AUTHOR’S NOTE: Yesterday I responded to a post in the r/tarot sub-reddit that deplored the exhausting challenge of having to deal endlessly with clients’ inane questions about socially-charged matters of little real import, primarily superficial affection (“Will he text me?”), animosity (“Why did she block me?”) and aloofness (“Why are they ignoring me?”). It’s all about petty external connections and there seems to be no interest in the psychological goals of self-awareness and self-development that were so much a part of the late-20th-Century Jungian approach to divination. I wonder whether they can’t be bothered or they just don’t want to know.

My reply:

“My personal belief is that the social-media hijacking of tarot has pretty much ruined it for the more serious readers among us.”

I was speaking of professional diviners like myself who would prefer to avoid being sucked into the digital maelstrom. What I think has happened is that opportunistic tarot readers can now reach much younger people who not so long ago would have had neither the money nor the access to enlist the services of a competent pro, and the latter would probably not have wanted to deal with such trivial matters anyway. One inevitable outcome is a “cheapening” of the experience as less-capable providers step into the fray, and their clients have lowered expectations because they don’t know any better. I see a downward spiral in the works, while those involved obviously believe they’ve found mystical Avalon, El Dorado and Nirvana rolled into one. I touched on this unfortunate situation in my recent essay, The Purposeful Diviner, but I felt the need to more fully explain my reservations.

Tarot as I learned it before the electronic age was emphatically an interactive, analog art. You had a “live one” sitting across the table whose immediate reaction to your observations you could assess and then accommodate as necessary by adjusting your narrative. You had no second chances to make the right call, only to try recovering from an obviously wrong one, so you had to be on top of your game or be really good at verbal tap-dancing.

But I went “on hiatus” for a few (well, quite a few) years and returned to find that tarot reading had become an impersonal exchange over social media. I scratched my head while pondering how in any way, shape or form this could provide a personalized account of a sitter’s subconscious awareness that in the past had been imparted to the cards at the physical location of the reading. The standard justification for this faceless interface is that “it’s all just universal psychic energy that anyone can tap into at any time from any place via the use of intuition.” In an earlier essay I called out this dubious proposition as an instance of “the Woo of We-Are-All-One”).

It sounds like an excuse to me, an attempt to validate the remote readings that have become a staple of so many modern diviners and clients as well as a source of income for the former. I come from an era when Ouija boards were screwing with the minds of naive dabblers in the occult arts, so I tend to distrust unfiltered input from ethereal sources, and even more so if I don’t receive it directly but rather second-hand through an intermediary. A tarot reader needn’t be a skilled psychic or medium, just a master of symbolism with a nimble mind and a talent for translating arcane perceptions into relevant guidance.

I don’t doubt the sincerity of many online purveyors of such lightweight fare, what I’m suspicious of is their credentials, which may be no more substantial than the bland “just add water” instant pudding recipes of the last century. If they can read, they can mash together an interpretation from a book or two (or even more egregiously, a tarot app or AI source) and nobody will be the wiser. Conversely, old school face-to-face readers had to be accomplished “think-on-your-feet” storytellers who could convert abstract insights into actionable advice. Most seekers wanted answers to serious questions and they preferred it to be presented with at least a little sensitivity and style. At its best this was entertaining and educational for both the client and the reader; it was a shared effort with no sympathy for the modern concept of “instant gratification” in receiving predigested knowledge without having to work for it. The reader also had no opportunity to groom the output as is afforded by text or email readings; if it escaped your lips, you owned it for better or worse.

For the record, I’ve done a few email readings and I appreciated having the opportunity to choose just the right words to make my points, a luxury that face-to-face readers don’t enjoy. What I didn’t like was the uncongenial “firewall” between reader and client and the lack of direct engagement, something on which internet readers seem to thrive due to its anonymity. I’m not a “cold reader” who judges people by their facial expression, their body language or their clothing, but I opt for looking them in the eye when I’m reading their cards to judge whether I’m connecting with their own view of their private reality, which provides a far better litmus test for the validity of my observations than any inspired guesswork can offer. While I pride myself on demonstrating unbiased discernment, a certain amount of cut-to-fit improvisation is almost always required; it’s just “the nature of the beast.” If the light dawns as an “Aha!” reaction after I go that extra mile, I know they received the message loud and clear.