Cards, Runes, Staves and Bones…..

I always like to pull cards this time of year, for some reason more then in any other season I will do full readings for myself in the winter and always at Solstice.

In the summertime I may pull a card here and there to place on my altar for the day, but it is usually light and from one of my lighter decks as well such as Isha Lerner’s Flower cards.

This Solstice eve I decided to pull some cards and realized just how many decks and choices I had to choose from, which got me to thinking and remembering that this was not always the way…….

When I was six years old or so, I went with my parents to an old timers outdoor farm auction, we went to these often and I loved it, the smell of the old guys pipe tobacco, the warm hay and barn, and the musty smell of old things.

Image from the Blog My Shabby Roses

There is one memory however that sticks with me to this day, of my father bringing me a big box of old toys he had bought for a dollar, it was overflowing with mostly unusable stuff, but there were a few treasurers  that I coveted.

At the bottom of the box were these cards, they had beautiful pictures on them and I fell absolutely in love, so I gathered all of them up from the bottom of the musty box and went to sit under a tree to inspect them further.

To this day there is still great sadness over what happened next, for my precious cards were then snatched from my hands just as I had sat down with them!  My mother had seem me with them, recognized them as tarot cards and taken them away faster then I could look at all the lovely pictures.

For you see I was raised in a very strict religion{Which I  left at 15} and was promptly told that to play with these cards would invite Satan to come around me and this could lead to demonic possession. Imagine my fear, my wonder at how something so beautiful could be so terrible? This event left me afraid of Tarot for many years to come, and in equal measure fascinated and curious of them.

Fast forward 10 years later, I am 16 or 17, I can’t remember, but living on my own and finally free to explore the world at my own without fear of of a restricting religion. It was then that I stumbled onto Runes, smooth stones in a soft satin bag tumbling around, ancient and tied into something older and more mysterious then I could comprehend at the time.

Somehow I convinced myself that runes were not the same as Tarot, they were safer, more anthropological because these signs had been carved into standing stones in Germany and Northern Europe. I loved them and began to make my own sets, sewing fabric bags to put them in and buying my first dremel to make the grooves deeper. I used smooth limestone from the side of Lake Ontario where I lived, and still to this day have several sets of these around. But I was still curious about tarot, as sometimes runes can be brutal with their answers, and often confusing if you are not very clear of mind….

Finally years later I managed to allow a friend to read my cards from her personal set, a set that her mother had bought her! Something I could not even begin to imagine happening to me, and something that I myself did for my own daughter last year with Nao my beekeeping sister. Together we went in on a Fairy deck for her, she loved it, and I have to say it was not only really fun but also very empowering!

Fast forward again, I am in Italy with my husband in a tiny shop that looks like something out of a movie, that I found down an alleyway. The shop is filled with books and globes, jewelry and calligraphy pens, but behind the counter and on the top of a dusty shelf are several sets of tarot cards, I ask for one and slowly the shopkeeper who speaks no English pulls it down, and reluctantly hands it to me, and I know that I must take it home. It was called Tarot Of The Old Path, came with no book,leaving me to find a copy on-line,  and was to be my first set of many tarot cards.

After that the flood gates opened, and I began to learn and to see what worked for me, some sets were pretty, but simply had no substance for the questions I was asking. In my priestess training I was asked to learn a set that simply did not resonate for me and then there were the sets that were gifted me.

Later I discovered the Celtic Tree Ogham and had a handmade precious set gifted to me, carved by my dear friend Sarah Lawless. These had a deeper meaning for me a connection to my ancestors and I have been using them now for many years.

Then I am on my second vision quest with 16 women on an island, in the forest of British Colombia, we are there for 4 days and all spread out so as to be alone and with ourselves and our spirit guides, in shamanic process.

On the last day we break down our respective camps and gather together in silence, we eat for the first time, and slowly come back to ordinary reality and begin to process what happened. As we sat quietly around the warm fire that evening drums in hand sharing, one of the women came up to me with a small red box and placed it in my hands. It was filled with small deer bones, 6 of them, and I knew right then and there what they were for and why they had come to me.

Those bones were meant to be thrown, on a leather board that I had been told to create 2 years prior. The moment those bones were in my hands I finally understood the purpose of the leather pouch with drawings on it, and why these bones were given to me. This is to be a divination set, the symbols given to my in shamanic journey and used for no one but myself for a year.

The journey of learning divination has been long, there are so many options to us these days and so much information! I was astounded that when I applied myself to collecting all of the sets I had just how long it took for me to gather them from every corner of the house, and then just how many there were! It looked like a small metaphysical store!

These days I am using bones more then anything, but sometimes there is nothing like doing a large spread of cards for a longer term outlook, or view on the situation.

Do you use a certain set of cards, Runes, Staves, Bones? What worked for you and what did not?