A Year of Tarot de Marseille: Three Career Readings

In my previous post on the Tarot de Marseille, I admitted that the system I was building wasn’t working for me and I wanted to start all over. Since then, I’ve been working my way through getting to know the deck again, using Camelia Elias’s book Read Like the Devil as a guide.

And honestly? I’m loving it.

The key distinction between the technique Elias teaches and what I was trying to do is that Elias doesn’t assign meanings to the individual cards. Instead, she emphasizes visual storytelling and context-dependent reading. She treats a Tarot reading like a sentence: Where is the subject? Where is the verb? Where is the object? What is being done and by whom? Then, she takes that information and distills it down into a one-sentence answer to the question being asked.

It’s a radically different way of approaching Tarot than what I’m used to, and the truth is that I’m not currently very good at it. It’s a new skill set, and it’s hard. But it also feels very authentic and grounded. This is a good, practical way to approach Tarot reading, and reading with this deck in particular. Learning a new skill is uncomfortable because I have to embrace a period of time where I’m floundering like a complete novice, and that’s unpleasant.

It’s doubly unpleasant because I consider myself somewhat an expert in Tarot; I wrote a damn book on it, after all. I’m comfortable with Tarot. I’m good at Tarot. And so letting go of that, suspending my use of the techniques I’ve mastered in order to learn a fresh approach to the cards, requires an extraordinary amount of humility that frankly doesn’t come naturally to me. It is extraordinarily difficult to swallow my pride and go from being great at something back to being a complete incompetent.

Despite that discomfort, though, it’s been an interesting and rewarding project. I already feel like I’m pushing my skills as a Tarot reader in directions I’ve never taken them before and getting to know the TdM in a drastically different way than I’ve known any other deck. Performing a reading takes me a very long time; I’ll ask a question, lay out the cards, and then spend an eternity looking at them and trying to piece together a visual story from them. Nonetheless, when I’ve finally done so, I feel good about the story I’ve told.

Today, I want to share a couple of readings I’ve done recently, as I go about getting my sea legs. I won’t go into excruciating detail with any of them, but I’ll provide the basics of my interpretation for each, so that you can see how I’m orienting myself relative to this method of reading with the Tarot de Marseille.

The Cavalier of Coupes, Ace of Bâtons, and Cavalier of Deniers.

This first reading was about my dissertation. It’s been a constant source of frustration for me; I’d intended to submit it back in May, but then I kept running into road blocks. Revisions needed to be done on this chapter; these translations needed to be redone; this secondary literature needed to be cited. And so on, and so on, and so on. Eventually, I reached a point where I had taken care of all the things on my to-do list, but I worried that there was still something left undone. So I pulled out my cards and asked: “What remains to be done on my dissertation?” I drew the Cavalier of Coupes, the Ace of Bâtons, and the Cavalier of Deniers.

Visually, I see a hand proffering something that looks like a scroll. On either side of it, we see riders setting forth. The hand gives them something, and that is the starting point for their journey.* So my one-word answer to the question is: Submit the dissertation and let others do with it what they will.

I submitted the dissertation last week.**

Top: Three of Coupes, Ten of Coupes, the Moon. Bottom: The Hermit, Queen of Bâtons, Seven of Bâtons.

Having submitted my dissertation, the next task before me (until it’s time to defend) is to try to secure a job for my life after grad school. This is going to be an extended, agonizing process, but I’ve slowly begun it and have already applied to two positions. This brings me to my next two readings. For each of the two jobs I’ve applied to, I asked: What will come of my application to this job?

In the first reading, we see a growing depth of feeling. Three cups become ten cups, and then ten cups ultimately become the whole of the sea. But the waters of the sea are turbulent and poorly illuminated—and crucially, there are no coins bringing in money and wealth here. Despite strong positive emotions, the whole thing is just a dream and not a practical reality. My one-sentence answer to this reading, then: They’ll like you a lot, but any hopes of being hired are illusory.

The second reading is also a “no” as far as getting hired goes. In the center, we see a woman of action: The hiring manager. (And indeed, the hiring manager for this position is a woman.) She isn’t even looking at the other person in the card (the Hermit), instead focusing her attention on a knot of obstacles before her; the Hermit is neglected and left to go in another direction on his own. My answer to this reading: They’ll only see problems and won’t even give your application serious consideration.

Note that I’m not trying to be negative or throw a pity party; these are only the first two jobs I’ve applied to, and like I said, I know that securing employment is going to be a long process. I don’t feel down about that just because my first two swings aren’t looking like home runs. But sending in these applications has also been an excellent opportunity to practice reading with the Tarot de Marseille, and I wanted to share those readings here.

Thanks as always to everyone who’s been following my experimental year of TdM. I hope it’s as fun for you as it is for me. I’ll be back next week with a (non-TdM) deck review; I’ve had the deck for a little while now and keep meaning to write a review, but I just haven’t gotten around to that.

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*It’s worth noting: The way dissertation defenses are structured in my department, my final dissertation will be read by two faculty members who will then make a recommendation on behalf of the whole department as to whether I should pass. So the two riders displayed here are particularly apt, because there are in fact two people to whom I’m handing my dissertation.

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