AUTHOR’S NOTE. In his 1967 study The Medium Is The Message: An Inventory of Effects, Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan proposed that the medium by which knowledge is transmitted can have an impact in shaping our understanding of the world that goes far beyond the information it conveys.

A good case in point is the modern news media, which has abandoned simple reporting of events to become a propaganda machine for manipulating public opinion (even weather forecasting has descended into melodrama). Another is social media; much of the content is puerile but people can’t seem to get enough of it (and opportunists of various stripes have taken note of this). Beyond the “fringe” activity of fortune-telling, divination in the mid-60s had yet to make much of an impression on popular culture outside of major cities or McLuhan would have been all over it since, in the aggregate, its diverse practices constitute a “message-bearing medium” that can be easily abused.

In the case of tarot reading, the cards have been charged (or burdened, take your pick) with elaborate metaphysical symbolism since Jean-Baptiste Alliette (aka “Etteilla”) first used them for fortune-telling in the mid-18^th Century. But many present-day diviners have turned their collective back on all esoteric implications and instead apply visual free-association directly to the images as a catalyst for intuitive reckoning about what they mean. This is an instance of surface impressions supplanting philosophical depth, at least until the results are mentally processed and transformed into specific insights about the subject of the reading. (In my own practice I use such correspondences in moderation when they can add value, but they are abstract principles that I seldom highlight for my clients.)

In my estimation, it is impossible to fully comprehend that “2+2” equals “4” unless one first has a firm grasp of what “2” implies; lacking a conceptual framework, any such calculation presents a moving target that may not yield a reliable answer. The same can be said of tarot cards, but their interpretation depends not so much on memorized keywords as on core concepts that can be internalized and readily retrieved on demand. However, many if not most purely intuitive tarot readers are too mystical to care about the semantics; they are operating in the moment and flying by the seat of their pants. I call it the “if-it-feels-true-it-must-be-true” syndrome, although I won’t go as far as claiming that it’s “all woo” (even when it’s not entirely “twoo” as Madeleine Kahn gushed in Blazing Saddles).

When used for divination the cards are mainly “pointers” like road-signs or the look-ups in a computer program that establish a protocol for future developments. The narrative they offer is not so much literal as it is suggestive, and the roadmap defined by the glyphs (which semanticist Alfred Korzibski wisely observed “is not the territory”) must be deciphered before it will lead us anywhere. As I’ve said before, all prognostication with the tarot involves an element of subliminal sensitivity, and it is this subtle awareness that serves to “connect the dots” in any more factual analysis. (Note that the pragmatic Lenormand system of prediction is – or should be – considered an exception.)

But I don’t profess to be a spiritual adept, a statistical wizard or a dedicated futurist who can function solely on mental chemistry without auxiliary “props” to jump-start the process. The cards are my chosen tool, and to that end they function just fine as long as I don’t demand too much from them beyond summoning my prior learning and experience to the occasion, in which case they act primarily as “memory-joggers.” Cartomancy is merely the vehicle for my speculative pursuits, and as a friend of mine once said when refusing to purchase a Mercedes for his wife, “I buy cars, not nameplates” (meaning that he resolutely avoids flaunting status symbols for their own sake). A similar objection can be raised about placing blind faith in tarot’s infallibility, but then I’ve always been more matter-of-fact than idealistic in these matters, which explains my love of Lenormand reading.

In McLuhan’s language, “the medium” should never be mistaken for “the message” since there is almost always more to the latter than meets the eye, and casting everything in “the eye of the beholder” has never offered enough interpretive grist for my oracular mill. I don’t lack the imagination, just the requisite suspension of disbelief in such unsubstantiated visions. As a diviner I’ve always liked the professional skepticism of the for-hire “Fair Witnesses” (kind of an exalted notary public) in Robert Heinlein’s science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land; when asked what color a nearby house is, these incorruptible observers would invariably reply “It’s white on this side.” If they couldn’t see it, they wouldn’t say it and, to a large extent when reading the cards, neither will I (even when I don’t take them at face value).