Creating a Year-Ahead Reading
This month, I introduced a new offering for a year-ahead reading (Portals of Being: A reading to make your year) that I believed would be a special experience for me and the few people to whom I could offer it. I described it as follows:
If you’re looking to make the most of 2021, let me help you with my new Portals of Being reading. This is a large ritualistic divination that looks at the energy of your year, the months, and five gateways of obstacle and opportunity within each month. In total, there are dozens of cards drawn from tarot, oracle cards, and other divination tools that provide monthly messages and guidance for the upcoming year. While this is looking into 2021, this should not be used for predicting specific events so much as an energy forecast to help you make the most of each month.
This was actually the second description, and it was intentionally a little vague. Why? Well, for one thing I only had the energy to do one a day, and I couldn’t do it every day, so I didn’t need to fill my calendar with these readings. But more importantly, I didn’t quite know quite what it was going to look like after a rather embarrassing thing happened.
I had initially structured the year-ahead reading as a 77-card reading that held a similar outer shell to a year-ahead reading done by a friend of mine (year, seasons, and months). I even landed on the same total number of cards and similar-sounding language. These things happen. After all, the year can only be structured in so many ways that speak to others in a logical way, 77 is an important number in the tarot, and the way we communicate relates to our similar world views. But I had received that reading from my friend (Celestial Esther of the Wildly Tarot Podcast), and when she pointed out the similarities in the way we advertised and described our readings, I knew that I had inadvertently taken more from that experience than just inspiration. It wouldn’t be right to keep the offering as is, so I took down the original post and listing.
And since it’s come up in the past few weeks, I just want to say that there are plenty of spreads that are widely used by many different tarot readers, but those are either part of a canon of spreads, such as the Celtic Cross, or they’re meant to be shared, such as the tarot spreads that I offer through this blog and on my Instagram account. This year-ahead offering was meant to be something special and uniquely mine. Clearly it wasn’t. So I had to regroup and pivot.
I knew that the final “layer” was unique to me because it was based on the spiritual landscape I’ve been exploring. During those recent explorations, I discovered five landmarks, and I knew that each month in this reading needed to offer access to the wisdom of those landmarks in some form. That’s 60 portals right there.
I also knew that I wanted to have an impression of the energy resting in the background of each month because the portals leading to the five landmarks offer certain kinds of advice (one-word versions would be release, ignore, risk, grow, and remember). But there may be more to the month than those pieces of advice, which may or may not have any easy coherence. So that’s another 12 portals for a total of 72. And of course, I wanted to see what the year itself was going to be about, making 73 portals. (The term portal is symbolic for the 60 portals, but it’s also just a shorthand for the way that we use them to peek into divine wisdom, so I refer to all of the divinatory implements as portals.)
I thought about stopping there. 73 is plenty of datapoints, and the readings were already much longer than I had promised (as in 3 or 4 times longer). Originally, I’d offered four more cards to help get a read on the four seasons. And while that’s useful, it’s also the aspect of the reading that felt the most borrowed. In fact, I’d intentionally thought to add it in after two different year-ahead readings had included an intermediate layer between month and year. But it was also the layer to which I was least attached.
Looking at the number of cards, I was really torn because I liked 77. First off, it’s a double number, and that is auspicious. Second, it emphasized 7s, which are generally seen as lucky or fortunate in the U.S. (admittedly, 7 is more complicated in tarot and esoteric numerology). Last, 77 is the number of tarot cards in a standard deck after you remove your significator.
But as I did the readings, I realized that the four seasons are much more about timing, and that felt more predictive than growth-oriented. A year-ahead reading is obviously going to offer some kind of forecast, but I felt as if there was enough of that. I went back to the roots of the reading, my five spiritual landmarks. I was envisioning the cards (or divination implements) as messages from those landmarks, not just facts about the year. This reading is a forecast, but it’s also about exploring spiritual geography, so I returned to geography and doorways for that missing layer. The intermediate layer would be realms that help you orient yourself to the energy of the year.
And if you’re thinking, what in the hell is this inner landscape where there are energies and realms and landmarks and portals that all overlap? That’s a rational response. But this is like dream geography. It doesn’t make cartographic or rational sense, but it still works.
As for the total number of cards, I went with simple multiplication. It felt simple and right.
I had one card for the year’s focus (1).
I had an unknown number for the realms (x).
I had twelve cards for the twelve months (12).
I had sixty portals (cards or similar) underneath the months (60).
To get from 12 to 60, you multiply by 5. To get from 1 to x, you multiply by x. And to get from x to 12, you multiply by 12/x. If I stuck with four intermediate cards to keep my total of 77, then I would multiply 1 by 4 to get 4, and then I would multiply 4 by 3 to get 12, so we were descending. But then I would multiply 12 by 5 to get to 60, so we were ascending again. I didn’t like that.
