AUTHOR’S NOTE: Despite the title, I promise I won’t invoke the cinematic spirit of Kurt Russell in this essay; Carl Gustav Young will have to do. I’ve just begun reading Benebell Wen’s Holistic Tarot, and the introductory chapter brought me back to the topic of “first principles” in my practice of divination. Some of this will be a reprise of past essays, but I’ll take it further based on Wen’s input.

Around 1970 I became an avid student of natal astrology, and shortly thereafter I picked up the tarot. This was near the very beginning of the New Age infatuation with metaphysical concepts and the associated pursuit of mystical intentions. I personally observed both of these “cunning arts” succumb to what I later came to view as Jungian hijacking of the pseudo-scientific kind. I eventually worked my way out the far side of both, in the first case gravitating toward classical astrology and its four “humours” and temperaments that suffice to explain the human persona as basic character types that we’ve all observed in our associates: choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic. This has been good enough for most non-therapeutic sociological purposes (although I’ll grant that the tarot may be better-suited for navigating the “shadow”).

As for tarot-reading, upon learning that Etteilla (Jean-Baptiste Alliette) became the “farther of modern divination” in the late 18th Century, I recognized that New-Age Jungian pretensions had merely been grafted onto the French model, which in the interim had morphed into the Golden Dawn system. At the time this seemed like a dubious force-fit with the aim of catching up to psychological astrology. I ultimately concluded that the natal horoscope is a far more capable tool for promoting comprehensive self-awareness and self-development, while the less-rigorous tarot is a “poor relation” that has been thrust into the spotlight by the social-media purveyors of popular metaphysics and their penchant for easy-to-formulate mental/emotional snapshots.

After having spent the better part of four decades in self-analytical “navel-gazing” with both astrology and tarot, I finally settled on calling myself an action-and-event-oriented prognosticator (or, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, a “fortune-teller”) since there didn’t seem to be a viable alternative to the psychological mode of interpretation. But I’ve just been schooled by Holistic Tarot, in which Wen floats the idea of “tarot analytics” (which, from the reactions I saw when the book was first published in 2015, struck a false note with many in the mystical/psychic/intuitive tarot community).

To be honest, this assumption is nothing new to me since it corroborates the opinion I’ve had of my own cartomantic style since I first set foot on my current path in 2011. My approach to tarot divination is now 70% analytical and 30% mystical; I “just read the cards” – that is, the symbolism in the artwork – and largely refrain from embellishing my impressions with intuitive guesswork. The following excerpt from the first chapter of the book sums it up neatly:

“The cards do not tell us what to do. Rather, they help us think about our problems from a different perspective and, like a diagnostic tool for decision-making, help chart a roadmap for a solution.”

In thinking about this, I realized that lying squarely between the cheerleading “life-coaches” and the dogmatic “fortune-tellers” one finds the “diagnostic analysts,” a population of philosopher-clinicians among whom I enthusiastically count myself. My belief has always been that tarot doesn’t produce iron-clad predictions but only hints at tendencies, trends and possibilities that may attend future circumstances. It’s more like a weather-vane than a satellite radar image, and it’s certainly not a flawless crystal ball but an occluded “dark glass” through which we must peer in the biblical sense.

Wen notes that tarot assists in providing “insight into the most probable outcomes for your contemplated actions.” From that point-of-view, a tarot reading will generally be more anticipatory than predictive, offering a heads-up that can aid us in avoiding unforeseen difficulties and capitalizing on unexpected windfalls, neither of which will have been apparent prior to the reading. This is the essence of empowerment: giving the querent unique information to support an informed decision if and when the opportunity arises to execute it.

I’ve long taken issue with the term “intuition” because it is overused and poorly understood by those tarot readers who fancy it and see something more magical than empirical in its operation. I have instead substituted the related attributes of “inspiration, imagination and ingenuity” as being more directly aligned with the storyteller’s mission. But Wen has helped me clarify the relationship between the two paradigms by observing:

“When we study the imagery and symbols on the cards in a tarot spread, we activate our imagination. That imagination then activates our intuition, which is often the only instrument we have that channels a clear path for us to the truth.”

Thus, imagination (aided by inspiration and ingenuity) becomes a springboard for more impressionistic and suggestive (aka “intuitive”) tarot-based insights that serve to raise subliminal awareness of our state of being to the conscious level so we can acknowledge it and act on it if we choose. Not that I resort to such rarefied extrapolation every time (or even most of the time), but I like the fact that intuition is being subordinated to the subjective imagination. I might take issue with the “only instrument we have” premise since I’m a fan of James Ricklef’s advice for dealing with an ambiguous card: “Let it simmer in your consciousness, it will eventually make sense; they always do.” (Ricklef doesn’t mention where the epiphany comes from, but we can safely assume it is of subconscious or unconscious origin, and that – because it has a cognitive precursor – it is an induced and not a purely spontaneous flash of recognition.)

Rather than leaping straightaway to an unsubstantiated intuitive solution, I tend to trust my analytical instincts to come up with a convincing answer after further contemplation. (Think of it as taking different perceptions and “trying them on for size.”) Obviously, in a face-to-face session with an expectant (i.e. hopeful, not necessarily pregnant) querent sitting across the table, there is little time for this form of self-indulgent pondering, so I often default to prosaic storytelling tropes (e.g. metaphors and analogies) that can incite an immediate reaction rather than attempting feats of spiritual enlightenment with nothing more to go on than a cryptic picture. (I would venture to say that the latter is not what they came for anyway; they already know who they are and are mainly interested in what they might become.)

It can be too much like grasping at straws for my literal-minded sensibilities. I have a vivid imagination so I’m not necessarily bad at it, just skeptical of the necessity. When working with a client, my usual rebuttal to suggestions that we follow our wildest (umm, “most inspired?”) hunches is “Whose reading is it anyway?” If they shuffled the deck and subconsciously arranged the cards in the proper order for the reading, they own the outcome and I won’t presume to step on their toes by putting my own baseless creative spin on their circumstances. The cards have given the last word on the matter, and my sole contribution is to translate the message without superfluous ad-libbing. In other words, I try to get my personal bias out of the way and let the cards “speak their piece.”

Thoth writer Michael Snuffin has said that the symbolism in the imagery provides everything we require for the interpretation, so we don’t need to resort to intuition. The cards themselves tell the tale, so all the reader has to do is follow the narrative. The “New Tarot” police would probably have me banished or worse for this sacrilege, but I’ve always placed solid experience and meticulously-acquired wisdom ahead of random insights pulled out of the astral haze. It’s a simple matter of valuing thorough and thoughtful preparation over spur-of-the-moment conjectural improvisation (which should always be applied sparingly). I like thinking on my feet so I don’t mind a bit of unscripted verbal tap-dancing, but I would prefer not to be standing on thin ice while doing it.