Ancestral Tarot Spread
Have you ever sought to gain wisdom from your ancestors? Are you curious about ancestral patterns that have carried over into your life? Do you want to know how your journey connects with your family lineage, and what kind of spiritual wisdom has been passed down from previous generations?
Well, you can! Through the Tarot reading outlined here, you’ll be able to access deep wisdom from family members that came before you.
Why use a Tarot Spread to reach your Ancestors?
Tarot spreads allow you to observe yourself, your life, your strengths, areas for growth, and that can be causing you problems. They serve as a tool for self-awareness and self-empowerment. In this case, you can uncover family patterns as you let your Tarot deck take you through an ancestral journey.
While there are other methods of divination to connect with your ancestors, a Tarot spread is one of the most personal and practical. This is because it gives you the ability to explore a personal connection with past generations, receive their guidance and wisdom, and see how you can improve your journey with this information. It's an extremely helpful Tarot practice that can add a tremendous amount of depth to your spiritual practice.
When you connect your ancestors through a Tarot spread, you can see how to break out of habits that no longer serve you by identifying the underlying trends and patterns from past generations. You can find sources of strength within yourself that you may have forgotten. Perhaps most importantly, you can honor your lineage through expressing gratitude.
There are other methods of divination that you can use to contact an ancestor. For example, a medium may be able to help you if you seek a connection with a specific ancestor. This Ancestral Tarot spread is deliberately purposed to help you gain wisdom and receive healing energy to help you on your journey.
Some Tarot spreads are used for entertainment purposes, others can be used to generate a new idea or overcome a challenge in your regular life. A few, like the birthday spread, are suited for special occasions. Others have a practical, ad-hoc application, like determining if someone is a friend or foe.
This type of Tarot reading, however, is much more serious and intimate. Make sure you perform it in your sacred space and, during the reading, treat it with the respect it deserves. You may channel energy from your great-grandmother or a distant ancestor seeking to pass down guidance to future generations.
How to use a Tarot Spread to Connect with your Ancestors
Spend some time preparing the setting by giving yourself a peaceful and motivating reading space and momentarily practicing meditation while you purposefully attract any ancestors who have your best interests in mind. If you'd like, you can concentrate on a particular issue for which you'd like guidance, but I advise letting the reading unstructured so that whatever is most crucial might come through.
Tarot spread can still be used to connect with and receive messages from spirits and even ancestors, even though some tarot readers may not use it as a tool for making predictions.
Ancestral reverence is a significant tradition in many civilizations, including the Wheel of the Year of the Pagans. Specific cards can allude to ancestors, previous lives, mediumship, the deceased, and spirits.
When these cards emerge in a reading, it could mean that a message from a spirit or ancestor is about to be received or that more time needs to be spent learning about mediumship, working with spirits, the dead, or spirit contact.
What you can expect to learn from the Ancestral Tarot Spread
Meanings:
Which ancestors are currently present with me?
What they wish to tell you
How you can honor them
What abilities you've inherited
Family patterns that have been passed down
What healing energy they're providing
What to do moving forward
Understanding Ancestor Communication
Instead of diving deeply into the positions of this Tarot spread, let's focus more on the big picture of ancestor spiritual energy. This will help you make sense of the message they wish to transmit and give you signs that can point you in the right direction.
Ancestors can include members of your family tree and other distant relatives who are part of your lineage. These could also be individuals with whom you have a shared cultural heritage. They might be regarded as elders in your culture. Your ancestors can offer advice, knowledge, and messages to support you on both your daily life and spiritual path. They are similar to spirit guides in that they can assist you in achieving your objectives in this life. They are closer to this physical world because they have previously lived in it and have a blood link to you.
While some spirit guides have adopted physical forms, others have not.
Spirit guides have chosen to become guides based on their experience and expertise in particular fields. They collaborate closely with you for the purposes that fall within their areas of specialization. Although you have a family of spirit guides, your lineage and cultural family are represented by your ancestors. You are in part because of them. They have inherited a cultural DNA marker from you that you share with them.
You can decide to work with them in spell craft and magic, ask for their advice, or try to understand yourself and your heritage and learn more about inherited or generational patterns and behaviors.
How to Use Tarot spread to communicate with your Ancestor spirits
Here's a technique to assist you in getting in the appropriate frame of mind and clearing some space so you can speak with your ancestors, your spirit guide, or a deceased loved one. Although you can adjust this to meet your own practice and/or tradition, there are a few steps you shouldn't skip as a novice. When speaking with spirits, be careful to have protection, raise your energy, set your intention, and ground yourself afterward.
