Tarot, Numerology and Divination

Every other area of the Library is about you: your energy, your abilities, the work you do on yourself. This one is about the languages I use to look at a life, and how you can start to read them for yourself.

I learned tarot first, in my early twenties, and I used it constantly. Then I put the cards down and worked for many years with no tools at all, only my own sense of things. When I came back to the cards it was with a birth chart open beside them, and that changed how I read. The chart shows the shape of a life. The cards show what is moving through it right now. The chart and the cards are two languages describing the same soul.

Tarot

The tarot pages start at the beginning. Learning Tarot is the place to begin. How to Read a Card gives you five questions to ask of any card you pull, so you can start reading without memorising all 78. Then the deeper pages: the Major Arcana, the four suits, the court cards, and what to do when a card comes up reversed. The Celtic Cross walks through the spread I use for every reading, position by position, and Tarot Spreads gives you seven more layouts to try, from a single card to the Tree of Life. The 78 Cards gives every card in the deck its own page, upright and reversed. The Difference Between Oracle Cards and Tarot Cards sets the fixed structure of a tarot deck beside the open rules of an oracle deck, what each does well, and how I use the two together.

Every Thursday the daily posts carry a Tarot Card of the Week, one card at a time. The Major Arcana page links to every one written so far.

Numerology

Your name and your birth date are a set of numbers, and each number carries a meaning. The Numerology section teaches the whole chart the way I calculate it for a reading. Learning Numerology is the place to begin. How to Reduce a Number and The Letter Values show you the arithmetic, The Core Numbers explains the five numbers at the heart of a chart, and Personal Year, Month and Day shows you where you are in the nine year cycle. 2027, a Universal Year 11/2 sets out the year ahead, with a page for each Personal Year from 1 to 9 and the birthdays that fall in each. The deeper pages cover Karmic Lessons, the Reality and Growth numbers, the Pinnacles, the Challenges and the Major Cycles, and The Numbers gives each number from 1 to 9, and the Master Numbers 11, 22 and 33, a page of its own, each with its reverse side. Master Numbers in Everyday Life is about living with an 11, a 22 or a 33 on an ordinary Tuesday. Karmic Debt Numbers 13, 14, 16 and 19 explains the four debts, how to find them, and why none of them is a punishment. Life Path Compatibility looks at two Life Paths side by side, through the three families and where pairs tend to rub. Your Birthday Number is the easiest number in the chart to find, and each of the 31 days has its own page. Repeating Numbers is how I read 111, 222 and the rest when they keep turning up, with a page for each from 111 to 999 and one for 11:11. The Reverse Side of a Number explains how every number can be lived too little, well or too much, and sets that beside the Chaldean reversed numbers and the modern mirror numbers.

The Tuesday series in the daily posts works through the numbers one at a time as well, and each post shows you how to find one of your own.

Tarot Birth Cards

Your date of birth, added up, lands on one of the 22 Major Arcana, and that card is the tarot's answer to the Life Path: the archetype you are living out. The Tarot Birth Cards section shows you how I count, which cards share a number and arrive together, and gives each of the 22 its own page as a birth card. It is the bridge between the tarot pages and the numerology pages, and it reads best after both.

Kabbalah

Behind the Tree of Life spread sits a diagram I have used for most of my reading life: ten spheres joined by twenty two paths, the Western tarot tradition's map of how an idea becomes a life. The Kabbalah section walks the Tree sphere by sphere, puts the twenty two Major Arcana on their paths, and shows how I read your name a second way, with the Hebrew style letter values, so that it lands on one of the spheres. I use the Tree the way the tarot tradition does, and I say so plainly on the Learning Kabbalah page out of respect for where it came from. The Tree of Life is the place to begin, and The Sephiroth gives each sphere its own page.

I Ching

The Book of Changes is the oldest oracle I use and the plainest: sixty four figures of six lines, cast with three coins for a question you actually want answered. The I Ching section teaches how to cast and read a hexagram, gives the eight trigrams a page, says what I think about birth hexagrams (the short version is that the book was never a birth chart, and I tell you how I handle that in a reading), and gives each of the sixty four hexagrams its own page, as an answer and as a picture of a person. The Eight Trigrams is the place to begin, and then cast one.

Runes

The twenty four letters of the oldest runic alphabet, each with a name and a picture, drawn from a bag for a question. The Runes section is plain about where they come from (an alphabet first, an oracle only in the last hundred years) and then teaches them anyway, because the pictures are good ones: cattle, hail, the yew, the torch, the sun. The Elder Futhark page gives the alphabet, How to Cast the Runes gives the method, and each of the twenty four has its own page.

Astrology

Astrology has an area of its own in the Library now. The Astrology area opens with Western Astrology, the whole chart from the planets and houses to the signs and the fixed stars, and the other systems I read with follow it. The Week Ahead still goes up every Monday and reads the week for all twelve signs, and the Moon posts arrive with each New Moon and Full Moon.

Start with Learning Tarot if you have a deck sitting in a drawer and have never known what to do with it. Most people do. (Go figure.) Start with Learning Numerology if you have ever wondered why your Life Path describes you so well.

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.

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