Toward Ecosophy

A question for those of my readers who practice magic, divination, or any other form of occult practice:  in the last few days, have you noticed any significant changes in the results of your workings?

I have, as it happens. I'm not going to talk about my experiences right now as I don't want to bias the discussion. Instead, I'd like to check in with others, to see whether it's just me or whether something has changed on a broader scale.  If you've noticed a change, please let me know; if you haven't, ditto.  Then, once I have a clearer sense of what's going on, we can take the discussion in the direction that seems appropriate. Thank you for your help!

Another podcast appearance of mine, this one on Parallax Academy with hosts Andrew Sweeny and Owen Cox.  The subject was Tarot and divination generally, but regular readers (and listeners) of mine will know already that it veered off in any number of unexpected directions. Interested?  Check it out here.

In previous posts in this series we’ve talked about the two basic numbers of numerology—the birth number, representing the aspects of yourself and your life that aren’t subject to change, and the name number, representing the aspects of yourself and your life that you can do something about—and combined them into the time number, which tells you how each day and year will work out for you. Very few of us go through life untouched by the influence of other people, however. In the case of important relationships, certain numbers created by addition can be used to sort out how these will work.

Relationship numbers are a relatively new dimension of numerology; they are mentioned on very few of the old books, and the meanings given below may well need a certain amount of revision as more experience with the system is gained.  I have found in my own experience, however, that they are worth calculating for any serious interaction among two people—relationships in the romantic sense, of course, but also business partnerships, friendships, and any other close connection. You can also use them for your relationship to a company, a school, or an organization, provided that you can get the necessary information to work out the number—which is not always easy.

Two numbers need to be calculated to make sense of any relationship. The first is the outer number. This is based on the birth numbers of the two people involved. Add the two birth numbers together and reduce to a single-digit number in the usual way (with the usual exceptions of 11 and 22).  That gives you the outer number. This number represents the concrete, outward, practical side of the relationship.  If it’s for a marriage, for example, how will the marriage work out in purely practical terms?  Will the people involved be able to handle each other’s habits?  Will they be comfortable together?  Will they be able to work together, build a stock of shared wealth, and prosper?

Here’s what the numbers mean.

If your outer number is 1, the relationship will be a practical success.  This is the number of those relationships where the two people work together instinctively, as though sharing each other’s thoughts. They will need to learn how to listen to advice from others, however, as such a relationship can become a feedback loop that amplifies bad ideas and keeps mistakes from being noticed until too late.

If your outer number is 2, the relationship will be full of ups and downs, successes and failures, wins and losses.  The two people involved are very different, and they can succeed if they learn to balance their strengths and weaknesses, but this will not be easy and will require a great deal of patience and thoughtfulness on both sides. Lacking that, things can very easily descend into stalemate.

If your outer number is 3, the relationship will be successful but unstable. In a marriage or other romantic relationship, one or both partners may not be faithful; in a business partnership, one or both partners may have something going on the side in a more economic sense! If you know what you’re getting into and are willing to stay flexible and adjust to the other person’s vagaries, this can work, but don’t count on happily ever after.

If your outer number is 4, the relationship will be stable but not necessarily successful. This is a good number for a marriage when both parties are interested in home and family, and it can be an extremely good number for a partnership when hard work and steady gains are desired, but if you are looking for a whirlwind of romance or quick profits in business, this is the wrong choice for you. 

If your outer number is 5, the relationship is going to be a mess. This is a number of sudden change, disruption, and adventure, not of any kind of lasting situation. A brief passionate affair followed by “So long, it’s been real” or a short-term business deal are certainly options, but if you try to hang on and make things last, the two of you will likely end up fighting like cats and dogs, if one or the other person doesn’t simply blow right out of town.

If your outer number is 6, the relationship will be a success, even though it may not have the results you want. This number brings happiness and generosity; a relationship of any kind with this number will tend to be comfortable and happy in its practical dimensions, though if it’s a business relationship the business may not make much of a profit. “Relax, enjoy, and have fun” is a good motto for this kind of relationship.

If your outer number is 7, the relationship will only be successful if you can both handle solitude and silence. A romantic relationship with this number will be difficult, though it can work if both people are comfortable spending much of their time apart and treating closeness as an occasional event. A business partnership with this number will have the partners working on their own most of the time, and interacting only as needed.  If you need social interaction in your relationships, this is a very difficult number.

