The Power of the Tarot Aces

I have a huge affection and affinity for the four Aces of the Minor Arcana. Within these cards I find power and magick, and many opportunities for truth-telling.

Typically, in a reading we can see each Ace as a new beginning. The sort of new beginning is determined by the suit.

For example, the Ace of Pentacles might be a new job, or new money, or a new way to care for your health, such as a new diet.

The Ace of Swords might be a new idea, a new understanding, new information, new technology or a new sort of communication.

The Ace of Wands might be a new creative project, a new passion or a new energy or sense of vitality.

The Ace of Cups might be a new relationship or a new connection within a relationship.

Yet, there is so much more to be found in these four cards. Not only do they each speak of a new gift, or a new journey, they also speak of untapped potential. Each Ace can be like a seed waiting to sprout, or an egg waiting to hatch. Within these cards we can see the incubation, as well as the beginning.

Each of the Aces can also speak to a need to find the source, or the essence of something. Sometimes a journey leads us back to the root. In these cases, the Aces can each be the goal of a journey, or the successful end of a journey.

The power of each Ace is to hold the essence of their element. The Aces can tell us where we are going, they can urge us forward, and they can help us keep our goals firmly in mind.

The Aces can also tell us what we need to nurture in order to get to where we are going.

The Aces are the Four Tools of Magick. We can use them to invoke their elements and to create sacred space.

The Aces correspond with our chakras. We can use them in chakra healing and activation.

The Aces are archetypes. The Ace of Cups is the Holy Grail, while the Ace of Swords is Excalibur.

The Ace of Wands is the priapic symbol of life waiting to happen. The Ace of Pentacles is the Earth Mother herself.

It is easy to dismiss the Aces simply as the energy of new beginnings. They are that, and so much more.

There are many tarotists who find similarities between the Aces and the Pages. Some even have a hard time finding the differences between the Aces and Pages of each suit. I think when we fail to find those distinctions, we do a disservice to ourselves.

Both Aces and Pages strongly hold the energy of their element. Both Aces and Pages can speak of something new or young. But, to me, that is where the similarities end.

Pages are about youth, learning, and communication. Aces are about initiation, essence, and source.

We can also see a correlation between Aces and Tens, since they are numerologically the same. We might see the Aces as the beginning of the journey, and Tens as the end. Yet, we could also reverse that and see the Tens as the situation we find ourselves in when the story begins, and Aces and the solution to which we eventually arrive.

I often like to see the Tens as the higher octave, or next level, of the Aces.

It is always a good exercise to find more connection, information, and power within individual cards and sets of cards. This is especially true when we believe we know the cards well. I think the Aces are especially important to explore because their simplicity can cause us to miss their depth if we don’t take the time to look.

It Is Okay to Feel What You Feel

Have you ever felt shame for your feelings?

Something I often hear at the tarot table is this. “I know I shouldn’t feel that way, but I do”.

Sometimes the cards indicate feelings that clients are uncomfortable acknowledging.

They might be experiencing something that we see as ‘low vibrational’ or even unhealthy, like jealousy, fear, or rage.

Recently I have noticed a trend toward shaming people for their feelings. There is a term for this; ‘toxic positivity’.

Toxic positivity has always been around. I remember in my days of following the Grateful Dead from city to city many of my fellow Deadheads feared and avoided ‘bad vibes’. When I was raising my kids, I knew other parents who demanded happiness from their children, no matter what their children were actually experiencing.

The increased popularity of the Law of Attraction has led to a great deal of misunderstanding.

It’s true that our thoughts and words have power. It’s true that if we constantly say and think negative things, we are more likely to manifest negative things, or to be unable to manifest the things we desire.

The reverse is true, too. The more that we can visualize what we want, and recognize our ability to have what we want, the more likely we are to manifest it.

All of this is true, but it sometimes leads to a faulty leap of logic. People come to believe that it is wrong, unlucky, or destructive to feel sadness, grief, anger, or any other type of upset.

The problem with that is that we, as humans, are designed to experience a range of emotions. When we acknowledge uncomfortable feelings, we take the first step toward healing and transformation.

If we feel shame around acknowledging what we are feeling in the moment, we have no opportunity to heal.

It is incredibly hurtful to stay stuck in grief, sadness, fear, or anger. It is completely normal and healthy to feel those things from time to time.

Tarot has an amazing knack for showing us our feelings, especially the feelings we don’t want to acknowledge. Even better, tarot can help us find ways to hold space for our grief, and then, eventually, change our narrative and move on.

