The second consideration is to ensure that if you are selecting a themed deck it has sufficient emotional range. I have several tarot decks on the theme of Arthurian mythology and the Grail cycle, for instance. These stories have a sufficient amount of sex, death, misfortune, and triumph to be able to speak the nonlinguistic language of the unconscious. “The Flowers of West Wales Tarot”
probably does not. You are effectively teaching your mind to speak to itself in images like a zoologist would with a depressed gorilla or precocious dolphin.
Calibration
There is an element of that Christmas morning feeling when one receives a new tarot deck. Typically the cards are pulled out, looked through, briefly shuffled, and then taken for their first road test. This is fine; it is your money and they are your cards after all. The next step, however, really should be working out which combination of image and meaning matches your own interpretation and unconscious. This process is called calibration.
Begin with the deck and accompanying book sitting beside you. Lift the first card and see if you can discern its traditional meaning. Check the book to see if you are correct. If you are correct, place this card to the left of the main pile and to the right if you are not. Move on to the next card.
Continue the process until you have exhausted the main deck leaving you with two piles, one of cards whose meanings you recall and one whose meanings you do not. Shuffling the pile of cards whose meanings escaped you on the first round and repeat, checking each meaning against the book as you go.
Eventually—in less time than it appears when written out like this—you will have a full deck of cards whose meanings you know. At this point, shuffle and run through them one more time, then put them away for the rest of the day.
Interleaving or interleaved practice is a method of studying used as a memory recall booster. Rather than cramming, recall is higher in instances where there are gaps in study or memorisation.
By no means does calibration imply that book interpretations are the only valid ones. Instead, consider it like learning your ABCs before you can begin to read and write. Similarly, it does not imply that you cannot begin using your cards until you have memorised their meanings … this is akin to memorising music rather than learning how to read it—you are trying to squish the wrong thing into your mind. It is impossible. Each sitting and each querent will be different. Personally, I can barely remember all my email passwords; I would have no chance of memorising each and every meaning of each and every card of each and every deck. Consult the book regularly and unashamedly. Many of
my favourite companion volumes are of such a high standard of research that they function as independent sources of insight anyway.
Nested Divination
When you have multiple card sets and use them regularly, certain characteristics, shortcomings, and areas of expertise become apparent. Just as there are different golf clubs for different shots, you will discover that certain oracles are better suited to specific situations. For example, my Sibilla oracles are deeply paranoid, concerned with surprise visitors, double-dealing business associates, family members with their own agendas, illicit love affairs, that sort of thing. As such, they make excellent “classic fortune telling” decks because they deal with mundane issues that would lead you to the proverbial gypsy wagon parked at the edge of the town fair one evening (assuming you lived in a racist cartoon/Cher music video).
Other decks deal with loftier or at least larger issues to do with personal destiny, life goals, and the wider movements of fate that are more likely to mark cornerstones in your incarnation. Then there are either the “darker” decks whose
“good” cards aren’t actually all that good and their interminable opposite, the lighter oracles where even a cancer diagnosis is presented with an abundance of kittens.
You will only find out the limits of your oracles’ emotional ranges by pushing past them and throwing a really bad or inappropriate spread. The good news is this tends to only happen once. After that, you begin to develop an appreciation for which oracles work best in each situation. And that allows you to do something really quite neat. Comme ςa:
In situations where a card spread—typically one thrown using your most-used set—surfaces a card that you know has a very specific meaning such as malicious office gossip or family health problems you can “jump” up or down into another oracle system that is better matched to the challenge. The classic advice is to pull a few additional cards for clarity from the deck you are currently using, but this strikes me as asking the universe to type you up a new letter after you have removed at least ten keys from the keyboard. (The keys being the cards that are already laid out in the spread. What if they are needed for the clarifying message?) Granted, this is a bit unwieldy for a professional
card reader (although I have certainly seen it done), but the focus of this book is you. Take your time, get the best reading.
As for which specific spreads to use, concerns regarding space and also a general pointlessness in doing so leave little time for their discussion. Each deck worth its salt will come with variations of classic spreads such as the Celtic Cross or three-card spread, and the Internet abounds with thousands of more suggestions. If the images on the cards are the letters forming the words your unconscious uses to speak, the spread is the grammar that builds the sentences.
The process of spread discovery is as unique as meaning discovery.