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Christiana Gaudet 6/18/19 Christiana Gaudet 6/18/19

Superstition Doesn’t Mix Well with Tarot

The more superstitious we are, the less spiritual we are.

I am not a superstitious person, though I have fun with the traditions of some superstitions. I will throw salt over my left shoulder if I spill it, and I announce that a man is coming to dinner if I drop a knife. Yet, I don’t worry about bad luck should I forget to throw the salt. Nor do I set an extra place for a stranger at dinner.

Some people think it is strange that I am a full-time professional tarot reader and not superstitious. To me, it makes perfect sense. Tarot is a proven tool, when used appropriately. Superstitions, when taken seriously, seems to be borne of fear and idiocy, and seem to increase and create both.

Superstitious people who use tarot rarely gain the many benefits tarot has to offer because they are too busy ascribing supernatural attributes to cardboard rather than using the cards to find the magic within themselves.

This is a difficult distinction for a couple of reasons. Tarot does seem to operate magically. The cards can speak truth in uncanny ways. The tarot images feel sacred to us. It is both easy and appropriate to revere tarot as one might revere a sacred text like the Bible.

I believe that tarot works well because it works with the third eye, or brow chakra, by stimulating our eyesight when we see the cards, and then stimulating our imagination and intuition. Vision, imagination and intuition are all seated in the brow chakra. These things work together to help us create a tarot reading.

No one really knows for sure why random token divination of any kind works as well as it does. People have ascribed all kinds of theories to it, understandably. The Golden Dawn felt that the angel Hru presides over tarot. Many of us feel that spirits speak to us through tarot. Still others feel that the power that makes the tarot work resides within the cards themselves. There is nothing wrong with any of those theories, until we start to use those theories to absolve ourselves of our own responsibilities as diviners.

When we start to feel that we are getting bad readings because our decks are angry at us, we step into superstition and step away from real spiritual practice. When we blame a deck for a faulty reading rather than looking at our own mistakes in interpretation, we are as bad as any fundamentalist in any religion. When we use the practice of a “deck interview” to decide how we will work with a deck rather than deciding to learn the deck and try actual readings with it we are artificially limiting the deck and ourselves.

When we are receiving cards that don’t make sense, it is our job to study until they do make sense. When we blame those nonsensical cards on the deck itself, we have lost the opportunity to learn and grow, as tarotists and as people.

Whatever rituals we use to honor our deck and keep it holy, we are remiss if those rituals don’t include our own study, our own psychic development and our own meditation.

When we rely on our superstitions about tarot to provide the parameters of our tarot practice, our tarot practice will always be limited by those superstitions, and by the lack of scholarship they allow us.

Christiana Gaudet 6/4/19 Christiana Gaudet 6/4/19

Dear Tarot Student: Don’t Try to Be Good at Tarot

The point of studying tarot is personal growth.

So often new and intermediate tarot students tell me they worry that they aren’t any good at tarot. I tell them they are missing the point.

It is true that at a particular level of tarot study and practice we want to tap into intuitive and interpretive talent. It’s also true that at the professional level you need to be good or go home.

Yet, I firmly believe that the study of tarot is beneficial to everyone. When I was a child in Sunday School we didn’t worry if we were good at Bible study. We learned the parables and discussed their meanings, and from that we grew. Tarot is the same way.

When we study tarot, the focus on card memorization can be daunting and discouraging. Some tarotists never memorize keywords, classic interpretations or archetypes. Gifted professional intuitives often use tarot as a prop, or as a focal point for inspiration, without ever knowing any traditions of tarot interpretation. I believe they aren’t technically tarot readers and are missing the wisdom of the tarot, but they get the job done.

Some students enjoy flashcard-style memorization and have a knack for it. Others don’t. Yet, tarot study doesn’t have to include a focus on tarot memorization, and, for many of us, probably shouldn’t.

Tarot study has a personal and spiritual value above and beyond building our skill at reading for others or predicting the future.

Each tarot card teaches a spiritual lesson. When we study tarot, those lessons inform our lives and hasten our healing. As a result of that process, we learn the meanings of the cards without really trying.

If you are frustrated with your tarot practice, you may be trying too hard to divine, and not hard enough to learn the lessons of the cards. If you are too focused on memorization without understanding the lessons and applying those lessons to your life, you are missing the point entirely.

In the beginning of your tarot practice, worry less about whether you are good at tarot, and worry more about discovering how tarot is good for you.

