Collaborative Reading: The Forty Servants

Here’s a simple two-person reading my friend and I came up with that is similar to the collaborative writing exercises where each person writes one sentence and together it makes a story.

(Although conceived using The Forty Servants, there’s no reason this couldn’t work using any divination deck. You might want to do a Card Swapping Ritual first to link the two decks.)

First, decide what your query is and both shuffle your decks.

Whoever did not pick the question goes first laying down one card and beginning to interpret how it relates to the query.

Then the next person lays down a card and continues the reading as it relates to this new card (set these in 2 separate piles so you don’t get your decks mixed up).

Keep alternating back and forth, taking turns laying down a new card and interpreting it to build off each other.

We experimented a few different ways and found it best to limit the number of cards drawn to 4 or 6, otherwise you could just go through the entire deck and it gets a bit redundant and less meaningful the longer you go. The game doesn’t seem to end organically so it’s best to put an artificial cap on it.

Possible variations:

• Do it fast, like word-association, where you just say the first thing that comes to your mind when you see the card, rather than give a detailed interpretation.
• Interpret the cards your partner draws instead of your own.

When we tried this a couple interesting things lined up, like drawing the same card from each deck back-to-back. Little things like that felt like we were on the right track.

We’re excited to come up with more of these, one possibility we talked about but have not tried yet was a past, present, future spread where the first person would draw a card for past, and the next person would draw a card representing the outside forces acting on your past (and so on).