AUTHOR’S NOTE: Several years ago I met a kindly gentleman from Mississippi, a business colleague who told me pointblank that, when engaged in conversation with a Southerner, I shouldn’t believe everything (or maybe anything) I hear; they are masters of amiable dissembling and there is almost certainly something quite different going on behind that charming smile. In his estimation, their observations will typically have three layers of meaning, each unspoken statement less benevolent than the one actually presented to the listener. Being told “You look fine today” could just be an indirect way of saying “You’ll do,” or it could in fact carry the veiled insinuation that “You used to look great but something has changed.” The first two come across as “damning with faint praise” and the last one is an outright insult, but you’ll never know which is intended.

I dredged up this old memory while reading the text for Hexagram 47 (Blockade) in Benebell Wen’s I Ching, The Oracle: A Practical Guide to the Book of Changes. The oracular message reads:

“Truth presents itself, but there is no truth. Trust presents itself but there is no trust.
There is a message but it is not a message. Words spoken, but there is no meaning.”

The take-away for the prudent tarot reader in this cautionary tale is that, when setting up to do a reading, pause for a moment and assess the “lay of the land,” then take a deep dive into each card to see whether it has more to say than what is apparent on the surface. The rubric “There are no bad cards” is always accompanied by its opposite: “There are also no entirely good cards.” Everything is shades of gray when it comes to divination as we look “through a glass darkly,” so nothing should be taken at face value. There are ways for the honest diviner to make this clear without having to fall back on deceptive half-truths.

I’ve found that it’s best to forestall any such misapprehension by never forming value judgments around the insights I glean from the interpretation. I just “read the cards” for content without trying to moralize with them or give them more than their due in terms of either virtue or vice. Neutrality is the best policy, even when I’m being urged by the querent to expound on the relative “good or bad” aspects of the pull. Any actionable pronouncements I choose to make are couched in the language of possibility (or, at the very most, probability) rather than that of certainty. The Universe is far too unpredictable to vouch for any intimations of “truth or trust” offered by the cards, although that assurance is usually the goal of those who sit for a tarot reading. I hate to be the one to break it to them, but . . .