Category: Tarot Cards

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This is a first.

It’s new but not difficult.

The Alleyman’s Tarot is unique, as far as I know. It’s intended to be. The customization is the irresistible part of the deck. From the beginning, Seven Dane Asmund, has encouraged deck owners to follow the Alleyman’s lead and take cards out or put cards into the deck as opportunity and intuition prompt. This original deck was curated from many artists and decks, and has multiples of several cards, especially if you add in the expansion packs. Which I did.

I’ve always used standard, one of each card RWS decks up until this one. Believe it or not, I still don’t use the Alleyman’s deck ALL of the time. Believe it or not, this is the first time I’ve done a reading with multiples of one card in it.

It’s fitting that the first multiple card is Death, change because it takes a small shift in perspective. Fitting, but not surprising and certainly not supernatural. Of all the multiples in the Alleyman’s deck, the most common card is the major arcana Death card and I’m glad because the artwork on these things is phenomenal. This is serious, gorgeous, hang it on a museum wall art.

But two deaths in one reading? Do they cancel each other out like adding negative numbers? Actually, it kind of fits right in with the way I read Tarot.

It’s easy, actually.

In the past we’ve talked about each card can have multiple key words and multiple threads of meaning. Different artwork for the same card just fits right in with that.

We’ve seen this in action before. There have been times when the image from one deck or another resonates with the energy message at hand. When the energy brings to mind the image from a different deck…I’ll tell you, so you can google it and see the different visuals for yourself.

That’s all there is to it for multiples of the same card. They aren’t identical. The images are different, and convey different aspects of that same card. The multiple different cards are different facets of the same diamond.

We’ve talked about reversals before too. I let intuition lead. If it feels like nothing, I’ll just flip the card upright and go on. If it feels significant, I read it as an indication of blocked or challenged or turbulent energy. That’s the case today, so the “smoke” death and the high priestess are staying reversed (upside down relative to the person doing the reading)

Intuitively the reading today came through as this one concise idea: Make the obviously needed change; we always fight the demons alone.

There is a trace of that adage to stop waiting for the perfect time because the time is never perfect.

The fading energy is death upside down….resistance and blockages around changing are fading. I don’t know if “resistance is useless” as the Vogons said, but it certainly is decreasing.

If you like TV that is even older than the Vogons and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, cue the Brady Bunch episode where Peter’s voice keeps cracking so they write into the “It’s time to change” song.

How’s that for an outdated pop culture reference?

The High Priestess is about the mysterious. What is a blocked or turbulent mystery? It could mean it is something utterly unknowable. I know I’ve said that reversals don’t automatically mean the exact opposite of the usual meaning for the card, but in this case it turns out to be functionally the same thing as inverting the meaning. If something fails at being mysterious, it is obvious. If something is having a hard time hiding, it is seen.

Put these two together and the first half of this week’s message is get your head out of the sand and face the obvious. Something needs to change and avoiding it isn’t helping.

From those two we head into a more classic, death or horseback card. This one is harsh, down to brass tacks, realistic confrontation of violent ends. In the reading we go from ethereal smokey death to violent bloody death – death.

Although not usually related to the death card, I intuitively get this is about confronting inner demons, about an internal change. There may be something about ourselves we don’t want to admit or face, but it is something we’ve known for a long time. “Suspected from the beginning” comes through here.

All that and I still haven’t touched the guidebook.

Let’s see how this unfolds, and I’ll read the Alleyman’s Notebook on the cards and maybe we can weave that in on Friday or Saturday for the weekend update if nothing gets in the way this week.

Photo by the author of this weeks real-world card layout. Alleyman’s Tarot deck used with permission of Publishing Goblin LLC

Allergies getting me down at the moment…see you Monday for the Energy Path reading for the week if not before.

Be kind to each other. Peace … out

Hi everyone!

It’s a day-job day for me, and the schedule is a little tighter than I expected. Crank up your favorite Sisters of Mercy song, the squirrels are raving.

I, on the other hand, will post the Wednesday “learn with me” post this evening, prolly later around 10 or 11 pm eastern time. Talk to you then!

When it comes to dice, I guess you have to roll with it.

All puns intended.

Like fiction detectives, when you are learning Tarot or a new oracle of whatever type, it pays to follow your hunches.

Today when I did the bag shake thing just like in the previous videos, two dice came out. My hunch was to keep them both.

The grey person icon looking one felt as if it was meant for today, so I’m naming that one dice six of our learning seven.

