The Soft Season: Tarot for Clarity & Inspiration

January is a slow month for me, soft around the edges after the solstice's bright sparkle. Having already celebrated the new year at Samhain, January is less of a starting place as it is a slowing place. But, truthfully, January hasn't always been like this for me - I arrived here after spending a lot of time connecting with the seasonal rhythms of the land and my own internal seasons.

Which is all just a poetic way of saying that a few years ago I burnt out so hard that finding space for radical slowness in my life the only (slow, soft, steady) way home again.

During this period of burnout, I found myself lying on my back in the brambles of the untended hedges of my personal boundaries, watching the seasons pass by. Getting out of that tangle took time and a lot of listening to where it was the slowness that I needed lived in the cycles of my year. The pace that I was used to moving at was no longer an option and, as the dense speed of the year rushed past me, January stuck out with its calm. It was during this month between sabbats that I started to rebuild my energy using the unfamiliar-to-me tools of softness and ease. In the process, January has become my soft season, my Quiet Moon, and the time of year where I linger between rest and reconnecting with my community practice.

Even though it was an uncomfortable and strange land to be moving through, I have come to treasure softness as the soil where the seeds of inspiration and clarity are planted. As an herbalist, tension is one of the energetic states I see most often in the clients I work with, not least of which because we are living in demanding times of ever increasing stress, and many of us are taught to overly rely on tension to prove our productiveness or as a "reasonable" way of getting by. But it is from softness, letting go of tight and narrow thinking, that possibility arises, and we can feel where it is that inspiration is calling us to.

While my soft season is the time between Midwinter and Imbolc, your soft season might appear to you at any time of the year. I encourage you to find your season of softness and I hope the following tarot spread helps you call in the energy of softness for clarity and inspiration in your life whenever you need it most. 

View fullsize

Tarot for Clarity & Inspiration

The following tarot spread is all about slowing down and softening your gaze so that you might dissolve the edges of whatever it is that is blocking your vision to better spot where inspiration is trying to guide you.

Witch tip! I recommend calling in the physical qualities of softness before casting this spread, whether it is lighting candles or soft lamps, changing into soft and comfortable clothing or perhaps building an altar to softness, gentleness, and ease.

✨ Card 1. The Querent

A card representing you (or the querent if you're reading for someone else) and your current state of being. You can see this card as something like a personal energetic snapshot or simple emotional weather report.

✨ Card 2. Less Of

A card showing you what you need less of in your life. This card might reference experiences in your past.

✨ Card 3. More Of

A card showing you what you need more of in your life. This card might refer to new habits, beliefs, and/or activities you're trying to incorporate into your life to draw you towards future goals.

✨ Card 4. Inspiration Calling

An inspirational idea, concept, and/or practice that is calling to you that would benefit from your attention.

✨ Card 5. The Cradle

Something (an idea, proposal, practice) which needs more time being sheltered, resting, and growing before being shared with the world beyond yourself. A card that helps us to invite clarity in, instead of trying to figure everything out all at once.

✨ Card 6. The Coracle

Coracles aren't the steadiest form of water craft, and represent how we might ride the current of inspiration whether or not it is a fully formed or stable idea just yet. This card is about letting yourself ride the current of inspiration and points toward the place to jump in and follow your flow.

᠅

While you can peruse through my complete archive of tarot spreads, you might be interested in my annual review tarot spread or how to incorporate tarot into your healing practice if you're journeying your way through burnout or similar experience. If you’re looking for more herbal inspiration for the season of softness, come this way.

May your journey ahead be full of inspiration, ever nourished by a wellspring of clarity!

This post was made possible through patron support.
❤︎ Thanks, friends. ❤︎

Study Wellness: A Tarot Spread for Students

I loved my days as an herbal student (though, truthfully, you don't ever stop being a student as an herbalist as you're always learning from plants and people) and I love that as part of the ever-growing and diverse community of folks teaching herbal arts, I get to interact with students everyday. Being able to support students in ways that I was supported (and wanted to be supported) and helping them figure out what sort of path they want to travel as plant folk and magickal people has been an ongoing source of joy for me.

And, for as much as I loved being a student, I also struggled to feel like I fit into the herbal world, oscillating between intimidation and overwhelm when grappling with all there was to know (there are so many plants, help).