If your outer number is 8, the relationship will be a great practical success, but you will have to work at it. This is the number of businesses that start out with very little and grow from there a step at a time, and its effects on romantic relationships is similar: it’s common for couples with this relationship birth number to start out relatively poor and end up comfortable or even rich. Learning to work together productively is essential in either case.

If your outer number is 9, the relationship is high-intensity stuff, and it may be a success or a disaster depending on how the people involved handle the pressure. Setting positive goals and remaining faithful to ideals is essential, and can result in great achievement. The people in the relationsip will face important challenges, and how they deal with those will have immense influence on how things turn out in the short run as well as the long run.

If your outer number is 11, the relationship has the characteristics of a 2, but with a much stronger chance of success. Different as the two people are, if they can learn to work well together and balance their very different capacities against each other’s, they can accomplish astonishing things.

If your outer number is 22, the relationship has the characteristics of a 4, but with a much greater intensity for those involved. These are typically fated relationships, the sort of thing that happens to the people in question whether they want it or not. The results may be heavenly, hellish, or (more likely) a mix of each, but a relationship with this birth number probably can’t be avoided, and the consequences for good or ill are likely to be life-changing.

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That’s the outer number. The other number is the inner number, and it’s found by adding together the name numbers of the two people involved, and reducing it to a single digit in the usual way (with the usual exceptions of 11 and 22). Where the outer number tells you about the practical dimensions of the relationship, the inner number tells you about its emotional dimensions, and especially about what provides the relationship with its emotional foundation and direction.

If your inner number is 1, the relationship is founded on shared goals. The people involved know what they want and need each other’s help to get it, and will thrive so long as both are willing to share the effort needed to achieve their mutual goal.

If your inner number is 2, the relationship is founded on shared needs. Each of the partners has a quality the other lacks, and often more than one such quality—this is the classic case of “opposites attract.” The relationship will thrive so long as each person is able to get their needs met by the other.

If your inner number is 3, the relationship is founded on shared interests. The people in this relationship keep it going by staying light, playful, and entertaining, and by making sure that both partners have the chance to pursue their interests.

If your inner number is 4, the relationship is founded on shared security. We all need at least a little stability and familiarity in life, and a 4 relationship is a good way to get it.  It will thrive so long as both people are willing to accept the placid, unexciting life that this kind of relationship reliably generates.

If your inner number is 5, the relationship is founded on shared adventure. The craving for excitement and novelty is the glue that holds this relationship together, and a little danger simply adds spice. As a result, such relationships rarely last long, but they can be great fun—or great misery!—while they last. 

If your inner number is 6, the relationship is founded on shared comforts. This is the kind of relationship in which the people involved are simply too comfortable with each other to want to change. Generosity is essential for making this kind of relationship work.

If your inner number is 7, the relationship is founded on shared ideas. This can be a very cold and cerebral relationship, or it can be one of passionate commitment to an ideal, but one way or another it depends on the life of the mind and will thrive as long as the people in question remain equally committed to their ideas.

If your inner number is 8, the relationship is founded on shared effort. This is the kind of relationship that must be worked at, not one that comes easily. So long as both partners are willing to put in the necessary effort, it can be very successful, but there will likely be difficult times at first.

If your inner number is 9, the relationship is founded on shared service.  In this kind of relationship the people involved need each other’s emotional support and nurturing, and the relationship thrives so long as they take care of each other.

If your inner number is 11, the relationship has the characteristics of a 2 but with a dynamic element. By meeting otherwise unmet needs, the relationship enables the people involved to accomplish things otherwise out of reach; this is the classic number of a creative partnership in the arts or business.

If your inner number is 22, the relationship has the characteristics of a 4 but with an unusual emotional and spiritual depth. The emotional security and stability provided by such a relationship allows one or both partners to pursue a deep spiritual or creative life, very little of which may be visible to anyone else.

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A caution is probably worth adding at this point. Numbers are simple; relationships are complex. No pair of numbers can sum up more than a small part of what a relationship means to the people who are involved in it, and of course there’s the far from small detail that the relationship can mean one thing to one of the participants and something quite different to the other.

More generally, this is the great limitation of numerology. It’s a simple, clear, straightforward method of divination that is easy to use and easy to interpret.  Since the universe is rarely simple, clear, straightforward, or easy to interpret, there can be a distinct mismatch between the number and the reality! Numerological divination is most helpful as a quick, readily available source of guidance and intuitive insight.  It is worth learning and practicing, especially by beginners to the divinatory arts, but is best supplemented with other divination methods that can provide more nuance and detail.

In the final part of this sequence we’ll discuss some of the minor numbers that numerologists have used to add to the flexibility of the system. 

