Material Girl, Mystical World: The Now-Age Guide for Chic Seekers and Modern Mystics. Ruby Warrington

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СКАЧАТЬ also feel like tarot is gaining in popularity because it’s kind of like Google for your soul. We have access to sooooo many answers in the Now Age, since regular ol’ Google means we can get instant access to all the information that’s ever been plugged into the Internet about every subject in the world, ever. But since very little of the information has been shared with our specific needs, questions, or journey in mind, things can very quickly become misleading—resulting in yet more confusion. The tarot, on the other hand, is a tool for tapping back into our own inner knowing.

      Another deck I love is called the Thoth deck, named for the Egyptian god of writing, magic, and science and designed in the late 1930s by the famous occultist Aleister Crowley. And here’s the thing: in the past, that reference would have just reinforced my fear of the tarot. “The Occult” sounds dark and scary, right? But the word occult actually just means “hidden.” And what is the tarot if not a tool for excavating the hidden truths—truths our higher Self wants us to become aware of—of a given situation?

      As for my personal practice? I’m still more inclined to celebrate and carry the message of the “positive” cards with me, but I’m learning not to shy away from the harsher-seeming messages too—just like my numinous journey overall is helping me accept and embrace every messy aspect of being human. So read on for twenty empowering Now Age lessons about the tarot that have helped me get to this place and incorporate the cards as a valuable component of my numinous toolkit.

      Tarot is a tool for tapping back into our own inner knowing.

      1. The different kinds of cards—an overview.

      If the Major Arcana are like the A-list players in a movie, playing the “parts,” or higher forces, moving the action forward, then the Court Cards (King, Queen, Knight/Prince, and Page/Princess) of the Minor Arcana often represent our psychological state, as well as the actual people involved in a situation.

      Meanwhile, the suits each correspond to an element and go something like this:

      WANDS—Fire energy/passion/doing

      SWORDS—Air energy/ideas/thinking

      CUPS—Water energy/emotions/feeling

      DISCS—Earth energy/work/making

      As a rule, the Ace of each suit speaks to the energy of new beginnings, while the higher the number (2–10), the more extremely the element will be exerting itself in the reading.

      This is a very rudimentary overview, and every reader I’ve met will agree you can do a whole two-hour class on the intricate meanings of just one card. But one step at a time. As Lou puts it, “Even just learning about the elements will give you an entire self-help practice.”

      2. It’s all good.

      The first thing to remember—as lovely Lindsay puts it—is that “nothing in life is happening to you, since everything is happening for you.” For you to be empowered in your personal evolution, that is. This simple shift in perspective has been enough to reframe my relationship with the “scarier” aspects of the tarot. Plus it’s kind of an amazing life lesson in general, so please keep this front of mind.

      3. There’s no such thing as a “bad” card.

      When I first starting reading about the meaning of the different cards, I was shocked how many, like at least half, seemed to depict the shadow side of life: disappointments, frustrations, and unscrupulous individuals. But let’s get really real—life ain’t no bed of roses, and actually isn’t the point of developing all this spiritual awareness to help us deal better with the inevitable thorns? In Lou’s experience, the more “challenging” cards simply reflect the things showing up in our reality that we’d rather not deal with. Like the Five of Cups, for example—which speaks to feelings of sadness and loss. I love her message (spoken like a true Scorpio) that “part of our self-discovery is to look at our shadows and sit in our discomfort—as this is what deepens our levels of compassion towards ourselves and others.”

      4. Tarot is not a tool for prediction.

      As I’ve explained, like a lot of people I came to the tarot with the idea that it is mainly used for “fortune-telling,” and that this is where a lot of my initial fear came from. If my fate were somehow written irreversibly in the cards, what if I got a “bad” one? Rather, like with astrology, I’ve come to understand the tarot as a system of symbols that can be used to tap the Universal consciousness and access information from our highest Self. The cards and the messages imprinted on them are the “bridge” between our guides, God, the Universe, and so on, and our human understanding, and it is the reader’s job (whether it’s me or somebody else reading for me) to simply act as an interpreter for the information being delivered.

      5. The tarot is YOU.

      What a brilliant metaphor for helping to understand your deck! After all, you know better than anyone what a weirdo you are, right? Or rather, how many seemingly different weirdos you can embody in any given day, relationship, situation—veering from one emotion to the next, from crazy to rational thoughts and back, from lovable to needy and manipulative. (Please tell me this isn’t just me.) Anyway, how about imagining each of the seventy-eight cards as a different facet of your/our intricate human state? Like how the Fool is the naive part of us that will just say yes to anything and dive in with little regard for the consequences, or how the Two of Swords represents the way we can endlessly argue a point—with ourselves! According to Lou, “The more I look at the tarot, the more I understand myself, because I’m really just learning about the human psyche and our experience.”

      6. Pick a word, any word.

      As you get to know your deck, Lindsay also suggests choosing one word that best represents the energy of each card for you. In the Thoth deck, the creators of the deck have gone ahead and done this for you—for example, the Six of Discs is also “Success” (representing material gain and power), while the Three of Swords is “Sorrow” (melancholy and unhappiness). You can also attribute actual characters to the court cards. When I asked another reader friend, the New Age Hipster, to write about the Queen cards for The Numinous, she attributed the Queen of Pentacles to Beyoncé, and the Queen of Cups to Bridget Jones. So you can see how choosing a character for each card can make it even easier to connect with its individual nature.

      7. There’s no right or wrong way to read the tarot.

      Since the messages delivered by the tarot are all in the interpretation, it makes sense that each of us will see something different in the cards. Beyond the basics—such as the different suits representing the different elements/areas of life—how we deliver and therefore interpret the information in a reading will depend entirely on our own life experience and unique worldview. In other words, what our higher Self chooses to show us is the message.

      8. Because the tarot is also a mirror.

      While the best readers I know wouldn’t necessarily call themselves “psychic,” they are gifted intuitives—since being tapped in to your inner Voice / higher Self is a prerequisite for delivering an authentic reading (see above). In this sense, the tarot, and the reader delivering the information, can also be understood as a mirror—reflecting СКАЧАТЬ