Prices & FAQs

You’re thinking of the 10 of Swords. Well, the 10 of Swords does traditionally mean ruin, but again, modern readers extrapolate more abstract, client-friendly meanings from the cards. For me, the 10 of Swords means the nadir of a cycle, and always has the implication of an upturn following that nadir.

Yes and no. Think of tarot as a deliberately induced waking dream experience. It’s surrealistic and poetic, and for a while we allow ourselves to behave illogically. We put illustrated cards down on the table at absolute random and then create stories to connect them up. The purpose of going into this dream state is to pick up information from the subconscious/unconscious. Tarot readers do this in order to help people to get mental clarity and re-connect with their passion or their life-direction.

Tarot and other oracle-systems have become more therapeutic in the seventy years or so since C G Jung, one of the founding fathers of therapy, wrote about them. He helped to make oracles intellectually respectable and suggested that they might have a therapeutic value. But even in the classical world, oracles such as the Oracle of Delphi were consulted more for advice as to how to live well (ie, in accordance with the will of the gods) than to foresee the future.

If you want to get a feeling for my attitude towards this question, have a look at some of my online videos. You can see me reading live on Facebook for people who are chatting with me online, or you can check out my non-live videos, which are more constructed. You will see that, while I do make “soft” predictions about how situations may turn out, the main focus of what I am doing is picking up information relating to the present moment.

Speaking as a “querent”— that is, the person who goes to see the tarot-reader for guidance — I find that a good reader tells me things that I feel I knew all along, but had somehow forgotten. There is a feeling of truths bubbling up from one’s own subconscious. So in that respect, the answer to your question is yes. But what one wants to hear is one’s own truth.

There are respected tarot teachers who believe that nothing psychic occurs in a tarot session at all; the process simply creates a space in which the reader and the querent can use unusual, untried thought processes. The tarotist Vincent Pitisci sees tarot as a problem-solving exercise, a precursor of the modern concept of mind-mapping. He thinks that when one uses the cards one is using an alternative mode of thought that has been accessible to artists and inventors down the centuries.

However you understand or define a tarot session, it is almost always a positive experience. You don’t have to believe in anything to benefit from it — you can even be skeptical. But it helps if you get involved, play with it and enjoy yourself.

Check out a video I made, Tarot With A Skeptic. It’s on my YouTube channel. In it I read for my friend Waldemar, who defines himself as skeptical, but nevertheless allows himself to enjoy the process, and gives some fascinating feedback at the end.