Cartomancy

For the past few weeks, I’ve been attempting to teach myself cartomancy or card reading: Tarot’s idiot younger brother, and to say the least it’s an adventure. The closest I’ve ever gotten to divination before has been those little paper fortune tellers people made in elementary school, so I’m finding there’s a lot of history to this.



As an abridged version of the tarot deck, people have been using playing cards for fortune telling for almost as long as they’ve been around. No source is exactly sure whether they were developed first for games or divination, but the deck of cards have been around for at least 600 years and used for both.

Now, I know there are some who would argue that the mathematical laws of statistics make this kind of fortune telling a load of crock. Statistically speaking, you have the same 1 in 52 chance of drawing any one card first; however, I found one site that gave me some food for thought:

“Statistical laws imply that a deck, properly shuffled, will yield the same chance of a given Card being drawn. But the key to this axiom is that this is true – but it is a law of averages; if you draw a Card from a deck ten thousand times, you’ll find that each Card has roughly the same chances of being drawn … but for small numbers, the Universe has a method to communicate with us.”
- Excerpted from the Arcana Arcanorum

Pair that with the hundreds of different spreads used by those consulting the cards and there are near infinite combinations that can be interpreted by someone who knows what each card is said to represent.

Being that I’m a novice, I’m not yet very good at reading the cards. In fact, I wrote all the meanings on the cards to save me the trouble of looking them up every time I do a reading.

All the same, it’s a good distraction when I’m bored or unable to sleep or just have a nagging question that I don’t know who to ask. So excuse me while I shuffle up and start reading.