On Excess and Bad Signal

With a few notable exceptions, I recommend books on card reading published prior to 1970 or so. There are reasons for this, read on:

This is a meme that's been going around my dog groups. As you can see, all of these "breeds" are pitbull mixes. It reflects something that's really going on with the mixed breed population: pitbulls are so overbred that you'd be hard pressed to find a mixed breed dog that doesn't have a degree of pitbull ancestry. 

Pitbulls and pitbull mixes are not for everybody. No dog is, but especially not a dog developed for tenacious animal aggression. These dogs require responsible, knowledgeable owners. In the wrong hands, things can and do go horribly wrong. But that hasn't stopped the irresponsible owners from letting their intact dogs run at large and flood the gene pool.

The same thing can happen with ideas. Let's look at "jumpers."

Once in a great while, a card might "jump" from the deck while shuffling. Some readers attach special significance to it, others just stick it back in the deck. It's something that's probably been done for as long as people have been reading cards...but then the internet happened. There was the inevitable bad signal, and now we have people doing it intentionally, even doing something called "fallout shuffling" where they just drop cards all over the place. So now we have people asking what to do if they get more "jumpers" (but they aren't really jumpers if you drop them on purpose) than there are positions in the spread, how to read a card that falls at such-and-such angle, and all manner of irrelevant bullshit that has fuck-all to do with reading cards.

It's the same with the idea that you need to learn numerous dedicated spreads for different kinds of questions, that spreads without named positions are "not spreads", that "third party" readings are verboten, that cards "don't tell the future," etc., etc., ad nauseum. These ideas are spread like viruses in contemporary books and on websites.

If you want to read cards, study the cards and the older sources, not how to do 1000 spreads while playing 32/36/52/78 Pickup and only asking about yourself in the present. And stay away from the new age and wellness stuff. It's absurd.