Virtual Tarot School

someone just asked me a great question about how to interpret two cards together… the two they were asking about were the Wheel of Fortune and the Lovers. I am a terrible person to ask a question like that to, as you will find out…. I gave a pretty drawn- out answer, which I have copied here for you to enjoy!!

“the wheel of fortune coupled with the Lovers is going to mean different things depending on what you are reading about, who you are reading for, etc.
In general, I really recommend that you begin by doing simple one card readings and work up from there… I have a free training at www.VirtualTarotSchool.com explaining this and showing you how to start reading in 18 minutes.
There are loads of factors when you begin to couple cards together… are you reading the two cards you have mentioned in the context of a larger reading? did you just draw these two cards, and if so, what were you reading about?

hypothetically, for example:
if you pulled the wheel and the lovers by themselves to explain a current status of a romantic relationship, perhaps this would mean that only by pulling back and seeing the big picture (a simplified interpretation of the wheel) would you be able to come to a decision about which way to move forward in the relationship (crossroads symbology of the lovers card… one possible interpretation)…. but do you see how if you drew these two cards for another situation the interpretation could change? For example, what if you were reading to decide which school to send a child to, and the wheel showed up in the first position in a larger celtic cross spread, but the lovers had shown up in the root past position in the reading? Your interpretation would have to account for the other 8-9 cards in the reading, and also for the situation that you are reading about. I show people how to get to the point where you can take loads of factors like this into account for your own readings…. but it all begins by becoming comfortable with the cards and following a good system or course through….
a good idea is to look at the deck in its entirety, and then break it into the largest groups possible…. and then aim to understand smaller and smaller groups until you eventually deepen your knowledge of individual cards…. if you go to VirtualTarotSchool.com you will find a few free trainings that show you how to do this. With this “high concept” approach, it is easier to understand individual cards in individual readings, because it gives you a perspective…
the difference between this “high concept” approach to learning to read tarot cards versus a “lets memorize all the individual meanings” approach could be likened to taking a long wilderness trek and deciding which path to take in a forest: if we were just on the ground, we would not know which was the best path to take…. this is like learning the meaning of one card at a time. Alternatively, if we climbed a tree, scoped out the entire landscape and then decided which path to take (high concept approach), our hike would probably be easier and more enjoyable. I like to teach people to “climb a tree” and take a high concept approach to learning tarot…. this is what we do at Virtual Tarot School. Come check out the site… i think you’ll like it.
Back to that hypothetical situation though..
with the Lovers in the root position, I would probably feel that the choice of schools had been up in the air for a long time, and that the child’s root experience in schools up to this point had been mainly to do with how the child did in relationship with others… the Lovers card can often be about relationship. So maybe up to this point the child had been a social butterfly! With the Wheel of Fortune in the present position, this hypothetical child would seem to now be in a more chaotic situation, trying to find his new “center” in a potentially new environment.
i hope I’ve conveyed how there really is no one set meaning to any one set of cards… really, the best thing to do is survey the entire landscape of the tarot by taking a top-down approach…. climbing a proverbial tree to gain a broad spectrum of knowledge of the entire system… after you have a good broad knowledge, specific situations become easier for you to interpret.
After all, being human is a very varied, diverse thing! There are billions of us, and no two people have the exact same experiences. So it would be silly to say that there is only one “meaning” for a card or set of cards, wouldn’t it?!
I hope you come climb the tree with me at VirtualTarotSchool.com : survey the landscape of the tarot. Very soon, you can have such a deep AND broad understanding of the cards that you will be able to read for anybody in any circumstance with any deck…. not through memorizing, but through deep understanding of the major patterns at work in the tarot.
Enjoy the journey!
cheers,
Laura ”