Anonymous asks: “There’s a lot of things going on underneath the surface, may I have a clue to the identity of the person behind it?”

The cards answer: “It’s complicated.”

This is not a One Card Question. This is the beginning of a discussion with your diviner of choice. I know I have answered questions like this with one card, but to be honest, it has always left a sour taste in my mouth. There is so much potentially lost to translation and differences in cultural assignments to the denotations and connotations of the words used. If I were to say the person behind the shenanigans has a “gay” personality, would you know if I meant the denotation of “happy, jovial, buoyant” or a cultural connotation of “queer, non-conforming, deviant from societal norms of behavior”? Or worse, would you know if I meant both?

So as my Evil Genie gift to you, I’m going to complicate the issue. Instead of asking one deck for one card, I’m going to ask three particular decks for one card each to address your concern. Each deck views the query with a slightly different perspective. If this were an elephant, these three decks would tell you about the feet, the trunk, and the eyes.

It’s still up to you to figure out how the pieces fit.

The Bosch Tarot has little consideration about what is happening to the Querent, but will instead speak volumes about the Querent’s drive, personality, and internal conflicts. In your case, the Bosch Tarot has this to say about the person’s motive(s): 9 of Wands.

The person is up to this shit, not so much to make a game of you and enjoy the chaos (that’s the unintended consequence), but to protect themselves and create a boundary between them and whatever has prompted them to erect these defences in the first place. That their actions are causing you distress is happenstance at best, and accidental maliciousness at worst. You are not the trophy of the game, but a game piece on the field.

The Fey Tarot speaks about interpersonal relationships. It does not care if that relationship is between an owner and a pet, an employee and their boss, two lovers and/or their spouses, or a devotee and their god(s). How does A relate to B? What needs to be opened up and what needs to be veiled away? In your case, the Fey Tarot has this to say about the relationship between you and that person: The Sun.

Fully exposed. You are transparent to them. Having withheld nothing from their view, they see all the parts of you as they please, even those parts you thought hidden. This exposure also means their reach into your life is equally pervasive. There is very little of you they have not left a mark on, for good or for ill. What areas of your life has been “sunburnt”? There lies your clue.

The Sweeney Tarot is a non-esoteric deck. Religion is a social club as far as this deck is intentionally concerned. It does not attempt to make any spiritual proclamations and flattens the game board you are scrambling around on. It is a deck about roles and responsibilities, about assumptions and the way those assumptions are played out. Each card has a title, and for the court cards, a formal role. In your case, the role of the person as seen from your perspective is: 8 of Cups, reversed.

“Abandoned Winnings,” is the name of this card when upright. But this is not an upright situation. The Bosch Tarot says they are protecting themselves, but unlike the lottery, abstinence from making a decision is still a decision. From your perspective, this person has played it safe for so long, they are about to be trapped in their own security. They are in the process of shaking up their status quo, but like any good infusion of chaos, the shaking is spilling over to others, including you. Because the card is reversed, instead of “Abandoned Winnings”, perhaps it should be titled as “Abandoned Safety”.

So, Anonymous, there you go. Three cards from three decks about the elephant in the room. If you are going to pursue divination to acquire more pieces to add to this larger than life puzzle, I do suggest that you engage the services (and perhaps an afternoon or two) of a trusted diviner. There are nuances here that one (or three) cards are not going to tell you, and personal knowledge that you are not going to tell a random card reader on the internet (or any other stranger throwing cards for free) that will adjust how the cards are read.

Good luck to you.