I keep my student self in mind when I'm creating my own online courses and especially when I'm teaching in-person, where I have a more direct control with the physical and social learning environment. I've also tried to pay a lot of attention to what it is that inspires, stresses out, clarifies and confuses the students who have taken my courses - it helps me create more accessible courses and develop my skills as a teacher. Over the years, one of the most common recommendations that I’ve made to students that they find helpful is to remind them that they can take their time, set their own pace, and show up as they are able to and with the adaptations they need to feel good in their studies and development.

It’s not surprising that slowing down and reflecting on what it is you’re striving for and seeking as a student is a important value within my courses - whether through changing your sense of time as a healing practice, connecting with your breath, embracing your sensitivity, using storytelling as part of your healing craft, or sitting in deep relationship with our plant allies.

With all that in mind, and being someone who uses tarot as a tool of self-reflection (and time travel and magick and healing), I thought it would be useful to put together a simple spread made for students who are feeling a bit overwhelmed, lost or uninspired in their studies. Make a sweet ritual of it, add some plants to your shower or bath, brew some tea, practice some breathwork, and then settle in for some card casting.

Study Wellness
A tarot spread for students 

Study Wellness is a slow-down and take a look at your inner landscape sort of tarot spread to help students shift away from stress and reconnect to the purpose of their studies. You can use whatever tarot deck (or system of divination) you prefer, but if you're looking for some tarot decks with a plant focus, come this way.

Card 1. The Querent

A card that you can either choose purposefully or draw at random to represent you and your current student energy.

Card 2. What Brought You to Your Studies

This card helps you to reconnect to why you were drawn to your studies in the first place. An inverted or challenging card here might reflect something that you're trying to undo (i.e. traumatic family patterns) or heal as part of your studies.

Card 3. Where You Hope Your Studies Will Take You

A hopeful card that is less about predicting the future and more about helping you remember where it is you hope you'll arrive once your studies are completed.

Card 4. What You Are Focusing Too Much On

This card helps us to assess what it is that has become outsized in our life and often highlights an area of major stress in our studies. It is a place to pull back from, shrink down to appropriate portions, and maybe even let rest for a bit. In a practical sense this card may indicate a part of your studies to set aside for the moment to focus on another aspect of your work (i.e. taking a break from writing plant profiles to doing some hands-on remedy making practice).

Card 5. Where To Turn Your Attention To

This card helps to draw your attention towards an aspect of your studies that you would benefit from focusing on at the moment. This can include another aspect of your studies, but it can also point you towards an overall part of your student life that you would might consider focusing on like taking breaks, getting outside and connecting with plants, consulting with teachers or collaborating with your fellow students.

Card 6. The Student Transformed

A card that might not make too much sense to you at the moment, but peers ahead at ways that you might be transformed by your studies. Something to take note of in a journal that you can forget about for now and look at again after your studies are completed.

Bonus Card. A Message From Your Plant Ally

If you're an herbal student working with a particular plant ally, you can pull an extra card that represents a message from your plant ally to you, helping to recenter your studies in relationship to our green kin.

🌙 📚 🌿

I hope that Study Wellness, whether you use it as a tarot or oracle card spread, as journal prompts or even as part of a study group with your fellow students, helps you to feel a little more settled, centered, and confident in your work. Of course, the work that you’re doing now shapes your future, but you should also let it shape your present in ways that feel good and affirming to you.

If you’re looking for more gentle tarot spreads you might enjoy my favorite daily tarot and evening tarot practices.

May your path as a student be an inspiring one, may you be supported in ways that help you flourish in your learning, and may your inquiries lead you to places you couldn’t quite imagine, but feel like home when you finally arrive.

This post was made possible through patron support.
❤︎ Thanks, friends. ❤︎

Discernment: A Rising Sign Tarot Spread

The Rising Sign or Ascendant (i.e. the astrological sign that is rising or ascending up from the horizon at the time of our birth) is a rather magickal part of our birth chart where we explore how we want to be perceived versus how we are perceived.

While exploring our Sun and our Moon signs can be a deeply internal process, with our Ascendant we are required to not only look within, but to take a brave look outwards, too. If you want a better understanding of how the Moon, the Sun, and the Ascendant interact with one another, creating a powerful triad of insight in your birth chart, be sure to check out my first post in this series.

