AUTHOR’S NOTE: Every day on local highways I encounter risk-taking “alpha” types (usually adult males) who have clearly “weaponized” their automobiles. They drive aggressively at high speed, weaving in and out of bumper-to-bumper traffic and squeezing into tight spots at 80 miles an hour; they’re always quick to lean on the horn and brandish the middle finger, and woe to the pokey driver who gets in their way. I would call it juvenile if it wasn’t so thoroughly “21st-Century American” (although in my personal experience we have nothing on the Germans and their ruthless autobahn tactics).

This intrusive behavior reminds me of those who attempt to get inside someone else’s head with the tarot, hoping to figure out what they’re thinking as a way to potentially gain an advantage of some kind. Tarot readers who indulge this propensity without a second thought may be committing “psychic assault-and-battery” by trying to open a window into an unsuspecting targets private thoughts and feelings, but it’s also one of the most common topics brought to the modern diviner.

I’ve always felt that the “What does Joe or Mary think/feel about me?” question is a thinly-veiled substitute for “Does this person like/love me?” It comes across as an overture to an emotional foray by the seeker, who aspires to make a move on the quarry with some confidence that it will be well-received, but is afraid to take the chance without first hearing that it’s likely to be a “sure thing.” Yet there is typically an innocuous motive behind it; some unsophisticated querents even use the obsolete teen-age term “crush” instead of the au courant “twin flame.”

Of course it’s seldom as cold-blooded as I’m making it out to be since they’re driven mostly by anxiety, insecurity and loneliness. What they fail to recognize is that the intuitive guesswork of card-reading is a “blunt instrument” when it comes to character analysis and psychological profiling; that’s the domain of the much-more-precise natal astrology but you need reliable birth data for it, which would blow your cover. After all, anonymity is paramount in these delicate matters.

There are readers who consider this sort of thing unethical, an invasion of privacy if the subject of the probe isn’t aware it’s happening, but I just think it’s presumptuous on the part of those who want to hide behind the tarot. Although I don’t usually entertain such queries in my own practice, believing them to be a waste of time, I would be tempted to slyly inform credulous sitters: “Joe or Mary? Oh, they don’t even know you exist!”

Even if that isn’t true, the cards are not likely to tell me one way or the other whom the parties like or dislike, and I’m not going to impose upon the oracle with idle-curiosity questions anyway; after all, “need-to-know” should be a legitimate barrier to such irresponsible trespassing, and I wouldn’t want my sitters thinking otherwise. Furthermore, I’m certainly not going to invent a “psychic” answer just by looking casually at a few symbols. I have better things to do than try to read minds, and so does the tarot.

There are acceptable uses for a more hard-headed approach to the cards, for example in business and entrepreneurial environments where any decision-making “weapon” is a valuable asset against competitors who are equally predacious. While I would love to engage in this corporate skirmishing from the perspective of divination, I have yet to be exposed to commercial settings of this magnitude. Traditional managers usually don’t warm up to anything that can’t be reduced to dollar signs, and the impressionistic abstraction of the kind of soothsaying that doesn’t spring from Wall Street is entirely foreign to them. I like to think I could do it with some panache, but I doubt I’ll ever get the opportunity.