Telling me something I already know

In these coronavirus days, I need to save money to spend on groceries and bills, but what do I do? I buy a new tarot deck instead. I reasoned that since I was no longer spending money on public transport, going to art galleries, the movies or cafés due to businesses having to close to combat covid-19, I actually did have some spare savings after all.

My tarot deck collecting habit has lasted for a long time, but I hadn’t bought a new deck for a few years. It’s easy to fall down a tarot deck rabbit hole, checking out decks and wanting to buy the majority of them.

I decided to limit myself to one new deck. I needed a deck for a novel I’m working on, a deck which a character could have used 100 years ago. The deck I chose was the Visconti Tarot. This deck is based on one of the oldest known tarot decks originating in the fifteenth century. The hand-painted cards were commissioned by the Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti. This deck would fit into the past perfectly and not be anachronistic.

I ordered the deck online and the package arrived outside my front door sixteen days later courtesy of the no-contact postie.

I opened the package after I’d returned from my legal exercise walk.

The front and the back of the Visconti Tarot box.

Even though I was tempted to do a reading straight away, the cards had tiny shreds of cardboard residue on them from the card-manufacturing process, making them feel gritty to hold. It took me a few days to get around to cleaning them all with a tissue while I was watching TV. I no longer remember what the program was.

Finally I bit the bullet and did a reading. I shuffled the cards and asked about advice for the moment.

The card that came up was the IV of Pentacles.

The internet revealed that the motto on the card a bon droyt, was the Visconti family motto, meaning by legitimate right.

The cards I normally use are based on the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot, featuring scenes on the minor arcana cards. To divine a meaning from this Visconti card, it was easier to refer to the IV of Pentacles from my Rider Deck with its illustration by Pamela Colman Smith.

The card is often related to materialism. But for me this is the perfect card for coronavirus self-isolation lockdown. Stay away from the city, keep your distance from other people as much as possible, be frugal with your money, huddle up in self-protection from the coronavirus.

Not that a tarot reading was really necessary for me to know this information. Or perhaps the card was a message that this is the right track to be on.

In the meantime, I’ve already stopped heeding my own advice about frugality and I’ve ordered another tarot deck online.