Are you one of the many folks who feel not quite connected to their Sun sign, they'll often find themselves resonating with the energies of their Ascendant. Such an experience makes a lot of sense as our Ascendant better describes our personality - the Ascendant part of our birth chart represents who we desire to be perceived and what we do to achieve that desire. Our Ascendant shapes our behavior depending on what it is pulling us toward. A Taurus Ascendant, for example, might want to be perceived as grounding and thoughtful as their steady poise is not only something that they want for themselves but they believe that such traits make them desirable and worthy to others.

Our Ascendant sign is our personally tuned skillset of discernment, the filter by which we look out at the world which colors all of our interactions. The great work of understanding our Ascendant is to not only understand what internal desires are shaping our external perceptions, but to recognize that we cannot control the perception of others and how we are going to shape our life by that knowledge. Will we bend ourselves out of shape to fit in? Rebel against the system? Feel like a perpetual outsider instead of risking vulnerability? Recognize that there aren't any outsiders just folks who haven't found one another yet? Stop reading this post because astrology is silly? 

By exploring our Ascendant we have an opportunity to recognize how we've been shaped by the tension of perceiving ourselves and being perceived. We get to name the patterns of being that we really love about ourselves and help us feel at home energetically (Sun) and emotionally (Moon) while reconsidering and even releasing those patterns that feel outdated, meaningless or exhausting. There is a beautiful opportunity of synthesization and authentic engagement with ourselves and our world when we bring together what we've learned about our luminaries into all the ways we relate to the world.

View fullsize

Discernment
A Tarot Spread for Your Ascendant

Begin by pulling out the card from your tarot deck that corresponds with the sign of your Ascendant. There are two correspondence methods to determine your Ascendant card. The first, simplest, and most common way is to choose the corresponding Major Arcana card based on the system used by The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn:

• Aries: The Emperor

• Taurus: Hierophant

• Gemini: Lovers

• Cancer: Chariot

• Leo: Strength

• Virgo: Hermit

• Libra: Justice

• Scorpio: Death

• Sagittarius: Temperance

• Capricorn: Devil

• Aquarius: Star

• Pisces: Moon

The second way, for those of you more familiar with the astrological tradition of decans, is to choose a card based on the corresponding decan to your Ascendant (I personally prefer the first method, but if you have the skillset, the second is great, too).

Once you've chosen your card card from your tarot deck, set it out at the top of your reading space. If you like you can place candles around it and build an altar full of items representing your Ascendant sign energy. You might include plant allies to your ascendant sign (explore my astroherbology profiles for recommended plant allies) or any of plant allies you feel support your Ascendant energy, focusing on creating a space that feels welcoming to your personal energy and aesthetic.

Cards 1. Cosmic Lens of Beauty

The first two cards of our spread help us to understand the lens by which we are viewing ourselves and the world. For our first card, it is the lens of beauty - that which we are drawn to, place value in, and aspire to be perceived as. While I'm using the word beauty, it could easily be replaced by holiness, desire or ethics, but it is a card that helps us to understand what shapes our perceptions of our inner and outer worlds. 

Card 2. Cosmic Lens of Fear

The second perception card is about how our perception of life also shapes our fear of it. In other words, what we perceive to be lacking about ourselves and our world or what we perceive to be our faults that drag us away from the beauty we perceive in ourselves and the world. This card highlights what we fear we might be perceived as.

Card 3. Collective Gaze

This card highlights your current comfort or discomfort with being perceived, helping us to understand how much beauty or fear we think is being placed upon us by others. Affirming cards in this position can reflect on the work we've put into and the space we've been given to flourish. Challenging cards in this position might reflect that you're in a state of transition, changing how it is you perceive yourself and want to be perceived, and/or how significant areas of perception in your life (i.e. in relationships, at school or work, during intense social-cultural periods during election periods, and so on).

Card 4. Alignment

This card highlights ways that you can help align your inner perception of yourself with how you are perceived in the world (at least in safe, supportive relationships). A particularly challenging card in this position might show a state of conflict with how you want to be perceived versus how you've been allowed to be perceived by your family, friends, society at large. Even in challenging cards, seek the symbol or meaning that shows small paths of rebellion to eventual freedom.  

