I love cooking… You might be wondering what great cooking has in common with cartomancy. Quite a lot, that will become evident in a few sentences…
I love cooking. I love watching on youtube or television how great chefs prepare food. A professional kitchen looks like a well organized ballet, people move around each other, each one has their own task, each gesture is precise, and everything looks so well organized. It’s magic. And then you see the chef, the master of all, plating the most beautiful foods with such precision.
If we look deeper, there are common traits among all these chefs. They all learned basic techniques in school or even better by being apprentice for another chef, then honing their skills working for other chefs, learning all there is to learn. Until someday their creativity takes over and they start their own restaurant, they control their own kitchen, and they start using their own style to create the most amazing foods.
If we think about it, cartomancy works a lot the same way. We all learn from books or from such or such teacher. Then we practice with the teacher’s ideas, or following this or that book, any maybe another one after that. And we can certainly give good, reliable readings that way, the same way following a recipe in a cookbook gives decent results. But if we really want to shine, to master our craft as a reader the way a great chef creates magical dishes, over and over, whatever the ingredients and conditions, at some point we have to leave all this behind. Books are like crutches, once we have learned to walk, there comes a time to put them in the closet and start developing our own style. A good reader should find and speak with their own voice, not the one of their teacher, be true to themselves when interpreting cards.
As it is my tradition to always do a reading in my articles, I asked my cards “what should be the importance of method in our readings?”
Fox – Cross – Tower – Mice – Ring
The Tower stands tall in the middle of the spread, as focal point. It represents what has lasted over time, the construction we have built when learning some method or other. This is the core of our knowledge, the tradition we built upon.
What do we do with it? If we look at the first pair, Cross and Mice, the Cross certainly shows that staying rigid like a tower can become painful over time. So we nibble slowly at that core knowledge, the same way mice nibble over what’s around them, tiny bit by tiny bit. And we remove some of the core knowledge.
And here intervenes the second pair, Fox and Ring. We do this repeatedly, as shown by the ring. We start acting like a fox. The fox is certainly not a character that would follow method or tradition. The fox is independent, does his own stuff, he finds strategies to obtain what he wants. Slowly, we replace these methods we learned by our own style, until what remains is our own voice, our own way of seeing the cards.
Deck: Lilac Dondorf, by Game of Hope Lenormand.