As for the other one – YODA!

Actually, I get it that this is the Publishing Goblin, in silhouette from the publisher’s logo, but some things come flying out of your brain like that. I’ve been a Star Wars fan from the beginning – I do mean the beginning way back in 1977 – and Yoda has always been a favorite.

So I couldn’t resist. When these two dice came out of the bag together I kept them both because – Yoda. And at the time I had a nagging feeling that people are getting a little tired of the long, drawn out, week by week methodical thing. I mean, that is why I charge for private readings. I have thirty years of doing this, learning this stuff in granular detail.

That’s also a little bit why I decided to learn the dice this way. It is mirroring how I’ve learned Tarot over the years. Card by card, layer by layer, with ever increasing complexity, followed by ever increasing simplicity.

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

Albert Einsteian

I don’t know everything. I’m still learning stuff too – this dice set included. But I think I understand the process of learning a fortune telling device well enough to explain and bring you along for this particular ride.

To review: The basic game plan is to randomly select of the 22 dice week by week, and take a look at whatever face turns up that week. As a dice is chosen, I set it aside the following week so there are no repeats and we could get on with the dice selection. Today was a twofer bonus in that part of the process.

Now that we have our seven learning dice we’ll start combining them…and at the same time look at the other dice faces as they turn up.

Each die has a them or an oracle “lord” well go through that one by one…meet the lords of our seven chosen dice, so to speak. Why seven? Seven has a long tradition of being a lucky, magical, spiritual number. I’ll leave the numerology googling up to you. It’s also a nod to the dice creator and author of the Alleyman Tarot, the Alleyway Tarot, the Normal Tarot, the Alleyway Oracle cards, descktop games and, I think, previous ebooks and an astrology blog – Seven Dane Asmund. I’ll definitely be posting about the oracle cards from the recent kickstarter once they arrive. If you want to see what all this fangirling is about, please visit publishinggoblin.com.

But back to the dice.

The grey die that I’m calling dice six is the Relations Die (the guidebook is brilliant the way it is cross referenced by dice color) This single figure, reminiscent of every social media default avitar, represents self. I ‘hear’ that song “one is the lonliest number” from what? The 60s? That one is even before my time. I get the feeling that is speaking to the loneliness that pulls people to readings in the first place. Whether is a lonely person in search of a life mate or someone who just wants to re-connect with universal energy and their own inner guidance that sense of self, a sense of isolated oneness is often the impetus for getting or doing a psychic reading of whatever variety.

It’s feeling alone that pulls us to readings, not the actuality of it, because we are never actually separate from the cosmos at large. We are connected to the oneness of everything whether we feel it or not.

In a reading, the self die-face points to the inner world. This is about your relationship with yourself, your inner thoughts, feelings, fires, passions, isolation, hopes, dreams, philosophy or spirituality. Think of Wands cards in Tarot and their aggregate suit meaning. That is the flavor I get here.

Mr. Asmund also describes it as a stand-in…very much the querants avatar within the reading. In Tarot this is sometimes called a significator card. It puts the person getting the reading in perspective with the reading as a whole.

That’s really pulling at me at the moment. I have an idea how to incorporate just exactly this into my Tarot readings….see….lifelong learning in action right there. Instead of calling the center card of my TaoCraft Layou “advice and choices” it might be more potent to call it “YOUR CHOICE” because you really are in charge of all of this: your choices cause things to happen.

I think maybe that is THE message for us today, why this dice seemed like the “today” dice of the two, and partly why it felt important to keep both

But I like the Goblin image, I gotta keep that too. I refer you to the fangirl paragraph above.

This is the Goblin Die, and this face is called inspiration. I love it because that is just what inspiration feels like. I can see where the idea of the crown chakra (energy center at the top of your skull) comes from and why it is representative of your connection to spirit and the divine.

When inspiration comes, I’ve always though it feels like the muses dropping it right in through the top of your head like a weight.

Add doink! kaching! bazinga! eureka! or any other appropriate exclamation. It fits. I like the way the guidebook puts it “Inspiration is the moment of consummate explosion.” It is the bolt from the blue and lightning in a bottle.

It could be a good keyword to add to the Tower Tarot card’s repertoire as well.

Lightning is one of those particularly potent universal symbols, it seems.

Thanks so much for reading! Next up: Energy revisit on Friday or Saturday where we’ll look at a card from our week-ahead energy path reading from Monday and see how things are unfolding.

See you at the next sip!