Card 5. Horizons

When we work with the energy of our Ascendant we can tap into the ability to gaze towards the horizon and get a glimpse at what it is that we are drawing towards us/what is drawn to us in connection to our perception journey.

✨

I hope you enjoyed our journey through the Luminaries (i.e. the Sun and Moon) and Ascendant in your birth chart. Explore the rest of the series:

• Vitality: A Tarot Spread for Your Sun Sign

• Illumination: A Moon Sign Tarot Spread

Becoming familiar with these parts of your birth chart will help you create a solid foundation for your astrological practice, include any astroherbology studies from the lunar to the tarot.

If you’re looking for more tarot inspiration, I have a decade’s worth of community posts for you. For those seeking to learn more about the intersections of stars and plants, come this way.

May your studies be illuminating, your cards clear, and your heart open to the possibilities of all that you are.

This post was made possible through patron support.
❤︎ Thanks, friends. ❤︎

Illumination: A Moon Sign Tarot Spread

Having written about what the Sun represents in our birth chart and how we might explore our energy through a solar perspective, it's time to turn our attention to the other luminary of the birth chart: the Moon. If you want a better understanding of how the Moon, the Sun, and the Ascendant or Rising Sign interact with one another, creating a powerful triad of insight in your birth chart, be sure to check out my first post in this series.

With the Moon we begin to feel our stories, our myths, and our truths. Within the birth chart, the Moon represents the filtering of our consciousness from the deep well of the subconscious, unconscious, and collective consciousness. The Moon represents our earliest experiences of feeling held, sheltered, and nourished (as well as the absence of these experiences), shaping how we view and seek out feeling at home in ourselves in the world. 

I grew up with texts on astrology that far too often dismissively presented the Moon as a weak place of feeling in the birth chart, almost always contrasted in a false dichotomy to the vigorous, unchanging logic of solar thinking. The Sun in our chart could be easily hindered by the Moon's unwillingness to sit still and stop changing - our feelings were something to be fixed so that they didn't disrupt "logical" forward progression. And yet, feeling is the foundation from which thought emerges. Thought emerges not as a refinement of feelings that we should be trying to pull away from, but as an interconnected expression of feeling that helps us to better understand our experiences. 

It is good to be friends with your Moon, to let yourself feel your way to your story.

The Moon is a great symbol of consciousness, feeling, and personal narrative. While the Moon is always full in the sky, we perceive it to be ever changing in light and form, stretching out an invisible influence over big patterns of nature, including the tides and cycles of growth. We have an opportunity to ebb and flow, expand and contract, pull away and draw in as we explore who we are and what we feel about who we are. We don't know how experience will change us, but we know we will be changed. When we sit with our Moon, we sit with the cyclical power of change and renewal as a symbol of hope for what is possible. 

Approaching the Moon in our birth chart as a place of illumination, we can begin to appreciate who we are in the stories we tell, changing them when we need to, and learning more about how we protect our feeling body as much as our mental or physical one. 

View fullsize

Illumination
A Tarot Spread for Your Moon Sign

Begin by pulling the Moon card out from your tarot deck and set it out before you. If you like you can place candles around it and build a lunar altar full of items representing Moon energy and your own Moon sign. You might include lunar plant allies like Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), Milky Oat (Avena sativa), Lemon Balm (Melissa officinalis), Passionflower (Passiflora incarnata), and Jasmine (Jasminum spp.). Focus on creating a space that feels good and supportive to you.

Card 1: Illuminated

This card describes your inherent lunar energy and the place from which you filter experience into consciousness. This card might illustrate the emotions you find yourself most comfortable in being in. The card’s elemental correspondence can be helpful to pay attention to: cards of Fire (Wands) often describing quick and heated feelings, maybe even anger, Water cards (Cups) showing us a place of deep feeling and empathy, Earth cards (Pentacles) suggesting a longer journey to figuring out, much less showing, how one is feeling, and Air cards (Swords) typically describing someone who is quick to feel and move on and feel again. These are incredibly broad guidelines, meant to give you a starting point to describe your inner lunar landscape of felt experience.

