Tarot Time Traveller Read online

  1. Original Tarot Deck created by Marcus Katz, based on IJJ Swiss Deck in Stuart Kaplan, Tarot Cards for Fun and Fortune-Telling, 1978.

  We return to him sat a few days following that reading, as he was, meditating earnestly whilst contemplating the dawn light. Although he has been using his homemade tarot deck for several years, he still feels nervous about his knowledge and certainly his place in the world. It is a big step—an actual act of faith—to start buying occult books and contacting other magicians, witches, and occultists. He writes about his self-conscious lack of confidence in his journal.

  A few days later he would leave high school and start a new life not just in work but also in magic, the tarot with him always, travelling at his side. They would travel in time together and divine nature in the journey becoming much like the Fool and his dog.

  Some people wonder what the Fool, who is nothing and has no number, carries in his bag. The answer is that he carries everything—everything he has done, everything he has learnt and experienced, and his memories and past. The dog is his faith; and the last companion he must leave behind at the end of the path. The Fool is empty as his bag is full; he has come to the end, the realisation of everything and nothing, and that time alone is the secret—the secret of a life which is lived forever in an everlasting day.

  Today, writing this, an older man looks upon the young man he once was. Ever the teacher even to himself, he gently looks over his shoulder and points out the Hierophant card. “You missed that,” he says to himself, “the success is not social but perhaps in becoming the teacher you seek now in others.”

  I remember myself back then, and imagine that I look at myself now and reply, “Will it be worth it? All this work, all this learning, all this struggle to understand these mysteries? Really? Is it worth it? Is there any real meaning or pattern in life?”

  I sigh; we both look at each other across thirty-three years of time and tarot; and for the first time I look at the date today in astonishment as I write this, and say, “Oh yes, there is a pattern, oh yes indeed.”

  —Marcus Katz, Dawn, Friday, 17 June, 2016: The Lake District, England

  Tali

  2:00 am, 21 June, 1988: North-West England

  A young woman is dreaming on the night of the solstice, a powerful time when the sun appears to stand still and the night is at its shortest.

  In the dream, she is returning to the family home at an earlier time, when her mother was still alive.

  She stands across the road from the house and looks towards it longingly yet is unable to bring herself to walk any closer to the house. She holds a simple brown cardboard box.

  With some bemusement, she turns to see on the side of the kerb, left of where she stands, is sat an Indian man wearing a white turban whose appearance she recognises as a secret master, guru, or swami.

  She senses his presence but does not acknowledge him. Instead she crosses the road and enters the house. The house contains all her life, her past, and her memories. It is a warehouse of visions for the future held in the past, and past memories that may or may not have happened.

  All she has come back for are the precious childhood photographs of herself and her now-deceased parents. She sorts through the photographs and piles them high into the box. She leaves the house carrying the box. As she walks away from the house, a wind begins to blow.

  She looks and can see across the road, still sat upon the kerb is the swami. He looks intently at her, and for some reason this makes her feel angry. As she crosses the road, halfway across, the wind whips up into a sudden frenzy and blows the cardboard box high into the air. All the family photos are swept clean out of the box and scattered into the wind.

  She panics and rushes to try to save the precious photographs, running this way and that, grabbing at the photographs as they spin through the air.

  As she does, she notices something curious: when she plucks at each photograph, it turns into an illustrated card like some sort of playing card or the tarot cards she sometimes saw in her childhood when her mother used to go for readings. She recalls now that her mother always asked about whether she should have a long and healthy life, time and again. Yet her mother had died like her father, too soon and too early, leaving just these memories, these precious photographs that were now turning into cards.

  She looked up from her mad dancing about the pavement, clutching at these

  falling cards, and still the swami was staring and now smiling at her. This infuriated her; she felt he was laughing at her in this desperate time when things could be no worse.

  She walks up to him, letting the cards slip through her fingers to leave a trail of images behind her across the pavement.

  “What are you laughing at?” she demands.

  He stares back at her, and for a moment she thinks he will not answer. But then he does, with a voice that awakens her from her sleep and into the long day of summer ahead:

  “You will heal. You will turn your life into cards one day. And you will heal others. You can call the Wind.”

  It is these words and this dream that would be realised twenty-eight years later into a new deck of tarot cards, the Tarot of Everlasting Day.

  2. Ace of Swords from the Tarot of Everlasting Day/Union Deck, Janine Hall, Marcus Katz & Tali Goodwin, 2017 (in progress, unpublished).

  The tarot is an illustration of not only our dreams but also of our future.

  Now let us take you on your own journey through time, hopping into our tarot time pod and setting the dials for 1955. If you are ready, we will begin.

