Extispex: Tarot and Tarot Readings

As a cartomancer, I hate doing romance readings. To me they’re the worst, and yet those are the ones everyone wants. I would estimate at least half my clients want to know about their love life. Will she meet Mr Right? Will his relationship end? Is she cheating on him? When will he ask her to marry him?

Ugh. I hate doing tarot readings on love because I am the least romantic person on the face of the earth, and I knew I could probably stand to improve my romance readings, so I picked up this Tall Dark Stranger Corrine Kenner’s book on tarot for love and romance, even though the cover was enough to make me want to hurt, with its rose-red cover and its Mucha-esque cover-art, featuring an illustration from Antonelle Castelli’s Art Nouveau tarot deck.

When you’ve been reading tarot for twenty-five years you don’t run across too many books that offer anything new to the subject, and the same can be said for this one. The first few chapters cover things like the history of the tarot, choosing a deck and familiarising yourself with it, tarot ethics, and symbolism.

Then a couple of spreads are given, the celtic cross and the zodiac spread, which is a variation of my most-used spread, which I call the house spread.

Then interpretations of individual cards are given, but with an emphasis on the romantic. For instance the hermit is interpreted thusly:

If you are in a relationship, you are no clinging vine. It is important for you to have time to yourself, to collect your thoughts and contemplate. It’s easy for you to remove yourself from the hustle and bustle of everyday life - spiritually and intellectually, if not physically. Just make sure your partner understands that you are climbing away to contemplate, not to hide, and that you are not retreating simply to avoid interaction.

I like my trumps a little deeper than that, but not everyone leads a deep life.

Sometimes the author’s correspondences are different than the generally accepted ones, for instance she associates kings in the deck with air, rather than fire. This could be confusing for beginners, if they’re reading other books that tell them differently, but advanced readers will already have their correspondences firmly worked out.

Tall Dark Stranger wasn’t for me, but I think many cartomancers, especially beginners and intermediate readers, may find this book fun and valuable.

This review was first published at Noumenal.Net.

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