Card 2: On The Surface

Referring to the original illustration of the river for our Sun, Moon, and Ascendent, this card represents how we appear on the surface to ourselves and others. If this surface level presentation is challenging for us, that might be reflected in the card. Or the card might illustrate an archetypal energy we seem to most easily connect to in our public persona (i.e. we might be the Knight of Wands whose always showing up to defend our friends). 

Card 3: Deep Within

This card reveals your lunar energy that is kept deep below the surface, usually hidden from most of the world besides those people, places, and creatures you are closest to. Sometimes our Deep Within card is in stark contrast to our On The Surface card, other times they are closely aligned. Often there is a story happening between these two cards that can be interesting to explore.

Card 4: Homecoming

This card illustrates the ways you feel most at home and supported in the world. There are often suggestions within this card for how you can call home those parts of yourself that deserve to be felt. A challenging card in this position might suggest that you're struggling to access feeling at home in yourself, and this struggle to access your own feelings can be for so many complicated reasons, and sometimes the wounds are very old. Some of the deepest wounds are hidden away in our inner Moon and you deserve to be supported in all the ways that help you heal, including therapeutic services by mental health professionals - be sure to check out the resources below. Any card here suggests ways to start telling the story of how we find our ways home again. 

Card 5: Intuitive Knowing

This final card highlights what might be considered our psychic gifts and shows us how we draw on our deep well of feeling and experience to know something before we know it.

🌙

I'm writing this while sitting outside in the (relatively) cool air of (very nearly early winter) late autumn, thinking of the patterns handed down to us through the generations - knitting patterns, woodworking patterns, star maps, and seeds. How these patterns help us continue the story of being dwellers on an ocean planet without getting lost in the vast sea; growing patterns where we another stitch, another word, another drawing to the story of all we've ever known, knowing that there is still more to discover. It's an incredible, complex, haunting, and uplifting legacy, and there is just so much to feel about it.

Since our Moon is about our feeling body, it's important to recognize that Moon work can be a space that feels too hard and challenging to access on our own - which is why you shouldn't have to go this work of knowing yourself alone. A lot of Moon work can be done within a therapeutic setting with culturally-competent mental health professionals. Your story deserves the space to be explored in a way that feels empowering. 

If you feel like you're not the type of person that does something like therapy, whether you feel like you should be "strong enough" to do without or it's not something anyone in your family does or whatever reason you've come up with, I ask you to consider this bit of ancestral lunar magick. The Moon represents not just feeling, but the full fruition of ourselves into our being, and our ancestors had ways of honoring that need through rituals and community support that is not so dissimilar to many forms of modern therapeutic practice. The Moon also represents change, including changing modalities of healing to whatever ones keep us alive and thriving, something our ancestors were constantly seeking in order to protect their beloveds, including us, their descendants.

I'm rooting for you and if you feel like it might be time to access therapy, here are a few resources to check out: 

• If you are currently in a state of crisis or just really want to talk to someone right now the Crisis Text Line, RAINN, and The Trevor Project are all available right now and for free to support you.

• Inclusive Therapists is a site dedicated to helping you find a therapist that celebrates your identities. There are so many resources on this site!

• The Loveland Foundation provides financial assistance to Black girls and women seeking therapy.

• Mental Health Liberation focuses on BIPOC mental wellness.

• Asian Mental Health Community

• Latinx Therapists

I hope that you find the people that love your Moon, love your changing, love your stories - may we be Moon-bodied people finding each other in the dark. You deserve all of that and more.

This post was made possible through patron support.
❤︎ Thanks, friends. ❤︎

Finding The Pattern: The Major Arcana & the Tarot Court

The tarot is a fascinating tool of communication and clarity, where we build trust in our own stories through the mythic archetypes presented to and invented by us in the cards.

When I held my first tarot deck and saw all the patterns spread out before me in the images of the cards, I was completely enchanted and continue to be enchanted by the cards all these decades later. While there is plenty of esoteric mystery to explore with the cards, the tarot, at its roots, is simply pointing out patterns of common experiences. From the pain of a broken heart, the pride of a skill well-developed, the boredom we all experience from time to time, the way grief changes us, and how we feel open and brave we can feel when we are able to be who we really are in the world - all these stories and so many more are told in the tarot. Storytelling is one of the ways we develop empathy and curiosity about ourselves and others, and the tarot is a storytelling tool.

