Some of the images that join on the card edges.Excerpted from Lost Envoy.
"The deck design is highly unusual for combining cartomancy and taromancy, and for the complex system of interconnecting visual motifs that link many of the cards across their borders."
Unfortunately, yes. This was the way people read cards. It was pretty standard: Majors meanings, pip meanings, combined meanings. No pulling a Daily card (hoping you see That Guy) and calling it "spiritual." The Tarot, after all, is a deck of playing cards. And even Waite borrowed heavily from "A Book of Days." Spare, at a glance, appears to be following PRS Foli's Fortune-telling by cards.
Victorian cartomancy is vital to reading pip decks.So the Spare deck appeared not a moment too soon.)
This deck was only rediscovered in 2013. It stayed hidden throughout the 20th century, and seemed to reappear when it was truly needed, almost like Tibetan terma.
Today I received The Southern Gothic Oracleand The HAUNTS Expansion Pack. I ordered at Etsy and it took all of three days to arrive - it was mailed the same day I ordered. It came from Tennessee. I've noticed that mail from southern states seems to arrive a lot faster than mail from other parts of the country. I call it the "Hillbilly Express" - they have a long history of fast driving. The moonshiners and bootleggers had to outrun the law. Appalachia is the birthplace of NASCAR.
But before I talk about the deck, I want to talk about Southern Gothic itself, what it is, or at least my understanding of it. It's a veneer of gentility over brutality and evil, there's often a supernatural element or at least something people experience as supernatural, there might be decaying houses, family secrets, mental illness...you get the picture.
You can feel it, especially if you get away from the city. It was strong in my hometown, the history there is extremely bloody. I had one no-bones-about-it paranormal experience at a friend's house. A big glass ashtray broke. Nothing knocked it down, there was no fire in it, it just broke. My friend said "I told you there was somethin' in this house." He decided it was prudent to lock up the house and leave for awhile, and asked me where I wanted to be dropped off. About a block from his house, there's a historical marker saying it was once the site of Robson's Castle. Some crazy Scotsman moved there in the 1800's and built an actual castle by the river. I found out later that he had a huge plantation, that was how he could afford to have a castle built and host huge parties. My friend's house sat on the site of Robson's cotton plantation. I don't even want to imagine what went on there.
Later, the castle was destroyed when the river flooded, and they built a meat packing plant there. More blood. This is the former site of it. There's nothing there but the north bridge and a historical marker now:
And so on. You walk around and there's big gorgeous live oaks with spanish moss and vines, everything looks so peaceful, but something feels evil, too. It lingers. Nobody tells you about it when you're a kid, you don't know what it is. You find out later.
That's my take on it. For a more objective explanation of Southern Gothic, there's this. You've seen some of these movies, read some of these books, I'm sure.
Which brings me back to the cards. They're large, but the deck seems best suited to smaller spreads, so that's not an issue. And they're matte - matte is always preferable to glossy. It's good stock, strong, flexible. The cards aren't slippy - that's a plus for a lot of people who have cards flying everywhere when they shuffle. I don't have that issue, so I'll probably give them a little fanning powder so they slide more easily. The box is sturdy and attractive. All in all, it's beautifully done.
You get a little booklet with the deck, and the expansion pack has a QR code to a pdf you can download. The cards are grouped by elements, handy if you use elemental dignities. The interpretations given lean towards the currently trending, introspective/advice style, and you can certainly use the cards that way. But you can get classic predictive readings out of these cards, too. Most of the cards depict familiar things: a mason jar, a wasp nest, a dog. OK, I've never seen the Boo Hag (nor do I want to!) but I've heard of her. The legends in the Haunts pack are well known.
First I did a personal reading for myself that I won't post here. Suffice to say the cards seem to be working well.
I don't do deck interviews. Maybe it's just me, but they seem silly. Still, my next question was whether the cards would be compatible with my reading style, which is basically old fashioned fortunetelling.
The cards as they fell:
Oh, that Boo Hag. If you wake up tired or sick, she "rode" you, took your breath. People use her as a kind of boogeyman to scare kids into behaving, too. Kudzu was imported here and it kind of took over everything. And Roots is good old rootwork. The ones shown are High John - said to be powerful for money, protection, and gambling. It's one that men use, not women so much. It kind of looks like a ballsack. So what does it all mean?
