Workshopping God’s Reading from Rachel Pollack’s A Walk Through the Forest of Souls

Carolyn Cushing and Jenna Matlin, in collaboration with Weiser Books, are hosting a series of content to celebrate the late Rachel Pollack’s re-release of A Walk Through the Forest of Souls. This is a day-long event for the tarot community, and you’ll find many contributors to this celebration.

Read more about the event in this announcement from Carolyn Cushing.

On May 10, 2023, Carolyn, Jenna, Weiser Books editor Judika Ilkes, and author Mark Horn will be live streaming here between 3 pm and 5 pm Eastern time.

Jenna Matlin and Mary K. Greer will be in conversation about A Walk Through the Forest of Souls here, going live at 8 pm Eastern.

My contribution is a video workshop of a tarot reading prompt:

That is a question presented in the book.

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21-Card Spread from Joseph D’Agostino’s Tarot: The Path to Wisdom

Download the Worksheet (PDF)

INTERPRETING YOUR 21-CARD SPREAD

For even more “training wheels” support, download the following quick reference table of keywords (DOCX file):

Download the REFERENCE HANDOUt (DOCX)

Tarot Keywords Quick Reference Table

After noting the card drawn for each position in the 21-card spread, write down the keywords from the reference table onto your worksheet pages. The keywords themselves will support your arrival at the divinatory significance of the reading.

Tarot: The Path to Wisdom by Joseph D’Agostino was first published in 1976. A second edition was released in 1994, which is the copy of the book that I have.

I’m not sure whether this book was intended for beginners, but I’m guessing so, since it devotes most of its pages to card meanings, and gives the obligatory opening chapters on what the tarot is.

As a beginner’s guide to the tarot, it starts you off with instructions for two divinatory methods: the Celtic Cross and this 21-card tableau. . . . Beginner tarot books have come a long way since then. =)

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Court Card Self-Reflection Exercises with Esoteric Tarot

I had the incredible opportunity of meeting Dr. Yolanda Robinson in London a few years back, where she gifted me with a copy of Studies on Mystical Tarot: The Court Cards, published in 2013.

Sourced from Studies on Mystical Tarot: The Court Cards (2013) by Yolanda M. Robinson

Robinson is a professor of transformational psychology and a member of BOTA, the Builders of the Adytum, a western mystery school tradition dedicated to the study of Qabalah and the Tarot. Studies on Mystical Tarot explores the tarot courts through a Rosicrucian lens, contextualizing the courts through Hermetic Qabalah and modes of inner alchemy.

Download the Workshop Handout

PDF

This Sightsee the Tarot video installment will guide you through two self-reflection meditative exercises with the court cards in your favorite tarot deck. The first will focus on the four Kings to reaffirm your personal power and the second will be working with the Page of Pentacles.

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Connecting to Your Ancient Ones (with Ancestral Tarot)

Ancestral Tarot (Red Wheel Weiser, 2021) by Nancy Hendrickson, a genealogist and tarot master, is an incredible journey into self-discovery through ancestor work. This Sightsee the Tarot video is a guided meditation and three-card reading from Ancestral Tarot— how to commune with your Ancient Ones. You’ll find this spread in Chapter 5, Ancestors of Blood.

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Tarot Year Card (from Archetypal Tarot by Mary K. Greer)

For each year of your life, you have a card from the Major Arcana called the Tarot Year Card, which represents the tests and lessons you’ll experience in any given year. Your Tarot Year Card indicates the kind of archetypal energies that are constellated in that year, suggesting personal qualities you can work with.

In Archetypal Tarot (Weiser, 2021), Mary K. Greer connects astrology and numerology to the tarot to create an in-depth personality profile that can be used for self-realization and personal harmony.

This video workshop will explore Chapter 14 from Greer’s text. We’ll reflect on your Tarot Year Card from 2021 and write out forecasts for the year to come in 2022.

DOWNLOAD THE WORKSHEET HANDOUT

Your Tarot Year Card 2021 – 2022

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Intuitive Tarot: Throw Out the Books?

Thank you to the hundreds (according to YouTube at least, who knows, right?) who showed up to participate this morning in the chatroom when the above video premiered.

By the way, can any of you help me with this? I really thought I had the recorded LiveChat transcript function turned on. I checked it several times before the video premiered and I checked it after. It’s on. However, it seems like the chat transcript from this morning has disappeared.

