Predictions in Year-Ahead Readings
Every December and sometimes for birthdays, folks want to look into the upcoming year to see if there is any guidance the tarot (or Oracle or whatever) can offer. It’s an explicitly predictive form of reading tarot, but it offers a chance at future mapping and what I call fate weaving, taking the information from your divination and acting upon that knowledge to work within the pattern that the threads of fate have set forth.
Forecasting and fate-weaving
In the metaphor of the threads of fate, there’s a tapestry being woven, and certain threads have been placed, but there’s some wiggle room to change the exact pattern. You can’t just leave the tapestry, but you can rearrange portions of it in order to create certain futures that are different from what may be the current design, but it is within the realm of possibility. The earlier in the pattern you adjust the design, the greater freedom of action, and the more regularly you can shift things, the greater the rate of change. There are some important parallels here with mundane activities too, such as exercise or skill building: start when you can, and be consistent.
In creating your destiny in an interconnected network of energy like that, it’s important to know where you could be headed and where there could be … knots that need untangling first or cords that are dependent on (or greatly affected by) your pattern and its changes. That’s where divination comes in. And that’s why predictive forms of divination can help empower your future creation. Where is there room to wiggle? Where is there a firm design? Where does the pattern offer clear opportunities to diverge sharply?
When I conduct my year-ahead Portals of Being readings in the lead-up to the Winter Solstice, I believe that I’m tapping into strange and powerful energy centers within me (connected temporarily to the client) that offer access to pieces of that metaphorical tapestry. I see what old knots need to be released, what patterns will not lead to completion, what starting points could lead to interesting but unpredictable new designs, where there is a design ready for expression, and how you can work with older patterns productively. Or something like that—I don’t explicitly use the tapestry metaphor in that work because our fates don’t have to be quite so three-dimensional.
What that does is allow you to think about what is possible for yourself and what may cause problems in the upcoming year. That doesn’t prevent you from creating the future you want, but it can guide your preparation. So you want to go against the natural headwinds of the season? Fine, try it. Just be prepared to work harder than you otherwise would. If you don’t have those excess resources though, consider why it’s so important for you to expend everything on that one thing at that one time. It’s often ego, and it probably isn’t necessary to force. On the other hand, when you’re working with the energetic “weather” of a given time period, it’s easier to focus on and achieve your aims.
Predictive divination, such as year-ahead readings and astrological forecasts, help you understand the energetic weather, and that can help you make decisions about when to engage in certain activities or implement certain strategies. If it’s going to rain, you’re probably better off going to a coffeeshop to read than to the beach for a day of fun in the sun. If it’s sunny and hot, you may want to go outside, but you’re probably going to want to have sunscreen and water and sunglasses and maybe a hat. (If it’s overcast, still wear sunscreen. UV-B rays will go through clouds and burn you.) You take advantage of the conditions and you prepare for possible problems based on the forecast.
Okay, enough about tapestries and weather.
What does that look like in a reading?
It looks like advice about the year’s themes and bigger lessons, where you’ll have opportunities to expand and grow thanks in part to various challenges. It’s like a mini life path reading, but it’s for the year. This kind of big picture look allows you to enter the year with the right mindset and expectations and to keep the bigger picture in mind when you get caught up in the details.
In my own 2021 year-ahead reading, I pulled Release from the Threads of Fate as my year’s theme and lesson. It showed up in many ways, some of which I helped make happen through planning: I allowed myself to invest in my own creativity with the Life Line Tarot and Life Line Lenoracle, and I decided to up and leave the state in which I’d lived for the previous eight years on a whim. In other ways, the lessons of Release happened to me, and I may or may not have properly prepared for them: I had to relinquish my old Moon sign and Rising sign when I learned that I was misinterpreting the AM/PM designation on my birth certificate, and I lost my final grandparent to the ancestral realm.
In addition to that year-long look, I examine the general conditions for each month around five areas of energy influence with some specific highlights. Certain areas may be more important than others in a given month, such as the need to slough off old patterns or the opportunity to explore unexpected paths.
Reviewing the year-ahead all at once allows for some journaling and planning for the year ahead. But checking in at the beginning of the month is important for targeted plans and for keeping in mind the bigger context as opportunities and challenges arise. Checking in with your reading at the end of the month is a good opportunity to see what may have shown up in ways for which you couldn’t have prepared. Why? It helps you prepare better for future months.
The specific opportunities can often be a little abstract, not unlike an Oracle’s prophecy. But in some cases, the information is more on-the-nose. I’ll share some examples of what I wrote for myself and what actually happened for them.
For Capricorn, I had written this: “Although it will be tempting to expand and innovate and look for new ways to make my business a success in financial terms, I get the impression that I will learn more by going with the flow. There’s a reminder to enjoy the cold and isolation of Isa, the stasis and hibernation.”
This was clearly when I decided to take a last-minute vacation after some very challenging personal experiences. I wanted to plan out a course on the court cards, so I began to create single-line art of the court cards that I could use in the class. The court cards class would not emerge for many months still. But in releasing that desire that wasn’t coming and instead going with the flow of that line art allowed, I was able to create the Life Line Tarot without realizing it, mostly during Capricorn.
