AUTHOR’S NOTE: The term “poser” has a couple of meanings; it can refer to a question that is exceptionally difficult to answer, or to an individual who is “faking it” in some way. I recently read a fascinating essay in New Yorker magazine about the “imposter phenomenon” (not “syndrome” since, according to its creators, it is more a sociological and systemic challenge than a matter of clinical psychology) that is – as we might suppose – more prevalent in career women who are made to feel professionally inadequate by the “system” than it is in men. It started me thinking about how this might be identified in a tarot reading independent of gender stratification.

In her version of the venerable Celtic Cross (CC) spread, Eden Gray dismantled the “Hopes or Fears” architecture of the ninth position and relegated “Fears” to the seventh place, ousting Waite’s semi-redundant “Himself” descriptor (after all, what is the Significator card but another way to define “Himself?”) Over the years I’ve come to recognize that all of the active mental/emotional implications of the CC reside in the “staff” section because the series of “cross” cards is more about transitional chapters in the “back-story.” (There is an old premise asserting that the “cross” displays incremental developments in the scope of the situation, while the “staff” reflects the querent’s reaction to those evolving circumstances; in my own practice I’ve seen ample proof of this.)

In this regard I began to relate “Fears” to all manner of self-defeating attitudes and behaviors, and re-imagined the seventh position at the bottom of the “staff” as the “psychic basement” and the “root of self-limitation” where all subjective doubts about our personal competence fetch up and eventually fester like so much rotting garbage. Extrapolating from the plateau that was reached in the sixth (“Near Future”) card that serves as a “staging area” for the next leg of the querent’s journey, I started looking at the seventh card as proposing a cautious step back from uncritical acceptance of the vision of the future offered by the previous one. It represents a pause to reflect that might harden into push-back if the card pulled strongly disputes the testimony of its predecessor. Nothing says that we must “roll over and play dead” if the immediate future seems to be less hospitable than we would prefer, especially if we’re being “boxed in” by a scenario that makes use feel like we aren’t able to be ourselves in the matter. Perhaps we’re being cast in a role that is completely out-of-step with our self-image, turning us into unwilling “imposters” who are just acting out a scripted plot. In such instances a shot at rebuttal is not just presented for consideration, it is absolutely vital for progress.

This is particularly interesting when reversal suggests the risk of “second guessing” ourselves if anticipated events or circumstances appear on the horizon before we have a chance to make peace with any unresolved “baggage” we brought to the table. That short-range forecast might not “settle in” for us until we have worked through its likely consequences and decided that it is what we truly want from the situation. I’m not going to hand my client the “Pangloss argument” about the virtue (or inevitability) of the near-future outlook when the “Fears” card indicates that he or she isn’t ready-and-willing to embrace the opportunity or shoulder the burden. (Look it up; an exposure to Voltaire might just make you a better – or at least a more thoughtful – tarot reader). From that vantage point, we can move on at least provisionally to the eighth position (the “Querent’s environment” or “home-base”) to examine whether (and if so, how) the character of that cross-cutting, broad-based response might be reshaped to overcome or otherwise circumvent the foregoing obstacle. If a “no-win” roadblock arises in “Fears” territory it may be time to redraw the map to accommodate its presence, perhaps by adopting a more flexible posture going forward.

In conclusion, it’s reasonable to assume that this “imposter” concept can be applied to any layout that involves a contrarian or “push-back” position of the “What should I avoid doing?” kind, but it would take some imaginative spread-craft to match the psychodynamic acuteness that is already present in the Celtic Cross. I’m not much impressed by the modern practice of in-depth “mind-reading” with the tarot – in one’s own space or that of others – because it involves too much intuitive guesswork for my taste. As a situational-awareness evocator I don’t consider myself much of an “adaptive life-coach,” so I prefer to treat the cards as a “WYSYWYG” (“What you see is what you get”) window on the personality without becoming too wrapped up in their subliminal intricacies. An instructive parallel is the use of the elemental “humors and temperaments” in classical astrology to describe a native’s orientation to the world as opposed to applying the “New Age” tenets of Jungian analytical psychology. The seven traditional planets serve very well to convey the fundamental “building-blocks” of one’s individuality without resorting to the jargon of the psychoanalyst. I see no reason why a similar approach to tarot reading wouldn’t be sufficient to flush out the “poser in the woodpile” when brought to bear on aspects of a matter that may invite self-delusional dissembling.