When we do this, we end up stronger and better than we were before.

If the only feelings we want to acknowledge and experience in life are ‘positive vibes’, we will end up shallow and filled with denial.

Hurt is always an opportunity for healing. Taking time and holding space for hurt and grief will not manifest more hurt and grief. In fact, the opposite is true.

Those who call themselves spiritual leaders and teachers yet cannot handle their own feelings, or the feelings of their clients, often do more harm than good. Those who shame others for harboring negativity, living in fear, or hanging on to anger are often guilty of doing the same.

We are spiritual beings having a human experience. To do that well, we must allow ourselves to be fully human.

To approach the goal of being fully healed humans, we must use our uncomfortable feelings as the impetus for personal healing and transformation. Acknowledgement and acceptance of those feelings is always the first step. Tarot can be a tool that helps us do that.

How Tarot Helps When We are Suffering

Suffering is part of the human condition. Most spiritual thought and psychological study, is, in great part, an effort to understand and ease suffering. As a professional tarot reader, I often feel that my job is to help clients identify, understand and mitigate the things that cause them unnecessary suffering, and to help the manage the suffering that cannot be avoided.

While our current pandemic has sharpened everyone’s focus on the many problems we face, there were certainly problems before the pandemic, and there will be problems even once our current crisis is solved.

I have always been interested in the concept of suffering. I remember as a child asking my father, a Methodist minister, why God allowed people, or perhaps caused people, to suffer.

In college, I was fascinated with a book that was required reading in my psych 101 class, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. You are probably familiar with his premise, that we can tolerate a great deal of suffering, as long as we can find meaning in that suffering.

Often, I find that a purpose of tarot reading is to find meaning in difficulty. The process of divination with tarot lends itself well to discovering these sorts of insights.

When we study tarot, we realize that tarot study is not simply memorizing seventy-eight cards. Tarot study introduces us to the archetypes of tarot. That is, the characters, themes, lessons and experience that are common to all and understood by all.

As we learn these archetypes, and find that commonality of experience, we learn spiritual lessons to help us on our own journey through life. Over the past fifty years this process has come to be known as ‘The Fool’s Journey’.

Each Major Arcana card has a lesson to teach us about how to live life, find our balance, and journey toward our spiritual enlightenment. What is interesting is that none of these Major Arcana cards address suffering specifically, although all people suffer. While the Major Arcana cards address a host of issues, including things such as oppression, addiction, fairness, closure, patience, wisdom, compassion, mastery, responsibility, loneliness, self-awareness, education, meditation, and change, there is no Major Arcana card that is specifically and exclusively about suffering.

I think there is a lesson in that. Suffering is not the event, or the situation, but a reaction to the event or situation. The Hermit may speak of our loneliness, but whether we are suffering in our loneliness or handling it with patience is up to us. The Tower may reflect an uncomfortable occurrence, but how much we suffer with the Tower will depend largely on us.

In the Minor Arcana there are certainly cards that can speak of suffering. The Three, Eight, Nine and Ten of Swords, for example, or the Five of Pentacles or Nine of Wands, can all depict suffering.

Sometimes, in a reading, acknowledgement of our discomfort and misery is helpful. Sometimes holding space for our struggle is an important part of our healing.

We see that tarot divination can help us find meaning in our suffering, can help us find our place on our journey toward enlightenment, and can help us acknowledge our suffering. Divination can also help us find solutions for our suffering that are both practical and spiritual.

Tarot can also help us see the suffering of others.

I often think that the world divides itself into two types of people. There are those who have suffered and therefore want others to suffer as well. There are those who have suffered and want to help others avoid those same difficulties. The lessons of tarot that we learn in tarot study and find in tarot divination tend to steer us toward a path of compassion. In this way, tarot helps us heal ourselves, and each other.

Suffering is part of human existence. Tarot helps us understand our suffering, manage our suffering, heal our suffering, and learn from our suffering.

Tarot makes us aware of the suffering of others, and often holds us accountable to act with compassion toward others.

How Did This Show Up in the Cards?

How Did This Show Up in the Cards?

Part of the process of reading predictive tarot for yourself is retrospective. Sometimes it feels like the cards try hard to tell us something that we can’t quite see. Then, an event occurs that causes us to say, “Oh! That is what this card has been trying to tell me.”

A great example of that was my mother’s cancer diagnosis and death. In the months before the phone call that changed my life, I had been stalked by the Six of Cups. It was not until my husband and son and I moved to my family homestead to care for my mother, and ultimately inherited that historic house, that I understood the poignant message of the Six of Cups.

