Tips & Tricks to Survive the Broom Closet: Those who hide their true magickal identities from friends & family are known as dwellers in "the broom closet". Many who work with magick and witchcraft feel the need to constantly hide their practices, of...
Cartomancy is typically an umbrella term for divination using a deck of cards (tarot, oracle, playing cards, etc). But with recent times it has become the term for divinating with regular playing cards, and is how I prefer to use the word.
Fortune telling with playing cards, or poker cards, was common long before tarot became popular. For broom closet witches, it can be hugely beneficial because playing cards are cheap, easy to come by, and do not arouse suspicion unlike tarot. If reading tarot is something you really want to do but you wouldn't be able to hide it, then cartomancy is the perfect alternative.
Tarot and poker decks have a very similar structure. Excluding the major arcana, a tarot deck almost perfectly matches up with a playing card deck (save for knight cards). They both have 4 suits, each numbered 1-10, followed by court cards. Thus, it is super easy to assign tarot's minor arcana card meanings to the corresponding cards in a playing card deck.
Jack = Page Joker = The Fool (the only major arcana card in a playing card deck)
Playing cards also have their own traditional meanings that you might want to learn too, but if you just want to stick to tarot meanings with a sprinkle of your own intuition, that's fine too.
One major difference between tarot and cartomancy is reading combos, or multiples. With the exclusion of the major arcana, getting combinations of cards is much more likely in a cartomancy reading as opposed to a tarot reading. You can use this to your advantage, as combos enable you to find extra meanings and insight. Reading combos is a method used in tarot too, but they are much more frequent in cartomancy.
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This Reddit post gives a good rundown of the differences in meanings between cartomancy and tarot https://www.reddit.com/r/tarot/comments/ekf4u8 and their shared meanings are summarised in these graphics:
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If you want to invest in a playing card deck for your divination, I really recommend The Illuminated Playing Cards. These cards were derived from The Illuminated Tarot, so the cards are decorated with lots of symbolism, including integrated meanings to make up for the lack of major arcana https://caitlinkeegan.com/illuminatedplayingcards
Further Reading
Further info: https://divinationlessons.wordpress.com/2019/08/30/playing-card-divination/
A list of card meanings: https://divinationlessons.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/playing-card-divinatory-meanings.pdf
