The following is from a keynote presentation I did at the Northwest Tarot Symposium in 2022, the materials now made freely and publicly available.
The subject of this presentation was one more often seen as taboo: using the tarot to do health readings.
Spiritual health and its interaction with physical, psychological, and social wellness had been gaining serious attention in medical literature. So I wanted to consider those perspectives in a discussion on spiritual health and tarot.
What this post provides is a summary of the workshop, the PowerPoint presentation slides I used during the keynote that you can now download and walk through, and all the handouts and resources that were provided to the attendees.
I’m an I Ching aficionado and also a tarot aficionado, wrote chonky books on both subjects, so naturally I’ve thought long and hard about how the two systems reconcile. This page is a download of a tarot and I Ching correspondence table for your easy go-to referencing.
Left or Right – Which one do you prefer? The left G-rated version that leans more into psychological pain? Or the right bloody version that leans more into the physical manifestation of our suffering?
First three left to right are representative of the TdM, RWS, and Thoth, respectively; fourth is from the DruidCraft Tarot, and fifth is from the Tarot of the Owls by Elisabeth Alba and Pamela Chen
The Ten of Swords in tarot has come to be associated with betrayal, treachery, backstabbing, the pain of being double-crossed, and the breach of trust. So how a deck creator illustrates the Ten of Swords reveals a lot about their unconscious processing of these themes.
It’s also the soul wound, a crisis of faith, where faith and reason are at war. It’s the mob mentality vs. individuality. Seeing an artist’s rendering of the Ten of Swords will reveal to you that artist’s relationship to the archetype of the ego-death.
You’re probably quite familiar with the “For Dummies” learning series that were popularized in the 90s. The book series published by Wiley & Sons de-mystifies difficult subjects and is known for accessible, easy-to-understand, plainspoken writing. Wiley could not have chosen a better author for the task than my dear friend Charles Harrington.
Although the “For Dummies” series catches a kitschy rep, this is in all seriousness a legit, no-nonsense, superb beginner’s book on tarot and oracle decks — and I love the dual coverage this compact yet comprehensive book packs for you.
The Playful Heart Tarot and the PipSpeak Tarot by KittenChops
You may be familiar with the Playful Heart Tarot by Kitten Chops (Zaara), based on the RWS, whereas the latest creation from the KittenChops studios is a Marseille-based pip deck, the PipSpeak Tarot.
After completing the RWS-based Playful Heart Tarot, Zaara redefined her work with the tarot by unpacking her RWS framework and re-learning the tarot with the Marseille. The result is the PipSpeak Tarot, which became a liberating experience. Likewise, this might just be the very deck to get a seasoned RWS reader out of a rut.
From the little white book (LWB) for the PipSpeak Tarot
“Fortune tellers and cunning folk have been reading with Marseille and playing card/pip decks for hundreds of years,” writes the artist. “Instead of esoteric intellectual prowess, these readers have been relying on their common sense, their understanding of human nature and key card reading wisdom passed down from generation to generation.”
If you haven’t been watching the 2024 Marvel TV series Agatha All Along, it’s a spin-off from WandaVision focused on the character Agatha Harkness. And the episodes have been chock full of tarot (and witchy) goodness.
I love how the online tarot community is currently having fun with a fictional but bona fide tarot spread in the show, named the Safe Passages spread, a key feature in Episode 7 (“Death’s Hand in Mine”). It’s got Celtic Cross vibes in the formation of a pentagram.
(Ignore my graphic above; I squished all the card positions together, which is why you can’t really see the pentagram anymore. In the TV show, the pentagram shape is more pronounced.)
Just a head’s up: there may be spoilers in this blog post, but nothing too major; I’m focusing on the tarot parts.
Lord have mercy that the tarot card you were drawing on your birthday isn’t an omen of what’s to come for the year. Because I was “called” to work on the Five of Swords. Or I was “pulled” to, I dunno, I find all that New Agey jargon a bit fluffy but there it is. “I was called to” just means I don’t have a logical explanation for why I did what I did.
I’m struggling with swords placement in my Six of Swords wip. In fact, there’s a lot to this illustration composition that I’m struggling with. Maybe you’ll have some suggestions on what I can do.
I’ll start from the beginning. I knew I wanted to play with the religion and science dynamic in the Six of Swords, and my ambition was to do that in a way that isn’t too cliche.
Psychism vs. Psychology: Transcending the Binary Bias in Tarot
For the 2023 Masters of the Tarot Conference held at the Omega Institute, the theme is magic, mysticism, and neuroscience.
My presentation will be on practical reading methods for transcending innate binary bias. We’ll be talking about what that binary bias is in both neuroscience and the world of tarot and how to bridge the binary through assigned correspondences and guided imagery, a tempered method for bilateral cognitive stimulation.
Due to the layering of images to create animation effects, you’ll need to view the slides in Slide Show.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR VIEWING: Along the upper row of tabs, click on “Slide Show.” Then click on the icon “From Beginning” to start the animation.
You will have received a printout copy of the above downloadable handout. Here are the digital files in case you want additional copies, or you would like to integrate this information into your personal working journals.
7/18 REVISION: Please re-download the handout with the correct correspondence table. Recall there was a typo between the Water and Air columns under “Physical Body” correspondences.
This is a compilation of notable sources I found discussing brain lateralization, with bullet point summaries of the contents of each resource.
“Tarot’s Chinese sister, the I Ching.”
– Rachel Pollack, A Walk through the Forest of Souls
HOMEWORK
As an additional bonus step, and to further symbolically bridge the binary, combine your two card readings from the workshop to yield an I Ching hexagram reading. As Rachel Pollack notes, the I Ching is “Tarot’s Chinese sister.”
Begin by identifying the corresponding Ba Gua trigrams to the two tarot cards you pulled during the workshop.
Click on image file to download
The first card you had pulled, reading elemental correspondences per Body, Mind, and Spirit, will be the Lower Trigram (left most column).
The second card you pulled, for the guided imagery exercise, will be the Upper Trigram (top most row).
Here’s an alternate version of the table for your archives:
Click on image file to download
Use the below cross-reference table to identify the six-line hexagram that your two tarot cards form:
Click image file to download
Here’s the I Ching cross-reference table found on your workshop handout. It’s the same as above, but without the hexagram images.
Click image file to download
Once you’ve identified the resulting hexagram, look up its short form oracle message in the below download:
The above book of short form oracles summarizing the meaning of the 64 hexagrams is excerpted from my forthcoming book, I Ching, The Oracle, published by North Atlantic Books (September, 2023).
Instead of continuing on to the second septenary of Majors, in order, I realized that practically speaking, I had better try my hand on some of the pips early on, because the last thing I want to happen is to finish the artistic labor for all the Majors then start on the pips, only to realize I hated the direction I was going in and having to abandon the project altogether, after all that work had already been done.
So I thought, okay, let me see if I can even come up with a good approach to the pip cards first, before committing to this deck project.
But where do I start? I started at the tail end of the deck (but not Card 78 or Key 0 The Fool). I started with Card 77, the Ace of Coins, then worked backward to Card 76, the Two of Coins, Card 75, the Three Coins, and so on.
This blog post will showcase the first drafts of the seven Coins cards corresponding with the Sacred Seven (in the order of Sun, Mercury, Venus, Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn).
