We’ve now covered the meanings of all the cards – ace through king – in playing card divination. But open up any brand new deck of playing cards, and you will find two additional cards included: the jokers.
These two cards don’t belong to any specific suit. They’re included with the deck as replacement cards; if a card were to get lost, you could substitute one of the jokers in instead, and still have a full deck of cards. Most of the time, in card games, the jokers just get pulled out. And you can do the same thing in divination.
But you don’t have to. You can, if you like, leave the jokers in. In this case, they have their own special meaning when they come up in a reading. I treat the jokers as an obscuring factor.
They might come up in a situation where the answer to your question is still in flux. Where the threads of fate come together in such a way that multiple possible futures are open, depending on the choices of the people involved. The situation is still in balance, and hasn’t yet “broken” one way or another. This is the cartomantic equivalent of “Future unclear, ask again later” from a Magic 8 Ball.
Alternatively, the jokers might come up in a case where the future is set, but there’s some aspect of it that’s important for you to stay ignorant of. As you get more fluent in divination, you can go overboard on trying to do readings for everything. Becoming paralyzed by analyzing all the possible futures, and trying to guide yourself towards some perfect one. The jokers give the universe an opportunity to tell you to get back in your own lane. Sometimes you have to be comfortable operating with less than perfect information.
Finally, the jokers can come up to mean a lack of clarity or visibility in a more mundane sense. Back when I was doing daily card draws, I several times pulled jokers on days when smog from wildfire smoke was particularly bad. Nothing related to fate or uncertainty, but a very literal reduction in visibility.
Looking at them, you’ll notice the jokers are not identical. Typically one is in color, while the other is black and white. In my own practice I read them the exact same way, but there’s no reason that has to be the case. You could decide that some meanings are distinct to one versus the other. Perhaps the colored one meaning “future uncertain” and the black and white one meaning “this is not for you to know.” Or you might assign your own meanings to them, if there are things that you want to include in your divination vocabulary that you don’t feel are adequately covered by the other cards.
In fact you can do this with any card. The system of meanings I’ve presented here is the one I like, because it has a nice internal coherence to it. The suits mean things. The numbers mean things. It’s easy to reason about what a specific number within a specific suit should mean. But there’s nothing magical about these particular meanings. You’ll find other traditional systems of interpretation that are wildly different from what I’ve outlined here. As you become a more experienced reader, you’ll develop nuanced associations with particular cards that go well beyond what I’ve laid out. Some of those may reinforce my ideas, some of them may diverge. That’s fine. The important part is that you have a clear idea of what the cards mean. You and your deck will speak the same language.
And, as far as this version of that language goes, we’re basically done. I’ve covered the meaning of all fifty-four cards in a standard deck. At this point you have all the tools you need to pick up a deck of cards and start doing readings.
There are a couple additional topics I want to touch on before wrapping up this series, just to tie everything up neatly. Next week we’re going to cover building your own spreads, and some considerations that go into making good playing card spreads, which might be different from other systems. Finally, we’re going to go through some example readings to help illustrate what this system could actually look like in practice, to help take it out of the realm of the theoretical and make it more concrete.
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