“Your goal as a reader is to clarify the client’s situation, so reducing the possible meanings for each card on the table is a part of this process.”
– Paul Fenton-Smith in Tarot Master-Class

AUTHOR’S NOTE: My belief has always been that the tarot cards are infinitely flexible and adaptable to any situation, given that each one embodies several levels of meaning that run from purely mundane observation to psychological discernment and universal/spiritual abstraction. This is a condition I’ve likened to the layers of an onion that can be peeled back until insights appropriate to the question or topic are revealed.

Paul Fenton-Smith describes this act of reduction as instinctive, a characterization I like because it is more visceral than intuition and doesn’t partake of the same mystical “gloss.” This is an approach that I’ve used for years with the Lenormand cards when choosing which of the small number of key concepts for each one best defines their interaction when paired in a reading. Tarot offers a much broader palette that renders the decision more complex and thus more crucial to success.

When confronted with a client who can’t make sense of anything we say, in our zeal to ensure that they receive the message in the cards we can be tempted to throw every scrap of our knowledge and experience “at the wall to see what sticks.” Instead of peeling the onion, we are padding it with more layers that can be counterproductive to understanding. We know what our point is, but in pressing it too strenuously all we are likely to do is confuse our sitter with too much information.

Although Fenton-Smith places the onus for clarification squarely on the reader in all cases, rather than casting around blindly for a “hook” I’ve found that it is much more efficient to bring the querent into the deliberation. I always start at the practical level by discussing the cards pulled in terms of day-to-day circumstances and potential events. If nothing of the kind suggests itself to the client’s awareness of his or her present reality, I will switch to a more psychological perspective and bring in aspects of mental/emotional adaptation to the matter in question. Only after both fail to elicit an “Aha!” reaction from the sitter will I turn to a more impersonal (i.e. universal or spiritual) analysis of the situation, although I must admit that this rarely improves comprehension of the answer in any useful way.

Once again I will offer my favorite literary quote to explain my view of reductionism in tarot reading. In his 1961 novel The Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone put words into the mouth of Michaelangelo to the effect that: “If I want to carve a statue of a horse, I just remove (from the block of marble) everything that isn’t “horse.” Although I haven’t read it in over five decades, this epiphany has stayed with me and I see it as directly applicable to the diviner’s goal of enlightenment.

In the same vein, when reading the cards we can economize by preemptively whittling away anything that doesn’t add immediate value to the narrative. When stuck on an interpretation, we may feel the urge to just keep talking to avoid seeming clueless (like Nature, face-to-face divination “abhors a vacuum”), but a better solution is to take a brief moment to order our thoughts rather than recklessly plunging onward with what may wind up being inane drivel if we aren’t careful.

I’ve found that, if I let them know what’s going on in my head, most client’s are amenable to the idea of waiting a moment for the “light-bulb” to come on. This can require a little bridging language to keep the silence at bay, but I try to minimize my equivocation because my clients aren’t paying for padding. Rather than handing them a disfigured “onion,” I would prefer to deliver the cartomantic equivalent of one of those delicately carved radishes that sometimes garnish the meal in an Asian restaurant.