I learned to read tarot cards with the Rider Waite Smith deck, like everyone else who didn’t learn on the Thoth deck. Those two are chock full of esoteric symbolism, which some folks naturally get, and others have studied long and hard to recognize. I’m not one of those people. I wrote keywords on my tarot deck instead! Even still… What the heck does a dude sneaking around with a handful of swords mean to a modern person who has a love life question, wonders about work, or about spirit contact? Or whatever…
I heard somewhere that all the symbolism is really supposed to simply trigger our own intuition (and whatever internal or external intelligence talks to you there), so since I’ve been playing Pokémon The Card Game since it came out. First with my kid brother, next with my teen son, and most recently with my second grade son. I REALLY know the symbolism in those cards! Plus we have thousands of them… So I thought I’d pull out the ones that spoke to me and put my own deck together. I did a bunch of readings with them for myself, at parties, poolside at a retreat, and for my online Chaos Magick pals. Not only is it a slammin’ novelty that people really enjoy, I get clearer readings than I do with the Rider Waite Smith cards!
Since they are so much fun and give good readings, I thought I’d share pictures of the cards I selected, not in hopes of others finding the exact same cards, but to empower you, Dear Reader, to experiment for yourself!
Since I’m really into the Chaos Star and have correlated it with the eight trigrams of I Ching I clumped my cards around the eight categories. The correspondences are mine, not by the book, if there even IS such a book. First term is the color in the Chaos Star, the middle term is my association that connects them (to me, anyhow!), the last term is the name of the Trigram. I didn’t include it, but Evee is also in my deck to represent me, or the person who I am reading for. He’s that little fox guy that evolves into eight different Pokémon. Fitting, right?
Black/ Ancestors/ Mountain
Green/ Body/ Earth
Orange/ Introspection/ Thunder
Blue/ Intuition/ Water
Silver/ Magician/ Heaven
Yellow/ Mind/ Wind
Red/ Passion/ Fire
Purple/ The Chase/ Lake
I didn’t make a correspondence chart in a cute little booklet for keeping all these initial associations straight or anything. That’s what I wanted to move away from in the first place! Instead, I simply piled them this way while I was going through the massive stack of cards we have, so that the deck would be balanced, and that every situation in life would be present and up for interpretation.
Some of the more iconic characters speak to me by sight of the picture alone. Most of the heavy lifting I tend to pull by skimming the moves in relation to the position in the spread. There’s no special layout I use, just my favorites from normal tarot cards.
If you don’t own your own humungous collection, ask the dude at your local card shop. More than one in my area has a bargain box, a quarter a card!
There you have it. If you’ve got a shoe box full of Pokémon and nostalgia, this can make you the fortune teller for every kid (or millennial)’s birthday party!
Building the Philosophers' Stone 