One might wonder, then, the value of predictive self-reading if we can’t always see what the prediction is until it has already come to pass. Actually, there is great value there. The Six of Cups served as a beacon for me during that difficult transition. The Six of Cups told me that it was correct to upend my business, my life, and my family to make this out-of-state move to try to help my mother and manage her affairs after her passing. The Six of Cups told me that my mother’s passing was inevitable; one of those things that is ‘written’, rather than something I could have changed. I found immeasurable comfort in that.

We professional readers can often see societal trends in the cards of our clients. I wrote about this last year in a blogpost entitled What Tarot Readers See About the World.

The question is, how did a worldwide pandemic show up in the cards? I am encouraged that, in the past few months, I haven’t seen a slew of doom and gloom, financially or health-wise. Yet, when I think about it, I did see a lot of cancelled trips (Chariot reversed). I did see job changes (Ace of Pentacles reversed, Three of Pentacles reversed). I did tell a lot of people to be careful about their health. I told folks that they would be teaching classes online. I told folks that they would be spending more time with their kids.

In retrospect, the two cards that have been presenting a lot more often than usual are the Hermit and the World. Now, that makes a lot of sense.

Another card I see quite often these days is the Seven of Swords. This card appears to describe those who are cavalier in their approach to social distancing. In some cases the Seven of Swords appears to describe the virus itself as the unseen enemy lurking.

At the beginning of 2020 I did a reading for the year and shared it in a blogpost. The questions I asked were about the thing that was bothering me most at the time; the great polarization and division between Americans.

Now that we are in an unprecedented world event, I thought it would be interesting to go back and look at the cards that appeared, and to see if there was any foreshadowing of this great crisis, or any wisdom we might derive from those cards.

I had asked three questions and pulled three cards in answer to each. The final question was about where we would be at the end of 2020. Would we still be a divided nation? The cards that came up were the Hierophant reversed, the Fool, the Wheel of Fortune Reversed.

Knowing what we now know, these cards take on a new meaning for me. The Hierophant reversed could be about eschewing science and good medical advice, as well as the high price our medical workers are paying in the pandemic. It could also show an end to business-as-usual at the highest levels of government. The Wheel of Fortune reversed could speak of this difficult cycle we have found ourselves in, and the many people who are suffering. The Fool could speak of our naïve ways of handling this crisis. Yet, the Fool also offers the hope of a new beginning, and a new journey at the end of the crisis.

Every tarot reader works in their own way, as does every intuitive. I think for a lot of us it is hard to interpret things that are unthinkable. Now, global pandemics are suddenly a reality that will always stay fixed in our mindset. In the future, when this nightmare is over, if I see the World and the Hermit together repeatedly, I will wonder if another pandemic, or other global event, is on its way.

The hopeful news is that as I continue to read for people, positive things appear in everyone’s cards. I see business, I see relationships, I see weddings, I even see travel. Within the cards of each person it is clear that the world is not ending, it is simply on pause.

Another way that predictive self-reading is helpful is this. Once we are in a situation, we can find wisdom on how it might evolve, and what might happen next.

Of course, the one thing we all want to know is how long this crisis will last. Timing is often one of the hardest things to figure. In this case, when this ends will depend so much on what people do right now. Yet, I still feel compelled to ask the cards some questions.

What do I personally need to know about this pandemic?

Hermit reversed, Ten of Wands reversed, Page of Wands

Well, that’s pretty clear. My job is to continue to do what I am doing. I must continue giving readings and encouraging our community with live broadcasts and online classes.

When will this crisis be over?

Ten of Cups, Six of Cups, Queen of Cups

That is certainly hopeful, and to me suggests a return to some kind of normalcy somewhere between June and October.

These three cards offer the sort of comfort and hope that reminds me how helpful tarot can be.

Sometimes the cards give us a full picture of what to expect. Sometimes the cards give us only clues. I have to trust that in every case what we see is what we need to see.

When we look back, old readings are often able to offer new insight. This is why keeping a record of the cards we pull can be so enlightening. Whether we are looking to the future or the past, tarot helps us understand the now.

These days, we are more in need of understanding than perhaps every before. I have been a tarotist for thirty years. Yet, tarot never ceases to amaze me with its ability to comfort, to inform, and to offer wisdom and insight when we need it most.

How Tarot is Helping a Person with Aphasia

I didn’t know the word ‘aphasia’ or what it meant until a dear long-time client was diagnosed with PPA a couple of years ago. I am writing this with her permission. I won’t give any identifying details.