Does anyone know how I can make the chat transcript from this morning available to all? What everyone shared was so insightful and more valuable to the topic than just what I had to say in this video, so I want that chat transcript to be available to you. However, the function doesn’t seem to be working for me. Any help you’re able to give is welcomed. Thanks!

Tarot Tableau: The Fool’s Journey & Card Journaling Therapy

Click on photo to purchase book

Tarot Tableau: The Fool’s Journey (2020) by Thomas of Hermit’s Mirror is a versatile, power-packed tarot reading method based on the Grand Tableau from the Lenormand tradition. Thomas takes that method many steps further and presents a way of reading the cards that you’ll turn to time and time again, for your personal readings and for your professional client readings.

Skill LevelAdvanced

To start, let’s introduce the basic tableau, the foundation of Thomas’s Tarot Tableau: The Fool’s Journey. I’ve put together a Sightsee the Tarot video to guide you through the basic spread along with 22 tarot journaling prompts excerpted from Tarot Tableau.

In this workshop, we’ll be using the Tarot Tableau for a long session of free-writing as therapy. Writing therapy helps you to process your thoughts and experiences, which opens you up to new insights on how to get back to equilibrium, facilitate much-needed spiritual healing, and grow emotionally.

Working with your reading results from the Tarot Tableau method, you’ll answer 22 questions inspired by the 22 Major houses of the spread and after you’re done, you’ll attain newfound clarity in the situation you were inquiring about or, at the very least, understand the “why.”

22 Journaling Prompts with the Tarot Tableau

DOCX   |   PDF

Click above to download.

Print out the PDF linked above and free-write your answers to the journaling prompts. If you have a particular tarot journal layout and design going on already, you can download the DOCX and edit accordingly.

Click on worksheet to download fillable PDF

Download the above-pictured worksheet and either print it out or copy the layout into your tarot journal before you start the video. You’ll be recording your reading results on the worksheets.

The rest of this post will be my review of the book.

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Invoking HRU and the Riddle of the Sphinx

Skill LevelIntermediate & Up

Set aside 30 minutes for a mood-altering tarot reading experience. This is a guided reading with the Riddle of the Sphinx tarot spread from M. M. Meleen’s Book M: Liber Mundi (2015).

Book M is the companion guidebook to Meleen’s tarot deck, the Tabula Mundi Tarot. She recently launched a Majors only deck, which I’ve been working with and loving, the Pharos Tarot. You can support this incredible artist and occultist by ordering your copy here.

If you have a specific question you’d like answered by the Great Angel HRU or you don’t have anything particular in mind and just want a general prophetic reading about the direction of your life, try out this spread. You can use any tarot deck or even a Majors only deck.

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Charting Your Goal: The Parade Spread

The launch date for the Pride Tarot, a collaborative artists deck from U.S. Games, is scheduled for this month, April 2020. This video and companion blog post is going up during difficult global times. We’re in the midst of a world-wide shelter-in-place quarantine and most of our business-as-usual has been put on pause. People are anxious, feeling insecure and uncertain. I’ve found great comfort and insight in my reading with the Parade Spread and I hope you will, too.

Download the Worksheet (PDF)

Charting Your Goal or Journey

The Pride Parade Tarot Spread

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Elemental Directional Correspondences in Ritual Magic, East vs. West: How Do You Reconcile Conflicts?

One of my favorite personal rewards from launching the Witchcraft Fundamentals course is the Google Group, where all of us are exchanging insights, asking tough questions, trying to answer tough questions, and getting to know each other. To give you a sampling of what that e-mail list-serv group is like, I’m sharing something I wrote on there in one of the threads started by a practitioner of both Eastern and Western metaphysics.

The question presented is, in short, how do you reconcile Eastern elemental-directional correspondences with Western elemental-directional correspondences?

By the way, scroll all the way down for the PDF downloads of this post, which you can then print out and tuck into whatever reference manual for your metaphysical studies you have going on.

IN THIS WESTERN WITCHCRAFT COURSE, you’ll learn fairly soon that there are different systems of elemental-directional correspondences even within the umbrella of Western occult philosophy, and we cover three of them in this course:

Continue reading “Elemental Directional Correspondences in Ritual Magic, East vs. West: How Do You Reconcile Conflicts?”