AUTHOR’S NOTE: My title is an allusion to a quote from the Talmud mentioned by Sallie Nichols in Tarot and the Archetypal Journey:

“Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers, ‘Grow, grow!'”

One of my favorite semi-truisms about the tarot is “Every time I perform a reading for another person, I learn something new, if only about the human-tarot interface.” This phenomenon demonstrates the fact that the cards can serve as an arbiter or midwife for the sublimation of consciousness that can occur through embracing their archetypal wisdom. I’ve always been ambivalent about the concept of a personal “Guardian Angel” (although in all honesty I can sometimes see evidence of “cosmic intervention” whenever I dodge a bullet I didn’t see coming). Whether or not they exist as independent entities is a question for the theologians and philosophers.

Jung believed that “angelic powers,” like all archetypes, are utterly amoral in their action, neither good nor evil but merely immanent deep within the Unconscious such that we can’t tap into their energy until we find the “right gradient,” and sometimes life finds it for us before we can get around to it). Angelic meddling aside, I believe that we steer our own destiny by the positions and subsequent actions we take or fail to take; through this predisposition we often set ourselves up for either an agreeable future or a more problematic one, and the tarot can help flush out which one it is going to be before it lands on us with both feet. To me, this forewarning should be the ultimate goal of any divination, not whether “Joe or Mary likes us.”

Tarot-reading can be a thoroughly enlightening discipline, but it is still a discipline. My advice to beginners is to allow clairvoyance sufficient freedom to “grow your intuition” (inspiration, imagination, ingenuity, etc.) but don’t grant it unlimited latitude or you may well wind up “coloring outside the lines,” creating the same kind of blurry mess we once made as kids with our crayons and coloring books. If all we’re doing is entertaining ourselves with this slapdash sloppiness, a deeper awareness will almost certainly come upon us over time as we manifest its implications, but if we attempt to read for others prematurely our poorly-focused observations may be more damaging (or at least confusing) than helpful unless we adopt the fundamental “rules of engagement” offered by the divinatory tradition. (I once described this rudderless union between clueless sitter and inexperienced reader as “the blind leading the blind.”) This is one very real danger of the groundswell of popular acceptance that has overtaken all forms of divination in the last few years. I welcome it on one hand but mistrust its superficiality and lack of structure on the other.

There are sound metaphysical and spiritual reasons to engage with the tarot as a way to open up unseen vistas in our view of reality, if nothing else than to create an opportunity for encountering “things in heaven and earth” that weren’t previously “dreamt of in (our) philosophy.” But – contrary to what I see all around me in the social-media whirlwind of the tarot dabbler – it should not be treated as a freewheeling psychic “free-for-all” to amuse friends at parties, but approached as the revelatory, life-affirming wonder it can become with the proper attention to its transformative potential. This requires being resolutely serious and not casual or flippant in how we apply our sensibilities to its intricate, interlocking network of hidden meaning.