Orphalese Tarot Zone Community Forum

I have a couple of suggestions for the program, which I love BTW, registering it over a decade ago.

The first is to give the option of using a Shadow Card. This is a fairly common technique I've seen where after pulling a spread during a reading the card that was on the bottom of the deck is interpreted as a "shadow card". This card is interpreted in various ways: information the querent seeks to deny or repress, content that the overall reading is obscuring but is important, or even positive or lofty information that the querent thinks is out of their reach but they can absolutely own. Sometimes a reader will check the shadow card out for personal information without letting the querent know but usually I see a reader flip the entire unused deck over to reveal the card at the bottom. It would be nice to have this as an option that is automatically added onto all spreads or to have as an option for specific spreads or as an option for the remaining part of the deck on it's own in the case of flipping the entire deck over after a spread is interpreted.

Also, some spreads use an additive pull where you add up the numbers on the pulled cards and then pull a card that is that number down in the unused portion of the deck, subtracting the number of remaining cards in the deck if the sum goes over. For instance, if you pulled the Ace of Wands, The Star, and the Page of Swords you could add 1 + 17 + 11 = 29 and then pull out the 29th card down in the remaining deck. Alternatively, some use this sum to refer to a specific card without pulling. For the example above the card numbered 29 in the Orphalese numbering sequence is the 8 of Wands or the actual 29th card in the sequence is the 7 of Wands. Even better would be an option to assign the number used to add from each card with varying methods (one method uses 5 for an Ace, 7 for a Page, 4 for the three other courts, the face number of the pips, 3 for the Fool/Hanged Man/Judgement, 12 for the Emperor/Hierophant/Lovers/Chariot/Strength/Hermit/Justice/Death/Temperance/Devil/Star/Moon and 9 for Magician/High Priestess/Empress/Wheel Of Fortune/Tower/Sun/World).

Of course these techniques can be used manually with the program which is one of the reasons I love it so much. It's the closest to using an actual deck that I've found. It would just be a time saver if it was available and then I could focus more on interpreting the cards during a reading.

Hi there, I've taken note of these suggestions. I think the idea of having a menu option to flip the entire deck (or fragment of a deck) would be quite intuitive. I would see it as an option on the deck itself rather than the spread. Obviously it would just flip the deck, not any cards that are already out.

With regards to adding up the pulled cards to find another card in the deck, I can't think of a very intuitive way to make that an option, especially when it would have to factor in people using various different methods (and some of them probably having their own systems). But one idea does occur to me, and maybe you can tell me if you think it would be useful. The idea would be to have another menu option to copy the entire sequence of indexes in the deck to the clipboard. So first of all you would have the index of each card that is out, in the order they are in the spread, and then you would have all the rest of the indexes in the deck in the order they happen to be. The indexes would all be separated by return characters, so you could then very easily paste the whole sequence into a spreadsheet program like Excel. And in the spreadsheet you would have formulas you had set up previously for each spread which would let you identify a card or cards in any position that interested you. Is this something you think you would find useful? I think it would be flexible enough for people to use it in different ways too. I know in the past some people have expressed an interest in this kind of numerical analysis too, it is something the program doesn't really have at the moment.

Yes, having an option to flip the deck over at anytime to see the bottom card sounds great!

I just uploaded a new version of the program. In the end the option of flipping the entire deck wasn't practical, but I added a menu option to peek at the bottom card which I think works very nicely - it directly shows the bottom card on a special scaled up menu item (and also reflecting whether the card is inverted or not). You can find it on Cards >> Peek at Bottom Card.