[There’s a lot of intro and personal reflection here. If you want to skip to the reading, scroll down. I flag where the reading itself starts.] Back in the early days of this blog, when I was still figuring out a lot of religious stuff, I had a devotional practice involving Tarot cards. Long story […]
Read more "My Yule Opening of the Key: The First Operation"I own a lot of Tarot decks. Some were sent to me so that I could review them on the blog, others were gifts, but for the most part, these are decks that I bought because I saw them online, fell in love with the artwork, and felt that I had to have them. The […]
Read more "My Five Go-To Tarot Decks"People read Tarot for a variety of reasons. Some people use it predictively, some people use it introspectively, and so on. The uses range from the purely psychological, to decision-making, to bona fide divination. However, a common thread among all Tarot readers is that we read Tarot because it works. Whatever we’re trying to use […]
Read more "Sometimes You’re Wrong"I’ve been away from the blog for a while, and I apologize for that. My father died unexpectedly, and I had to fly out to the West Coast to deal with that. I will likely write about the grieving process at some point here on the blog, but for now, I prefer to keep it […]
Read more "The Four of Swords and the Nine of Wands: Rest Imposes Itself"This is a fun getting-to-know-you tag that was apparently started in 2017 by Arwen Lynch. I’m not sure how I didn’t see it when it first made the rounds (or who knows, maybe I did), but Benebell Wen just did a great post on this tag, and it looked like so much fun that I […]
Read more "Tarot Tag: 15 Questions"I have a fairly modest Tarot collection by some standards; the current count is about 35. Nonetheless, when I talk to non-Tarot people, that figure makes jaws drop and heads spin, and I’m inevitably faced with the question, “But why do you need so many?” The honest answer? I don’t. I don’t need to amass Tarot […]
Read more "What’s the Point of Deck Collecting?"Last weekend, I gave a local workshop on the astrological correspondences of the Tarot deck. We went through all the Golden Dawn correspondences, starting with the Sepher Yetzirah and examining the attributions of the Major Arcana, then looking at the Minors and the Court Cards. It was tremendous fun. At one point during this workshop, a […]
Read more "What is Tarot Good For?"I remember the day I learned the word “concatenation”. It was a Friday, and I was in my eighth-grade* Gothic literature class. We were talking about the numinous experience of the narrator in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. That day changed my life. The definition that I learned on that Friday turns out to […]
Read more "Emergence, Beauty, and Tarot"It must be terribly confusing to be the Knight of Pentacles. Or, for that matter, the Queen of Wands. Or the King of Cups. One of the first tactics you learn when you’re starting to tackle the big, scary Court Cards is that they can be understood as a confluence of elemental energies. Each rank within […]
Read more "The Courts Out of Their Elements"If you don’t know about the way the Kabbalistic Tree of Life is used in conjunction with Tarot, check out my previous piss-poor attempt at an introductory Kabbalah post. The Kircher Tree of Life (pictured above) is the one used by just about everyone who’s interested in Kabbalah these days. Especially those influenced by the […]
Read more "Tarot and the Tree of Life, Part 2: My Way"
Jack Chanek 