Tarot is what allows me to peer through the lens of the present at the distortions of the past. Maybe, if I am lucky, a glimpse through the vortex at possible futures.
That is my way in. It always has been. But there are other ways, older ways, and I have been drawn to most of them at some point across a lifetime of readings, a lifetime of watching people look for something just beyond what they can ordinarily see.
The crystal balls
I was obsessed with crystal balls as a child. I would sit in front of one and simply stare, sometimes falling asleep in front of it. There is something about the quality of that particular depth, the way light moves inside it, that quiets the ordinary mind and opens something else.
I have two now, mine and my mother's, and they sit beside each other on display. Not as tools I use in the traditional sense of scrying, more as a focus, a presence, a place to direct intention. My mother's has been with me a lot recently. It has given me a great deal of comfort.
During lockdown two slinky Burmese descended on our life and immediately became obsessed with both crystal balls. As far as those felines were concerned, those spheres belonged on the floor, and nothing we did made the slightest difference. That was the one period the crystals were put away.
The cats were not wrong, exactly. A crystal ball demands nothing of you. It does not promise. It sits there and invites you to be still, which is most of what any of this is.
Cartomancy and where I began
Before tarot there were playing cards. Madame Tamar, who started my entire journey, was a cartomancer. Worn playing cards on the table, edges battered by the countless fates they had touched. She worked with the standard 52-card deck and she knew exactly what she was doing with it.
I moved to tarot eventually, drawn by its deeper symbolic vocabulary. But I do not think of cartomancy as lesser. Different vehicle, same practice. The cards are a language; what matters is whether the reader can speak it.
The symbols are a language. The reader is the translator. You learn the vocabulary over a lifetime. You never stop learning it.