AUTHOR’S NOTE: Jungian tarot author Sallie Nichols made a strong case for why it isn’t helpful to ask “Why?” of the tarot cards. I gave her a fair hearing but came away unconvinced.

In her lengthy chapter on the Wheel of Fortune in Tarot and the Archetypal Journey (which I’ve been wading through in half-hour segments during my morning treadmill workouts), Nichols got a lot of anecdotal mileage out of imagining conversations with the sphinx at the top of the wheel, a mythical creature that was known for riddling and not giving straight answers. Here are a few of her observations, slightly edited for brevity:

“Within the borders of our wheel there are more opportunities for free movement than we might imagine. Imagine is the key word. As long as we let our imagination have free play, we can find ways to move about. But when we approach the sphinx with our ego-intellect, we can remain stuck in circular thinking or interminable rounds of philosophizing and psychologizing.

One way to keep the imagination free, I have discovered, is to avoid asking the sphinx questions that begin with ‘Why?’ (Why did this happen to me? Why did I [they] behave like that? Why am I so stupid, inept, misunderstood, or whatever?) I find that, for me at least, ‘Why’ questions result only in recriminations and accusations, burying my creative energies under tons of ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts.’ Either I am the ‘guilty party’ wholly responsible for whatever has happened or ‘they’ are the guilty ones, and it is my job to chastise them, setting their feet once more on the path of righteousness. Either way, one’s creativity is paralyzed.

‘Why’ questions, like Harpies, suck out the blood of life. Learning to address the sphinx in a way that evokes her help is an art. If the questions we ask her are too psychological and philosophical, she will pose counter-questions that set one turning summersaults (sic) like a trained seal. If our approach is too literal and specific, her answers may send us forth into reality in ways that are inappropriate, if not disastrous.”

When I was a high-school English student I received lessons in effective expository writing. One of the first things we learned was the “Five W’s” model of explanatory journalism: Who, What, Why, Where and When. If news writers touch on all of these elements in a narrative, they can be assured of adequately informing their readers of what is going on. Much later, when I took up tarot reading, I realized that, with a few tweaks, this approach perfectly describes the fundamentals of putting questions to the cards. I settled on What, Why and Who (in that order of relevance) for the basic inquiry, including How as a useful adjunct; Where and When are not the tarot’s strong suits, so I tended to downplay those factors and continued to wrestle with them separately. I currently practice both tarot and Lenormand with roughly equal proficiency, but I find that Lenormand excels at the What and the How, while tarot is decidedly better for the Why and (with its court cards) the Who.

This mode of interrogation has served me well for five decades, but Nichols’ concerns about the dubious value of “Why” questions gave me pause to consider whether they are really worthwhile. After some contemplation, I concluded that she was probably overthinking the whole thing (as well as taking it much too personally). I’m a pragmatic diviner, not primarily a philosophical or psychological one, and I’m mainly interested in the antecedents for action-and-event-oriented scenarios that don’t open up the “blame game” that Nichols envisions. By asking “why” something is the way it is, we create an invitation to work our way back through the labyrinth of prior events and circumstances via the cards, which will hopefully enable us to pin down where in the past (and why) a malignancy originated. Once we get a fix on that, we can set about ensuring that it doesn’t happen again. If we just wring our hands and acknowledge (or assign) guilt as Nichols assumes, we have learned nothing about cause-and-effect that could help us steer a different course in the future if and when similar conditions come back to haunt us (life is, after all, a “wheel”).