AUTHOR’S NOTE: The Shadow was a supernatural detective show that ran on AM radio in the United States from 1937 to 1954. In its early years it featured the distinctive voice of Orson Welles intoning at the beginning of each episode: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” trailing off into sinister laughter. The character of crime-fighter Lamont Cranston was an early prototype of the superhero “alter-ego” identity subsequently enshrined on television by Superman and Batman, and the series also seems to have been a precursor to The Twilight Zone in that it mined the same vein of subliminal anxiety about the Unknown. I was too young at the time to have had direct exposure to the broadcasts, but the spooky introduction made a lasting impression on me when I heard it in later years due to its uncanny parallel to the psychological shadow posited by Carl Gustav Jung.

There is a popular set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge that embraces four types of comprehension:

1. “You know that you know.” This is a function of conscious awareness that might be called “how education works,” whether academic or experiential.
2. “You know that you don’t know.” This is also a conscious recognition of knowledge that lies outside your experience although you are aware that it exists.
3. “You don’t know that you know.” This mode of subconscious intimation is the type of subtle awareness that is the particular domain of tarot reading and other forms of divination.
4. “You don’t know that you don’t know.” This condition expresses complete ignorance of something that you may have no reason to know or to which you’ve had no exposure and thus never had an occasion to learn about. (One example would be the existence of obscure linguistic dialects at the far side of the world, something Monty Python might have lampooned on their fictitious TV show that opened with the statement “Tonight on Who Cares? . . .”)

Although I haven’t studied it in depth, I understand that Jung’s shadow embodies unassimilated or dissociated aspects of the personality that have not been successfully integrated into one’s waking consciousness, thus forming the “flip-side” of the persona that can emerge at inopportune times to blindside us (however, it’s more likely to appear only in dreams). Due to its connection with the Collective Unconscious, it is also one possible source of the kind of insight that French author Joseph Maxwell dubbed “presentiment about (one’s) own destiny” that can’t be accessed through “the normal processes of consciousness.” He further identified the proper avenue of approach to be that of vaticination. However, this action also comes with the caveat that, being a spiritual or astral foray into the depths of one’s psychological “dark side,” it can unearth unsettling revelations.

Several years ago on the Aeclectic Tarot form I was discussing the role of the querent’s subconscious “presentiment” in tarot reading with a forum-mate, whom I could only get to acknowledge that “it’s one theory.” Granting that everything about divination is theoretical, I couldn’t argue that point, but the only other credible basis for the phenomenon seems to be spiritual illumination that some consider to be “Divine” and others to be completely inscrutable (i.e. “I don’t know what it is but I’ll know it when I see it”). Having some concerns about the mental risks involved in astral exploration, I have no desire to throw myself wide-open to the latter and will stick with letting the querent’s subconscious act as the “psychic filter” between the diviner and the Universe.

If they are receiving ominous intelligence from their contacts, it’s their obligation as the “agent of discovery” to process and validate it prior to the reading; the cards of the pull will then capture the results of their internal deliberation. This is the main reason I choose not to perform the shuffle for remote clients: I don’t want to arrogate to myself the responsibility for taking the pulse of their circumstances. It may – as some say – be entirely a case of “universal energy” that anyone can tap into on behalf of another person, but I see no reason why I should act as intermediary and thus potentially inject my own subjective bias into the proceeding (for example, I might unintentionally “filter out” something that needs to be said about the matter). I would much rather hand the cards to my sitter and say “It’s your reading, not mine, so have at it. I’ll translate and interpret.”