There was another card clinging to the back of Roots (remember when I said they're not slippy?), and it holds the key:
In the Point Pleasant area of West Virginia, in 1966. people started seeing Mothman.
I don't believe that there was a physical cryptid any more than I believe that there was a physical Bigfoot. Nor do I believe that there was a "rational explanation" like the theories that have been put forth about sandhill cranes and whatnot.
But I don't believe all those people were lying, either. They saw something. Call it a spirit, or a hallucination, or whatever you like, people were seeing it.
During rush hour on December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge collapsed. 46 people were killed.
Mothman has been commodified and marketed to death since then, he's kind of a joke now. But when people were seeing him, he was a warning. The sightings stopped after the bridge collapsed.
When bad circumstances (Boo Hag) threaten to take over (Kudzu), these cards will be protective (Roots) because they will give a warning (Mothman.)
I can't ask for better than that!
It's a great deck, it doesn't gloss over the horrific undercurrents we have here, it's well thought-out, and it's actual art that Stacey Williams-Ng did with her hands. Support artists, not AI! Available at her Etsy shop:
"I know very well that many scientists consider dowsing as a type of
ancient superstition. According to my conviction this is, however,
unjustified. The dowsing rod is a simple instrument which shows the
reaction of the human nervous system to certain factors which are
unknown to us at this time."
- Albert Einstein
For years, pendulums just told me what I wanted to hear. What
finally solved that issue for me was getting a heavier one that I can't
subconsciously "push."
While I do have a couple of pendulum charts, I seldom if ever use
them. A pendulum is a very simple, direct instrument and I find it best
not to impose unnecessary complications. I like to keep it to answers
like "yes," "no," "maybe," and "rephrase."
I don't buy into new age/wellness schools of thought with
"programming", Ascended Masters and their ilk, elaborate cleansings, or
rituals. I just ask questions and wait for it to move. I do keep a
camphor tablet in the box with it, it seems to keep it honest. Andy once said that impressions of past card readings seem to (at times) cast a shadow over a later reading. He called it "shades." I've noticed that I do have to swap decks out from time to time, as do most readers I've talked to, so it makes sense. He noticed the same thing with the crystal sphere. There's no reason that the pendulum would be an exception. The camphor tablet works, the pendulum works, and that's good enough.
Mine seems to work best for questions that directly affect me. I seldom use it for client readings.
The best bit of advice I've seen was posted by Cat Yronwode on her Lucky Mojo forum: "What
a pendulum can do very well, and better than many other forms of
divination, is to determine things in the present at a distance, to
locate hidden or lost things and people, and to uncover hidden emotions."
It's good for cross-checking card readings. If the cards seem to be
saying that grandma's ring is in a low, shadowy spot in a room on the
east side of the house, and you think it may have fallen behind the
dresser, the quickest, easiest way to verify that is to consult the
pendulum. Much easier than moving furniture only to find out that the
ring is somewhere else.
I got mine from Stan Slater in Austin, Texas. He does excellent work. He makes some lovely pens, too!
There's
something I've used to break up dog fights, a guy told me about it in
the 90's and it works. You really need two people though, if it's a fight between two dogs. If you just need to get a dog off of someone, you can do it yourself. You pick up
their hind legs like a wheelbarrow and they'll let go - it's like magic.
And spraying an attacking dog in the face with a fire extinguisher
works if you have one handy. A school bus driver got a pair of pits off a
lady and her small dog she was holding doing that. That's what he had,
so that's what he used and it worked.
Everybody
has pits these days and a lot of idiots let them run at large, so I
have to be ready. I have Shelties. A couple of shakes and it would be over for them. I don't care what the pitmommies say about "pibble
nannydog cuddlebugs" - they might be fine at home but once they start,
they don't want to stop. It's the "gameness" that's bred into them,
they'll keep fighting with their guts hanging out. Look at this carriage
horse attack - the dog only stopped when the horse stomped it to near-death.
It died soon after. One well-meaning soul tried to help by hitting the dog with a spatula.
(Didn't work, lol.)
And sometimes they go after people. Statistically, it's rare (if they were as psycho as some people would have you think, we'd all be dead) and yes, other breeds can be aggressive too sometimes. In the interest of fairness, here's a non-pit and a crazy no-good owner. Dog parks are stupid - would you get on a subway and start trying to interact with everybody? Your dog isn't much different.