The deck became a reality in Aquarius, when I had predicted that it would be a month to “transition from Son to Father” (from deck consumer to deck creator) and “a good time to explore creatively and try my hand in areas where I know I will excel but where I haven’t really dared to go.” I made sure to focus on finishing that deck so that I could begin working on the Life Line Lenoracle during that auspicious month for creative experiments.
The following month, Pisces, featured “a certain death that will need to be celebrated, not necessarily in a wicked way but perhaps in memoriam,” and I ended my month’s reading with this line, “there may be a chance to … find the rebirth that comes after hibernation.” And I was not far into Pisces season when my mother called to let me know that she had found the hospital bracelet from when I was born. It had my birth time, which I had been reading from my birth certificate incorrectly. My old natal chart (and my carefully analyzed astrological self) died to make way for a new natal chart that fit me better for where I was taking my future. (I explained at the time that even the incorrect natal chart had immense value for self-reflection and future planning for that stage of my life.) And that new identity allowed me to make sense of my Aries season prediction about new starts and blank pages.
Libra was, fittingly, about having too many choices to decide and the nascence of partnership that would concretize in the future. And Scorpio featured this telling line: “it’s hard to build a legacy on water, but that’s where the outside help comes in.” Together, it made sense that I would be starting a collaborative relationship with watercolor illustrator Siolo Thompson then, and that we would narrow down our huge list of potential projects to land on the watery Seaborn Kipper is perfectly right. By that point in the year, so far out, the predictions were much vaguer, but it’s fun to see how they might play out and to know, ahead of time, that some of the partnerships I was making in Libra—such as for another project still in early mid stages—did not need to be a final limiting decision.
At the time, I remember thinking that I couldn’t manage both deck projects, my then-new Awaken the Court Cards course (and workbook), and an expanded form of my Reading the River of Time course. But I knew that I probably didn’t have to try to control them or nail every detail down thanks to even that vague prediction.
For this year, I’m keeping my cards close to my vest since one of the words for the current season—ignored on the surface—has been ringing in my head for the last month for a future project, but I can say that I had mentally prepared for time away from Instagram when my account was accidentally deleted for a few days. I had written this for Taurus: “What’s on Instagram or the usual circuits is actually not important this month. Don’t be afraid to take time away.” Glad I prepared for that!
As for others, I have predicted a variety of good opportunities for which they could plan and advance, such as a new creative project featuring certain themes that the querent had secretly been waiting to bring to life. And I periodically hear how they are taking advantage of those to map their future and weave their fates.
But I also have predicted the need to take advantage of certain limited opportunities and to be prepared for various challenges, and it’s harder to hear when those predictions are “right.” For one querent, I shared the importance of being present in parenthood during the months before they lost a beloved fur baby. For another, I warned of an accidental workplace conflict that would seem very damaging in the moment but which would not ruin the relationship forever. For a third, I predicted the importance of political and civic engagement that would lead to taking to collective action in Taurus season, possibly even around reproductive rights given the theme of the querent’s year, which was associated with the sacral chakra. (Hi, Supreme Court leak regarding Roe v. Wade!) Another querent was able to prepare for a couple months of stagnation and the frustrating urge to get out and move during a period when work ended up piling up far beyond original expectations.
The messages vary in terms of precision and clarity, but all they can have purpose.
Accurate forecasts
Now an important question remains for many people: “Is the prediction accurate?” Of course, we all know that weather forecasts are regularly inaccurate even with incredibly sophisticated technology, but when you’re paying for a prediction, it should be accurate. And that’s what I just focused on.
But far more important to me is whether it’s useful in helping you make the most of your year. And that doesn’t always require accuracy. I talked about the limits of accuracy in my last post, where the cards were right and my reading was limited by my own blindspots and fears. Even in some of these year-ahead readings, the timing of certain events is in the month before or after. And other messages for some months were clear only in hindsight because of oracular metaphors. And in some, other important events just aren’t foreseen.
With my 31-day divination challenge and workbook designed to help you become more comfortable with using divination for fortune-telling, I emphasize that such a practice allows you to get specific in ways that more broad-looking readings do not. In such predictive fortune-teller-style readings (as opposed to big-picture coaching readings), it’s probably not important to know that you will meet a tall, dark stranger who could become a lover. Either you will or you won’t (and unless you're a hermit, you probably will). But it can be useful to think about what it would mean to you to meet a tall, dark stranger as a potential lover.
If you think that you might meet someone who meets that desire, then you are more likely to be open to seeing it or imagining an individual filling that role. You might more consciously put yourself in situations where that can actually happen. If, on the other hand, such a figure fills you with fear or anxiety, then those are useful emotions to examine for personal reflection that you can work through. Either way, it doesn’t matter if the person ever shows up or not so long as the information has created a net-positive effect in your life.
As promised previously, I’ll continue to talk about the potential value of prediction in divination, but I’ll be looking at other forms of card reading, such as Lenormand, and Kipper, and Sibilla. And there may be some unrelated discussions to break up the blog content.