. But on tarot websites like this we tend to do it backwards, which can be confusing, and can seem stiff and artificial. Someone suggests a spread to the group, so we can practise our skills, and then we dream up a question that fits the spread. In this way everyone in the group can compare different approaches to the same spread. I say this because I had to break the rules and shift around the spread a little this month. I also don't "blend" the two outside cards, which was included in our instructions for interpreting this spread.

Max, I hope you get something out of all this. You mentioned that you had only recently discovered tarot so I thought I would try to introduce you to some aspects of the tarot world. Actually, I didn't decide that, the cards did. The message is that you should be confident about finding your own place among these varying styles.

Above I linked the 3 readers in the central column to specific major arcana cards:

Page of Coins = Le Bateleur (I)
King of Swords = Le Chariot (VII)
Queen of Wands = La Papesse (II)

Arranging the majors in a 3 card line we get the final message:

Games of chance (Le Bateleur) can speed our journey (Le Chariot) toward a greater intimacy with spirit (La Papesse).

[max]

Above I linked the 3 readers in the central column to specific major arcana cards:

Page of Coins = Le Bateleur (I)
King of Swords = Le Chariot (VII)
Queen of Wands = La Papesse (II)

Arranging the majors in a 3 card line we get the final message:

Games of chance (Le Bateleur) can speed our journey (Le Chariot) toward a greater intimacy with spirit (La Papesse).


IMG_1184.JPG

What to say except that I was very impressed by the fact that you hit the mark. The history lesson was very good for me but what made me think about it were the 3 summary papers. I am now making the journey with the arcana precisely to enter into my depth and understand from my unconscious what my true path is. So with my spirit. Truly remarkable.
Thank you.