“Deal them down and deal them dirty
Life’s a wheezing hurdy-gurdy
Deal them up and deal them clean
Man is just a soft machine”
-from Dame Fortune by the Holy Modal Rounders

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This essay gave me another opportunity to trot out the card-playing trope from the Holy Modal Rounder’s song Dame Fortune, which alludes to the fact that, while we may have profound psycho-spiritual aspirations, we are still very much William S. Burroughs’ “soft machine” with all of its human appetites and vulnerabilities.

I sometimes receive push-back from fellow tarot readers in my quest for actionable results, most vocally from those self-righteous deniers of fortune-telling who have been convinced (whether by books or teachers) that application of the tarot to psychological self-awareness and self-improvement is its only legitimate use. Having been personally immersed in its rise to prominence on the coattails of psychological astrology during the metaphysical renaissance of the early 1970s, I can say with some confidence that this is an atavistic (i.e. “throwback”) attitude. Since that time, I’ve worked through this premise to my own satisfaction during more than five decades of tarot practice and have come out the other side with a different perspective.

This is not to say that I’m immune to philosophical abstractions in my interpretation of the cards. In a recent post I made the observation that they can help deliver “insights from the casebook of psycho-spiritual mind/body awareness” along with natal astrology. But to quote myself yet again, I firmly believe that the average person who sits for a reading isn’t interested in psychological self-discovery: “they already know who they are, they just want to know where they’re going.” They are more likely to ask whether they will get the job, whether Joe or Mary likes them, or whether their romantic partner is cheating on them. This makes the public performance of tarot reading something of a dead-end for the dedicated proponent of psychoanalytical divination beyond exploring what another individual “thinks or feels” about the querent (a euphemism for “mind-reading” that leans heavily on intuitive guesswork).

When I conduct a reading for a client, I don’t ask in advance for the specific question that is on his or her mind; at most I want to know the general area of life involved, from which I begin by surmising that a pragmatic purpose underlies the request. My initial review of the spread proceeds under that assumption and I only switch to a more psychological line-of-inquiry when I receive negative feedback from the sitter regarding the accuracy of my initial conclusions.

This change of focus requires that I downplay any mundane impressions offered by the prosaic images on the cards (their “canned narrative vignettes”) and instead investigate the embedded symbolism that will ideally summarize the attitudes and behaviors the querent would do well to adopt or avoid. (This is much more straightforward with the semi-scenic presentation of the Thoth tarot than it is with the Waite-Smith deck, where we must first free ourselves from the burden of accumulated folkloric trivia.)

If I don’t get the “thumbs-up” from the seeker after that discussion, I will resort to a more universal or spiritual angle that envisions larger forces at work in the matter, but it can become a head-scratching exercise in diminishing returns that goes nowhere, after which I’m back at “square one.” In short, I don’t base my entire analysis on the rarefied point-of-view espoused by the navel-gazing contingent, I wind up there when all else fails to elicit the coveted “Aha!” reaction from the sitter.

I’m not dismissing the psycho-spiritual approach out-of-hand (in fact, it’s all I did with the cards for almost 40 years) but, if my own trajectory can serve as a meaningful benchmark, it will eventually become superfluous to self-understanding and perhaps even counterproductive. Should a reading suggest that psychological intervention is warranted to optimize well-being, it definitely belongs in the hands of a qualified psychotherapist who acknowledges tarot’s promise and can extract the most mental-health mileage from it. Untrained intuitive diviners (that’s the rest of us, even if we took Psychology 101 in college and have minutely digested Jung’s work) will never be more than well-meaning laymen. No matter how highly we esteem our inspired conception of the truth, there is always the risk of doing more harm than good at the mental/emotional level (including to ourselves).