January 18, 2020
This is a reading I had done in March 2019, and it turned out to be a perfect example of getting it wrong, often because of wishful thinking which makes you see what is not necessarily there, or as in this case, not seeing what is also there.
X was a colleague at our Toronto call centre whose work visa was about to expire. Before returning to his home country to apply for permission to return here as a Canadian resident, he decided to spend the last couple of weeks visiting the other side of the country (the west coast) to see what other parts of Canada were like.
A few days after X left I noticed he had posted a couple of pictures of himself in BC, with a huge shot of the gorgeous snow-covered Rocky Mountains behind him. He looked so happy! I decided to ask the cards what was up. Was X still planning to come back to work at our call centre when he got his residency status or not?
Cards used: Yves Reynaud’s facsimile of the 1751 Claude Burdel Tarot Spread: Traditional French Cross
Card 1 on the left (the Devil) shows the current situation. The two minions on the Devil card are bound to him with chains. Good, I thought: X was “pulling strings” or calling on his connections to achieve his goal.
Card 2 on the right (the Popess) represents what he should avoid. X shouldn’t lose himself in paperwork or too much research. In other words, dilly dallying here and there may not speed the process.
Card 3 above (Justice) is advice or major influences. Again, I thought this was great. I took it to mean that X would be able to rely on government or administrative support to speed up the process so that he could obtain Canadian residency status.
Card 4 at the bottom (the Moon) is the answer. Since this card often represents the call centre for me, it was clear that even if X considered other possibilities, once he got his residency permit, he would return to work at the call centre. Woof woof woof go the two dogs in the card. 🙂 That’s why I often read this as the “call” centre.
Card 5 in the middle (the Chariot) is the synthesis of the reading. So with the original question in mind, X would be running here and there in order to charge back to the call centre. Cool, I thought! It would be great to work with him again. If I had had another more careful look at the cards, I may have noticed that things were not quite as they seemed, and that X’s return to the call centre was not a foregone conclusion.
Of course I’m not saying that this interpretation could not have been right at the time the reading was done. After all, things can change and other forces can eventually change the course of events. What I would like to demonstrate here is that the same cards can be interpreted on a separate level and point to a completely different outcome.
So here’s what I found out. After a few months with no sign of X back at the call centre, I Googled him to see what he was up to. To my great dismay, at least in relation to this reading (and my vanity as a Tarot reader), I found out that X had ended up staying in his home country and had obtained a much better position in one of the government departments there!
So how else could I have read these cards at the time I drew them? The first thing I should have noticed was the presence of the Devil card. Yes, it could mean pulling strings and all that, but in a reading, it can also be a warning that things won’t necessarily go the way you (the reader) or the subject of the reading may think (or want). With the Moon card present, as well, this can also point to someone not seeing clearly anymore–it’s night and all you see are shadows–, or of having lost sight of his original path.
But what about the Chariot and “charging ahead”? Yeah well, that Chariot usually has horses wanting to go in opposite directions. And so Justice, like the moving needle of a compass, started to pull X towards a different “government” direction, one where he would obtain a position within the government of his country instead of trying to get Canadian residency status.