Anderson Neill T - Fortune Telling Using Playing Cards

If you want to use cards for fortune telling, buy a new deck and work them in by shuffling them a lot. Before using them the first time, ask for help and guidance from your god, spiritual guides or your higher consciousness so that you use the cards well. When you are not using the cards, keep them in their packet and within a bag or a box that you keep in a safe place. Never use your fortune telling deck for card games and dont allow others to play around with it. Respect your tools and they will respect you even if the tool in question is no more than a humble deck of playing cards.

The second section is concerned with the Romany Method of card reading and it uses a reduced deck of thirty-two cards. This system was popularized in France in the latter part of the eighteenth century by Jean Baptiste Alliette, who is better known by his pen name of Etteilla.

The third section has a totally different slant on the subject of cartomancy. It derives from the work of Mlle Marie Adelaide Lenormand, who read the cards for the Empress Josephine, Napoleon and many other powerful figures of the day. This system also uses a reduced deck, this time with thirty-six cards, and it is more correctly known as the Petit Lenormand. This deck was developed in the early nineteenth century. A Lenormand deck shows the familiar playing card set into a beautiful Victorian illustration. If you want to buy a set of these for yourself, you can find them via the Internet. They are produced by a famous card firm called Piatnik of Vienna. The fact that each card carries an illustration of an ordinary playing card means you can still use this system with a standard playing card deck, unless you decide to treat yourself to a real Lenormand deck.

A series of spreads or card layouts are given at the end of each section. However, as with so much in card reading, the spreads are fluid. So if you wanted to use the poker deck but fancied trying one of the spreads given in the sections that deal with the Romany deck or the Lenormand Method, there is nothing to stop you. The secret of successful card reading is experimentation and discovering what works best for you. There are no hard and fast rules. In fact, as you gain experience you will find your own meanings and ways of reading the cards, and these may be completely divorced from anything that has gone before. If you asked the question how many ways of reading cards are there? the answer would have to be, how many people read the cards? because I can guarantee that every single practiced card reader has a unique method of his own. There is no reason why you should be any different.