But it's mostly the pits and the pit mixes. I don't think the breed is inherently human-aggressive (animal aggression is another story) but there's so MANY of them. No-good owners get them cheap or free and let them run at large.
People need to know what to do instead of standing
around being ineffective.
ETA: The guy at the end of this video uses the Wheelbarrow Method. The dog doesn't redirect on him, it's safe. It worked beautifully when nothing else was working at all.
The image above might be a best case scenario. There's still wildlife, and the people don't look ravaged. If enough people wise up, maybe we can have that. Otherwise, things might look more like this:
Something I saw at a forum set off this whole train of thought:
"I've been reading longer than most of them have been alive."
It was in response to an article somebody linked to. Another of those "tArOt dOeSn'T pReDiCt tHe fUtUrE iT's a tOoL fOr SeLf rEfLeCtIon! " dribble pieces. (NPR, you really should know better.)
And yes, that's one of the things that's maddening about
these wellness readers. We had already been reading professionally for
years when these little snotnoses were still shitting yellow, and they
have the unmitigated gall and stupidity to tell us we're doing it all
wrong.
It makes me wonder if it's a generational thing. And I loathe the whole "Gen X vs. Millennials vs. Boomers etc." thing. It's stupid. No generation is a monolith. But it might have some relevance here. I know the younger people don't have much of
a future to look forward to. Of course ours was no great shakes either,
but at that age we didn't KNOW. We thought the pollution was going to
get cleaned up, race relations were improving, grievances would be addressed, etc. They're probably
expecting a Max Max dystopia with gangs roving through the ruins killing people for
potable water. And I can agree that's a very distinct possibility.
But they need to blame corporations, oligarchs, political lobbying, fascism, "replacement theory", etc. and stop attempting to use fortunetellers as punching bags to get their frustrations out. And even with what's coming down the pike, they can still ask the cards the same things people have always asked: "Will he ask me out?" "Will I get the job?" etc.
Not wanting to ponder the future is no reason to gut cartomancy or insult us.
Just a reminder: When working with old decks like Lenormand, Kipperkarten, Sibilla, etc. there is no need to add cards in order to "update" them. Don't innovate, don't modernize, don't tamper. You can put the meanings in a modern context - the Rider can be your car rather than a horse - but leave the image alone. Everything is already built into the system. What goes on now went on then, albeit sometimes less openly. People are people.
What I'm seeing online is people who want to learn the cards making the same mistakes over and over. The big problem is a lack of discernment. You need to learn from people who can actually read cards. Just a few reliable sources. Less is more! I'm not trying to discredit the "competition" here. I do not sell courses, workshops, or any of that. I don't make videos. I just read cards, and I'm telling you what the problem is: bad signal.
You won't learn Lenormand from sub-par books. The ones Hugh mentions are more than adequate, especially Andy's. Get that one and work through it. Then work through it again. Stay with it until you've absorbed it.
You won't learn from youtube. With the exception of Hexe Claire, everything there is crap. Hexe Claire's videos are good, but they're an introduction. They'll get you started, that's all. If you want to progress, again, get Andy's book.
You won't learn on forums. Those are full of bad readings, it's all guesswork. Bad information is seldom corrected, since forums are focused on getting and keeping lots of board traffic, not trying to make sure people learn properly. (BTW, being a forum mod does not confer knowledge of the cards!)
Facebook groups are, if anything, worse.
And you won't learn by focusing on spreads, or learning to design your own spreads, or any of that. Good old fashioned lines, boxes, and tableaus work the best, and will answer any question. You don't need dedicated spreads for various subjects like love, money, etc. Stop wasting your time on spreads and practice reading the cards.
Just because a person has a youtube channel, moderates a forum, or even writes a book does not mean they know what they're talking about. As I commented on Hugh's blog, "I’d advise anyone who wants to learn to toss any books they have other
than the ones mentioned. The vast majority of what’s out there is
garbage. Approach the cards with logic.
Then, study and practice. Don’t try to learn silly spreads. Don’t seek
instruction or advice on forums, facebook groups, etc. That’s the blind
leading the blind. Just do readings every day, record them, and review
them later to see if they were accurate. Keep doing that for at least
five years and you’ll get there."
And yes, it does take at least five years to get fluent. You're learning a language. Don't underestimate the complexity of the method simply because there are only 36 cards!
