17/03/26
my march tarot decks are the thoth and the ritual tarot and i took them out a week early because i just couldn't wait. that took me on a tour of thoth bloggers and i ended up watching a lot of paul hughes-barlow (in conversation with bart deleplanque). for a while i practiced his version of the first operation of the opening of the key spread. (explained at the end of the post).
anyway, the two march decks are very much magical tools. the effect was two-fold: it didn't feel right to fuck around with them, so i turned to playing cards for that (synchronistically someone republished the contents of the defunct hedgewytch cartomancy website), and i got back to a more focused spiritual practice (meditating, chanting, beads, reading the bhagavad gita, reading miguel de molinos etc). i think perhaps of this spiritual focus i haven't really been doing any projects. a lot of the time i'm just vibing?
reading... i tried very much to get into a couple of books we have at home but it just wasn't going. so the above texts are technically from outside of my shelves. but they're all online so i didn't bring anything new in to clutter up my space, nor did i pointlessly spend money, feeling good about that. having some flexibility to feed the brain and follow intellectual excitement without going directly against the year's goal.
purchases - i did get nail polish as threatened in the previous post. probably could have just gotten one color but went for two. neither is exactly what i wanted (looks different in the bottle vs. put next to my skintone) but it's alright, i'm having fun. and that's still an impressive achievement, almost three months into the year! there were some necessary household purchases but those don't count as whims - replacing broken things and fixing the living space. as a bonus i get to spend more time out on the balcony! even if it's just weeds and the sky, it's nature. and i can burn incense out there! a big win, especially with the weather warming up.
opening of the key, first operation, as explained by paul:
shuffle the deck, no question necessary. cut it in the standard way, that is:
4231
place the deck on your right (1) and cut in half to your left (2). cut the right pile (1) to the left again (3) placing the new segment in between the previous two piles. cut the left pile (3) to the left again placing it at the end of the row (4). traditionally the piles would describe areas of the querent's life, but in his version they go from right to left:
you might already be able to tell something based on the thickness of each pile. if there's a lot of cards in the past - maybe someone's living in the past or events of the past are very influential/relevant to the current situation etc.
flip each pile face up and read the top cards as a summary. then pick one pile to explore further - usually people want the future pile, what's possible to manifest, how to move forward. this is the pile we'll be "counting", regardless of whether the queren't significator is in it or not. (traditionally you search for the significator and read that pile, unless the area of life it appears in doesn't match the querent's question, in which case you'd abandon the reading).
lay the cards of the pile out in a fan or circle or a few rows, remembering they form a continuous loop - the last card joins to the first card. now starting with what was the top/first card, count to find the next card in the reading sequence:
count forward from each new card until you reach a "loop". normally you'd count from a significator in the direction they're facing, but here you can count in both directions, perhaps to represent two different ways forward? each card you count to has its own neighbors influencing it, you could include elemental dignities in that.
i don't think paul usually does anything more from the first operation, and you can get a pretty decent reading even without delving into the future pile, just doing the first step.