The tarot

asking, and reading what falls

A tarot deck fanned out, gilded backs engraved with a compass rose.

After a long walk across the northern plains, I sit down at the foot of a tree. My village all but fades into the horizon, and I wonder whether I will ever go back.

I take out the card my mother gave me when I left, dog-eared from riding against my chest: the Fool. That is you, she had said, the one who sets out. I look at it a long while. I no longer see in it what she saw: a man walking at the edge of a drop, eyes on the sky.

The is the oracle of closed questions; the tarot is the oracle of open ones, those whose possible answers you do not know in advance.

◆ Which tarot?

For this you use a tarot deck, all 78 cards shuffled together, Major and Minor Arcana as one.

Which one? Any will do, but an illustrated deck — one where every minor stages a , Rider-Waite-Smith fashion — makes free reading easier: the picture whispers to you.

Three of Cups — Three minors from an illustrated deck — the picture speaks before the meaning does.

Three of Swords — Three minors from an illustrated deck — the picture speaks before the meaning does.

No deck? A drawing app will serve, provided it shuffles all 78 properly.

Never handled a tarot? No cause for worry: no prior knowledge is needed to play. If you would like a footing all the same (what the are, the numbers, the majors, how to hold a card), the appendix “The tarot, in brief” gives it to you in two pages.

◆ Reading a card

A tarot card is read freely: it has the meaning the moment calls for. Tradition lends one to each of them all the same, and you can lean on this book’s appendices, “The tarot, in brief” for the footing and “The 78, card by card” for what each card shows.

Reading a card is learned over time.

Do not rush. If you are stuck, stay with the picture: that time is the game.
Take it literally when you feel like it. The symbol obliges nothing.
If nothing comes, start from your character or your world: that is where the matter is.

◆ Major Arcana, Minor Arcana

The 78 cards fall into two families. The Minor Arcana, the four suits from Ace to King, speak the : what you come across, what you do, what happens. The Major Arcana (the twenty-two named ones, The Moon, The Tower, The World) speak .

Three of Pentacles — A minor — it is read level with the world.

◆ What to ask a card

The coin decides between two possibles (part 1). A card, for its part, brings matter you had not foreseen. Since a card cannot say no, never ask it whether there is something; ask what.

A simple gesture to start with: the word first. Before describing anything, write down the card and what it stirs in you, in one sentence or two or three words, “Ace of Pentacles: an that begins”, “Nine of Swords: a gnawing dread”. This is not a settled definition, it is a starting point: once the meaning is down, the picture comes of itself, and you know what to lean on to imagine the rest.

You can ask an open question (who is there? what is behind the door?) and read the card as its answer. Or you can draw without asking anything, and take in what comes: no question set in advance, you interpret the card once it has fallen. The first way searches, the second receives.

The possibilities are endless, but some shapes come back often.

◆ The mood — the weather

It is the most profitable question in the game, and it can never answer “nothing.” Driving rain, hard sun, low mist, a rising wind: the answer changes at a stroke the light, the noise, who is outside and what can be done there. Make a habit of it. You can always ask about the weather, and it is never wasted.

◆ Widen — what exists just beyond the frame

What great building dominates the view from here? What can be heard from the room? What can be seen through the window? You draw a card, and you question it: it gives you matter, and you make of it a monument, a rumor, a smoke on the horizon. This is the family that gives a place an outside, and it undoes nothing, so ask without counting.

◆ Widen, played

What can be seen through the window? Six of Pentacles: the giving hand, and the one held out. I make of it a line along the wall, up to a low door: something is being handed out, and there will not be enough for everyone. The line is mine, entirely; what is not mine is having had to put charity into a district where I meant to set down a market.

◆ Hook — what is off, what calls

“Is something off?” opens a door that, one time in two, gives onto nothing — and onto a flat scene. “What is off, here?” gives something back every time: turn your head, linger on a detail, and draw a card. The same goes when you are looking for a , a clue, the trace of a : ask where it is hiding, never whether it exists. This is not indulgence: what you find can cost, mislead, be only a beginning.

◆ Hook, played

What is off, here? Two of Swords: the blindfolded eyes, what is held at a distance. I choose: nobody in the room looks toward the door at the back. Not once, not by accident. Nothing obliged me to that particular door — the card only asked that something, here, refuse to be seen.

◆ Probe — staying with the answer that fell

This one calls up no new matter, and it is often worth more than the other three.

To is to stay with the answer that has already fallen. Why so easily? What will it cost? What is he not saying? What does that teach me about him? Most often, without drawing anything at all: you ask for nothing new, you exhaust what has just happened.

When you want a footing, the coin almost always suffices. Does he know? Is he lying? Is this the first time? Two ends, one answer, and you have not left the matter you were probing.

You can also draw to shore it up, but then you narrow. For a card to probe, the question must bear on a detail of the one before.

◆ Probe, played

Eight of Cups — On the left the card being probed, on the right the detail that answers.

The Five of Cups gave me a sad face: a woman at the counter, and behind her something overturned. I could stop there. I would rather narrow: why is she sad? And I draw for that question alone. Eight of Cups: going away, leaving behind what one can no longer look at. She has left home, and not yesterday. The second card opened no new scene: it stayed stuck to the first, and served only to detail it.

◆ Draws for and draws against

Sometimes you know the thing is good, or that it is bad. Then draw a card and read it in that direction, for or against. And when the image resists — a Sun you have to make sinister — do not refuse it: take it from behind. The light that exposes, that blinds, that leaves nowhere to hide. The Sun is intact; it is you who took it by the other edge. If your deck gives every card a reversed meaning (most Rider-Waite-Smiths do), it will serve you here: it is a shortcut to the other slope of the image.

One condition only: the side must be true before the draw. Giving yourself the favorable side would be deciding the outcome and pretending to draw it.

I come out of the charterer’s office, my cargo stowed and his signature at the foot of the manifest. What this arrangement is going to cost me, I do not yet know; that it will cost me, that I know already.

The side is therefore true before the card falls: it will be against, whatever image comes out.

◆ Lay down three cards

Take your deck, shuffle it, cut it. Draw a card, set it down before you, and say aloud what it gives you: a mood, a face, an object, the weather. One sentence is enough. Then a second, then a third.

Do not try to link them: they are not telling anything yet, and that is not their job. And do not take back the one that gives nothing: look at it longer. That is all the tarot asks, and it is what is learned the most slowly — staying in front of the image a little beyond your appetite for it.