Fall Equinox Tarot Spread

Fall Equinox Tarot Spread - picture copyright Taylor Ellwood

I felt inspired by yesterday’s Tarot draw and decided to come up with a Equinox spread that you can to help you get prepped for the rest of the year, as well as to get some foresight into what’s coming your way in 2027. The picture above is an example of the spread but let me walk you through it.

The Root card is you/the situation going into the equinox.

The 4 cards above represent the last quarter of the year and the outcome that awaits you as you activate and work through the process of transition from summer to fall (or winter to spring)

The 3 cards above give you a glimpse of the next year, just enough to help you see the possible emergent patterns so you can beginning planning for that year.

The final card above is where you are going or what you are maturing into as a result of this transition.

In the example of the spread we have the daughter of cups as the root card, which shows the person in a stage of growth and curiosity.

The Ace of Wands, Two of Cups, Chariot and 4 of Pentacles shows the themes of the next quarter of the year. There is a call to focus, to enjoy the romance, to continue on the journey while working on the foundation.

The three cards above the 4 offer a glimpse of 2027. There is the Judgement card, the Ace of Swords and the Fool. They speak to a simultaneous need for discernment while taking calculated risks and being willing to wander into the unknown.

The Evolution card, what the person is transitioning toward, is the the Father of Cups. This speaks to the possible changes that the person can go through if they approach the transition of the equinox with purpose and apply it to the next few months.

I did this reading for myself, as part of the experiment of developing the spread. With that said the idea behind the spread is that it provides you some specific direction in the near term of the next quarter, and also shows you what could come your way further down the line. If you try it, let me know how it lands with you.

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Every act of attention, energy, and reciprocity keeps this experiment alive. Thank you for tending the fire with us.

A Tarot Spread for Mapping your Desires

I recently developed the Desire Alchemy Tarot Spread. This is a tarot spread that you can use to help you identify a desire you have as well as what is blocking that desire from manifesting.

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The community for occultists, pagans, magicians and psychics who want to explore the evolution of magic and get better results.

The picture above shows an example of the spread. I’m going to walk you through how the basics of the spread so you can try it out with your own divination reading.

Center card - Your desire

Card across the center card - What’s blocking your desire.

Card below desire card - the Unconscious motivation for your desire.

Card to the left of the desire - Your hope for the desire.

Card to the right of the desire - Your fear of achieving the desire

Left and right card above desire - The actions you need to take to turn your desire into a result

Outcome card at the top - what the result can be if you take action.

The Divination of Desire

Most of the time people get divination readings because they want to explore the possibilities and opportunities that are available to them or figure out how to respond to a situation.

But sometimes the best read is where you explore what you want, and why you aren’t getting it. I designed this spread to help you do exactly that.

Pick out a desire, something you’ve wanted, but never quite gotten. You’ll do a reading about this desire to find out what’s really stopping you from turning it into a reality.

This spread helps you discover the internal and external blockers that are preventing your desire from manifesting. Once you understand what’s getting in your way, the spread will also show you what actions you need to take to resolve the blocks and create the results.

Article continues below…

Free Guide: Why your Spells Don’t Stick – 5 critical mistakes blocking your magic

You aren’t getting the results you want.

And trying to figure out what isn’t working with your magic feels intimidating because there’s so much to track.

Let’s make this easier for you.

Stop guessing and start taking action with our FREE guide - Why Your Spells Don’t Stick.

A practical example of how it works

In the picture above, the Sun card is the Desire.

Lying on top of it is 7 of Wands, a feeling of being overwhelmed and taking on too much, which is obscuring your light.

Below it is the 5 of wands, which is an unconscious motivation of feeling scattered and trying to get multiple projects done.

The card to the left of The Sun is the Wheel of Fortune, which shows the hope that you’ll finally achieve success.

The card to the Right of The Sun is the 5 of Pentacles, which is a fear of being successful and the grief carried around not reach success.

The left and right cards above Desire card show you how to resolve the block. In this case we have the four of Wands on the left, which suggests laying down some of the wands so you can focus on the task at hand. The card on the right is the four of cups and it shows the importance of allowing the grief to come through and be expressed instead of suppressing it. This is how the lessons are learned.

Then we have the outcome card, which is the 7 of pentacles. This shows that your efforts will start producing results if you do do the work of focusing and releasing. Your desire now has a path to become a reality.

This is an example reading I did. You can use this tarot spread to do your own reading around a desire.

If you want to explore desire alchemy further come join Sheena and I in:

Wanting without Shame - Alchemize your desire into Reality

Join us for our next live class on September 19th at 9:30 AM PST

In Wanting without Shame, we work with desire as magical material.

