Fortune telling

I’ve never had my fortune told, or my card read, or a serious reading of my palm or face or aura.  It’s not surprising given I’m an engineer.  Telling friends from my studies I was planning to get my fortune told did some with some amusing looks!

However, across my two readings, I came to see how much demand and interest there was in these practices!

A dear friend of mine reads this blog, and has used my bucket list/s to inform her gift giving.  For my birthday in 2017, she intended a year worth of activities – one a month, but alas life got in the road.  When she saw my renewed interest in fortune telling, by way of seeking recommendations or referrals, she promptly arranged me two readings, with a third possible opportunity.

My first reading was upstairs at the Argyle Oracle – a terrace lining a street in the Rocks, which has a great market every weekend – one I love to browse for souvenirs to take when I travel.  The ground level is a store of gem stones and books and tarot cards, and then upstairs there’s a number of rooms where readings a done by a range of people!?  I saw Camilla, who lead with asking my name and birthday, which resulted in some calculations about cycles and such – 6 and 9 featured?!  She also asked me to shuffle to decks of cards. She then took her magnifying glass and intently looked at my palms.  Interesting, she spoke of how two of the prominent lines on the hands are more separate in younger generations and she some how linked this to greater technology?! My take aways from her reading of my palm were: long life, good health, minimal dramas (comparing to others, not that my life will be without them!), that I’ll have three children, two boys and a girl (though it did feel like she started at two, and got slightly muddled around gender or birth order or perhaps even quantity).

From my palm, she dealt a smaller than normal playing card deck, in which certain sectors related to certain aspects of life – the top quadrant to my right was related to work.  There was a king there, and across that top row, a number of red cards.  This lay of cards remained dealt on the table, with the expected velvet table cloth, for the balance of the reading, and to the left, she made space where she dealt and re-dealt the tarot cards.

The tarot deck she used seemed to feature swords pretty heavily, and also what looked like sapling logs?  She dealt these cards in different configuration and quantities.  At one deal, she had three cards, followed by two more rows of three cards, and a few more to the side.  Initially she said the top row was 2017, followed by 2018 and 2019.  When I clarified we were now in 2018, she corrected.  And with that, everything shifted a year – womp womp.  It was with this deal that she spoke to marriage and children, who are coincidently gorgeous.  It does make you wonder if anyone would read and say ‘horribly ugly children’, right?  That being said, I suppose there are negatives that may be seen – health issues perhaps?

She spoke quickly with quite a nervous energy.  I was open to what she said, but I also wasn’t giving away great swaths of my life story either.  She lead with asking if I had any kids. I think she also asked about my work.  There were certainly some parts of the reading that sounded like common advice that anyone would give!

Much later, that same day, my friend had arranged another reading – this time with a male, Paris, who also stares on a TV show.  He came to have a natural gift, despite being a sceptic, she told me.  In reality, our reading was far shorter than anticipated (40 mins not an hour), and so I took some time to talk to him about his work, the critics, what happens if he was to reread/redeal the cards again for the same person right there.  I found the debriefing chat as insightful as my fortune telling!

Paris started by dealing a deck of cards and then fanning them out in front of me, asking me to select a quantity, perhaps 17? I can’t recall.  As I did that, he started writing a page.  At the top of the page was a traced palm, and with that, he asked me to select two areas of focus.  I chose work/career and love/romance of the total of six options.  These selections resulted in him annotating the on two fingers with a love heart and elsewhere, two money symbols.  He held my selected cards as a smaller deck until he’d completed writing the page.  He then dealt the cards and proceeded to transpose the equivalent characters of the Greek gods shown onto the fingers of the traced hands on the paper. (deciphering this at the pub after was a fun activity for me with my two friends!).

His dealing of these cards resulted in a strong segment of blue Gods around the centre, definitely Neptune and Uranus.  There were some strong female Gods (godesses?) too, like Dianna, Pan, Venus and Medusa.  His reading seemed to focus on the coming year, and really saw strong components of work and travel, which echoed things Camilla has said.  Overall, he quietly dismissed romance and love, explaining that the personalities of the cards I dealt weren’t aligned with welcoming love at this time.  Whilst I did have Venus, she seemed to be crowded out by some more… domineering godesses!  I’d be the first to acknowledge this would align somewhat to my personality, and particularly lately with dating.  He did consider that I could have a very segregated work and romantic life as a way of making it work, but I can’t see this duplicity working for me.  So it would seem the year ahead is about career, more so than love.

Neither reading seemed to touch on health at all – other than the more platitude like concepts like Camilla suggesting meditating more, and asking if I did yoga.  Paris wrote of balance and setting boundaries, as well as mind and body.  Neither are particularly firm grounds but neither are bad advice – I mean who doesn’t need more balance?