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After my mother died (decades ago) I got Tarot of the Origins (now Primordial Tarot) because it featured death as a natural part of life. When things are already bad, I find an overly positive deck or reading depressing in how unrelated it feels. "You'll feel better later," doesn't really hit for me in serious situations. I want a message for now. I'd rather see the 3 of Swords and be reminded that I am not alone That this is the way life works, and there's nothing happening to me that isn't part of what everyone deals with. (Not because I want other people to be sad too, of course. But because that's the way it is, and accepting that reality gives me more peace than incorrectly feeling singled out or treated unfairly.) If I get 9 of Swords, 5 of Cups, Tower, the positive is that things going to s*#t is going to force me to deal with something I definitely don't want to. Lke being nauseas and needing to throw up, it's better to get it over with and get to the other side. So that's good advice. Even if I only drew one card and it was the 9S, I would read it as 'anxiety will be worse so remember your best strategies to cope with that' - which I find positive. In that way, to me all tarot readings are positive, because they're of use to me. Of course, that's not the same kind of positive as the tarot reader @Croat mentioned is talking about.

Bad **** happens in life. We can't deny it. Well, of course. Acknowledging that some cards may indicate messy, dangerous, or less than ideal situations or outcomes isn't necessarily catastrophizing. Of course there must be perspective in viewing how all cards in a spread correlate with each other and how the combination of cards relates to the querent's question. In just about every situation, there are options or choices to make in order to move forward or swerve out of the way of something that could have negative results or repercussions.

I have been browsing some of the pages and was thinking it felt so much like the Aclectic Tarot forum I was a member of back in the day. Penny has dropped. I am so happy to have found my way here! I am a long time deck collector and very amateur reader, but I’m looking to deepen my relationship with tarot and develop my own reading style. I am more of a lurker than a poster - but I want to change that, and look forward to speaking with you all here 💚

@RunningWild did your deck eventually arrive? I hope so. My photo of it seems to be featured on the posts page every other day 😅 The Invision software that cycles through decks must have taken a liking to it.

Hi! Thanks, Firecat! This week will be the next deck in my mid-century esoteric list, Fatima Oracle Cards, Lo Scarabeo, copyright 2004. The booklet says “painted around 1927 by an anonymous Italian illustrator.” I can’t see that it has anything to do with Fatima. I’m loving the super-bright colors, almost pop art! It’s a 32-card Lenormand, substituting Violet for Clover and Sphinx for Book and leaving out Tree, Coffin, Rod, and Paths. So it will be small spreads and less-than-grand tableaus this week. But first an interview! What is your most important characteristic? Cross It’s kind of difficult to deal with. What is your strength? Fish It’s good with money readings. Your weakness? Sphinx Not so good on wisdom readings. What can you teach me? Mountain How to overcome. How can I learn it? Tower By being steadfast and persistent. What will be the outcome of our work together? Knight (rider) I will move on from it. Or not because this really flowed in these short sentences. So we’ll see this week.

Alla @geoxena - bad things happen. Such is life. But in order for a reading to be useful to the querent - one must de-catastrophize alla @Chariot . Self-fulfilling prophesy is all-too-real, and it's always helpful to the querent to give them some positive things to take away with them. @Croat your aforementioned Tarot reader was a Doreen Virtue model? 😁 (Who removed all the "negative" cards from her decks, replacing with other imagery. It was all fluffy Angels and bluebirds... until she had some sort of personal breakdown [my assumption], denounced her practice & decks, and went back to being a stoic Christian. It was quite a drama).

You should see all the folders with different deck ideas that are on my hard drive 😁 I like falling into new rabbit holes and sometimes I circle back to old abandoned projects and make something out of it, other times I don’t. It’s the journey that I like, I don’t particularly care about having an end goal to my creative projects anymore. It’s all fun and play 😀

A unique version of Reading Circle for those who would like to work through their collection of decks, participants choose decks from their collections to work with for the week. Some use one deck, others use two or more. Some combine methods: Tarot, non-tarot (e.g. oracle), playing cards, or any other divinatory method is welcome. All we ask is that you use at least one tarot or oracle deck. No collection is too large or too small. The only rules we have are the Tarot, Tea & Me Rules; Be respectful of one other. Please join us! Please post with your choice of deck(s) for the week Chat away about your deck, how you're finding it (or not), etc., it's all up to you Participants may either choose to share their readings here in this discussion thread or opt to have their own journal in the Journals Forum and link it here Yet others may even have an offline journal in paper & pencil/pen form Share as often, as much, or as little as you like. You can drop in and out at any time—reality and life permitting. New to tarot? Long time reader? Come on in! Participants fire cat pickles: Tarot de la Rea Click here for DOTW 477 (8/24 - 8/30)