One of the structures of story found in the tarot is the delineation between the Major Arcana, which are cards signifying major life events and patterns, and the Minor Arcana or cards that represent day-to-day experiences. Within the Minor Arcana is the tarot Court which are a set of sixteen characters that have an interesting relationship to the Major Arcana, helping us to find big patterns in small moments.

Knowing that the tarot court cards are ones that readers struggling with again and again (myself included!), from their hierarchical structure to sparse traditional meanings and more, I wanted to share the ways that I have come to understand the tarot court in a way that brings meaning to my own, and hopefully your, healing practice. I started earlier this year by exploring the often difficult to decipher tarot Court through the lens of healing ritual (check out part one and part two).

Now, I want to explore the tarot court in a way that's a bit more experimental and intuitive.

One of the fascinating aspects of the tarot Court cards are the way that they act like a more subtle expression of the energy and archetypes of the Major Arcana cards. Major Arcana cards often represent big energy and patterns in our life that are showing up over an extended period of time, whereas the Minor Arcana, including the Court, represent smaller energetic patterns and day-to-day insights. Yet, the deep patterns of the Major Arcana are reflected in the everyday experiences of the Minor Arcana, especially in the Court.

The Neutral Vibes Tarot

When I see the Page of Swords show up in a reading, for example, I am reminded of the energy of the Magician. While the Page of Swords has achieved some level of skill and self-control, they are are still developing their confidence and knowledge. Their body, however, has already begun to mimic that of he Magician, directing them to the wisdom of “As Above, So Below.” For me, the Page of Swords hints at the energy of the Magician, but in a more subdued and developing way. We are not meant to be gazing at the mysteries with intensity everyday (the Magician), but we are still living in a world of those mysteries (Page of Swords). In other words, the mysteries as profound are represented by the Magician while the mysteries as profane are represented by the Page of Swords.

While not every day is a profoundly meaningful sort of Major Arcana day, the energy of the Major Arcana and profundity is always at play. Through the Court cards we are a way to spot some of those deep currents of mystery represented by the Major Arcana. One of the ways these correspondences work in readings is by helping us understand our relationships with other folks in the grander scheme of our personal Major Arcana journey.

Let’s say that you pull the Page of Pentacles for a card representing a new significant other in your life. I connect the gentle energy of the Page of Pentacles with the Strength card, which would tell me that this new significant other in your life may illuminate the dynamic of Strength in your life, whether by testing it, affirming it or in some other way connect with how you embody and connect to Strength in your life. The Court cards are not meant to identify a deep valley or high peak of a pattern of energy - that’s the work of the Major Arcana - but help us to notice where that pattern is occurring in a more diffused way in our everyday life.

The Natural Ink Tarot

If you're intrigued by this idea of the Major Arcana’s connection with the Court, I’ve gone ahead and listed my very loose correspondences between the Major Arcana and the Minor Arcana. For my personal correspondences, there are a few Major Arcana cards that don’t have direct links to the Court: the Fool, the Lovers, the Wheel of Fortune, the Star, the Moon, and the Sun. The lack of correspondence for these Major Arcana cards are for the following reasons: 

• The Fool always represents who is being read for so doesn’t need a corresponding Court card

• With The Lovers, no Court card seemed to represent that particular energy to me but instead any Court card could represent oneself or others in a Lovers relationship (which is a traditional meaning for the Court card, the current, past or prospective romantic partner).

• The Wheel of Fortune is an abstracted, impersonal energy and does not easily correspond to any of the inherently personal Court cards.

• The celestial cards (The Star, The Moon, and The Sun) are similar to the current of the Fool, being deeply personal to those being read for. 

I created my Major Arcana and Court card correspondences when working with my Smith Waite Tarot and the imagery of this particular deck of cards definitely contributed to my correspondence choices. Keep that in mind if you’re interested in creating your own correspondences for your favorite deck (which I hope you do!). There are more traditional ways of connecting one card to another, mostly through astrological correspondences, but that was not my focus for my own list. I hope you feel inspired by tradition but not burdened or beholden to it whenever you read the cards, create correspondences, and use tarot as a tool of healing.