It seems important to share this story for three reasons. I want to highlight tarot’s phenomenal abilities to be the tool we need, even under difficult circumstances. I want to share the tarot-teaching techniques that are working in this situation. I want to encourage tarot teachers to embrace sharing tarot with students who struggle with speech and language difficulties, dementia, or other neurological issues.

I will call my client ‘Jenny’. I’ve been conducting tarot readings for Jenny by phone for almost a decade now. I’ve only met her in person twice, when she happened to be visiting my area. On the first visit we did a reading. The second visit, just a month ago, I spent the day with her at her request, teaching her tarot. We have had two further tarot lessons by phone since then.

Jenny is a smart, active, dynamic woman. She was a life-long educator, and a leader in many community organizations. She travels the world, and always thinks to send me a present from wherever she visits.

Just as Jenny was planning her retirement, she received a startling diagnosis. Jenny has primary progressive aphasia, a form of dementia which is slowly robbing her of her speech and language abilities.

Jenny and I do short readings on a monthly basis. She calls it her ‘weather report’. As she was dealing with her diagnosis, her cards said that when a door closes a window will open. For Jenny, the opening window would be her intuition. What she would lose in human communication she would gain in communication with Spirit.

Over the past couple of years since her diagnosis Jenny has maintained an active lifestyle and is amazing her therapists with how well she is doing, despite the fact that her PPA is advancing. I can see evidence of its advance. I can also see evidence of how Jenny’s spiritual strength shines through. When she stumbles for a word and then finds it, she says, “Thank you, word, for being there for me”. When she can’t find a word she waits patiently, and one or the other of us figures it out.

When Jenny told me she was serious about learning tarot, I wondered how the aphasia would affect her ability to work with the cards, and my ability to teach. We both felt that tarot would be good for her. Yet, I harbored some misgivings. I knew I wouldn’t be able to teach her the way I would have prior to this cruel disease.

It was silly for me to doubt tarot’s ability to make itself understood to each person in accordance with their needs and abilities. All I had to do was be less didactic and more intuitive!

Years ago, Jenny, no doubt, could have become a truly talented professional tarot reader. Today, that is not what she needs to do. Tarot is versatile in its uses and has this amazing way of being the tool we need at the time, if only we will let it.

Today Jenny uses tarot to help her communicate with Spirit, and to help her with her language skills. They say a picture is worth a thousand words; that Jenny can use a picture to replace missing words helps her stay grounded and find her words. She tells me that pulling a card a day helps her focus on the positive things in her life. She also uses cards to create prayers and chants.

Sharing tarot with Jenny has taught me a lot, too. As a tarot teacher I tend to stress certain knowledge, traditions and practices. None of those things are important in this situation. What feels important is that this tool be accessible and useful to Jenny. Seeing how much tarot is helping her fills me with delight.

If you have the opportunity to teach tarot to a person with aphasia, or other neurological issues, don’t focus on what the student can’t do, focus on what they can do. Allow intuition, rather than structure and lesson plans, to guide your teaching.

Jenny has done very well staying focused on the Major Arcana only, although I have given her an overview of each of the seventy-eight cards. Usually I give a student a week or two to work with the Majors only, then I add the Minors in right away. In our last session we pulled cards to determine whether she should continue to work just with the Majors for a while. The answer was clear. The twenty-two keys are working well for her, and she is still absorbing their wisdom.

I have taught her the Majors as spiritual lessons. She embraces these lessons eagerly. Yet, she also sees herself and her situations in the cards. In our last lesson, she pulled the Magician and Justice. She saw herself as the Magician, and Justice as the fact that she is working with attorneys to correct a legal situation within her family. The cards helped her describe what was going on in a way that seemed much clearer than she might otherwise have been able to express. The cards, wonderful story-telling devices that they are, are helping Jenny retain her ability to talk about her life.

When it is time to add in the Minors, I will not add the entire Minor Arcana at once. I may add the Aces and Twos only, for example, let her get used to that, and proceed in that fashion.

Another difference in the way I am working with Jenny is that, after our first introduction to the cards, I am not asking her to study the cards in numeric order. Rather, I ask her to pull some cards at random for us to study. Then, I ask her to tell me which cards she has questions about.

I’ve given Jenny charts with keywords and interpretations which she relies on. I have not asked her to memorize the cards. Yet, she is able to look at the cards and the charts, and from there she can extrapolate a reading even better than many neurologically well students do.

Tarot is helping Jenny keep her language, stay positive as she battles her disease, and stay connected to Spirit.