Divination on the Sixteenth Day of Halloween...

After throwing a fancy Halloween party on Friday and hosting a plethora of lovely people from A Fanciful Twist's Party Saturday, I decided to kick back with a bottle of red wine and my Heart of Faery Oracle Deck and do some divination.

I poured a glass, sipped a bit and shuffled the deck. I didn't focus on any question in particular I just asked to be shown a focal point in the form of a three card spread. What turned up was interesting...

I had intended on it being a past, present and future spread but looking at it originally, it didn't seem to fit that pattern. The fact that two queens showed up in the reading seemed of significant importance. I left the cards on the table and went off to get some dark chocolate to enjoy with my wine while I pondered. However, when I came back something jumped out at me. There was no past, present, future theme. The cards in the first and third position were showing me the two sides of myself who have been feeling a bit neglected and out of balance with each other as of late while the central card was showing me the outcome of realigning and acknowledging them.

The Faery of Naughtiness represents my spontaneous, mischievous inner child. She likes to play and have fun and doesn't take anything including work, life or light hearted pranks, too seriously. She is my light, a source of joy and never becomes fixated on one thing for terribly too long. The Queen of Night however, is the darker more adult aspect of myself. She is a passionate, sensual woman who yearns for success and desires to fulfill her dreams, occasionally to an obsessive degree. She is often inspired but can be quite serious, even melancholy at times and can lead down a path to ruin if you let these aspects of her take over.

Between the two, the Queen of Day sits calmly. She declares that should I learn to acknowledge, accept and balance these two I can be more at peace than I have been in some time. She warns that excess of either aspect can lead to disappointment; an inspired painting that I work on in frenzy once finished may be an abject failure, too much play can lead to the forgetting of important daily matters. To have these women within me is a blessing for while one should not be serious all of the time, one cannot lose themselves in constant play either.

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I've only recently begun to work with cards of any sort again after nearly ten years of neglecting my first deck, the Universal Waite. I was given this deck at 14 and memorized the little white book as I thought this was the way to go about doing it. After a few years of getting garbled readings that meant nothing to me, I put the cards away in frustration.

Almost a decade later I found myself yearning to read them, but again, the Universal Waite refused to speak to me. My goal in picking the cards back up is to get away from the memorization of the little white books and learn to read intuitively. As I've had a very hard time connecting with much of the imagery of the Universal Waite I went off to find a deck that spoke to me. Over the past year, I've come into possession of the Housewives Tarot and the Paulina Tarot. I've had greater success connecting with the Paulina Tarot than the other two decks. The imagery is absolutely stunning and her figures are very emotional. I'm still learning the basic symbolic meanings of some of the images found in various tarot decks, so some cards are more difficult for me to read than others, but I know that once I've gotten the symbols down, the Paulina Deck and I will be very close.

While tarot still tricks and eludes me to a degree, I've had great successes with intuitive readings through the Heart of Faery Oracle deck, which I came across quite by accident while I was perusing the book store nearly two months ago. I was wandering in search of the mythology section, sipping a comforting pumpkin spice latte after a particularly awful morning, and passed by an end cap. Something caught me out of the corner of my eye and caused me to turn around to check out the display. Amongst the books of love spells and other things I never usually glance twice at sat a huge box with a regal woman on it. I recognized the art as Brian Froud's immediately and picked it up, not intending to purchase it. I never made it to the mythology section that day and instead headed home with my new deck of cards. The fae are funny like that, causing you to do things you never intended to do.

I find that I have a difficult time practicing with my decks because I rarely have anything specific I feel the need to ask them. This causes me to lack focus and my typical tarot readings to come out extremely scattered. With the Faery Oracle however, I've found that I need not focus on anything in particular, I just shuffle and ask them to tell me something. The readings I've done with them have occasionally come out as riddles that need to be solved, or less than a soft blow, but have always been honest. I really enjoy working with them and they have re opened the door to belief in the wee folk that I had left behind when I 'grew up' so to speak.

Now that I've rambled quite long enough, here are some questions I'd like to put to all of you lovelies. Do you read cards? If so, how did you go about learning? Do you read intuitively or by the book? Which decks do you use and what sort of successes have you had with them?

Feel free to post in the comments or on your own blog. If you post in your own space, be sure to let me know so I can stop by for a visit!

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Here are links to the folks who expanded on and shared the discussion in their own blogs:
My history with tarot at the Deepest Well
Tuesday Talk at Kally's Cauldron
A little about me and divintion at Witchy Gumbo