AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’ve yet to meet a tarot beginner who hasn’t agonized over whether an emotionally unsteady state of mind will improperly bias the outcome when reading for themselves.* This can certainly happen (for example, in stressful romantic situations), but it doesn’t have to.

For the record, divination with the cards is an emotive storytelling art (Enrique Enriquez calls it an “irrational act,” highlighting its non-linear nature), and if our emotions aren’t sufficiently engaged we might as well be reading from a laundry-list. The trick is to avoid letting them get the upper hand on our reasoning faculties to the point that they cloud our perception of reality. We may strongly object to a prediction at first blush, but we should try to step back and let the cards speak their piece from a place deep within our subconscious without twisting their testimony to agree with our skewed appraisal of (in the immortal words of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant) “what is and what should never be.”

In her discussion of the Wheel of Fortune in Tarot and the Archetypal Journey, Sallie Nichols offers ways to turn the tables on the sly Sphinx at the top of the Wheel (although she acknowledges in another part of the essay that, while Oedipus was successful in outwitting the Sphinx at the gates of Thebes, it didn’t save him from his eventual fate – you know the story, he inadvertently killed his father and then unknowingly married his mother). One technique that has a direct bearing on my subject is to imagine that the cards portray characters (none of whom is us) in a drama and that we are members of the audience who observe the actors and may sympathize but don’t identify with them. In that way, if we are emotionally overwrought at the time of the reading, we can distance ourselves from the anxiety by first projecting our problems onto these surrogates and then creating a narrative that follows their adventures without having to assume a personal role on the stage. Think it of as “playing make-believe” with virtual dolls, but with the serious objective of obtaining useful insights.

Such detachment can be hard to come by, which is why some authorities recommend not trying to read for oneself on important matters, particularly “affairs of the heart,” when upset. I’ve always scratched my head at this bit of cautionary advice. Who better than our befuddled selves to practice on when we’re trying to learn the ropes? (We won’t get fidgety and we won’t take offense.) An emotionally-charged situation is likely to produce vivid and memorable commentary, and we don’t have to instantly run off and hang ourselves like Jocasta, mother/wife of Oedipus, if we don’t like what we discover. We need to take the philosophical “long view” and recognize that what the cards are showing us is only one of several possible outcomes, typically the one that will surface if we sit back and do nothing. Therefore, in adverse circumstances we must engage, not just wring our hands and whine impotently. It takes a while for a neophyte to realize that nothing about a tarot reading is carved in stone, it is all susceptible to personal intervention if we want a different conclusion; in fact, the purpose of a reading in most cases should be to provide just that kind of empowering incentive.

A tarot spread is a reflection of our subconscious landscape at the time of the shuffle, and whether it is a precise rendering of the psychic backdrop or a pallid and distorted perversion depends entirely on how deftly we can get our cerebral impedimenta out of the way and let the unfiltered images flow in our mind’s eye. Used properly, the tarot can be a magic mirror that opens onto the future; misused it can be a murky crystal ball that defies scrutability. My point is that in a tarot reading we are dealing with symbolic approximations of infinite subtlety, not hard data. About the only thing that is certain is Korzybski’s semantic premise that “The map is not the territory,” it is merely an abstraction that can be cleverly manipulated through specious redrawing (historically, the French and Germans did that all the time). With tarot this reworking of the internal self-portrait is the role of the subconscious regardless of whether that mystical make-over is in line with our goals or conscious intent, and if distracted by external conditions or misguided objectives it can easily mislead us..

But the cards can also cater to our whims when we least expect cooperation. If we’re convinced that we’re screwed up, they will gleefully tell us that we most assuredly are; on the other hand, if we think our sketchy self-image deserves the benefit of the doubt, they will give us a fair shake even if we really should be more self-critical. Just don’t expect them to bend over backwards to coddle any feelings of entitlement. The last thing we should do is approach a self-reading with the mindset that we know what we want to hear and we won’t listen to anything that doesn’t play our tune. The tarot delights in poking holes in our hubris. We might paraphrase the maxim about the scofflaw who refuses a lawyer and defends himself in court: ” A seeker who willfully misrepresents himself when divining has a fool for a reader.”

*The question of emotional bias also comes up when reading for others who are distressed, but the best advice there is not to read for someone who is obviously distraught.