Introduction

“Noah Webster defines divination as “the practice of attempting to foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge by occult or supernatural means.” The interesting word in this rather prosaic definition is “attempting”, which would suggest that divination is humbug: typical mainstream thinking regarding a subject beyond one’s personal knowledge and prejudices.
Divination works, as long as the practitioner knows what he or she is doing and is not a humbug themselves. Using Tarot cards to garner “hidden” knowledge about people and situations goes all the way back to the Ancient Egyptians. If you are interested in an in-depth discussion about how they work and what they are all about, you would do well to study THE BOOK OF THOTH by Aleister Crowley, who had a much deeper and fuller grasp about this arcane subject than do I, and from which most of this treatise is derived.

Many times I have used Crowley’s Tarot cards to “tell fortunes” for people I do not know personally and more often than not I have been asked “How do you know that?” about their affairs and life situations. Actually, I don’t know “that” at all. The cards allow me to tune in on people and I merely give my interpretation of what I see. The trump cards usually show some spiritual force operating on the “querent” (the person getting the reading), court cards generally mean a person in the situation and the number cards deal with the more worldly aspects of the querent’s life at the time of the reading. The nice thing about the number cards is that they all (except the Aces) have a word on them describing what they mean. This little treatise is nothing more than a condensation of Crowley’s work in the book. I have tried to leave out the philosophy as much as possible and take only the data which deals with what the cards mean when used in divination. Next and last is a description of how I use the cards in a lay out taught to me by a mystical lady who really understood the Tarot.”

FRATER DIAMONDHAWK