The Journal
Longer pieces about how these five systems work, where their claims came from, and what the evidence actually supports. The reference pages state a meaning; these argue about it.
Who called the Four of Pentacles a miser?
Waite's list for this card has no moral word in it anywhere, and it includes gift, legacy and inheritance. The miser arrived from somewhere else, and he...
Reading the I Ching in English
The version most English readers know is a translation of a translation, and it is still in copyright. What Legge and Wilhelm each did to the text, and ...
Why two Life Path calculators disagree
Two standard methods, both in print for a century, return different Life Paths for 13.4 per cent of birth dates. We counted: 2,756 of the 20,496 dates t...
What the tropical zodiac actually measures
Western astrology's zodiac has not tracked the constellations for around two thousand years, and it was never trying to. It measures the seasons. That i...
What a tarot reading cannot tell you
Outcomes, other people's private thoughts, and anything a doctor or a lawyer should be answering. The limits stated plainly, and what the cards are genu...
Is any of this true?
No mechanism has been demonstrated for any of the five systems here, and where the claims have been tested they have not held up. What is actually being...
Waite and Smith: what actually happened in 1909
Pamela Colman Smith drew all seventy-eight cards, was paid once, and died in debt in 1951. The name the deck is usually sold under is a trademark belong...
Mercury retrograde: what is actually happening
Nothing reverses. Mercury overtakes Earth on the inside three or four times a year, and for about three weeks the planet appears to slide backwards agai...
Why a dream dictionary is the wrong tool
A dictionary works because a language is held in common. Dreams are not. The lookup table is a genre error before you read a single entry, and this site...
Reversed tarot cards, and how the spread decides
Waite printed a reversed meaning for all seventy-eight. Plenty of good readers ignore them. Both camps make the same mistake about what a reversal actua...
Cold reading, and how to tell it from a reading
The shotgun, the rainbow ruse, the vanishing negative, the out. The techniques named plainly, why most people using them are not frauds, and the four qu...
The Celtic Cross, position by position
Ten positions, printed by Waite in 1910 with a pedigree it does not have. A real ten-card draw, and the three positions readers use to explain away a ca...