I’ll be filling in this tarot map as I draw a card every day or so. Notes will be kept along the way in my tarot journal below.
My weird personal tarot ritual
I have my own weird tarot spread that I’ve been playing around with. It’s a 3-card spread like many popular spreads, but instead of being Past, Present, Future, or Situation, Action, Outcome, or You, Partner, Relationship, this one is Cat, Raven, Tortoise, or 😺🐦🐢 for short. Each card represents a conversational partner that I have an ongoing conversation with.
The 3 conversations
😺Cat: I talk to the 😺 about intuitions, unspoken feelings, hunches that I’m having trouble interpreting or am entirely blind to, and all that stuff we sometimes refer to as“subjective reality”.
🐦Raven: I talk to the 🐦 about stuff out in the physical world, data, facts, resources, space time, wave particles, and all that stuff we sometimes refer to as“objective reality”.
🐢Tortoise: I talk to the 🐢 about stuff in the social realm, all the interpersonal relationships, communities, and cultural norms, narratives, expectations, and incentives that weave the subjective an objective realms together into a“transjective reality”(I like Vervaeke’s definition for this if you are unfamiliar).
Four spreads
Each of the three conversations has portals to the other conversations as well. For example, it’s possible to ask your intuitions about the objective world, and about relationships; it’s possible to ask the objective world for data about your intuitions and your relationships; and it’s possible to ask others for feedback on your intuitions and the objective world.
Balanced spread: One way to do a reading is to actually go into the realms that each animal lives in and asking for a card in that language. For example:
For 😺 I can always draw a card from the deck. Intuition is the first language of tarot, and the symbols easily map to 😺‘s realm.
For 🐦 I need to get a card from a system of logic or reasoning. A simple system would be to take the current day number within the year modulo 78(the number of cards in the tarot deck) to pick a card for the day. I have a slightly more complicated version of it, based on January, 1st 1970(often referred to as the epoch number in the simplest daily card picker here.
For 🐢 I need to get someone else to share their daily card with me and share the significance of the card to them. I then take that interpretation and see if it applies to me as well.
Cat-centric spread: Draw three cards and interpret them as“What do 😺 , 🐦, and 🐢 want me to look for today?” That’s the easy version of this spread.
Raven-centric spread: Extend the system used in the balanced spread to output 3 cards instead of one.
Tortoise-centric spread: Ask 3 different people to draw a card for themselves, and interpret them as your own in the order you receive them(cat, raven, tortoise).
Tarot isn’t magic, it’s not going to tell my future or reveal secrets to me. It’ll spark a conversation, though, and that conversation might lead to new insights that we might not have otherwise had. As important as the actual card meanings are, even more important(I think) is the meta question about how easily meaning and insights are flowing in each of the three conversations. If one of the channels continually seems to fall flat, it may mean you have a weak connection to your intuitions, or to the objective world, or to the world of relationships. That is important information to take away even if it doesn’t show up directly in the cards.
NOTES / It's not magic, but it's still handyThere are 78 cards
My weird personal tarot ritual
The 3 conversations
Four spreads
Tarot Journal
2020