Here’s the thing about reading tarot for myself: it’s boring.
Not just because I have a hard time listening to my own advice – although there’s certainly an element of that – but moreover because I can usually predict, within a margin of error, what it’s going to say. My decks are old friends, nuanced and grumpy, each with their own voices and opinions. I, however, am always myself.
This means that some cards recur no matter which deck I use, reflections of my understanding of myself. The three of cups appears to talk about my continual search for community. The page of wands often represents how I am seen by others. The eight of wands reminds me, in case I didn’t know, that like my patron I want to go fast.
These are sometimes reminders, grounding me in my own self concept. More often they are repetitive, answers to questions I already know showing up in readings where I had hoped for new information. The call is coming from inside the house. In order to get a new perspective, I have to go somewhere else for a reading.
The flip side of this is how much I enjoy giving readings to other people. Directed outward, decks I’ve used for years will occasionally flip cards I don’t remember seeing before, some I wasn’t even aware they had. A reading for another person is very rarely boring, and even more rarely repetitive. It takes a long time to develop a relationship with someone robust enough that the patterns in their lives become as clear as the patterns in my own. While I’ve had that happen, more often reading for someone else is a way to get to know one of my friends and talk about things that matter to us both as we figure out how we work together.
These both fit within my main understanding of how the cards work. They are reflections of ourselves and, when reading for another, of the relationships between us. Whatever metaphysical or psychological explanation I am currently playing with, it makes sense that different people conjure different images out of the decks. There is nothing unusual about that.
What I struggle with is when the universe takes this trend and turns it into an unsubtle, repetitive, impossible to ignore hammer at the door of my self-image, a message too clear to mistake for coincidence or happenstance. Decades on, I still am never prepared for when a card decides to stalk me down.
Illustration of the Justice tarot card taken from the 1897 book La Clef de la Magie Noire by Stanislas de Guaita, 1897 [public domain]
Sortilege is already a divinatory system that has a difficult relationship with probability. I’m not a mathematician – I don’t know the likelihood that a specific card would show up in five readings that I gave myself from different decks. I’d guess that the answer is “slim.”
But I am not a perfectly random beast. I am the person that shuffles my own decks, and I can explain away unlikely patterns with consistencies of habit, the same pattern of cut shuffle bridge that my grandma taught me. Reading for someone else introduces another set of hands to the equation, adds an extra element of randomization. A reading from another deck removes me from the process, sometimes entirely.
How do I explain it, then, when the same card appears for me in a dozen readings, from a dozen different hands?
Tarot is, for me, a way of having my questions answered – but while I can sometimes expect the same message to come through, a specific card recurring again and again is rare and unlikely enough to verge into being spooky. It’s not hard to notice when a card appears again and again, the same message in a dozen voices. What’s far more difficult, for me, is understanding why.
The last time this happened to me, it was Justice who showed up in reading after reading with their placid gaze and their unsheathed sword. They aren’t a card I usually see, in my readings. I tend to hover further down the Major Arcana, among the celestial bodies or the cyclical moments like The Wheel of Fortune or the World. When Justice first appeared in April, I frowned at them uncertainly, pulling clarifying cards with a hope that they would resolve into something I was more familiar with. When no such clarification came, I went to a friend – and there they were again, scales out, seated in their robes of state. Again, from a stranger. Again, in my own readings. Again.
I know this happens to other people fairly regularly, but I’ve never been sure as to how to interpret it. Often, when someone reaches out about a card showing up in every reading, I will suggest reframing the question. Maybe the querent is being too literal, or too focused on one aspect of a larger picture. More often, I assume, they have gotten the only answer that they are going to receive and repetition is the universe’s way of making that point. “What should I do about this?” can be answered directly, and then, if that fails, with “I’m sorry, did I stutter?” If the universe is saying what to do, I have often told a querent, do it. There won’t be a different answer before that happens.
The other option – the answer I give when I’m feeling more generous – is that a card repeating is just a reflection of where the querent is right now. I often think of my life in chapters, identified by the themes and aspects that are playing out across different aspects of my world. While I can often identify those themes, and apply myself to those lessons, that doesn’t necessarily speed up the process. I have blamed it on the stars, or on the gods, or on some other great pattern – but sometimes I am simply in a season in which the same moment plays out again and again.
I expect that most often the answer is somewhere in the middle. The card appears – I try to ignore it. The card appears – I attempt the lesson and do not quite manage to internalize it. The card appears – something outside of my control is not yet finished resolving. It is my signifier. It is the answer to my question. It is the current I am moving away from and the one I am moving into. It is the house I am standing in, and my hopes and fears. It recurs and recurs until I put down my deck and go try to live through it.
Charles VI (or Gringonneur) Deck; Le tarot dit de Charles VI, 15th century [public domain]
Justice, for me, is a card with a clear message. Look at the truth. There is an element of choice in it, but it is not the crossroads of the two of swords or the boundless options of the two of wands. It talks about the necessity of a clear and unbiased eye, a weighing of the facts and a decisive movement to uphold them. Look at it, the card says. Why aren’t you looking at it?
I consider myself pretty good at looking at uncomfortable truths, but when Justice showed up, I told myself I didn’t know what it was talking about. Maybe I didn’t. I certainly believed it when I said I had already dealt with the unpleasant things I had been trying to avoid. But it appeared again, and again, and I started to tear at the walls of my world, looking for the rotten boards that I might be avoiding.
“What am I looking for?” I asked, as one small lie to myself crumbled and another long-held avoidance cracked. “How can I move forward?” The image of scales, weighted and leaning. The image of a nameless goddess, wreathed in laurels, with a kind smile and a bright blade. “What am I avoiding?” Letters sent, altars packed away, conversations stretched across a decade finally held out loud.
It was a specific moment, it was a lesson, it was a chapter of my life. I would not have been ready for it sooner, and I could do nothing to hurry it along. It repeated like a song until I was sick of it, and then it continued until I had grown fond of it again. Until, finally, it resolved.
The day I spread the cards and found a different message, I already knew it was coming. The close of the chapter had been too clear to miss or mistake. Still, it was a relief to turn card after card and see nothing but the minors looking back at me, difficult in their own ways but smaller, the themes of a life between revelations. The two of wands, the page of wands, the three of cups smile up at me – old friends, affirming in their familiarity.
The storm had passed and, the eight of wands told me in its reversal, I had a little time to breathe before the next one came. Sometimes, it is reassuring to be a little bored.
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