Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article tells you how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
This week, we are taking a trip into the realm of the subjective: the use of ritual when it comes to tarot. By “ritual” I mean the way that tarot readers might approach a reading, the ceremony they attach to it, the paraphernalia they use with it.
Ask a group of tarot readers about their own particular rituals, and you will get as many different responses as there are participants in the discussion. Some have reading cloths, others use a favourite table, while others still are happy to lay them down on any relatively flat surface. Some keep their cards in the original cardboard box, while others carry them around in a purpose-designed bag or container. Some let others touch their cards; some view their cards as being completely off-limits to anyone else.
Ask tarot readers what their rituals are, therefore, and you will tend to get responses akin to those above. Ask us why we use ritual, and the discussion tends to ramp up a few notches. Or maybe it’s my reaction that ramps up a few notches, because I’ve found that at the basis of every ritual lies a question that smoulders away, refusing to go out:
What is it all for? Or, more specifically: Is ritual even necessary?
I ask this not because I have an answer waiting in the wings. I ask it as someone who sits in two camps when it comes to the subject of ritual in tarot. I have a purple cloth embroidered with a silver “om” sign; I keep my cards in a velvet drawstring bag decorated with an image of The High Priestess from the Rider-Waite Smith tarot deck; I tend to shuffle the cards and cut them in a certain way; I am mindful of introducing the subject of the reading with due reverence. And yet I believe that all of this is primarily for my own benefit, and no-one else’s. I don’t believe that the message will be any less accurate without them. Oh, the dichotomy!
Which is why, today, I’m inviting you to take part by putting forward your ideas and reactions about ritual in the comments section. To get the ball rolling, here are the two camps that I am referring to — the two seemingly opposed ideas that, together, start to get those questions smouldering in the recesses of my mind.