Welcome to tarot by innowen.

Looking for answers to life’s questions? Want to know what the universe has in store for you in love, money, and your career? Then you’ve come to the right place.

I’m jaymi “innowen” elford and I read tarot. I give reassurance and help you design a roadmap to attaining your desires.

This site contains tarot reading tips, deck and book reviews, and new and interesting ways to use your tarot cards.

This is a test post to make sure my new plugin for cross-posting entries to LJ and DreamWidth works. I’ll be deleting this original post once I’m done.

Yay for tarot! Yay for WordPress and yay for this working?

Edited: Test post one worked for LJ, updating to see if it sends to DW and LJ with edits. Run two.

Last night I lead my first GEM meeting. I decided to share a concept that Katrina Wynne teaches in her Transformative Tarot Counseling program. It’s called Tarot Alive, and it is a playful approach to using tarot. It combines role-play, numerology (to help with card selection), and meditation to show people how to embody the energies of the major arcana. Effectively they become the personality in the card.

It was my hope that by sharing Tarot Alive with others that it would present them some practical ways to use tarot, and the archetypes, as personal assistants on their path. For example, they could perform variants of this experiment to embody other personalities to receive help or assistance with blocks in their lives. Read the rest of this entry

Review originally published at D*I*Y Planner.
I have a tarot love affair that goes beyond the metaphysical. I use the cards for more than divination: journaling with the cards and involving them in my creative writing, for example. In 2006, I wrote about how tarot can help generate story ideas. Rkfoster also wrote about tarot and paper-based planning.

I consistently tell people that the cards are an excellent writer’s companion. The pictures speak to the imagination, the cards weave stories when set side by side in a reading. In addition, the symbolism just begs to be written about in a narrative form. I’ve always wanted to write a book on tarot–one that goes into detail on using the cards for creative inspiration. However, Corrine Kenner beat me to it. Her Tarot for Writers demystifies tarot and shows writers how to use a deck in fueling their creativity and writing practice. Tarot for Writers is jam packed with techniques, writing samples, and reference sections on both the meanings and symbols found in tarot. Read the rest of this entry

I’ve wanted tarot certification for awhile now. Therefore it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of my 2009 goals is to get certified. This is important to me. I want validation on my knowledge and I when I teach tarot classes, I want to tell people that they can trust me and my knowledge because I’ve taken classes and gotten certification. Kender and I agreed that once we got our 2008 tax return he’d get a new Macbook Pro and I’d use my portion to pay for tarot classes. Our return hit the bank account Friday (insert much happy dancing here) and we put the order in for his new system yesterday.

I just finished paying for the Tarot School’s Correspondence Degree Program. It’s a 15-month program designed to solidify and certify people in tarot. I’m excited… looking forward to the start! This is one of two programs I’m going to get certified in. The other one is a “Transformational Tarot” and focuses more on how tarot can transform your life. Read the rest of this entry

I can now finally say, that I am a published pagan/tarot author. It’s been one of my goals to start pushing out into the tarot writing scene and I’ve done it! I am very proud of this and hope there will be more chances to share and write about tarot in my future.

In the beginning of this year, I answered a call for writers from Megalithica Press asking for essays on how people use pop culture in with their magical life. I wrote a nice essay showing tarot enthusiasts how they could use pop culture with tarot. Including some of my secrets on using an iPod with tarot information and the cards.

The essay got accepted in the anthology and I was told the book would be due 2009. Well, I got my contributor copy last week. It’s out and available for purchase from either Megalithica Press (the publisher), or amazon.com. Of course, if you really want to help me and the publisher, I recommend you buy it directly from Megalithica. My name does not show up when you click that link, but believe me, I am in this book!

I own over a dozen different decks and a bazillion books on various tarot subjects. I have even started making my own tarot deck. My bookshelves are bursting at the seams with tarot and tarot-related items that it’s easy for me to quickly overwhelm myself with tarot-formation. And there’s NO WAY I’m carrying all my books and decks with me whenever I want to study or give a reading. I’d never be able to leave my home. I needed something more compact. I decided to create my own book.

So I grabbed a large 9 by 11 journal bought on the cheep from Borders, and started counting the pages. The thickest journal, I believe it’s 2 inches, can hold a lot of information on the tarot. I worked on the inside of my journal, getting what I wanted in each section down on the pages before I went back to spiffy up the cover and alter some of the pages with my art. This way I didn’t have to worry about getting the cover all bumped up or immediately breaking the spine.
Read the rest of this entry

Artwork and Book Written by Timothy Lantz
Published by US Games Systems, Inc.
ISBN 1-57281-488-8

The Archeon is a very personal deck. It contains the personal mythology and beliefs of visionary artist Timothy Lantz. The Archeon Tarot defines and explores Lantz’s symbolism and mythology in a very contemporary and graphic fashion. The card’s imagery is absolutely stunning. Lantz uses a digital canvas to create the cards and explore the very depths of his soul. Long before this tarot deck was even published, I had seen images of the cards on his website. And I was impressed with what I saw. The cards are a wonderful blend of dark, gothic, carnivale mixed with elements of the mystical and fantastic. But don’t let the darkness of the deck’s imagery fool you because within each card there is a strong sense of light and beauty. Each card’s image contains dazzling backgrounds and characters expressing realistic emotions; each layer thick with symbolism. Even the cards’ back include snippets of Lantz’s personal mythology and symbolism. Read the rest of this entry

Originally published at D*I*Y Planner.

Candlelight flickers and dances across the walls of the room. Wispy, light sounds of Japanese pipes drift through the incense smoke into your ears. A tiny woman, her head wrapped in a bright red and gold turban sits at a intimate wrought-iron table covered with a purple, silk table cloth. A white candle, its flame flickering; a palm sized crystal ball; and a pack of cards, the top card displaying the picture of a giant wheel; lay carefully positioned on the table’s top. The woman beckons you to take a seat directly across from her. You take a seat as the woman waves her hand over the deck of cards and begins to shuffle them. As you stare at her, gauging her true intentions, the woman begins to position the cards onto the table in a careful layout. Then she begins to tell you your future as she describes how the cards and what each position relate to your life.

Tarot cards. One of the oldest means of exploring symbolism and your spot in the universe. A simple pack of 78 cards with a myriad assortment of images and cross-culture symbols painted on them, used as divination device by people all over the world. It contains a major arcana of 22 cards that seek to explain higher powers at work as well as a minor arcana composed of 4 suites corresponding to the 4 elements (wands, swords, cups and coins). Of course, there’s a lot of tarot history I’m glossing over here but I just wanted to give you a small background on the cards. If you’re curious about the tarot and want to learn more about its history, check out aeclectic.net and wikipedia’s tarot page for more information about the tarot and variety of decks out there. Read the rest of this entry

I love The Dante Tarot for its bright vivid colors and how they contrast to the dark symbolism many of the cards represent. I have always been a fan of Dante’s Inferno and when this deck got published, I immediately ordered a copy. The imagery does not disappoint me at all. This deck offers a rather interesting and unique perspective into tarot and its meanings. However, the design of the deck being radically nontraditional in suite and meanings, does tend to make me think that this tarot deck is better for collectors than for doing readings. It’s certainly not for the faint at heart. Read the rest of this entry