Friday 28 December 2007

The Bad Witch's Guide to Fortune Telling


The days between Yule and the New Year are traditionally good for making predictions about the future.

There are those who say that to do this you need special equipment, such as a tarot deck, and extensive knowledge of what all the symbols mean.

I disagree. Fortune telling is as much about using your own insight as it is about remembering what other people have interpreted as significant in the past.

A good exercise in using your intuition to tell the future is to make your own fortune telling deck, using images no one has written volumes about. You can do this with old greetings cards.

Collect up a pile of used birthday or Christmas cards. Find the smallest card first and cut off the back or cut out the shape you want - it can be oblong, square or round. Using that as a template, cut out more images in the same shape and size from the other greetings cards. You will need at least a dozen to make a workable deck.

Then you are ready to start fortune telling.

Shuffle your deck and pick out three cards. Place them face up in front of you. You can say that these three cards represent the past, the present and the future; or maybe a question you want to ask, the background to the question and how it can be answered.

Examine the three-card spread. What does each image tell you? It might start to mean something quite different to how you interpreted it when it was on the front of a Yule card. Do the three images appear to tell a story or do they have some other relationship to each other? Spend as much time as you need to see what the cards are showing.

Making your own fortune telling deck in this way is, at the very least, a fun party trick at the end of the holiday season. It is also a neat form of recycling.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This sounds fantastic. I have a big pile of Christmas cards downstairs and I'm going to give it a go. I suspect there I will meet a lot of tall, dark robins and reindeer this year though...

Badwitch said...

Could be worse :) Doing my own reading today, I see snow is due to fall and ice will form on my window. How accurate :)