The lovely, dark deck above is Bicycle’s Shadow Masters deck, available through Amazon.
Before I go any deeper into symbolomancy, I want to talk about divining with the standard playing card deck. One of the benefits of playing card-divination is the same virtue I talk about in the simpleomancy section–using ordinary things found in your every-day environment for divining. Unless you live with someone so religiously-strict, they don’t permit card-playing under their roof, chances are there’s a deck of playing cards somewhere. People who would freak-out if they stumbled across a Tarot deck in the house probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid about playing cards. If you’re the ‘kitchen witch’ kind of diviner, you can use your card deck for divining in the morning and poker that night. Though it’s a good idea to have a separate deck for divining, in a pinch, you could use your card-game deck.
First, let’s start with a little history of how the modern playing card deck came into being.
I have reasons to believe that Spade element is Fire and Club is Air.
I have seen that same attribution of element-ownership, Spades=Fire and Clubs=Air somewhere, but I can’t recall exactly where. Since Clubs seemed to me to be roughly-analogous to Wands in function (both get waved in the air), and Spades struck me as being roughly-analogous to Swords in function (both cut), the elements I assigned to both followed-on from that. But your correspondences make sense. Clubs and Swords are weapons (which are wielded in Air), and Spades and Wands are tools. Also, Clubs are associated with communications, which is a very ‘air’ thing. Richard Webster, in his book “Playing Card Divination for Beginners” says Spades=Fire and Clubs=Earth(!). I always thought Diamonds were Earth, since Diamonds are analogous to Pentacles/Coins. I’m going to have to do more research on this matter. Thank you for mentioning this!
Hi! Great information in this article & thank you for sharing.
Question, for Spades the Section of Medieval is missing. What is their medieval section?
Thanks!
Thank you for calling this to my attention! I overlooked that detail. It is now corrected.