Last week we discussed the first of the three numbers that play a primary role in numerological divination: the birth number, which represents the things in yourself and your life that you can’t change. This week’s lesson in numerology focuses on the other half of the equation:  the name number, which represents the things in yourself and your life that you can change.  As the label suggests, the name number is the sum of the numerical values of the letters of your name, reduced in the usual way to a number between 1 and 9, with 11 and 22 (and possibly other doubled numbers) as special cases.

The conversion of letters to numbers is handled as shown in the table below.  This is the Pythagorean set of letter values, and it’s one of two systems in common use in modern English language numerology—the other is the Chaldean, which takes its letter values from Hebrew. If you find different values in other books or online sources, no, you’re not confused; they’re probably using the other system. This is the one that I learned and that has always worked best for me, but of course your mileage may vary.

There’s a trap here, however, for those of my readers for whom English is a second language. The table shown above only works if your language has the same letters as English. If it doesn’t, you  need to find a different table. No, I can’t point you to one, but in theory all you need to do is write out your alphabet in its normal order and assign the letters to the numbers 1-9, repeating as needed. That’s the principle on which the Pythagorean system works. If English isn’t your native language, give your own language a try and see what you get.

With that settled, let’s go on to name numbers. Which name do you use as a basis for calculating your name number?  Whichever one you usually go by. Yes, this means that if you don’t like your current nane number, you can change your name number by changing what people call you.  Let’s say that your name is John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith, and everyone knows you as John Smith. That’s 1 + 6 + 8 + 5 + 1 + 4 + 9 + 2 + 8 = 44; 4 + 4 = 8.  If you don’t like having a name number of 8, you don’t have to keep it: start going by Jacob Smith, 1 + 1 + 3 + 6 + 2 + 1 + 4 + 9 + 2 + 8 = 37 = 10 = 1, and you’ve got 1 for a name number; go by J.J. Smith and you’ve also got a 1; go by Jay Smith and you’ve got a 6; or go by J. Jingleheimer Smith if you prefer that, and you’ve got a 5. And that’s without even doing a legal name change!

Yes, I know that rationally speaking this shouldn’t have the kind of effect that numerology claims it does. Let me whisper one of life’s great secrets in your ear:  the world isn’t rational. That’s why occultism flourishes in every age and among every people:  it deals, as rationality can’t, with all the places where human reason trips and falls flat on its nose in dealing with a universe too vast and complex for our minds to process.

Take the few minutes you need to calculate your name number, taking the name you normally use as the basis for the calculation. When you’ve finished, we’ll go on.

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Got your number?  Excellent. Now we’ll discuss what it means.

As your birth number represents the lesson you came into this life to learn, your name number represents the methods and strategies you’re using to achieve it. You can use any name number to meet the challenges of any birth number, though some work together more easily than others! (To know how a name number will influence a birth number, add them together and consider what the sum means—we’ll discuss this in more detail later on, when I post about adding numbers and interpreting the results.)

The name number is also known as the number of development.  There are nine birth numbers, and also the special numbers 11 and 22. We’ll take them one at a time.

If your name number is 1, your best strategy is always to get moving, make things happen, and deal with problems as they come up. Don’t try to plan out everything in advance—that’s not your strong suit. Instead, hit the ground running, choose the best opportunity you see, and stick to that. Avoid speculative ventures or long range projects, take each day and each project as it comes, and move straight ahead to your goals.  You have the energy, courage, and ambition you need to succeed; you are likely to make plenty of money, though you also tend to spend it just as easily. Keep moving and deal with problems as soon as they come up, and you’ll be fine.

If your name number is 2, you are good at planning and you have the potential for excellent judgment, but you lack the initiative to take the lead and make things happen. You have a changeable disposition that can leave you subject to mood swings and vagaries of action, and if you let this get the better of you, you will land in trouble. Instead, focus on expressing your naturally friendly and agreeable qualities, avoid arguments, and remember that patience and careful judgment are your strengths. Choose friends and associates who can take your advice and guidance and do something with it, and beware of sentimentality, which will lead you into unhappy relationships, failure, and spitefulness.

If your name number is 3, you have the capacity to become a jack of all trades and a master of some. You tend to be impatient with things that you think are small or trivial; rein in that habit and pay attention to the subtle details, and you will achieve much. You have a gift of self-confidence that will help you, but be careful not to let it go overboard and lure you into making promises you can’t keep, or thinking you know more than everyone else! Learn to take advice from others, and focus on making the most of situations where your versatility and quick thinking can shine, and you will flourish.