Desire is not just a personal preference.

Desire is orientation.

It is the current beneath intention, ritual, spellcraft, spirit work, creative work, business, visibility, money, pleasure, devotion, and becoming.

In Wanting Without Shame, we invite you to come play so you can:

• Clarify the desire underneath your magical intentions, instead of casting from obligation, confusion, or “should.”

• Identify the old selves that distort what you think you want: the self other people imagine you to be, the past self still running old spells, the idealized self chasing comparison, and the present self who can actually cast.

• Work with shame, shadow, envy, greed, pride, lust, wrath, sloth, and hunger as information instead of contamination.

• Use Love and Loathe tracking as magical data for your practice, business, relationships, rituals, offerings, and creative life.

• Create Desire Statements that function as magical source code for spellwork, spirit petitions, sigils, business direction, offerings, and life choices.

Turn your desires into reality clearly and cleanly.

✨ Ways to Support the Fire ✨

Our hearth grows brighter when you add your spark. Here’s how you can weave your magic with ours:

🔥 Comment & Share — Your questions, stories, and reflections feed the field. Passing our posts along brings new voices and Experimenters into our community.

🔥 Join Our Communal Wealth Experiment — Contribute to Abundantia our Magical Experiments Community Wealth Spirit, a current of joyful reciprocity that fuels our work, delightfully returns to you, and ripples blessings back into our wider community.

🔥 Subscribe & Journey Deeper — Paid subscriptions aren’t about paywalls; they’re about connection. Subscribers receive discounts on classes, events, and offerings, and are invited into the monthly Alchemy Lab to experiment live with us.

Every act of attention, energy, and reciprocity keeps this experiment alive. Thank you for tending the fire with us.

A space/time Divination Experiment

I share my latest experiment with divination and discuss the protocols of the experiment.

Reading the darker side of Tarot

I’ve been starting to read oracle cards and Tarot at metaphysical fairs and one of the fascinating trends I’ve observed has come in the form of people who get readings from me and ask me not to pull any punches with the reading. One recent customer shared with me that they didn’t want me to filter my reading for them in any way. I never filter my readings anyway and explained that to my customer but it got me to ask them a question in turn.

“Why do you think people filter their readings?”

“They probably don’t want to deliver bad news or share something that will make someone uncomfortable.”

I nodded and took that in and gave them their reading. I can’t really speak to the experiences that anyone else has around giving or receiving readings but in my own experience of giving readings I’ve always opted for trusting my intuition and telling the person what I’m actually getting about the situation. I trust that if anyone else have given me a reading they have done the same.

The exchange got me thinking about reading the darker side of Tarot and Oracle cards. In some cases you find that reading through reversals, but I actually think you can look at a given card in of itself and regardless of what the position is you can read it and look at all the angles.

For instance, if I look at the Hanged Man, the positive perspective I can take is that the Hanged Man represents presence, being still in the moment, and cultivating awareness. The shadow side of the Hanged Man could represent blockages and obstacles both internal and external. Both the shadow and the gold are present within any given kind of reading and yet it’s up to the reader and readee to determine what applies for a given situation. The way we read a situation matters because it tells what we can learn from that situation and the same applies to a Tarot/oracle reading. The most important skill you can cultivate in divination is learning to look beyond the surface meanings of a card, so you can read into the card and how it relates to the overall experience.

Want a reading from me? Schedule one at this link, and let me show you what happens when you combine two different decks for your reading.

How to learn a divination deck

I share my process for how to learn a divination deck and an exercise you can do each day to learn a card and what it means as it applies to your life.

My Experiments with Scrying

Last year I took a class on Scrying taught by Harper Feist. It was a fascinating course that explored the sensory aspects of scrying in relationship to our senses.

Not just the five senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, but also kinisthetic, thermal, and other more subtle senses all of us have access to, including of course the "psychic senses."

Since taking that course, I've been continuing to experiment with scrying and have made it a regular part of my practice.

Even before I took the class I had done some scrying with bowls of water and with a crystal globe, but after taking the class I added a couple of tools to my scrying practice. 

I bought a black scrying mirror and I started adding candles to the mix in order to create a source of light. 

Explore related entries in the Library

• Water Scrying the Tower
• Smoke Scrying the Aftermath
• Scrying the Collapse Experiment
• Pendulum Scrying Over Wreckage

Why it can be good to get a second divinatory opinion

I discuss why it can be good to get a divinatory reading from someone else, in order to confirm details of a situation or get a different perspective and why an unbiased reading can be beneficial if the person doesn't know much about you.