Storytelling: Reading the Cards as a Conversation

The cards on their own have individual meanings. That’s the easy part. What transforms a reading into something actually useful is when the cards start speaking to one another. When they form a story. A narrative. A conversation. Rachel Pollack put it better than I ever could: “The tarot has always been story. This is what I fell in love with the moment I saw it.” She quoted Italo Calvino, who called tarot “a machine for constructing stories.” That’s what it’s always been. That’s what we’re doing every time we lay cards out on the table.

But knowing that and actually reading that way are two different things. So let me show you what I mean.

The Recipe

Think of each card as an ingredient. You might pull the Four of Wands, the High Priestess reversed, the Knight of Swords. Flour, water, oil, whatever’s in your kitchen. Some ingredients complement each other beautifully. Some create interesting contrasts. Some are a bit of a wild card. When you bring them together, a bit of the salty and the sweet and the spicy, you get a meal. Something that is more than the sum of its parts.

A tarot reading works the same way.

Within the deck you’ve got the Major Arcana, which speaks to the bigger archetypes in life, the stuff that feels universal and significant. Then the Minor Arcana, which deals more with the day-to-day dance of things. Within the Minor Arcana you’ve got the suits: cups for the emotional world, pentacles for the material, swords for the mental, wands for energy and passion. If you’re doing a reading and one suit is dominant, that’s telling you something. If multiple cards share the same number, that’s probably telling you something too. These patterns are the first layer of how the cards start talking to each other.

Mary K. Greer said: “Think of the reading as a conversation. Let the cards talk to you, and talk back.” So that’s what I’m going to do. Let me show you rather than just tell you.

Reading in Sets

When someone comes to me without a specific spread in mind, I use what I call my dynamic free reading approach. I pull the cards in sets of three and let those threes talk to each other. It’s not a rigid formula. It’s more of a pattern that emerges as you go.

First three cards: Three of Swords reversed, Page of Cups reversed, The Fool.

Immediately I’m noticing that the Three of Swords and the Page of Cups are both reversed, and the Fool is upright. The first card usually relates to where the client is right now, the thing that’s sitting there. Three of Swords reversed, for me, links to living in your head too much. Bypassing your emotions rather than feeling them. The Page of Cups reversed sits alongside that well: the Page of Cups is this youthful, excited, open approach to emotion, and reversed it suggests a shallowness. Not really allowing the feelings to be fully felt. Those first two cards are diagnosing something.

Then the Fool comes in upright. Smell the flowers. Live in the present. Very different energy to what those first two are pointing at. At this point I’d ask the client: where are you emotionally checking out? Where are you trying to understand your feelings rather than just feel them? And what would happen if you took the Fool’s advice and let yourself feel them? In this deck the Fool is moving towards those feelings the client is trying to avoid. Take the leap. Don’t have an expectation of where it should go.

The Story Deepens

Second set: Ten of Wands, Eight of Cups reversed, High Priestess.

Something interesting is already happening structurally. Both middle cards across the two sets are reversed. Both end cards in this second set are upright and from the Major Arcana. The cards are patterning before I’ve said a word about what any of them mean.

The Ten of Wands alongside the Three of Swords reversed is burnout in more detail. You’ve gone into your head so much it’s built up pressure. Too much taken on, needing to let go. The Page of Cups and Eight of Cups are both cups cards, both reversed. The Eight of Cups is about moving on emotionally, walking away from what isn’t working. The fact that both cups cards have come out reversed suggests they haven’t done that. They’re avoiding it. As a result, things aren’t working and they probably can’t access their intuition the way they could.

The High Priestess at the end I’d usually read as a deep well of intuition, strong and open. But she’s come out as the final card in a reading where nothing else is pointing towards openness. So I’d say she’s blocked. I’d check that with the client: what does this feel like for you? Some people would say they feel completely connected to their intuition, in which case that changes things. But if they say they used to feel it and can’t reach it right now, then we look at why. And these cards have an answer. Emotional bypassing.