If your name number is 4, you have a talent for hard work and reliability that can take you very far indeed. Your steadiness and dependability make you a valuable friend, partner, and employee. Choose your path with care, after adequate time to research and reflect, but once you’ve chosen, move steadily toward your goal and you can achieve almost anything you can imagine. You will attract friends, though you will need to be careful to avoid people who simply want to exploit your dependability for their own benefit. Remember to learn new things as you go, and don’t let yourself fall into the common 4 habit of underestimating your own capacities—you can accomplish much more than you think.

If your name number is 5, you have an independent mind and shine best when working by yourself. You find it easy to learn from experience but hard to take advice or apply the lessons of others. You will be most successful in life if you can make it an adventure, for change is essential to you and risk adds spice to your experiences. You will have to work to overcome your restless nature when steady work is required, but if you do this you will excel. You are naturally lucky, but don’t count on luck carrying you through every obstacle, because your luck is as unsteady as the rest of your life. A little ordinary caution and some practical preparations for trouble will help stave off the risks involved.

If your name number is 6, you have a gift for making people like and trust you. Follow through on the promises you make to them, respond to their trust and loyalty by being loyal to them in return, and you will attract them to whatever you do—as customers if you are in business, as students if you teach, as supporters in you go into politics, or what have you. Integrity is your great strength, while your great weakness is the temptation to take the love and loyalty of others for granted. Avoid drastic changes and radical action, remember that each day builds momentum that will pay off in the long term, and you can rise very high in the world.

If your name number is 7, you have the capacity for original thought and deep reflection. You will do best in a situation that makes use of your mind and your creative talents. Learn to plan your activities in advance and move step by step toward your goals, and always take the time to think through every important decision before you make it, and you can accomplish great things. Your great weaknesses are depression, on the one hand, and a tendency to chase impractical daydreams on the other; focus your efforts on things you can reasonably hope to accomplish, and remember that you will need help from others if you wish to achieve financial success, since you have no natural talent in that direction.

If your name number is 8, you have the capacity to achieve great things in business or in any practical field, and if you want to make money you can do so—though you will have to work at it.  This is a number of hard work and big plans, and it requires you to set realistic goals for yourself and pursue them over the long term. You will need to learn how to tell the difference between real opportunities and illusory ones, for not every door you encounter leads to success; if you learn from the experiences of others you can avoid many problems. Jealousy and self-indulgence are your great weaknesses; think big and enlarge your heart to make room for others, and you will do well.

If your name number is 9, you have the capacity for great accomplishment in at least one field of activity, but you will need to set your sights high if you are to fulfill that capacity. Drudgery and boredom are very difficult for you to tolerate. Your great weaknesses are pride and arrogance, which can lead you into self-defeating behavior. Strive to live up to high ideals and to be fair to others, and you will avoid that pitfall. This name number can lead to great success or great failure; you will need to work harder to achieve the former and avoid the latter than most people, though you can succeed if you give others the same respect you give yourself.

If your name number is 11, you have the keen judgment of a 2 combined with the capacity for decisive action. This will tend to surface spasmodically—that is, you may go for years living life as a 2, suddenly accomplish something that relies on decisive action, and then settle back to the relative calm and balance of a 2.  Choose your goals carefully, think through all the details of your plan, and be sure of your timing, and you can accomplish your goals.  Pay attention to intuition and inspiration as sources of guidance, and consider learning and practicing one or more of the occult sciences—they will benefit you.

If your name number is 22, you have the capacity to venture into unexplored fields of thought and action. As a name number, this is the mark of the eccentric and the genius, but it can also be the number of the misfit and the misunderstood failure. The patient discipline and capacity for work that characterizes the number 4 is essential, and must be cultivated in order to put your unusual talents to good use. Focus on practical results rather than airy abstractions, or you risk overvaluing your ideas and becoming one of the legions of unsuccessful cranks.

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So there you have it. Take the time to think about your name number and see how well it fits the way you habitually tend to deal, or not deal, with the events and challenges of your life. If you have the chance to work out the name number of other people you know well, do the same thing. Always remember that your name number is only one of the numbers that numerology uses to understand your life; it needs to be assessed alongside the birth number, and certain other, minor numbers to give a complete picture—and then the time number needs to be factored in to see how the number influences are working at any given point in your life. In the next installment, we’ll discuss how to use the time number to make sense of every day and every year.  