The Weiser Tarot

The Major Arcana & Court Card Correspondences

• 0. The Fool: See Note Above

• I. The Magician: Page of Swords

• II. The High Priestess: Page of Cups

• III. The Empress: Queen of Wands

• IV. The Emperor: King of Wands

• V. The Hierophant: King of Cups

• VI. The Lovers: See Note Above

• VII. The Chariot: Knight of Pentacles

• VIII. Strength: Page of Pentacles

• IX. The Hermit: Queen of Pentacles

• X. Wheel of Fortune: See Note Above

• XI. Justice: King of Swords

• XII. The Hanged Man: Knight of Cups

• XIII. Death: Page of Wands

• XIV. Temperance: Queen of Cups

• XV. The Devil: King of Pentacles

• XVI. The Tower: Knight of Wands

• XVII. The Star: See Note Above

• XVIII. The Moon: See Note Above

• XIX. The Sun: See Note Above

• XX. Judgement: Knight of Swords

• XXI. The World: Queen of Swords

Finding the Pattern Tarot Spread

If you are trying to better understand how the pattern of a Major Arcana card is playing out in your personal relationships and development of your own identity in these relationships, the following spread is meant to help.

Begin by choosing the Major Arcana card whose energy you want to explore, setting that at the top of your spread. Next, separate out the Court cards from your deck - you'll be pulling only from the Court cards for this spread.

Card 1. How I am Manifesting the Pattern

This card represents how you currently understand and are manifesting the energy of the pattern of the Major Arcana card you are exploring. For our example, let's say you are exploring the energetic patterns of the Hierophant in your life and you pull the King of Cups to represent you. The King of Cups shows that you are deeply engaged in the work of examining the hierarchical structures, restrictions, and allegiance to authority in your life, that this is a front and center focus for you. If you are seeking more clarity, you can pull two more cards from the Minor Arcana to represent how you can ease the strain of this pattern in your life (i.e. the Hierophant energy can be very serious, here are some ways to lighten up) as well as support your explorations (i.e. talk about what you're exploring with friends instead of trying to untangle it all on your own).

Card 2. The Person Helping My Understanding of the Pattern

This card, as the position title suggests, helps you identify a person in your life who is beneficially assisting your ability to explore and understand the energy of the Major Arcana card you are working with. Everything from personal and familial relationships, social and work relationships, as well as para-social relationships can show up here. For our example let's say that you pull the Queen of Pentacles who represents the energy of your high school English teacher who encouraged all of their students to read banned books, helping you to understand how the energy of the Hierophant often seeks to restrict the flow of information. 

Card 3. The Person Hindering My Understanding of the Pattern

This card helps you to identify a person in your life who is challenging your ability to understand the energy of the Major Arcana card you're exploring. For our example, you might pull the Knight of Swords, who represents an online video essayist on popular culture who you used to love for their what you thought was incisive commentary, but are coming to realize are shallow in their opinions and driven more by gossip than insight. 

Card 4. The Person to Connect With

This card represents someone who may or may not be currently connected with in your life (whether they are someone you haven't connected with recently, to someone you haven't met yet) that you would benefit from knowing as you explore the energy of the Major Arcana card you've chosen. Let's say you pull the Queen of Wands - this card might represent someone who brings a fiery, creative energy to your explorations of the often cold and reserved Hierophant, helping you find playfulness and bravery on your journey.

⭐️

Explore the rest of my tarot Court series with a look at the Pages and the Knights (including an overview of the Court structure and non-hierarchical alternatives to the royalty theme) followed by the Queens and Kings. If you’re looking for more tarot spreads, I have a whole collection to inspire your practice, too. For those ready for deepening your knowledge of how herbalism intersects with tarot, come this way.

Whether or not you work with tarot, I hope that this post has inspired you to take a look at the big patterns showing up in little ways (especially in your relationships) in your life. May you be freed from those relationships that seek to keep you stuck and small. May you be drawn towards the people and places where you feel seen, where you are able to connect through collaboration and compassion. May we find each other again and again through our healing work.

This post was made possible through patron support.
❤︎ Thanks, friends. ❤︎

᠅

Tarot Decks Shown

The Neutral Vibes Tarot
The Weiser Tarot
The Natural Ink Tarot