  —Tali Goodwin, 22 June, 2016: The Lake District, England

  [contents]

  2. From the personal journals of Marcus Katz, 1983. It is important to keep a journal as you never know how long the journey may be or when you may need to refer to something in your own personal history.

  3. Ibid.

  1

  Cartomantic Orientation

  And it came to pass, as we went to prayer, a certain damsel possessed with a spirit of divination met us, which brought her masters much gain by soothsaying.

  —Acts 16:16

  11 February, 1955: Chicago, USA

  We are time travelling! We have just touched down in our tarot time pod in mid-fifties America. It is a small jump by time traveller standards but one just right for beginners.

  James Dean is still alive, and this year On the Waterfront will win the Oscars. As we arrive in downtown Chicago, we can immediately hear with some amusement the top hit of the day, “Melody of Love” by the Four Aces. Such resonances to our card deck show us that we are on the right oracular wavelength. In fact, it is when we recognise such synchronicities (meaningful coincidences) that we know our cards are leading us correctly. 4

  We overhear two men on the street corner in passing—someone called Lloyd Merriman has just been purchased by the White Sox from the Redlegs. As we walk by, they start to argue heatedly about left-handed batting. They are both wearing scarves across their faces, and it is curious to hear their muffled but insistent voices. It is cold here, and the wind is blowing hard from across the lake.

  Our only task in this time is to simply purchase a copy of a magazine called FATE, so we locate the nearest newspaper vendor (seeing the headlines, “US Fleet Evacuates Chinese Nationalist Tachen Islands”) and dig into our traveller’s bag of time-variable coins to hand over 55 cents.

  Without making too much contact with anyone, we hastily return to our time pod and put the little magazine on our shelf until we receive further instructions.

  That was fun—we could get used to this!

  The History of Tarot

  We are not too interested in the history of tarot as we are tarot time travellers and will be experiencing that first-hand for ourselves on our journey. However, we should look briefly at what we might encounter according to those wh
o have written about it in their own time or looking back as historians. The history of what people have written about the history of tarot is just as interesting as the history itself, if that makes sense. We will come across many such complexities, conundrums, and confusions as we wend our way through the time-streams. Let us first get a fix on the present.

  At the time of writing (2015–2016 CE), tarot is being revitalised through “social media” as it is called at this moment. Future readers may vaguely remember something called “Facebook” and perhaps “Twitter,” which were all the rage at this time. You may not believe it, but at the time, more than half the world’s Internet population was connected to Facebook alone. It’s true.

  Tarot today is more easily accessible than at any time back down the time-stream, ahead of the forthcoming things you future readers already know when it really changed again. Our time-tenses will get a bit convoluted if we keep addressing you in the future from now.

  At this moment, the information about the history of tarot is widely spread and includes unproven facts and guesses as well as the actual known history of the cards.

  The tarot originated as a set of engraved and elaborate images held by a few noble families in Italy during the fifteenth century. It followed the arrival of card games in Europe and was not used by the Romani (“gypsies”). We will see how some of these legends arose during our travels. In the meantime, here is a traveller’s checklist of misinformation:

  A man called Rider developed the major and minor arcana of tarot.

  The Romani came from Egypt, where tarot was used in ancient times.

  The tarot conceals a secret teaching of many ages.

  The tarot is evil, like the Ouija board.

  The name Rider is the name of a publishing company, which first published the Waite-Smith Tarot; the “gypsies” (the story is more complex) originated in India; tarot was never used in ancient Egypt; tarot contains infinite teachings, not just one; and like the Ouija board, was originally a game.

  The actual history of the tarot is fascinating and important to understand when we read the cards. In fact, it makes our readings even deeper and more flexible when we appreciate and can use all the layers of tarot through time.

  As we will also see, the history of how people turned tarot to their own ends by creating fictional histories and stories of its past is also a part of our journey. We will discover these myths and then use them to help us create new and exciting ways of reading our cards.

  Let us first consider a tarot timeline to identify a brief selection of the key nexus points, works, figures, and decks in cartomantic history. We might note the comparatively recent occurrence of tarot in the grand scheme of history; it really is at its infancy at the present time compared to other oracular systems such as the I-Ching.

  3. Tarot Timeline.

  There are relatively few academic books on tarot history and we recommend all tarot time travellers to equip themselves with at least one of these as a companion in their journey. 5

  However, before we set our course into times long gone, we will begin by looking at contemporary tarot card meanings, and get to use our deck straight away in a modern style. We will return to this and develop it even further in our final chapter on Tarosophy, featuring cutting-edge methods.

  Contemporary Time Meanings

  If you are a new time traveller in tarot (because every reading is a form of time travelling) we advise pursuing the following meanings to get your bearings before we begin our journey. We have surveyed and observed some of the best and most experienced readers in the modern era and analysed their style to create this orientation guide.