2022 is here, and since one of my resolutions for the new year is to teach more occultism. I figured I'd start things off right by showing my readers how to do a classic bit of American folk divination using numerology. As I noted in a post here a while back, numerology has a bad rap among serious occultists, but it's had a place in folk magic for a long time and my experiments with it have by and large had very favorable results. So...

The basic concept is that anything that has a number can be added up and, if necessary, the digits added together, until you get a number between 1 and 9. Since ancient times -- and I mean this quite literally; I can point you to sources from ancient Greece if you like -- each of those nine numbers has had its own rich body of symbolic meaning, and the theory is that anything that adds up to that number shares in that meaning. 

The year 2021, now mercifully past, was a 5 year -- 2 + 0 + 2 + 1 = 5. In the system of numerology I learned from my late teacher John Gilbert, 5 is ruled by Mars; it is a number of crisis and change, and a year ruled by it is marked by instability and sudden shifts.  It is a bad time to take unnecessary risks or to do anything on a whim, but a good time to take decisive action, once you've done the necessary research and know what the dangers are. 

This year, 2022, is a 6 year -- 2 + 0 + 2 + 2 = 6. In that same system of numerology, 6 is ruled by Jupiter, and it's a number of harmony and peace. It's a favorable time for ease and comfort, for settling disputes amicably, for following precedents and using established approaches. It's a bad time for conflict, which will prove ruinous for those who start it, and unfavorable for direct action, sudden changes, or new beginnings. Slow and easy is the motto of a 6 year. 

That's what numerology predicts for the world as a whole this year. Does that apply to your individual life? Nope. For that, you need your time number, which is calculated by adding together your birth and name numbers. You calculate your birth number by adding together the day, month, and year of your birth -- for example, a child born today, 1/1/2022, would have a birth number of 1 + 1 + 2 + 0 + 2 + 2 = 8. 

The name number is a little more complicated. Each letter of the ordinary English alphabet has a number, as shown in the table on the right. You add up the numerical values of the letters of your name to get your name number. Which name?  The one you usually use. If your legal name's John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith, for example, and you go by "Jay Smith" in ordinary life, then Jay Smith -- 1 + 1 + 7 + 1 + 4 + 9 + 2 + 8 -- is the name you use; that sums to 33, and you add the digits together: 3 + 3 = 6.  So if Jay was born today, he'd add his name number of 6 to his birth number 8, resulting in a time number of 5 (6 + 8 = 14;  1 + 4 = 5).

You add the time number to the number of the year to get your personal year number, the number that tells you what kind of year it will be for you. Jay's looking at a 2 year -- 5 + 6 = 11, 1 + 1 = 2. (The numbers 11 and 22 can have special meanings in certain contexts, but we'll leave those aside for now.) 

For those of you who've done the math, here's a brief summary of what the year numbers mean: 

1. Ruled by the Sun, this is a number of new beginnings and opportunity. This is a time of practical action and constructive change.  It's a good time to take direct action and to start new things in motion, so long as they aren't complex or evasive. Move ahead forcefully during this year.

2. Ruled by the Moon, this is a number of ups and downs, ebb and flow, and variability. This is a time of variable outcomes and of indecision, and is unfortunate for action. Spend the year weighing possibilities and researching options rather than trying to make things happen. 

3. Ruled by Mercury, this is a number of complications, minor changes, and many things to do. Plenty of opportunities and challenges can be expected. Stay nimble and you can manage them all. Cooperation rather than conflict is highlighted. 

4. Ruled by Venus, this is a number of stability and steadiness, but also of being stuck in one place. It is favorable for hard work and patience and is beneficial for small things, but trying to push events to a conclusion will have bad results. If you can, stay quiet and avoid trouble.

(5 and 6 have been described above.)

7. Ruled by Saturn, this is a number of contemplation and mystery. Things get weird during a 7 year as factors you don't yet know about take charge. It is favorable for study and preparation. Avoid depressing thoughts, as it will be easy to be dragged down by them. 

8. Ruled by Uranus, this is a number of material success and practical effort. Sustained effort this year brings substantial rewards. Focus on the big picture rather than the little details, and work on finishing up projects already begun. 

9. Ruled by Neptune, this is a number of completion and karma. The cycle that began with 1 ends this year, for good or ill; your actions in previous years will determine how this one turns out. If you don't like the outcome, learn from your mistakes and prepare to try again. 

So there you are. The same system, by the way, can be used for daily divination:  simply add your personal time number to the numbers of the day, month, and year, and replace "year" with "day" in the descriptions of the numbers. Have at it -- and have fun. 

