AUTHOR’S NOTE: There is a well-established marketing ploy that assumes “Sex sells, and everyone’s buying!” In the tarot-reader’s world, the sales model is more like “Love sells, and sex is along for the ride!”

Most diviners have extensive experience with the “love” question, usually phrased as “When will I find it?” Some querents are actively “on the prowl” while others are less bold and sit back with their fingers crossed in taut “spider-and-fly” suspense, but all of them are looking for confirmation from the cards. This quest is often cloaked in the guise of trying to deduce what someone else is thinking or feeling, either to anticipate a possible romantic interlude or to initiate one. Personally, I think this is an exercise in futility.

Although I consider myself a competent prognosticator (which I damn well should be after over 50 years of practice or I would just sell my decks and take up golf), I draw the line at mind-reading. In skilled hands, tarot cards can be extremely subtle in their discernment, but in my estimation they simply aren’t sensitive enough to pick up brain-waves from afar, which is an entirely mental phenomenon that the cards can help guide but won’t produce on their own. This reliance on telepathic imprinting falls into the same dubious territory as supposing that tarot decks can absorb negative energy like a sponge. Ain’t gonna happen, and any belief that it can is pure fantasy; the last time I looked I didn’t see any tiny psychometric collectors embedded in the cardboard that support either assumption. I have similar suspicions about so-called “charging ” of the cards with our intentions, but I think that’s more of a self-willed expression of purpose than a purely passive and receptive one, and thus marginally more credible. In other words, we’re affirming our resolve, and that’s more than half the battle in any mission.

I have no problem fielding “What should I do?” queries from those who want to bolster their presence in the field of social gamesmanship that has replaced formal courting in many modern cultures. It may have always been that way but now it’s easier than ever to “get in the game” without squandering one’s emotional capital (by which I mean the risks can be kept at bay until confidence has been gained in the likely outcome). It’s not as interactive as it once was, or perhaps I should say the interaction is not as immediately personal when social-media platforms intervene in the dance of attraction. Where the complaint was once “Why didn’t he call?” now its “Why didn’t he text me? Why did he block me? Why is he ghosting me?” The whining is the same but the dynamic has changed dramatically.

Some readers I’ve talked to believe there is no difference between determining what someone is thinking or feeling and predicting what they’re likely to do. I beg to differ. Thoughts and feelings are mercurial and can change in the brief instant between pulling one card and the next. Intentions that result in actions usually entail premeditation, even if only subliminal, and, as French tarot writer Joseph Maxwell observed, “Coming events cast a shadow before them; each individual has a presentiment about his own destiny, which may remain latent: the normal processes of consciousness do not include such presentiments.” Trying to pick someones brain with the tarot may penetrate no deeper than the “normal processes of consciousness,” and the purported revelations can be formed entirely around the preconceptions of the diviner, having little or nothing to do with the querent’s self-awareness. Subjective bias is always lurking within the mystical “snipe-hunt” (dare I say “fool’s errand?”) where the power of suggestion (true believers dub it “intuition but I prefer “inspiration”) trumps that of clear-eyed insight.

It’s completely reasonable and respectable to ask the cards how the sitter should behave to easily attract the object of his or her desire, and how the person of interest is likely to respond. This is strictly an input/output scenario in which a contemplated action begets a reaction that, at least at face value, may not be congenial and require maneuvering to bring the two together in sympathetic accord. It can be as benign as “How should I act when I meet so-and-so at such-and-such an event next Tuesday?” or as intense as “What will happen when I bare my soul to Joe or Mary the next time we’re alone together?”

Either way, it’s a self-initiated proposition and not one that leans on the psychic probing of someone’s emotional state of mind with the cards as a crutch. Some readers feel that such subconscious sleuthing without prior consent is invasion of privacy; I don’t have the same reservations but I do think its pointless to “hide behind the tarot” in this way when there is little evidence that we’re seeing the truth of the matter until the quarry makes a move, after which we’re in the transparent (and therefore predictable) realm of cause-and-effect where we should have been in the first place. As the old saying goes, without this kind of validation “my guess is a good as yours” in these situations.