  A lot of students tell us that the two main difficulties for beginners are:

  Having difficulty applying a card “meaning” to a question (interpretation)

  Having difficulty putting the meanings together (delivery)

  We have spent a lot of time listening to readers and breaking down simple skills that are universal to most readers, which we can then teach. It appears that by having just three essential meanings for a card, and one single sentence, we can get reading straight away.

  We call this our three-minute method. Get ready.

  You will discover that most tarot readings weave together a story from the cards using three simple points of reference that each card can give us:

  Resource

  Challenge

  Lesson

  Every card, from the ten minor arcana (ace to ten) in each suit (pentacles, swords, cups, and wands), the four court cards (page, knight, queen, and king) in each suit through to the twenty-two major arcana (numbered 0 for the Fool, then I through XXI in Latin for the Magician to the World) can be read in the context of just those three essential themes.

  First, each card can be seen to offer a resource. This can be easily imagined: if you plugged yourself into that card, what charge would it give you? A card like the Tower would charge you with sudden acceleration, for example, whereas the King of Pentacles would charge you slowly and surely. The cards contain these different energies and signify the resource or attitude they offer in a reading.

  Similarly, every card is a challenge. In some cases, we could see this as the “reversed” meaning of a card, but we do not need to add reversals to our readings at this stage. If we imagined that each card was an obstacle—an image of a stage in a story that the hero or heroine must overcome—we can see these meanings. Again, the Tower would now be the challenge of a sudden shock to the system, striking like a lightning bolt and destroying everything, but the King of Pentacles would be a solid slow-moving person in the way of progress.

  Finally, every card can be viewed as a lesson. There is no card that is not a lesson of some description. We might see this as the card being a teacher or summing up a moral at the end of a story. In seeing a card as a lesson, we can also practice getting an overall view of the card … and the reading itself. If we take the Tower again, we now see it as a lesson about renewal and moving onto new things, and the King of Pentacles offering us a straightforward lesson about patience and the reward of long-term work.

  We have put together in Appendix 1 our own suggested list of universal keywords we find useful for this beginner method. We encourage you to consider each card in these three aspects and add your own words as you progress.

  You are encouraged in your time travels to add constantly to this lexicon of card meanings under each heading—resource, challenge, and lesson—with your own meanings from other references and your experience.

  Now that we have listed these universal keywords for the three essential aspects of every card, we will provide a quick method to get started reading tarot in just three minutes. Time will tell how we do when we come to practice our methods; however, first we want to jump-start our journey by being able to read right from the beginning.

  How to Do a Tarot Reading in Three Minutes

  In case we meet any emergencies in our time travel (or in life) we have a fallback method of reading tarot that works very well when we want to read for ourselves and for other people. It follows a script that’s one example of what we call an Oracular Construct or Oracular Sentence :

  In this situation, you are/I am challenged by [challenge] but can draw upon [resource] to learn [lesson].

  When we want to perform a tarot reading, we simply draw three cards from our traveller’s bag and read the appropriate word from our universal keyword list for this oracular construct.

  Let us try it with a test question; “How will we learn best to do tarot readings by travelling through the history of the cards?”

  We draw for our Challenge, Resource, and Lesson: Knight of Cups, Page of Pentacles, 8 of Swords.

  If we look up in our list the Knight of Cups as a challenge, it is the challenge of temptation. Our challenge here is to not give in to thinking we already know the
answers and remain open, perhaps.

  When we put the other two cards into the sentence it becomes clearer:

  In this situation, we are challenged by temptation but can draw upon steadfastness [Resource of the Page of Pentacles] to learn Autonomy [Lesson of the 8 of Swords].

  We are being advised to keep at our studies and follow them through steadfastly to become free of previous feelings about the cards and learn our own meanings.

  You can try this for any question that you have about your life right now and make a note of the answer to expand upon as you enjoy the rest of your journey throughout this book. As you continue to practice with this oracular construct, you will find your other readings becoming more flexible and fluid. You will be training yourself to read the essential context of the cards for any situation and delivering your interpretation in a consistent way.

  Advanced Time Traveller Method

  You can also use the three essential keywords and oracular construct with a past/present/future tense. So, you can say “In the future, you will be challenged by … ” or “In the past you have drawn upon … and learnt … ” As you get more practised, you will find it easy to lay a nine-card square down wherein the top three cards are the past, the middle row the present, and the bottom row the future. You can also then compare how the three challenge, resource, and lesson cards work through the person’s past, present, and future.

  Now that we have learnt to read tarot, we will look at one example of how the meaning of a card changes over time yet somehow remains the same. You will see from this how we have also roamed the time-streams to discover the essential keywords that remain the stable core of each card no matter how many years pass.