 One of my commenters on the blog asked me a little while back for advice on learning how to read Tarot cards. It's a question I field fairly often, and it has a fairly straightforward answer. 

There are tens of thousands of books out there on the Tarot, and at least as many on other systems of what is technically known as sortilege -- the kind of divination that involves pulling one or more symbols out of a preexisting set (say, a Tarot deck, or a set of runes, or a set of Coelbren letters, or what have you). Sortilege isn't the only kind of divination out there, but it's far and away the most popular, and it's also easier to learn than most of the others. 

There are also many different ways to learn to read Tarot, or any other method of sortilege. The following is the way I do it. I've learned something like twenty different sortilege systems over the years, starting with Tarot and going on into some fairly odd corners of occult tradition. I don't recommend books for beginners, though those can be useful later on. Here's what you do:

1. Pick a Tarot deck (or what have you) that appeals to you. You'll get better results with a deck if you like the art and find the symbolism interesting to look at. 

2. Go through it slowly, card by card, looking at every image. Then read the LWB ("little white booklet") that comes with it. 

3. Every day thereafter, take one of the cards -- do them in order so you get every card -- and just look at it for some minutes. Notice how the imagery makes you feel, what it reminds you of, what thoughts it wakens in you. Then read the section of the LWB on that card, and think about how the meanings listed there (both upright and reversed) relate to the imagery. Then look at the card for another minute or so before putting it away. This is Part One of your daily divination practice. 

4. Part Two is to cast a simple reading every day. The one I recommend is three cards laid side by side. The first represents you; the second represents the situation; the third represents the outcome. Shuffle the cards, ask them "What do I need to understand about today's events?" and then shuffle them again, cut, and deal out three cards. Again, look at the cards, and see what reactions they awaken in you; then look up their meanings and think about those; then try to tell a very simple story in which the cards provide the plot and your life provides the characters and the setting. 

Write down your interpretation. Of course it's going to be wrong at first; don't worry about that. Just write it down, then shuffle the cards, put them away, and go do something else. 

5. The next day, go back to your reading, compare it to the events of the day, and see if you can figure out what the cards were trying to tell you. This is Part Three of your daily divination practice. You probably won't figure it out at first, but give it time, and remember that the LWB is not a set of stone tablets handed down from On High. If you review your readings every day once the facts are in, you'll begin to figure out what the cards mean to you, which is after all what matters, and then you'll begin to interpret them better the first time. 

That's it. It's probably going to take you several months to get to the point that you understand what the cards are trying to say to you, but it's going to take you that long no matter what you do, so you might as well buckle down and do it. 

Two additional comments that I've found it necessary to make over and over again to students: 

First, as noted above, the LWB is not a set of stone tablets handed down from On High. It's just one person's attempt to summarize what the cards tend to say to that one person. The single most common cause of failure in learning to divine, in my repeated experience, can be summed up in the words "But that's not what the LWB says!" The LWB is a springboard; if you cling to the springboard while trying to dive off it, you're going to end up going nowhere. The important thing is to try to figure out what the cards mean to you, and that need not have much at all in common with what they mean to someone else. When you cast a reading, let your intuition take over; when you try to figure out what the reading meant the next day, approach each card with the thought that it must refer to something you experienced, and pay attention to any connection that comes to mind, no matter how far-fetched. It may not turn out to be far-fetched at all. 

Second, nothing in any reading is as dire as you think it is. Again, nothing in any reading is as dire as you think it is. And one more time, NOTHING IN ANY READING IS AS DIRE AS YOU THINK IT IS.  Seriously. Every beginning Tarot reader I've ever met, myself included, started out reading each card in its most over-the-top sense, and learned through experience (and more than occasional embarrassment) to tone things down to the point that they make sense. OMG, here's the card named Death! (It means that something's going to change in a way that doesn't permit going back to the previous state.) OMG, here's the Ten of Swords! (It means that something is over and done with.) OMG, here's -- well, you get the picture. Over-the-top Tarot reading is a reliable source of drama for those who enjoy being emotionally overwrought, but I can't think of any other use for it, and it reliably yields inaccurate readings. 

So there you have it. The daily practice of divination is one of the three foundations of occult training as I understand it and teach it -- the other two being the daily practice of a basic banishing ritual, and the daily practice of discursive meditation. Five minutes of ritual, fifteen minutes of meditation, and ten minutes casting and interpreting a reading -- that's just half an hour a day, and it will open portal after portal for you.