Cristini P's Tarot Journal

So there's a thing in tarot called the First Operation. This is where the practitioner selects a card to represent the questioner, which I initially felt resistant to for three reasons. First, it felt really judgmental and presumptuous to just say, like, "OK you're the Fool," or whatever. Secondly, there's 78 cards and honestly I can't be bothered to root through them all to find the one I want; which is also assuming I know them all by heart, which I don't. Thirdly, it's removing a card from rotation, and what if it would have been the perfect card for a certain position in the layout?  Misgivings aside, I'm warming up to the idea. I recently learned a shortcut for interpreting the "face" cards as passive/active and experienced/inexperienced. Combining that with basics about what the suits represent, I made this handy grid to more easily pick out a First Operation card. First Operation is not limited to the face cards, but they're fr...

As a tarot learner, I find the greatest challenge is intuiting the story and relationship between the cards. As part of a learning exercise to improve this skill, I pulled the following two-card spread. The assignment was to ask a choice-centered, active question. Summer is gone and I've been feeling a bit of dread about the months ahead, so today's question was, "What can I do to keep going through the pandemic, social unrest, and election chaos?" The first step of reading was to just look at each picture and try to decipher the symbolism of each, and then how they relate to each other. At first I thought, shit, I better switch decks because my pictures have nothing to do with the Rider-Waite imagery. But then I remembered I bought this deck because the art made me feel something, and surely has its own symbolic  value. So I stuck with it and I jotted down the following impressions: King of Cups: The cup is at the top of the page, so emotion rules. The swan is glidin...