In this particular deck there’s a bowl of water on the High Priestess card that’s sitting wrong. That detail says something about the link between intuition and emotion. It’s like she’s got all these cups, but they’re dirty and broken, being used to catch leaks. There’s nothing left to fill her up. Spiritually dehydrated.

The Third Layer

Third set: Three of Pentacles, Seven of Swords reversed, Six of Pentacles reversed.

Three of Pentacles is about teamwork. It’s maybe saying: you can see what you’re capable of, but you’re not letting the people around you share this load. Seven of Swords reversed is that internal gaslighting energy. Telling yourself everything will be fine, lying to yourself to avoid doing the work. Six of Pentacles reversed: the scales are out of balance. This imbalance will keep repeating unless you accept the help that’s being offered.

And then I noticed something. The magpie on the Seven of Swords card in this deck is looking directly at the Three of Pentacles. Maybe the distraction, the self-deception, is specifically what’s getting in the way of the teamwork. There might be some jealousy in the mix too, because the magpie’s got jewels in its mouth.

That’s the thing about reading this way. You’re not just asking what each card means in isolation. You’re looking at where they’re pointing, what they’re looking at, what’s echoing across the spread. Stitching those patterns together can completely change what a reading is saying.

The Stories Behind the Cards

“When we read the cards,” Rachel Pollack said, “there are three people present: the subject, the reader, and the cards themselves. Together, they create a story.” That collaborative quality matters. The reading isn’t just the cards. It isn’t just you. It’s all of it, together.

One of the things that helps me read this way is that I’ve got a story for pretty much every card. Not just an interpretation. An actual story that illustrates the meaning, something I can bring in to make it land for the person in front of me. You can see some of these on the card pages on the website, but here are two from this reading.

With the Three of Swords, I always come back to something from when I was a teenager, working in a church and helping out with a marriage course. I wasn’t there for the marriage content, to be honest. My job was to do the presentation, just sitting there clicking next on the slides, so I was half listening at best. But I remember someone asking what you should do when you disagree with your partner. And the answer that stuck was this: the worst thing you can do is retreat into your head and ruminate, because feelings and thoughts aren’t compatible. When you bypass your feelings and go into thinking mode, those feelings get weaker and weaker. Feelings aren’t rational. They don’t make sense. And when you’re in your head going through the list of what the other person has done or said, you’re logically talking yourself out of love with them.

That’s what I see in the Three of Swords. That’s what I saw in this reading: the emotional bypassing, the retreat into analysis instead of feeling. That story gives it somewhere to land.

The Seven of Swords, for me, always brings up supernormal stimuli. Which is a fascinating fucking thing. There was a beer company in Australia that redesigned their bottles. Made them slightly more yellow, changed the shape a bit. They started getting complaints from people in the outback: a particular kind of beetle had been trying to mate with the bottles. To the beetles, the bottle looked like the scales of an extremely fertile female beetle, and they were completely drawn to it. Scientists tested this further. They’d place a slightly larger, slightly more brightly coloured egg in a bird’s nest. The bird would abandon its own eggs to tend to this supernormal egg, because it looked more promising. Their own chicks would die. We do this constantly. You can see it online right now: AI-generated images of impossibly attractive people pulling in folk who know, on some level, it’s too good to be true, but are drawn in anyway. The self-gaslighting in the Seven of Swords is exactly that kind of distraction. Tending to the fake egg and leaving your actual life unattended.

When I can connect a card to a story like that, and then connect that story back to the other cards in the spread, the reading stops being a list and starts being something the person can actually use.

When You’re Using a Spread

Everything I’ve described works the same way when you’re using a named spread, but you’ve got an extra layer. Each position has its own meaning, independent of whatever card lands in it. With the Celtic Cross, the first card is the situation or the significator, then you’ve got what’s crossing it, the conscious mind, the unconscious, past, future. If you’ve got the Seven of Swords reversed in the conscious mind position, and the card in the past position seems to be looking up at it or responding to it, that’s a conversation happening through position and through imagery at the same time. The positions and the cards are both talking.

Same principle. All the ingredients, coming together to make the meal.