“Crystal ball on the table
Showing the future, the past
Same cat with them evil eyes
And I knew it was a spell she cast

She’s just a devil woman
With evil on her mind
Beware the devil woman
She’s gonna get you from behind”
– from Devil Woman by Cliff Richard

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I confess to a bit of “trolling” with my title, but I was just listening to Devil Woman by Cliff Richard, which comes across as a compelling statement about the poor opinion that the material realists in the general public have of divination, which they prefer to dismiss (if not gleefully ridicule) as baseless “fortune-telling.”

Ever since the early 20^th Century courtroom drama surrounding astrologer Alan Leo’s legal woes over the act of professional prognostication, there has been an ongoing effort to promote divination as being mainly about character analysis and self awareness/self-improvement. (For the record, Leo failed to persuade the jury of his motives in that regard, and he was convicted of fraudulent enterprise.) This initiative accelerated considerably with the advent of the mystical “New Age” beginning in the mid-1960s, during which significant intellectual and spiritual horsepower was brought to bear on distancing modern practice from the taint of charlatanism as conducted by those pseudo-psychic posers who purport to “banish curses” and the like. This has led to a cautious Jungian approach to divination that is well-served by natal astrology as a tool for personality profiling but has not been convincingly furthered by more conjectural applications like cartomancy. At its most tenuous there can simply be too much of the “mentalist” about tarot reading.

Personally, I find no shame in accepting the title of “fortune-teller” to the extent that my focus is largely on action-and-event-oriented forecasting and the scrutiny of projected events and circumstances from a purely factual standpoint. I try to steer clear of the “squishier” psychological and mystical angles in my work because, as the saying goes, I had already “been there and done that” over the 40 years preceding my transition in 2011 toward a more literal slant on predictive analysis with the tarot and Lenormand cards. As the old platitude has it, “the proof is in the pudding,” and I’ve always preferred the more robust tapioca with its chewy bits to bland vanilla custard.

Strictly speaking, my liaison and expert witness for this metaphysical pursuit does not reside in either my own subconscious awareness or that of my client but rather inhabits the larger arena of the Collective Unconscious for which the personal subconscious is only the local messenger. In the extremely narrow sense to which I will admit having one, my semi-religious stance as a “Spinozan sympathizer” is at the heart of this perception. The interpretation of this rarefied source material is obviously going to be more abstract than that for the usual run of mundane concerns brought to me by querents, so my challenge is to translate it into language that conveys practical wisdom and advice within the identified context.

There is a tendency in online tarot circles to turn every reading into generic “coaching” about the experiential aspects of a distant sitter’s life (evidence of the collective “empowerment” mindset), with more psychological probing (the “mind-reading” mentioned above) usually reserved for remote inquiry into what another person “thinks or feels” about the querent. In my book, this is pop-tarot “entertainment” at its most insipid, performed by a different brand of social-media “poser,” and its fortune-telling content doesn’t move me in the least. Although it isn’t “evil” per se, this psycho-spiritual charade can be entirely superficial and of limited personal value to the client. I’m after bigger game of the philosophical kind, and my methods are more esoteric – and decidedly more profound – than populist. I’ll leave it up to you which group seems to be more credible: the psychic “devil women” or the pragmatic empiricists with whom I typically cast my lot.