AUTHOR’S NOTE: The subject of “randomizing” a tarot deck before pulling the specific cards for a reading is one that suffers from much misapprehension. The common belief is that the pre-deal shuffle by the client or the diviner accomplishes the intended dispersion, but it is more accurate to say that this step instead subconsciously arranges the cards in the correct order to provide a coherent answer from the top of the deck. In short, it creates an appropriate degree of organization, not the random scatter that should be introduced well before the deck is taken up by the shuffler.

In his book 54 Devils, a study of playing-card cartomancy, Cory Hutcheson delivers as lucid a description of this process as I have ever seen. In his approach, the deck is prepared for the sitter by thoroughly “clearing and neutralizing” any pre-existing pattern in the order of the cards that may have been left over from a previous reading. He doesn’t go into much detail about how he does this other than to say that it is “ritual” in nature, but it is something that should occur before every encounter.

Various methods have been proposed by others for meeting this objective, one of which is to riffle-shuffle the deck seven times (a technique borrowed from card-playing) as a way to guarantee an arbitrary distribution. (Other readers put the cards back into their “out-of-the-box” order between readings, but I think this invites an undesirable “clumping” of adjacent cards that can’t be effectively eliminated by routine manipulation; in this situation extra care in randomizing is required.) The goal is to produce a “clean slate” that is subsequently “written on” by the acts of shuffling and cutting while silently concentrating on the question being put to the cards.

My personal preference for randomizing a deck for both sequence and orientation (e.g. upright or reversed cards) is to use the so-called “casino shuffle” by which the cards are placed on the table and then mixed around with both hands to rearrange them within the pile. After reassembling the cards I perform a few additional hand-over-hand shuffles to “settle” the deck. But this is not something that can be done conveniently in “on-the-clock” public sessions with a series of clients because it requires a large, flat surface and takes too much time away from actually reading the cards.

To deal with this, I always bring several previously-prepared decks to such events, and if I exhaust the supply I will do a standard shuffle of one of them for the purpose of breaking up any residual configuration (I’m no good at riffling and tend to damage my decks) in the brief interval between sitters. The idea is to give them as thorough a “random scatter” as possible within the time available