Now she began to stress. Could a reading get any worse?
“You are undergoing a transformation,” Doreen said, sounding vague. She pulled another card.Judgement.Doreen stayed silent.
“What is it?” Semele was almost afraid to ask.
“Despair,” Doreen whispered, looking shaken. “I’m sorry. I try not to focus on the negative when I give a reading, but you…”
“Are filled up to the wazoo with it?” Semele tried to joke, but she was starting to panic.
Something was incredibly wrong. It was the same feeling that had gripped her outside the café.
“Pick a card,” Doreen commanded with a sense of urgency, as if trying to gain control of the reading again.
Semele drew one from the deck.The High Priestess—another Major Arcana card.
Doreen stared at it, speechless. She looked at the spread of cards, then at Semele, and then back to the spread.
“What does this one mean?” Semele prompted her.
Doreen held the card up. A bead of sweat had formed on her lip. “What do you see?”
Semele studied the card, not sure what she was supposed to see. It depicted a queenlike woman sitting on a throne between two pillars. She was holding a scroll in her hands.
“Thisis your card.The High Priestess.” Doreen placed it on top. “She symbolizes our intuition. She guards the Tree of Life at the gate of the conscious mind, wearing the blue robe of knowledge and the crown of Isis.” Her finger tapped the image. “Whatever challenges are ahead, never forget you have an inner strength and your own compass. You drew these cards for a reason. I’ve never seen a spread like it.”
The candle on the table flickered, and Doreen swept all the cards back into one pile. The session was over.
Semele stood up, more than ready to leave. She was unnerved, but she also couldn’t shake the feeling that something significant had happened here.
Doreen took Semele’s hands and clasped them firmly in her own. “I’m here almost every day. You can call too.” Her smile was warm and genuine, her eyes bright with awareness.
Semele felt the urge to confide in her. No one knew what she was going through. She felt trapped in an alternate reality. An ancient seer was talking to her through a manuscript, and now Semele had her tarot cards.
What did Ionna want? For her to learn how to use them? Just the thought of it made her shake her head.
Queen of Wands
“It’s bad luck to buy your own tarot deck,” Semele read inTarot for Dummies.
She looked at the bag on Cabe’s coffee table. She had purchased not one, but two decks at the bookstore, the Rider-Waite Deck and the replica of the Visconti Deck, and brought them back to his apartment.More bad luck. Lovely.
But as she continued reading the how-to book, the author clarified her position. It was the tarot’s wisdom that couldn’t be bought, not the cards themselves. So people could, in the author’s opinion, disregard this belief. Semele grimaced.At least that was something.
She moved on to the next chapter. Within an hour she had covered many of the highlights, including the history of the cards and their meanings, some of which she already knew from Sebastian.
A typical tarot deck was comprised of seventy-eight cards. Twenty-two of those cards were called the Major Arcana, a group of symbolic cards starting withThe Fooland ending withThe World.“Arcana” meant “mystery of the mysteries, the ultimate secret.” The Major Arcana was the backbone of the tarot.
Semele got out her new deck and studied each card. There were also sixteen court cards, consisting of four groups made up of a king, a queen, a knight, and a page, each in a suit of cups, pentacles, swords, or wands.
In a sense, the suits were similar to astrological signs: cups signified water or the emotions, pentacles were the earth and the material world, swords represented air and the mind, and wands symbolized fire and spiritual energy. The numbered cards were organized into four sets of ten cards that ranged from ace to ten. These were also grouped by suit. Every card had a meaning, and together the deck formed a system that allowed the tarot reader to see life’s progression, reflected through symbols and archetypes. A trained reader could use his or her psyche to interpret the answer to any question being asked.
There was a chapter that discussed the “freak-out cards.” That made her laugh. Yes, she had definitely been alarmed by some of the cards that came up in her reading. But the book explained howDeath, The Devil,andThe Towercards, for instance, were nothing to fear. They meant different things at different moments: it all depended on where you were.
Another chapter explained how to find your soul card by adding up the day, month, and year in your birth date and then adding those digits to arrive at a single number. Semele quickly grabbed a pen and did the math. Her number was two.
She flipped to the chapter entitled “Pick a Card, Any Card” and was stunned to find that card number two wasThe High Priestess,the same card she had drawn at the bookstore.
Semele couldn’t help shivering. She closed the book and put it back in the bag. That was enough card reading for her. She wasn’t ready to attempt a tarot spread, no matter how simpleTarot for Dummiesmade it sound. Maybe she never would be.
