Book Review: Tarot for Your Future by Sandra Pendle

Sandra Pendle, Rochair Ltd, no date

I found this book at The Works last night for £1.99. I bought it because it features the Morgan Greer Tarot. It was shrink wrapped so I couldn't tell anything much about it until I got home.

It's an odd little thing (though not actually little, at 8.5 x 11.75 inches). The cover is a tri-fold, which has spreads printed on them, and then the actual book is on the left side, so when the whole thing is open, it takes up a lot of space:

 Tarot for Your Future features the author's personal style of creating a reading, which involves four very large card spreads:

Spread 1: Character cross, 14 cards
Spread 2: Relationships, 20 cards
Spread 3: Star of Work & Finance, 17 cards
Spread 4: Events Triangle (the future), 21 cards

These layouts are printed on the two right-side panels of the book, so that you may refer to them continuously whilst using the information contained in the spiral-bound pages to the left.

 My first impression is to be boggled by the size of the card spreads, which constitute a single reading for the author, Sandra Pendle. She says she has 'designed and perfected' this style of reading over 20 years. Her instructions and card interpretations are somewhat narrow and idiosyncratic. For example, she instructs in several places that one should find the Fool card and place it on top of the deck before shuffling, every time. She then gives a very prescribed shuffling method, without mentioning that there are many other shuffling methods. Nor does she encourage her audience to develop or try other styles or card interpretations. In fact, she advises that to read the 'Character' spread, one should  ' turn to the illustration and description of each card in this book and just read out the section concerning Character.' I don't recall any other tarot book which tells readers to do this. Most give a variety of meanings as a springboard and encourage you to take it from there.

In the Introduction, Pendle presents a history of tarot (or as she calls it 'The Tarot'), going through the usual 'Egyptian'--Middle Ages--RWS progression, then a FAQ section which I found amusing. Answering whether tarot is connected to 'witchcraft and The Devil', she answers, 'Nobody truly knows how or why The Tarot can be so accurate. It's one of the mysteries of life.' And on whether a reading can be about a couple or a group: 'No, it won't work. You can only do a Tarot reading for one person at a time.'

The book contains three detailed sample readings, with client feedback. Each card has yielded only one or two sentences -- understandable when doing a reading that contains a total of 72 cards!.The rest of the book is Sandra's interpretations of all 78 tarot cards, with how she would interpret them in character, relationship, work, and events, both upright and reversed meanings. Some of the interpretations are idiosyncratic, as mentioned above. For example, the author interprets Page of Cups as 'Mary is close to her mother, who has been a strong influence on her.' It's not something I would instantly say about Page of Cups, particularly as the card has no set spread position (like 'family'). Some of the interpretations seem more intuitive (and I don't mean reading by the card picture), which is not particularly helpful to beginners, although to be fair, when you turn to the Page of Cups, the meaning she gives there does include: 'Sometimes a little over-attached to their mother due to lack of socialising.' So at least she is consistent.

For £1.99 it is certainly an interesting and thorough look at one person's reading style. (I wonder how much she charges for such a gigantic reading!!) If you have a Works nearby, look around for it if you happen to stop in. I actually think it's a nice book to have in your collection and I intend to get my Morgan Greer out and try out these spreads, using Pendle's method just as she describes, and see how I get on with it. Might be a bit like taking a long hike in someone else's boots, but who knows!