Christiana Gaudet 12/16/14 Christiana Gaudet 12/16/14

How to Discover your Inner Tarot Reader: An Eight-Point Guide

What is a tarot reading? Is it simply the process of interpreting some cards pulled at random?
Yes and no.
Any tarotist, and any tarot client, will tell that that something special happens in a good tarot reading; something beyond the recitation of standard card interpretation. A tarot reading is a process during which information is received, connections are made, truth is heard and inspiration happens.

A tarot reading is a separate thing from both the tarot cards and the tarot reader. A tarot reading has a life of its own.

The question is, how can you make this process, the process of tarot reading, happen? Of course you must study, and learn your cards. But you also have to practice actually giving readings. And, if you wait until you really feel like you know your cards inside out you’ll wait forever. You have to jump in and start using your cards. Here are some of the important points you’ll want to consider as you discover your inner tarot reader.

Point 1. Understand this important truth. There is no one right way to perform a tarot reading. It’s good to try different techniques, and even to invent techniques.

Point 2. How much tarot knowledge you may have is not as important as your ability to tap in to your intuition and to be an open channel. When you go to your cards it should be second nature to breathe, focus, ground, center, pray, create sacred space, invoke elements and entities, meditate, or do whatever works for you to make sure that you are in the proper space to give a reading.

Point 3. How you begin your reading is up to you. You can ask a question, or start with an overview. You can lay out cards in a spread, with designated positional meanings, or a pattern with no specific positional meanings.

Point 4. How you interpret the cards is up to you. The techniques you can use range from classic interpretations to allowing yourself to intuit your reading based on what you see in the images and how they make you feel.

Point 6. There are correlations between tarot and astrology, numerology, Kabballah, the Four Elements, and other esoteric and philosophical systems. You can use any of these you want in your interpretations, or none at all.

Point 7. However you arrive at your card interpretations, you must interpret the cards based on the position in a positional spread, the question, if indeed a question was asked, and the surrounding cards. These contextual concerns are what makes the ultimate difference between a reading that feels personal, specific and on-point, and a reading that feels general and uninspired.

Point 8. Keep your personal opinions out of the mix. This can be difficult. You will form opinions based on what you see in the cards – that’s the point. But you will probably have other opinions too, based on your own personal experience. No matter what the subject matter, interpret the cards and give the reading. Leave your soap box at home.

When you enter into the process of tarot reading, you will tap in to internal resources you didn’t even know you had. When you find your inner tarot reader, you will also find your inner confidence, creativity and spiritual connection.

As you can see, there is no one right way to do a tarot reading. However, you must have a sense of what techniques work for you, and how you, personally, perform your best readings. Practice, study and innovation are all important parts of learning to give a great tarot reading!

If you are truly interested in being the best reader you can be, make sure you check out my upcoming premium webinar, Sharing Wisdom – Reading for Others!

Christiana Gaudet 12/2/14 Christiana Gaudet 12/2/14

Stop Fixing the Hierophant!

Modern tarot creators enjoy stretching tarot to fit every possible theme and worldview. That’s a good thing. Tarot’s ability to speak universally, using the imagery of so many cultures, is part of its awesome power.

I believe it is the strength and power of the tarot archetypes that allow tarot this much flexibility. Unfortunately, it is possible to stretch a card so far beyond its archetype that you lose the archetype entirely.

We are all aware of the trend to rename some of the more difficult Major Arcana cards. Death becomes Transition; the Devil becomes Materialism, and so on. We often discuss this trend in terms of the dark cards, the Tower, the Devil and Death.

Another Major Arcana card that often receives this same treatment at the hands of deck creators is the Hierophant. Weirdly, there is generally very little protest when a well-intentioned modern deck mangles this particular archetype.

I think deck creators’ tendency to mangle the Hierophant, and our tendency to put up with it, comes from two factors. First is the way most tarotists seem to feel about Hierophant energy. We don’t like rules and structure. We fear the religious hierophants in our own community who discriminate against us and disrespect us. Of course, we don’t want any of them in our tarot decks!

The second factor is that we seem to lack a basic understanding of the Hierophant. Because we don’t understand him, we don’t see his value along the Fool’s Journey.

I can think of three well-loved tarot decks that, in my opinion, really get the Hierophant wrong.

