“Gideon is knocking in your hotel while you slumber”
– from Prophets of Doom by Clutch

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a more thorough examination of a subject I’ve touched on several times in past essays, one that keeps coming up in conversations within the online tarot community due to an entrenched belief in reliable psychic disclosure that I see more as a type of rarefied physics we still don’t have the capability of measuring and quantifying. Bob Dylan nailed it in the lyrics to Ballad of a Thin Man: “. . . something is happening here but you don’t know what it is.”

When googling the suffix -mancy (meaning “divination”) one will come up with well over three dozen examples of the ancient art of prognostication just from a single website (and I know there are more). Some – like haruspicy (shamanic fortune-telling with the entrails of sacrificed animals) – are too gross for modern sensibilities, except perhaps in the symbolic offerings of modern paganism and of course in the solemn but macabre “ritual cannibalism” of the Catholic church, while at the other end of the spectrum psychomancy (popularly known as mediumship) involves less lurid consultation with the spirits of the dead. Here I’m focusing on those with which I have personal experience, primarily cartomancy in the form of tarot reading.

As I’ve said too often before, one of my favorite oxymorons is “devoutly nonreligious,” which conveys my personal stance in all matters of the supernatural. But I also count myself a “Spinozan sympathizer” since I have no reason to doubt that a spiritual presence in the form of an “immanent universal consciousness” permeates all manifest reality, most likely as a primordial or inchoate emanation that binds everything together rather than in a highly-evolved form, and our challenge when approaching it is to translate the hints we receive from the contact into comprehensible information. (By way of example, we can rest assured that a rock vibrates at an extremely low cognitive frequency, so the performance of lithomancy – divination with stones – relies on more mystical assumptions.)

My opinion has always been that the experience of spiritual discourse should be direct and unencumbered, so I’ve never felt the need to suppose the existence of “spirit guides” or other disembodied mentors who will spoon-feed me with or at least point me in the direction of hidden wisdom. It goes without saying that we probably get it right only a fraction of the time since our brains aren’t wired for telepathic communication despite periodic experiments that have attempted to prove otherwise. Our imaginations, however, are certainly capacious enough to convince ourselves that they are, and being led astray by our own convictions when navigating these murky waters is not uncommon.

When I returned to active tarot practice in 2011, I re-positioned myself as an action-and-event-oriented diviner after having pursued psychological self-analysis with the cards since 1972; this seemed prudent since, following a lengthy hiatus from public divination during which I studied and practiced privately, I finally realized that tarot is not fabulously effective for revealing individual character traits and hallmarks of personality with the same precision that natal astrology readily demonstrates. What we assume to be penetrating intuitive insight in this regard may be no more than compassionate or sympathetic resonance with the subject of the inquiry; we see in a reading what we expect to be true based on our personal understanding of human nature, so it’s more of a conditioned response than an exceptional epiphany.

But apart from my protracted stretch of navel-gazing, I always felt a more numinous power lurking behind my overt use of the tarot for utilitarian purposes that let me know subliminally whether or not I was on the right track. I suspect this impression is the root of my long-standing view that any observations I make during a reading come through me and don’t originate within me. It’s a matter of tapping into a more profound source of knowledge, but it isn’t something I ever set out to do consciously and I don’t pretend to have a lock on absolute truth.

The avenue or channel via which this dialogue occurs is sometimes identified as springing from the “Astral Plane,” but this strikes me as only a convenient label to describe the next level of subconscious awareness that operates immediately above or behind the facade of material existence that the Buddhists relate to maya or illusion. This is the subtle region that the Medieval cosmologists referred to as “sublunar” or “beneath the Moon” and the Qabalists defined as the “Formative World” that holds the archetypal blueprint for all physical manifestation. It is the realm of “scrying in the spirit vision,” a psychic excursion that is sometimes facilitated with the Major Arcana in the form of path-working, a structured type of astral projection.

I’ve occasionally walked these paths but – even though I was once a fantasy-loving graphic artist who drew surrealistic visions from the Unseen – at an intellectual level I have trouble with the spontaneous creative visualization this exercise demands so I’m not particularly adept at it. I prefer to make such connections by opening the “mind’s eye” along more contemplative and inspirational lines of thought, and my methods are decidedly more philosophical than euphoric or ecstatic in the pursuit of these uncommon revelations. Let’s just say I believe in Spirit but not in its inevitable jurisdiction over the processes of the Mind. At best they are partners in the ongoing expansion of consciousness.