Tarot skills for the 21st Century - Mundane and Magical Divination is a toolkit and guide for exploring and expanding your tarot divination skills. Written by Josephine McCarthy, a leading magical adept and groundbreaking author, it veers away from the recent popular approach of using tarot for psychology and counselling, and instead shows you how to use tarot for true divination: seeing into the future, the past and analysing the present.
The Mundane meanings of the cards are introduced through handy keywords and simple explanations. The hidden, more esoteric messages, patterns and meanings of the trumps are also explored. Chapter five, Interpretation, looks in detail at the divination process, and gives you useful techniques for forming focused questions and interpreting the tarot's answers meaningfully.
Two chapters are dedicated to numerous layouts, beginning with the simple yes/no layout and progressing to more complex layouts/spreads designed to identify events, causes, and solutions, find missing objects, and to get an overview of the year ahead. Esoteric layouts are also presented, enabling magicians and mystics to view the powers flowing through their magic, their fate, and to look at the path of their soul. Chapter seven, interpretations of layouts uses sample readings to dig into the details of how these layouts work, how interpretation is approached, while also analysing their more esoteric and technical aspects.
Contents include: a brief look at the history of the Rider Waite Tarot, Caring for your deck, doing readings/getting started, getting good at reading tarot, reversals? tarots limited vocabulary, Major Arcana: Key words, mundane meanings, and esoteric analysis of it's symbolism, Minor Arcana: elements, numbers, key words. Interpretation: vocabulary, choosing a deck, how to construct a useful question, timing and time limits, fate patterns and cycles, emotions and interpretations, who is talking to you? parasites and reading hygiene, responsibilities when reading for others, reading about death. Layouts: What makes a good layout, a simple yes/no layout, Tree of Life layout, Overview layout, Event layout, Directional/location layout, Resources layout, Timing layout, Manifestation/causation layout, Solution layout, Health layout, Fate Pattern layout, Angelic layout, Landscape layout, Map of Self layout. Interpretations of Layouts: Sample readings of each layout with interpretation and deeper esoteric technical analysis.
AUTHOR: Josephine McCarthy is a Western magical adept living in the Southwest of England. An esoteric practitioner, teacher, and author, she has written twenty-seven books on the theory and practice of Western magic, and four works of magical fiction. Josephine has taught extensively in the USA and UK since the early 1990s, and has lectured at various occult, esoteric, and hermetic conferences in the UK and USA.
She is the designer and book author for the LXXXI Quareia Magician's Deck (2014 Quareia Publishing UK), produced with artists Stuart Littlejohn and Cassandra Beanland. McCarthy is also the author of Quareia, an extensive, in-depth, open source online training course in the theory, practice, and history of Western magic, which seeks to move Western magical practice into a deeper, more cooperative relationship with nature and the environment.