The first and oldest is Motherpeace, my second-ever tarot deck. In Motherpeace, the Hierophant is a man wearing false breasts, pretending to be a woman. Clearly, sensitivity toward the transgender community was not on the minds of these deck designers when they were creating the then-definitive feminist tarot of the 1980s.

The idea behind this vision of the Hierophant is that the matriarchy is the keeper of true spiritual authority. By pretending to be a woman, the Hierophant is trying to claim an authority that is not his. Trust me, this played better in the 1980s than it does now.

Modern spiritual decks with Pagan and New Age themes often try to “fix” the Hierophant. Tarot of Transformation renamed him “Spiritual Leaders” and used the key phrase “Taking the Hierophant off the Pedestal.” Chrysalis Tarot calls the Hierophant the “Divine Child” and says this in its LBW (Little White Book) to justify the change.

“Most tarot decks title this card the Hierophant, a religious authority figure. In Chrysalis Tarot, the task of spiritual growth is an individual responsibility that requires an open mind and critical thinking.”

To me, this kind of thinking shows an incomplete understanding of the Hierophant and of tarot in general. When we fail to embrace the Hierophant, and all the archetypes of tarot, we become unable to gain the knowledge, wisdom, insight and divinatory intelligence that tarot can provide.

Five hundred years ago, the Hierophant was the Pope. That’s why we see him as a religious authority. When we consider the position held by the Roman Catholic Church in Italy at the time of tarot’s emergence, we understand that the Pope was not just a religious authority, he was the ultimate authority.

Today, the Hierophant speaks to authority in relevant and important ways. To remove the Hierophant’s authority, as the three decks I mentioned have done, removes an important piece of the tarot puzzle, and risks making tarot less effective.

In a reading, the Hierophant can represent the rules and the authority of any “church.” That can be the “church” of medicine, law, or governance, of corporate, educational or military structure or spiritual doctrine.

When we need to submit ourselves to the church of medicine for surgery, we need the Hierophant, a surgeon who knows every piece of the doctrine, rather than a Divine Child who wants us to figure it out ourselves.

When we earn an academic honor, we have become expert in the doctrine of the Hierophant, not the introspection of a Divine Child.

In a reading, the Hierophant can suggest consulting a doctor or an attorney. The Hierophant can encourage your professional authority as a manager or a business owner. When the Hierophant appears to suggest these things, he commands our respect for the due process we all must endure. A Divine Child has no need or respect for due process, achievement, or a learned body of knowledge.

When we understand and portray tarot in a limited way, we limit the power of tarot. Right now, we seem to be inclined to limit the powers of the Hierophant.

When we examine the way our culture processes a tarot card, we understand something about our culture. At a time of corrupt governments, disenfranchised citizenry and economic disparity, none of us like the Hierophant energy very much.

The answer, though, is not to engage in navel-gazing and withdrawn self-discovery. The answer is to earn your own authority, and wield it wisely. That’s the way to change the authoritarian structures of the hierophants that don’t serve us. At the same time, when you need an authority – a doctor, a lawyer, a priest, you really can’t accept any substitutes.

Sometime the Hierophant comes up in a reading to describe a stubborn and didactic personality. The Hierophant has told me of a client’s dogmatic Evangelical husband, whom she would later divorce. The Hierophant has told me of a client’s spiritual leader who was abusing her sexually. The Divine Child in the same place would not have been able to communicate these things to me.

Our discomfort with the Hierophant is understandable. However, when we remove the Hierophant from tarot we miss the opportunity to explore the dichotomy of this specific energy. When does honoring tradition build our community, and when does it oppress us? When do we need the authority of a body of knowledge, and when is it best to trust or inner guidance?

True enlightenment comes from both studied knowledge and intuitive wisdom. The Hierophant is an important part of that journey. Through studying difficult tarot images, and seeing the ways in which they speak in readings, we learn about ourselves, and our society. The tarot archetype of the Hierophant is complex, and irreplaceable.

Christiana Gaudet 11/25/14 Christiana Gaudet 11/25/14

Aces, Tens and the Court: Tarot Exercises to Find your Path

Separate from your Minor Arcana the four Aces, four Tens, and all sixteen Court cards, separated by rank. As we explore each number and rank, consider how the suit/element is expressed in each card.

Aces: Aces are a new beginning, the source or the essence of their element. The Ace is the purest form of the element.

Shuffle your four Aces, and ask this question: What is a source of strength upon which I could draw more fully?