Throughout my tarot readings and teachings, I encourage the idea of allowing your personal experiences to color the readings. To completely remove yourself from the experience can yield a reading where the querent does not fully grasp the practical applications of the reading. In the vast majority of my readings, this is effective and essential to the success. Occasionally, I seem to overstep that boundary though and put my own expectations into the reading. I wrote about this before when I was trying to move to Chicago and concocted a narrative based on the cards that was totally wrong, but fit my needs.
Yesterday, I did it again. Dammit.
If you follow my Facebook page, you will know that I pulled some cards regarding the election and what the predicted results would be. I got some things right, and I got some things VERY wrong. Unless you are living under a rock, or just don’t care about US politics, you probably know by now that Donald Trump has won the presidency. As it stands this morning, the electoral vote has been called, Hillary has conceded and Mr. Trump is on his way to the White House.
I did not see that coming. The cards did, but I refused.
For the sake of brevity, I’m going to just focus on the cards I pulled for the Republicans and Democrats here. The two passages below are from my post on Facebook yesterday.
“Donald Trump: Six of Wands – The Trump camp will be touting victory all night long and potentially after the final results are in too. This does not mean that he will win (I don’t think he will), but regardless of the outcome, his camp will call it a victory and that his campaign was a success in that it did what it was intended to do which was to shake up America.
Hillary Clinton: Ace of Wands – A new beginning for the Clinton campaign and quite literally something that is being handed to her out of thin air. This feels like a very empty victory for America. With this being a wands card, it feels to be more of an idealistic win and her term will be largely be ideas rather than action.”
-Facebook, Matt Williams, 11/8/16
The votes are still being tallied, but the count now shows Clinton taking the popular vote while Trump secured the electoral vote. I shudder at the fact that the cards showed me quite clearly that this was going to be the case. Trump got the victory that matters, while Clinton got the empty one. They both “won” but, like Gore and others before him, the popular vote gets tossed aside if the electoral vote doesn’t match.
So on that note, I got I nailed it, right? Kinda…
You see, I could not wrap my head around the idea of enough Americans seeing Donald Trump as a viable president to actually cast the prediction in his favor. I dug into the possible meanings for the cards to come up with the answer that I wanted. I saw Clinton winning and being a lame duck president for her term. I actively refused to believe that the American populace would vote in someone who has preached so much hate, anger and divisiveness.
What’s worse, is that by taking Clinton’s Ace as a sign of victory, when I pulled Aces for the congressional outcomes, I saw those as victories too. My predictions showed a sweeping victory of the presidency, house and senate by the Democratic Party. Yeah, that didn’t happen. At all. So now we sit with Republican controlled executive and legislative branches and one Supreme Court seat already open. That is a frightening thing for the more liberally minded Americans.
What do we do now then?
Well, from a Tarot perspective, these times are an opportunity to see our biases at work and learn to overcome them. We readers get carried away by our predictive abilities at times and walk into these reality checks to keep us grounded. Does it shake my faith in the cards or my ability to discern them? Nope. Just gives me a new perspective on reading them on a national scope. This was a time for me to vocalize an uncomfortable truth and I didn’t take it.
On a more personal level, this is a time for us all to start focusing our efforts on what direction we want the country to go under Trump leadership. We need to be vocal with our Congressional representatives to let them know that we do not want hate, anger or divisiveness to rule the day. We need to be active and vocal on a local level to ensure that our fellow citizens walk in safety and respect. We need to look ahead to our future and not dwell on the past.
What’s done is done. Now we get to work