Instead, I went with 1, 3, 12, and 60, letting the multiplier increase from 3 to 4 to 5. Is it esoterically significant? Probably not. I tried to force it further by going the full range (1x2, 2x3, 6x4, 24x5), but then I had 120 cards in the final layer, and no one needs that. And in the end, having three realms feels right. Three is where growth happens. Having four shows too much stability (and it’s bad luck in some Asian cultures), making growth less important. And not insignificantly, three is the number of Fates and Norns, as well as the classical Horae (seasons in Greco-Roman mythology), whom I invoke for this reading. I can’t really say that I love the total number of 76 as much as I loved 77, and I was happy to do some year-ahead readings for people using the original proposal—they were still great experiences—but it leaves me with enough unsettled that I can grow from it.
And now, to you, I present my Portals of Being spread. Because the winter solstice is here, and I don’t have time to do any more of these readings as originally designed (in time for the solstice), I see no harm in sharing a modified layout with you all in case you want to do a similar reading for yourself. Note that I don’t actually have room or even a way to display the entire reading in an interpretable way because of the tools that I use, so don’t feel bad if you need to break the reading apart into manageable chunks. I separate the inner annual overview of 16 cards from the sixty portals within the months. Each month’s five portals are considered alongside their superior influences (month, realms, and year), but you don’t need to look across months. (There will be obvious points of overlap, so you don’t need to dig for them.)
UPDATE: I now offer Portals of Being readings to coordinate with the start of each season, not just to align with Capricorn season.
You can see one (1) central card for the energy, lesson, focus or theme of the year. I use an oracle deck here.
Beneath that are the three (3) cards to represent the realms where you’re going to have the best opportunities for getting the most out of the year’s focus. I use an oracle deck here as well.
Then there are twelve (12) cards for the dominant energy of the twelve months. In geographic terms, I think of these as similar to weather in the realms. I use several tarot decks here, usually four of three cards each, chosen by feel, not divided logically (i.e., one deck’s cards are unlikely to be used in consecutive months).
Then within each month, there are five divined messages that relate to the five landmarks and their guidance for the month. I won’t describe them further here since I plan to write a guide on discovering your own. (Those will be more valuable to you than mine anyway.) If you aren’t used to such large readings or you don’t have areas of guidance within each of the months that you want to examine, you can just stop at the single card for each month. That will tell you plenty of good information.
But if you want to go deeper, you can. So in case you’re wondering what on earth all the things around the twelve month cards are, know that I use five different divination tools for each month: one oracle card, one tarot card, one rune, one sentence from a book (bibliomancy), and one piece of art from a giant illustrated book on art history (a mix of bibliomancy and scrying). Which landmark is represented by which tool is determined in the moment as I feel called to one or other of the tools, but there’s only one of each type of thing in a given month. As a result, this process is very time-consuming. Part of that is just the sheer number of implements. You’re divining 76 messages. It would take time to shuffle and cut and intentionally draw that many cards. But bibliomancy and scrying take much longer: you need to properly document what you’ve found without getting side-tracked, so that usually means taking photos or typing or otherwise recording, depending on what fits within your practice and what non-magical tools you bring into your ritual divinations.
UPDATE: I actually now use seven implements for my seven landmarks in my full, comprehensive written report PDFs.
And last, related to my treating these as ritual readings, I spend up to 30 minutes in ritual preparation before each reading. It’s why I didn’t feel up to doing more than one per day. Add to that the sheer amount of time it takes just to draw the implements and record them, let alone actually interpret their messages in a coherent way, and you have a lot of time devoted to a single reading. My point is that this reading is fun and a wonderful experience, but it’s not for the faint of heart. If you enter into it lightly, you’ll spend a lot of time just pulling the cards, runes, etc. and recording the results. If you’re doing this for yourself, set aside time to do it right from the outset and then take a few days to journal with the outcomes, taking it section by section as needed. And of course, as with any large or forward-looking reading, come back to it month after month and reflect on the reading.
Last, this should go without saying, but if you use this spread, please let me know how it works out, and please give credit where it’s due. I am sharing this spread openly because I want people to know what is involved with a large year-ahead spread like this and so that those who couldn’t get a reading from me for whatever reason can attempt one for themselves. That said, the spreads that I and other tarot readers create (tarot year-ahead spreads or otherwise) take time to conceptualize, illustrate, and articulate, so the least someone can do if they use it is to direct others back to the source.
Thanks in advance, and I hope that you have a fantastic year ahead!
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