by SteelWitch
The Tarot is a powerful divination tool. It combines established meanings with a metric buttload of symbols crammed into each card to allow a huge range of interpretation within set guidelines. Each card has numerous nuances that can appear based on arrangement, position, relationship to other cards, or where your eye happens to land first when you flip it. And, even if you are a novice at divination, theres' always a handy little book for you to read which will guide you along the way to interpreting a reading.
We're often advised to perform a divination before working a spell or making an important meditative journey just to see if it's a good idea. Coin flips or yes/no rocks will tell you in no uncertain terms whether or not a spell should be performed, but if you're anything like me you want to know a heck of a lot more about the situation than that, or may even become more determined to cast the spell if a coin tells you “no”. Tarot is a great tool to learn details about a situation and is one that I've seen suggested numerous times. It sounds great in theory, but the standard layouts don't really cover everything you'd want to ask about very well. Sure, you could probably finagle the Celtic Cross into telling you why your money spells are backfiring and what you should do about it, but it's not really designed for that. Why not use a layout specifically designed for your question?
I decided to come up with a standard method for creating custom layouts after a frustrating experience while meditating. I needed to learn more about the situation and the players in it as well as what to do about it as I wasn't particularly interested in assaulting my subconscious without guidance. So, I figured out what I needed to know, broke that down to a set of questions, assigned those questions to cards, built a layout, charged the layout, and did a reading. Then I wrote an article about doing all that to further charge my layout. I'll explain a little more about my situation as we go through the steps below, going light on the actual details of the situation where they do not relate to the spread. A witch has to have some secrets.
What had happened was:
I was meditating one day and made a visit to my personal inner temple. It's the closest thing I have to a peaceful happy place, a little zone of power I visit to raise energy and prepare for deeper journeying. I got down to the business of raising energy as usual. When I had raised about as much as I could, an entity entered my temple unbidden, took the energy, and left. When I returned from my meditation I was pretty annoyed, but mostly confused. What should I do about this situation? My testosterone said, “Hey, let's try to summon it and, like, fight it or something. That'd be cool.” The rest of me disagreed. All I really knew was that an entity existed (for a certain definition of the word “existed”) and it wanted my energy. As the entity appeared in my personal mental world I was very aware that it could be a part of myself, and I wasn't ready to start fighting myself magickally. Before I decided on a course of action I needed to gather some information, and to gather the information I needed a tarot spread. None of the spreads I knew were suitable for the questions I had, so I decided to make my own.
Step #1: What do you want to know?
The first step is simple: decide what you want to know. I needed to learn more and decide on a course of action, so I had to come up with the right questions. Three came to mind pretty quickly. What is the nature of the entity? Why did it get involved with me? How can I stop it from interfering? Each of these questions will be represented by a single card in your new layout—you will draw a card to represent the answer to your question, and a spread is formed when you draw a card for each question.
After you come up with the questions you need to look them over and decide if they broad enough for the cards to work their magick. Too-specific questions can suggest answers to your subconscious mind and interfere with interpretation. In my case, I decided to modify question number three. “How can I stop it from interfering?” became “What can I do about this situation?” Looser questions will make the spread applicable to more diverse situations—just don't make them too loose, or it will loose applicability for your particular situation. After you've figured out what information you want to know, it can be helpful to meditate on it briefly. When I did so I noticed a hole in the information I wanted to know and came up with a fourth question: What is the lesson I should learn from this? This last question is important to me because I believe that the difficulties we have are caused by ourselves. If I can learn a lesson from this situation I can prevent it from happening again.
In summary, the four questions I came up with were:
#1 What is the nature of this entity?
#2 Why is it involved?
#3 What can I do about this situation?
#4 What is the lesson I should learn from this?
Step #2: Determine relationships
The next step is determining the relationships among your pieces of information. These relationships should be reflected in the physical location of your cards. You're deciding what your spread will look like in this step. It was helpful for me to write my questions down on index cards and arrange the cards in the shape of a spread. Questions #1-#3 all seemed to build off of each other in sequence, with the answer to #2 only being relevant when #1 was understood with the same relationship being true for #3 and #2. So, I lined the first three questions up in a row. Simple, right? The fourth question, the final one, I placed under the others in the middle as a culmination of information.
I recommend entering a light trance once you have built your spread in order to scan it with your magickal senses. How we feel these things is different: Maybe the questions don't vibrate right in their positions and need to be moved to vibrate in harmony, or they need to be moved to correspond better with the four directions, or... the possibilities are really endless and dependent on your own magickal training and experience up to this point. We all sense these things differently—in my case, I'm more aware of informational energy and, in trance, discovered that the 4th question, the ultimate question, needed to be above the other cards instead of below to represent its importance and status as a meta-question about the nature of the situation rather than the details of its expression. Once you have made any necessary modifications to the layout, its time for Step #3. You may want to deepen your trance for this one.
Step #3: Charging the Layout
A tarot layout is its own magickal tool—or maybe a meta-tool – and needs to be charged as such. The spreads that are currently in widespread popular use such as the three card, the celtic cross, or the tree of life have been charged by years of use across the world and already have their own inherent energy. You'll already have invested plenty of energy into the spread through the process of creation, but charging the layout solidifies and seals the energy to fix its creation into a solid entity rather than an amorphous amoebic blob of potential. Up to this point you've been shifting and moving cards and transferring energy in the process, and it is likely to continue if you don't formally charge and seal the layout to finish its creation. Not only are you finalizing the form of the tool at this point, you're also telling your subconscious that the time for moving cards and modifying relationships between cards is over.
To charge my layout I entered trance and set up the index cards in their final position, said an extemporaneous blessing, then pushed energy into the layout. It is important to remember you are not charging the index cards themselves, but the positions they are in and their relationships to each other. I envisioned the positions glowing with light and drew lines of energy between the cards overlaying their relationships. When it felt solid and firm, I sprayed the layout with some full moon blessed water. (I keep my holy water in a spray bottle, it makes it much easier to use! I wish I remembered where I read this so I could credit the author who suggested it because it is such a great, practical idea) The prayer, the energy, and the holy water set the layout firmly in my mind and in the world. With the layout created, I discarded the cards. Burying them or burning them is probably the best way to go about it for most witches, but I threw mine in the trash. Use whatever works.
Step #4: Try it out!
The last step is to try your layout. If you are a novice tarot card reader, it's fine to keep your book handy while you do your reading—anything that helps get you the information you need is what you should do in a practical exercise like this. I won't discuss my reading in depth, but through it I was able to determine that my situation might be an allegory for difficulties I am going through in my personal life, mainly related to managing my goals in the physical world in comparison to my magickal goals. My reading also encouraged me to try and understand the situation fully on all levels and from all directions because this understanding was necessary for a positive result.
I won't offer instructions here on actually performing a tarot reading as that isn't really the purpose of the article. However, as you test drive your layout, pay close attention to any problem areas in your reading. It could be symptomatic of general tarot difficulties, or it could mean that there is room for improvement in your layout. Feel free to change it up as you will as nothing is ever set in stone. If you do make changes to your layout it would be wise to rebuild and recharge it in its new shape to fix its energies. Whatever happens, do what feels right and try to have fun with it. As long as you are having fun and you are getting results, it doesn't really matter what steps you use to get to your final layout. So, be creative, enjoy yourself, and don't trust anything I've written unless it feels right to you.
gl, hf, and Blessed Be!
--SteelWitch
Thank you for posting this! It is very helpful in learning how to build something from scratch like this by following along with your experience. Wonderful, and thank you again!
Posted by: MamaBird | December 10, 2009 at 12:28 PM