ANNOUNCEMENT: Post No. 2,200. Yay!

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’m a former member of the r/seculartarot sub-reddit, where the term “fortune-telling” is a dirty word among the gatekeepers, who are Jung-besotted and staunchly anti-woo (for that, at least, I applaud them). But they are too enamored of their own pet theories to condone an intelligent dialogue about it; all I got was “We don’t do that here.” I became tired of being slapped down for trying to broaden the debate since they clearly didn’t want to hear it. This is my justification for a less-myopic view.

The tl;dr version of this essay is that I have no qualms about succumbing (I refuse to say “stooping”) to the act of fortune-telling when the inquiry demands it, and I don’t try to dissuade clients from asking it that way (including the much-maligned “yes-or-no” question that can always be finessed). In my experience any request can be brought to the tarot by imposing the proper frame of reference on it. But not every situation has a psychological or spiritual dimension, so why should we try to force one on a matter that is perfectly mundane?

Personally, I don’t believe there’s a sound rationale for excluding event-based prognostication from the modern art of tarot reading and, as long as it meets the “reasonable man” test of commercial law, I can live with it and even practice it to a degree. For the layman, that concept applies to judicial proceedings involving an ambiguous clause in a written contract (or an informal agreement backed up solely by a handshake), where a jury – having been vetted as rational citizens – must decide whether the stereotypical “reasonable man” would find the clause (or the implied deal) to be enforceable. In practice, assuming that a contested arrangement exhibits an established precedent in common dealing (usually shown by the fact that at least one party has “performed” or behaved as if they’re honoring the obligation), the argument for legal enforcement is likely to be upheld.

In my opinion this proof of commitment and dependability can be brought to bear on the performance of divination; if we’ve seen the projected outcome in a number of previous readings confirmed without fail, the law of averages posits that we can logically expect our success to continue in the present instance unless Dame Fortune starts throwing curve-balls. I might not tell a client outright that they can take a positive prediction to the bank, but – being a “reasonable man” – I would be inclined to be more optimistic in my advice than otherwise.

If there is even a shred of evidence that the testimony of a tarot reading will be objectively demonstrated in whole or in part, I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. There is a frequently-cited opinion that “the cards are never wrong” but the cartomancers might well be inaccurate in their assessment due to subjective bias from which they can’t escape. In short, they are flummoxed by their preconceptions when trying to read the signs correctly and they often don’t recognize their error until the facts (or the querent’s push-back) disabuse them of their mistaken assumptions.

Then there is the wholly intuitive vision of the psychic reader that often has little to do with reasonableness due to being pulled out of “thin air” (aka the “spiritual aethyr” or that other less-flattering “a-word”) on a slender thread of unalloyed imagination. Although unabashed mystics consider the legitimacy of clairvoyant divination to be unassailable, one of the major failings in the field of predictive guesswork is the unreliability of “tarot timing,” which I’m not going to revisit in this post. Suffice it to say that I have yet to be convinced that anyone can do it consistently using only the cards.

A quick aside: I’ve been harping on the subject of online divination for years now, so it’s past due time for a summing-up. I’m aware that I’m slamming the livelihood of a host of pop-culture soothsayers here, and I do acknowledge using a less-empirical approach (specifically free-association) sparingly in my own work so maybe I’m only a semi-prick about it, but I just can’t get behind the facile posturing of the ubiquitous social-media purveyors of half-baked metaphysical wisdom. (I guess anonymity emboldens the would-be parvenu, and tarot apps further enable the illusion of competence.)

Admittedly, I have the luxury of not needing to make money at this (in fact, I pay for the privilege of posting about it), but at least in my lifetime the mystical arts emerged from their primordial roots as a pure stream of non-mercenary intent. Say what you will about the “New Age” (another of my favorite whipping-boys), but at least it had sincerity and conviction going for it before the entrepreneurial “money-men” corrupted it. What I see occurring now reminds me of the Pink Floyd song title A Momentary Lapse of Reason, except I don’t think it’s going away any time soon, for which the serious esoteric community will be the poorer.

Tarot reading often walks a fine line between prophetic counseling of the kind intended to empower querents in the pursuit of their stated goals and the oracular discipline dismissed as “fortune-telling,” with the stipulation that the latter must be differentiated from the arguably more defensible purpose of providing recommendations that are viewed as worthy of careful consideration and implementation. When I returned to tarot practice in 2011, I decided that I would set myself the task of performing “action-and-even-oriented” fortune-telling to prove to my own satisfaction whether there is any truth to be found in its pursuit. In other words, does it or doesn’t it “work” as advertised? The verdict is still pending on my experiment due to lack of reliable feedback, but I’ve gained a lot of valuable experience in working with the cards and recording my study and practice for this blog.

This unsettled environment begs the question whether those diviners who try to dignify their output by couching it in the language of the self-help advocate are merely “putting lipstick on the pig” of fortune-telling. As I see it, the mechanics are identical, so it comes down to whether or not the aspiring self-improvement guru is just posing or “putting on airs” by attempting to extract greater human-factors value from what is a long-standing divinatory tradition. (Tarot visionary and TdM master Enrique Enriquez once noted that “Tarot reading is an irrational act,” and I have no reason to gainsay him.)

I tend to have it both ways by applying analytical methods to the more literal aspects of divination (primarily through Lenormand reading or horary astrology) and anecdotal techniques to those (mainly tarot) facets that verge on the realm of mystical conjecture aimed at dredging the depths of one’s subliminal self-awareness (After all, behavioral psychology is an observational science as much as it is a clinical one). In the first case I will be pragmatic in my interpretation and, in the second, impressionistic; my professional opinion is that there is room for both approaches.