I know this is an old thread, but I'm here with a happy heart and I'm excited to say that I've found a really wonderful book by Toni Savory , the lady who wrote the book for Ciro Marchetti's Lustrous Lenormand. She's written a book called :Mastering the Tarot Tableau: Revisiting Predictive Accuracy with Tarot. It's wonderful and I understand it better than the other book I got awhile back. I have what I call "dumb spots" about certain things that just don't compute when I try to understand them and the first book I got plus the Benebel Wen book fell into my dumb spots for some reason. I'll be able to understand them better once I've gotten some practice using this book by Toni Savory though . But anyway, in another week or two, I'll be offering some readings using the Tarot Tableau if some of you might be willing to sit for me and give me feedback in exchange. So watch for a post from me when I show up in a thread in Exchanges if you're willing to help me get some practice with theTarot Tableau. 😃 And thank all of you so much for being supportive and helping me get past my whatever-it-was that intimidated me for awhile.

Thank you for raising such a good topic, @Croat . Life is a mixture of good, bad—and very often simply indifferent or trivial as well. I find I am not attracted to card decks that emphasise one end of the spectrum at the expense of the other. (One reason I don't like 'dark' decks, for example.) Usually you can get some positives from an overly negative reading if you include a space for it in your spread. Something like 'what is best to do in this situation?" or 'what is helping me in this situation?' This kind of thing. This is another reason why I don't do one-card spreads, or spreads that don't have enough cards in them to give a nuanced view of a situation. And why I ALWAYS include an 'advice' card in every spread. Of course when you're reading for somebody else (or even for yourself) and you sense that an overly negative reading will shatter them rather than help them, it's good to be able to soften any blow without being dishonest. I think that's where practice comes in, and also the ability to interact with your querent. Talk the situation through, and get them to look at as many aspects of a situation that you can. How many different directions an 'outcome' can lead. You can even do a second reading to clarify any aspect of the first reading that needs a bit more information. It's also helpful if you can point out how many times you've received or dealt negative cards for yourself in your time as a card reader ...and yet, here you (still) are! My own tarot journey has recently led me into practicing how to de-catastrophise a reading. That's where the tarot journal can really help. How did Death manifest itself in readings where it actually appeared? Ditto 10 of Swords, The Tower, etc. Cards that are traditionally seen as 'negative cards.' What actually happened AFTER the card reading occurred? That is also a good approach towards understanding how the melodramatic cards hardly ever presage everlasting grief. OMG. Death! In a position of 'what will happen today.' Somebody is going to die! Nope. Turns out I finally threw away those shoes that never did fit me right—and now there is a space on my shoe rack for another pair. Death. Transformation. And we move quickly on, nothing to see here....

What are the lessons to be gained from the events that occur that we don't like, i.e. the "bad"? Positivity would (in its best form) be to identify the reality of the situation but point to where the individual needs to grow. We often don't like to face ourselves, but the cards can see us and our patterns clearly. For example, change and letting go is hard, and we often don't want to do it "Death". Sudden realisations about how gigantic our ego is and how we lie to ourselves can be shattering - we put ourselves in some superior category out of an often unconscious need to compete (don our regalia) and then get knocked off our perch and get caught out somehow in humiliation (Tower) hopefully making us humble and behave more like our true uncloaked self with all our emotions and subconscious/unconscious movements (Star). We're on a journey and while all of it is - or can be - good for something, we don't see it as good. There may be some need to clarify about the focusing on the positivity - is it the lesson that is the positive thing? My intention when reading is to help. I think that's the important thing. But we don't want to say "everything's fine" when we could be warning someone about something, do we? If taking someone's money to give advice and we don't, we are possibly doing the ego thing wanting them to like us - but the sitter would have every reason to despise us for taking their money. "You should have warned me!"

Bad stuff happens. We can't deny it.

I had a discussion with another Tarot reader recently who insisted that every card was positive and none of them should be read negatively. Even the Tower card. And reversals? Forget it. Since the human imagination is limitless I can envision a pathway to taking that approach, but it doesn't strike me as either realistic or healthy. Pretending that negativity doesn't exist by refusing to recognize it, in fact by forcing only positivity on Tarot readings, strikes me as fakery. Positive forces are balanced against negative forces, a foundational concept of eastern harmony. Focusing only on positivity seems wildly out of balance. Personally, I'm willing to let honesty rule the reading, releasing my intuition to feel negativity or positivity as presented by the cards. It's not my purpose to impose intentional outcomes through my conscious will. That honest approach to intuition makes the reading free of intentionality and willfulness, thus releasing me from moral issues about any messaged negativity rebounding. I suspect my views are in the minority. My friend's positive-only approach may be more extreme, but most of the Tarot readers I've met seem to focus strongly, at least, on positive readings and shy from negatives. What say you? Always focus on the positive, or just let the cards lead where they may?

