When the cards say nothing new

Somebody asked me last week what it means when the same tarot card keeps appearing, and there was a slight dread in the way she asked, as though the deck had started repeating itself on purpose to make a point about her.

Two answers. One about arithmetic, which is duller and truer than people expect, and one about the question, which is where the useful part lives.

The arithmetic first

A repeat is much less unlikely than it feels. Pull one card a day for a week from a full deck and the chance that some card shows up twice is roughly one in four. Do it for ten days and it is closer to one in two.

So if you have been drawing daily for a month, a repeat is not a message. It is Tuesday. And the way memory works, you will remember the two appearances of the Tower vividly and forget the eleven cards that came up once and meant nothing much, which is how a fairly ordinary run of draws turns into a story about being followed by a card.

I am not telling you this to spoil it. I am telling you because a person who knows the odds can stop being frightened of the deck, and being frightened of your own morning card is a miserable way to start a day.

What a repeat usually means

Once the arithmetic is out of the way, there is still something worth looking at, and it is almost never about the card.

It is that the question has not changed. Most people who report a card following them around are drawing on the same subject, in the same words, from the same seat at the same table, and they are doing it because the situation has not moved. The deck is not repeating itself. You are, and the card is simply where you noticed.

Which makes a repeating card a fairly good measurement. Not of what is coming, but of how long you have been in one spot with one question. If the Eight of Cups has turned up four times since September, the interesting fact is that you have been asking about leaving since September.

The redraw, said kindly

The other version of this is the reading you keep taking again. You draw, you dislike the answer, you shuffle and go once more, and by the fourth attempt you have found a spread you can live with.

Everybody does it and it is worth catching, because the second reading is not more accurate than the first. It is the one you preferred. If you find yourself redrawing, the honest move is to stop and write down what you were hoping for, since you evidently already know the answer well enough to reject three of them.

When the reading goes flat

There is a different problem that people describe in the same breath, which is that the cards have stopped saying anything at all. Not frightening, not interesting, just flat.

That usually means one of three things. The question is too big, so anything the card says fits and nothing lands. Or the question is not really yours, and you are drawing about somebody else’s life, which is where readings go vague most reliably. Or you already know the answer and are drawing to postpone it, which is more common than any of us like to admit.

The fix for all three is the same and it is not a new deck. Make the question smaller and put it in the first person. Not what is happening with him, but what am I doing about the fact that I have not heard from him. A card can do something with the second one.

Put the deck down for three days

This is the part nobody selling tarot wants to say. Sometimes the cards have nothing new because there is nothing new, and the right response is to stop drawing for a few days and go and do the step from the last one.

A reading that is not acted on turns into a habit of consulting, and consulting is a way of feeling like you are dealing with something while the thing itself stays exactly where it was. Three days off will not offend anyone. The deck has no feelings about it, and neither do I.

Keep the notebook anyway

Even in a flat stretch the record is worth having, and it is the first thing people abandon. A month of one line entries will tell you things no single reading can: which weeks you drew twice a day, which cards you kept explaining away, and the two weeks where you stopped writing anything at all.

Most of us are poor witnesses to our own patterns as they happen and surprisingly good at spotting them in our own handwriting three months later. The Nine of Swords in September is nothing. The Nine of Swords eleven times between September and Christmas is a sentence about your autumn, and it is one you would never have said out loud without the page in front of you.

The reading worth having about a repeat

If you want to draw on it anyway, do not ask why the card keeps coming. Ask what it would take for the question to change, which is a question about you and therefore one a card can honestly help with.

There is more on the habit itself in why a daily card works, and on the reading part in how to read your own cards.

Come back on Thursday and tell me whether the question had moved.