The Piper and the Glanconer

I am a total novice at ANY kind of card-reading, and I'm wondering if I'm doing this wrong.
I have long been a fan of Froud, and I simply adore "Good Faeries, Bad Faeries", so given my recent descision to learn to read Tarot, I was delighted to find out about the Faeries' Oracle.

Anyway, the point is, I'm not always seeing what the book says I should see.

Take the Piper for instance. In the beginning excercises in the book, I picked him as "least appealing card". He's gorgeous, but I find him menacing. He seems angry to me, while being seductively beautiful. I can't shake the feeling that following his music would take me into some very dark place. And yet his keywords include "Harmony, Empathy and Order". Okay, so I had Seduction bang on, but I just don't see the others. He seems bitter, bent on causing problems.

The Glanconer, now... I can't tell you how delighted I was to find he was in the Oracle. He's a favorite of mine from "GF/BF", where he's portrayed as a seducer of unwary women, a sort of male siren. He's downright scary, but I can't help but like him. There's something very friendly and familliar about him, like if I were to meet him I'd now exactly who and what he was and I'd follow him anyway, for the joy of it. He seems more of a flirt than an actual archetypal dangerous seducer, and a fun flirt at that.

The Piper is very much a dark seducer to me, and the Glanconer nothing of the sort.

I know one should use one's intuition (which I've never been any good at anway), but I'm afraid I've got it ALL WRONG, because I havn't got at all what the book says and... well, it's the instructions, right?

You should always follow your intuition - but this is one deck where you are REALLY supposed to follow your intuition..

Jess cannot stress enough in the book that the definitions are only starting points.. The Faeries have so much more to say.. and may say different things to different people...

Please.. don't worry when what you feel differs from the book.. when using this oracle, let the cards / faeries tell you what they mean... Jess and Brian would be so proud of you )

I would recommend you put the book away.

Read the cards as *you* read them, speak what words They say to you. The book can wait until you want to learn *more* about what the cards are ... not to learn simply what they are.

Try to think of this deck as Oracle and not Tarot. An oracle devise requires the reader to bring their own storytelling into the reading in an even more involved way (I think) than Tarot.

In Tarot it's "this means this, that means that".

In Faery, anything can mean anything. Listen to your heart. Listen to your Fae. Read your cards, and not the book. THAT is how you will best learn to communicate with the deck.

And enjoy them. Trust, and enjoy the discovery process. Enjoy what your Fae want to teach you, not what the authors of the book say. You will inevitably hear deeper, richer messages from within, not a book.