Cartomancy as Writing Prompt

I've done a couple of articles about divination already, so hopefully people will have some idea of what I'm getting at with this. Cartomancy is a form of divinatory spiritual practice intended to communicate with metaphysical powers. Traditionally, cartomancy is done to divine information about the future, but there is also a meditative school which uses cartomancy to explore the self through guided introspection.

All of this is, of course, a scam. There are no higher powers guiding the order of cards in a deck to cryptographically convey hidden messages to poker adicts. That's ridiculous. Cartomancy is a form of cold-reading that uses cards as guides to pose probing questions of your querent which sound like cryptic visions. The querent reacts in whatever way your "insight" most closely connects with them, and the rest is confirmation bias. It's pretty cheap to be honest. Modern cartomancers employ many other tools in the con as well. Some have philosophy and psychology diplomas under their belts, many are professional hypnotists, a few spy on querents in the waiting room to pull a hot read.

Really, all the cards do is give you a prompt about what to talk about, and in what order. This guarantees that your predictions always have unique structure and sound fresh. It prevents you from forming a habitual structure that would act as a tell to your lies. But if cards can do that for con artists, why not for other people? How could we repurpose this extremely effective tool?

I have found that cartomancy can easily be used as a writing prompt for authors. I have used it many times in the past to plan adventures for RPGs, and also just to practice writing. This article is a guide on how to take a cartomantic system and repurpose it for writing.

To begin using cartomancy as a writing prompt, you first need to assign a symbolic lexicon to the cards. That is to say, give each card an abstract meaning. You can make your own lexicon from scratch, or you can go the easy route and use one that already exists. I opt to just use the existing systems, because they have been proven to be highly versatile and robust within a competitive market.

Still though, cartomancers are a finnicky lot, and they all disagree a bit on what each card "means". Nobody has truly standardized it. So go on Google, search for card meanings lists, and copy as many as you can into a book. Give a page to each card and just list all the meanings you can find for it on that page. That'll get you a good cultural cross-section of the trends and conflicts in the professional community regarding each card. This book will now be your guide to the deck as a prompt.

Now you need to learn a bunch of spreads. See, early on, cartomancers discovered that a single vague card was rarely good enough to warrant their pay. It wasn't enough to say "you will receive a letter". People wanted to know when, what about, from who, etc. Their solution? Draw more cards! Certain patterns became so common with certain question types, cartomancers began drawing all the cards at once to skip the extra questions from the querent. Cartomancers with showmanship skills arranged the cards in seemingly important formations with specific order to give a visual appeal to the process. This marketing technique slowly became standardized over the centuries, and is now known as a card spread. Some of these spreads are beautiful and elaborate, while others are little more than a hand of cards splayed out on the table.

A spread is, essentially, a blank story skeleton waiting for details. A great example is the "general situation" spread of 3 cards, one card each for the past, present, and future. The most basic spread is a single card. You ask the deck a question and draw a card. That card represents, in some way, the answer the spirit can tell you. Hogwash. It's a random slip of wood pulp. Go browsing google and collect as many spreads as you can find. These will be the tools you use to formulate your prompts.

Don't want to do the leg work? Fine. Here, use mine. This is my collection of card meanings for the nameless deck. At the end is a huge collection of spreads as Well, and it opens with a history lesson about how playing cards came to be.

OK, time to write a story! Get out your pack of cards and shuffle it. The first thing you want might be characters. Choose a spread system you think could be used to describe people. Generally, the more important the character, the more detailed a spread you should use. Tertiary characters rarely need more than 1 card. Start with your protagonist. Add characters as the story demands them. Draw cards for your characters. Read the meanings of each card and consider the context of the placement of the spread. As an example, let's make a character using just the meanings from the above image. Note each card has multiple meanings. I'll just choose whichever one I feel is more interesting.

Protagonist, 3 card spread: Ace of diamonds, 3 of clubs, Queen of spades.

Past: A ring. The character is married.

Present: Secret admirer. Someone wants the protagonist to engage in an affair.

Future: False friend. Someone is going to stab the protagonist in the back.

Bam. We now know what our story is about; temptation of infidelity and betrayal. If we wanted to know more about the protagonist, we could pull more spreads. For example, a pinwheel (5 card) could be used to arbitrarily determine ethnicity, gender, age, hair, and eye color- if you've found meanings for those to apply to cards.

Next we need an overall story structure. Choose a spread. I like the 3 card spread, replacing past/present/future with first/second/third act. Then, for each act, I break it down into 3 more 3-card spreads. And so-on. But there's nothing stopping you from throwing a zodiac spread (12 card) for the overall story, a Celtic cross (10 card) for each chapter, or any other system you choose. Just remember, the more details your prompt has, the more writing you will wind up doing to connect it all together.

From the example above, let's make a 3-part short story about our unfortunate protagonist. Remember, they are trapped between treachery and temptation.

Act 1: 2 of Hearts
"Your next love affair will surprise you."
Holy dang the hero went and gave in to temptation!

Act 2: Jack of Hearts
"You are continually in someone's thoughts."
You'd think it's his mistress... But what about that traitor?

Act 3: 2 of Spades
"A sudden journey."
The story ends with them travelling far for some reason.

OK, so let's brainstorm a story off of that!

Our hero is a married man. A female friend of his has been pining over him for years. The story opens with her seducing him. The two fall in love in secret. The friend, however, has a husband- a good friend and coworker to our protagonist. He discovers the affair. Bad shenanigans happen. Eventually, the hero leaves his wife and runs away with the mistress, fleeing for adventure.

Not bad! Sounds like an exciting story. Depending on the details, it could be turned into a harlequin romance, a mystery, a space opera, all kinds of stuff!

Basically any and all divination techniques can be used as the foundation for a writing prompt. Remember, all of these tools were developed for the purposes of telling convincing lies about the future. Divination is simply a form of criminal storytelling.

Personally, I like to cross the three cartomantic traditions, using whichever suits my purposes for the prompt I need. The three schools can be characterized as focusing on three broad subject types.

Tarot focuses on emotions.

The nameless deck focuses on people.

Lenormand focuses on things.

So if you want to know if someone is lying to you, go with tarot; if you want to know who is lying to you, go with playing cards; and if you want to know what they are lying about, go with lenormand.

If you're interested in Lenormand, I also have a PDF of compiled lessons and meanings on the lenormand deck by Labyrinthos Academy, located here.