Usually, these are the fundamentals of initiating and maintaining spirit communication. Prepare a comfortable space where you may read for an extended period of time without interruption before you start.
Tarot Cards to pay special attention to
There are many diverse perspectives on ancestry in the spiritual/metaphysical world. Some people link our forebears to previous incarnations; others think we choose our ancestry at birth to offer us a particular perspective on life, yet others think our ancestry is entirely random.
Whatever your religious or philosophical views are, this tarot spread will show you multigenerational life lessons, qualities, patterns and will connect to your ancestors.
This tarot spread takes a humorous look at your family history and the role it has in your present life.
Let's begin with the major and minor arcana:
Major arcana
The Empress
The Empress represents mothers and mother-ancestors. This card may indicate that the maternal ancestral line is coming and healing has to be done with the maternal line when it appears in reading regarding spirits or ancestral work. This might be your mother, your grandmother, or other female ancestors. This could also mean that mothers also exist in the paternal line (grandmothers, great-grandmothers, etc.)
The Empress may represent any healing work you may be doing with the women in your ancestors and/or connecting with them so you can learn from them and get lessons from them.
Death
The Angel of Death is depicted as a skeleton riding a white horse while wearing black armor on the Death card. The armor denotes invincibility and the knowledge that death will occur regardless of what happens; the skeleton represents the portion of the body that endures long after life has left it. The horse symbolizes purity on the card and represents power and strength, yet its dark color is associated with grief and the enigmatic.
Death flies a black flag with a white rose with five petals, signifying beauty, purification, and immortality, as well as the number five, which stands for change. Together, these images show that death is about more than just life expiring. Death is about changes and transformations, birth and rebirth, ends and new beginnings. This card represents Death as natural transition in the life journey.
Wheel of fortune
Reincarnation, past deeds, activities in previous lifetimes, karma, and samsara are all possible indicators according to the Wheel of Fortune. African Traditional Religions (ATR), including Igbo, hold that children of deceased ancestors are born with their spirits.
Buddhism believes that any living creature could have been one's mother in a previous life; hence killing an insect or animal would be bad karma (even for food.)
Hinduism holds that everyone, including gods and goddesses, is subject to reincarnation, which is determined by the deeds (karma), one takes during a lifetime. The names of ancestors are documented throughout the Poetic Eddas and Icelandic Sagas as a record of the family lines, which some academics have theorized may point to a pre-Christian folk belief in reincarnation.
The Wheel of Fortune can make suggestions regarding the deceased's previous lives, their past deeds/karma, etc., when it appears in a reading concerning the dead, spirits, and ancestors.5
Minor Arcana
Five of Cups
The Five of Cups traditionally stands for lamentation, sadness, grief, and loss. This could be seen as needing time to process grief or to come to grips with a loss of ancestors or death.
The card of the five cups may allude to an ancestor or ghost who wants to assist you in working through or processing any grief, mourning, sadness, or loss that you may be experiencing or that you may have already experienced but have never entirely recovered from.
The Five of Cups could show up in a reading involving ancestors, ancestor work, or tarot readings where a spirit from the other side is trying to communicate with us.
This card may suggest that there is more effort to be done with the spirit world and to establish a closer connection with the spirit if you are a medium or learning mediumship.
Four of Swords
The 4 of Swords serves as a reminder to tune out the noise and take a break so that we can relax our minds. We can hear the advice from the spirits and ancestors when we calm the buzz in our minds. We become more receptive to the higher realms and the voices that guide us when we need them.
The Four of Swords may represent interacting with ancestors and mediumship, receiving messages, or using automatic writing when it appears in a reading.
Ten of Pentacles
The Ten of Pentacles depicts an elderly man with white hair sitting with his two devoted white dogs at his feet while donning a robe with elaborate embroidery. A young couple and their little child are close.
The man is a wealthy patriarch who has accomplished much in his life and is very happy to be able to provide his family access to his wealth and prosperity. His family now enjoys financial security and predictability, thanks to his accomplishments. He already recognizes the legacy he has left behind. This card sends you healing energy to aid in success.
Things to Help your Ancestral Tarot Spread
Prayer
To receive protection while you conduct the reading, you can invoke your angels and your protector spirit guide.
Black kyanite, smoky quartz, obsidian, and tourmaline black
These can all be utilized as protective crystals. Place them beside your reading area or carry or wear them yourself.
Protective Bubble
Create a protective bubble or border around yourself in your mind and picture it filled with the universe's pure white light.
Cast a Circle
You can cast a circle either mentally or physically if your practice includes this technique for protection.