I almost titled this entry as "Rethinking my idea," regarding what I wrote about in my previous entry, but the truth is I'm scrapping it. I think the concept of organizing a deck with each suit representing the life of a historical figure can work, but this morning I realized that there is an aspect of each person I wanted to represent that I don't want to glorify, and it would be pretty impossible to leave it out since they are well-known historical figures from ancient times. Plus, there's the question of how to depict the Majors if I went that route. So, I want to find a different theme or perspective for my deck. In the meantime, I really should get to work on another tarot-related creative project I've had in the back of my mind (not a deck). I came up with that idea a few months ago but haven't done anything with it yet, purely due to my usual habit of procrastinating. Onward!

Thank you, @JoyousGirl ! I should have explained my idea better. Each suit in the Minors would represent one particular person who lived in a certain time and place in history. So, Swords = Person A, Cups = Person B, and so on. The court cards will be easy, as those would depict the main person and the powerful or important people in their lives, and then the other cards would have other people, places, and events that took place. The reason I am stumped about how to do the Majors is because all these historical figures lived in different parts of the world and in different eras. So I am not sure (yet) how to make it all fit together cohesively. But I have time to work on it!

Thank you, @Raggydoll !

One suggestion (and maybe you’re already doing this) is to do test cards without committing to a full project. I’ve done lots of test cards in various styles, media and card sizes. I’ve also scanned and even test printed some to see what they would look like. If you want to eventually have your deck printed, it’s nice to learn more about how different papers, different pencils and colors (etc) work as a finished product. And it gets you going, which helps to give further ideas and inspiration! (If you don’t want to invest the money in printing test cards professionally, then you can print them with a home printer. It works great too). Best of luck with everything, and don’t feel pressured to show us your artwork, it’s nice just to read your thoughts on the process!

I have been wanting to create a tarot deck for ages. Every now and then, ideas come to me for the artwork on specific cards. I haven't done anything with these ideas yet, mostly because I want the deck to be cohesive and I was having problems visualizing how to connect the ideas I have for specific cards to each other. I was also thinking I need some sort of theme. I know that's not necessary, but I think it's cool when a tarot deck conveys a specific perspective. There are so many decks with really interesting or unusual themes/perspectives out there. Obviously, some work better than others, and some are very silly. I don't want mine to be silly. I want my theme to add something of value to anyone using the deck. For the longest time, however, I had a hard time coming up with any kind of theme that would be meaningful to me (and to others), and that I could execute well. BUT NOW I've come up with a theme that I can get excited about. I will have to do some research to see if there are any similar decks out there already, and I will also need to do some historical research and figure out who/what gets assigned to which tarot cards. See, the inspiration for my idea came from reading about actual historical figures. There are two historical novels I read recently, which are really fiction but heavily based on the lives of real people whose stories are amazing and inspiring. And those novels got me thinking. I could incorporate certain elements of their lives into tarot. Plus I would love to draw the clothing they wore, the types of buildings they lived in, and so on. While making notes on my ideas, I came up with four prominent historical figures and matched them up with the tarot suits. That made me see that this idea could work! And not in a cheesy or hokey way. The tricky part is the Majors. Do I have elements of each of these figures throughout the majors? Do I assign another historical figure to the Majors? Or do I create the Majors in sort of a generic way? I'm not sure "generic" is the right word, but I just mean less thematic, I guess. I'll just need to ponder this further and see what my imagination comes up with. Once I have the ideas for the theme and artwork solidified, then I will have to look into how to get the deck published. ===== I just want to acknowledge that some folks here were expecting to see images of my artwork in this "Art Blog." I should have been clear when I created it, that it's mostly where I want to work out ideas and talk to myself about them. That's not to say that I won't post any pictures of my art, though. I'm just not feeling ready to do that quite yet. Thanks for understanding!

Thank you! 🥰

I've said this before @Raggydoll , but I love the style of that deck you made. Even the card backs are just right.

I have some books on antique German and Swiss playing cards, and I referenced several different decks for this project. I picked my favorite depictions for all the cards, and I made sure that every card had clear symbolism. The coloring is not 100% original, I picked a color scheme that I loved and used it throughout. And the back design is of a later date, but I loved it so much that I had to use it.