Notes on Tarot practice

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been doing daily Tarot card draws and writing meanings in a journal — both my own intuitive meanings and notes on each card from 78 Degrees of Wisdom. Here are a few notes so far:

I’m really hesitant to write down more than very brief meanings before consulting the book. I don’t want to get them wrong because this Tarot journal is also intended as a reference, but that also means I’m relying more on copying someone else’s words than on intuition. So, this practice is kind of a mixed bag, but I do find that I’m able to look at a card I haven’t drawn before — today’s was 2 of Wands — and intuitively say, “Oh, this card is about how I have what I worked for (in my case, a book to edit), but my success means that I have to sit on the sidelines and wish I was doing something else.”

However, court cards are the most difficult so far. Even if a specific court card has popped up multiple times and I’ve had a solid intuitive sense of its meaning, I look at the card and go, “…uh?” It’s like the meanings fly right out of my head.

It’s also interesting to look at what cards have come up so far: queens of every suit, but only one king (King of Wands). Pages of Wands and Cups, knights of Cups and Pentacles. Eight total cards from Wands, Swords, and Pentacles; seven from Cups. None of the pips have shown up in all four suits, none of the aces have shown up at all, but at least one of each number has shown up (and I’ve had three 10s and three 2s).

I’ve been drawing cards for 40 days, but that doesn’t mean I’ve drawn 40 different cards. Some days I had “stalker cards,” or cards that show up repeatedly (sometimes days in a row, no matter how well I shuffled), because the situation they refer to is ongoing or because I wasn’t getting a message. When I did readings for myself with this deck, I also wrote down the meanings of the cards I drew, just because it was becoming apparent that simply drawing a card a day would not get me to 78 card meanings on its own. (Which makes sense; over time, that might happen, but if the cards are meant to reflect a wide range of human experience, that’s a lot for one person to go through in three months or so.) I suspect that at some point I’ll run out of patience and just finish writing journal entries.

So, this might be a longer-term project than I’d thought! It’s worthwhile, though, because I’m acquiring a facility with Tarot and a confidence in my own intuition that I didn’t get from simply reading through 78 Degrees of Wisdom.