Tyron's Blog
February 27, 2023
Cartomancy
Divination with playing cards is not something I thought I would ever be interested in but then I happened to read an essay by Enrique Enriquez, a strange man who talks to birds and reads Tarot cards in coffee shops.
The essay was entitle How to turn a pack of playing cards into a thermometer. It described a system of looking at a spread of three random playing cards:
1 to 10 is expansion
10 to 1 is contraction
warms up when moving from black to red
cools down when moving from red to black
moves slowly when hopping in short intervals
moves fast when leaping in long strides.
EXPANSION/CONTRACTION
COLD/WARM
SLOW/QUICK
Using this system one is able to answer any question.
Finding meaning in playing cards is absurd, but I feel that absurdity makes life more interesting.
Here are two examples of readings done using playing cards:
1. New Job
Amanda asks, “should I look for a new job?”
The cards read:
We see an idea that loses heat as it expands (2 of diamonds cools down to 9 of spades).
Perhaps one way of counseling Amanda is to tell her to think twice, to allow this urge she feels to leave her job to dissipate.
I don’t see this as a negative answer, but rather as the need to reach a certain calm and from there to contemplate her options again.
2. No Questions
Sometimes it’s useful not to ask the cards a question, but instead just let them “speak”.
This spread was read at the end of 2021:
We could talk about a cold year, (5 of spades is half, neither high nor low), and so in the end it contracts a little (5 to 3) but gains heat and then expands with a Big Bang (3 of diamonds to 7 of diamonds).
The year may be ending in a more exciting way than how it passed.
Imagination
Humans have the powerful gift of imagination; the ability to create stories that shape our reality.
Looking at playing cards (or Tarot) and deriving meaning from pieces of cardboard is one method of stimulating the imagination to surface ideas that ordinarily may have stayed buried.
#esoteric