AUTHOR’S NOTE: I was reading an essay about Medieval historians and came across the 12th-Century Italian theologian and monastic abbot Joachim of Flora (or Fiore) who was described not as a historian but rather as a “dabbler in the future,” mainly for his theory about a coming new age based on clear (at least to him and the popes who encouraged him) antecedents in Scripture. This epithet struck me as a perfect denotation for the modern reader of tarot cards.

Although many will object to the apparent slight, we really are dabblers in that our forecasts are never guaranteed to be 100% accurate, instead offering glimpses of latent tendencies, trends, potentials and possible opportunities, but always “through a glass darkly.” Perhaps we should fashion our approach after the admission of Herodotus, the reputed “father of history,” whose skeptical comments on the veracity of prior knowledge I will paraphrase for my purpose here, with my parenthetical substitutions:

“It is (our) duty to record what has been told (by the cards), but not always to believe it. This applies to (our entire work).”

As a rational diviner, I have no illusions about the absolute authority of anything I deduce from the cards. I’m satisfied if I can routinely better the 50/50 track record of the proverbial “coin-flip” since it will demonstrate that tarot isn’t completely random and thus will have done its job. We may not be convinced that our pronouncements are the whole truth, but we also have no reason to suspect that they are entirely false. I normally hedge my bets and make it clear that the messages I’m receiving are only “hints” of probability that can always be redirected through the querent’s active intervention.

It has been asserted as common knowledge that fortune-telling and divination are not synonymous, as if the latter is somehow more dignified than its tainted cousin. To use the excruciatingly clumsy term of C.S. Lewis, tarot readers who don’t want to be shamed with the allegation of fortune-telling have tried to desynonymise the two (even spellcheck chokes on that one). Biblical proscriptions aside (which I think most of us have outgrown), it’s as if there is something objectionable about wanting to know what is coming down the road simply because its presentation in a reading may not be perfectly factual.

To be honest, I don’t see much difference between them and in fact, as I observed in a previous post, any distinctions are merely a matter of degree and not pedigree. As a diviner I interest myself in what Lewis called “grounds and consequents” (as in, there is a discernible “reason” for something to happen and a predictable “outcome” arising from that supposition), whereas the fortune-teller trades in blind “cause-and-effect” of the more pedestrian variety. But we’re after the same quarry with our “dabbling:” an action-and-event-oriented perspective on the future that is more than guesswork.

I’m dismissing the opinion of those who believe that tarot is only good for psychological self-evaluation, and in particular those who claim that such inner scrutiny is what it was created for. If its origin went back no further than the 1970s and the New Age infatuation with Carl Gustav Jung, I might see some truth in that observation. But it doesn’t, and I don’t. Such misinformed enthusiasts need to brush up on their history before opening their mouths in a public setting. As for my own approach to divination, I’ll steal a line from Randy Bachman: “I think any news is good news, so I’ll take what I can get.” Then I’ll make something meaningful out of it beyond “You just ain’t seen nothing yet” on the premise that half-truths are better than none.