AUTHOR’S NOTE: As I approach the end of my re-reading of Paul Fenton-Smith’s Tarot Master-Class, I came across his view of the four types of professional tarot reader: the Mystic who endeavors to channel guidance from a spiritual source; the Nurturer who “just wants to help” and the Pattern-Reader who adopts a more deductive style when examining the cards in a spread, presuming that there is a message hidden in their seemingly-random arrangement. He also describes the Bluntly Direct reader (my re-framing of his words) who is intent on speaking “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” as conveyed by the cards regardless of how discouraging it might be; I won’t evaluate that option because I don’t think it’s a helpful (or healthy) posture to take in most situations.

My edition of the book is fairly old now (it has since been republished with a different title), so it predates the modern concept of “empowerment” that currently defines the goal of the Nurturer. I’ve written about that elsewhere so I won’t go over it again. My focus here will be on the Pattern-Reader as distinct from the Mystic. Fenton-Smith notes that Pattern-Readers are “concerned with (the seeker’s) life as a puzzle and the picture they can see forming.” I could not have come up with a better description for my own mode of interpretation, although I always give a nod to the mystical side of things because I believe every reading has an intuitive (and perhaps even a “psychic”) side to it.

Because they are freighted with so much symbolic meaning, the cards lend themselves quite well to a narrative rendering of their encoded content, all we have to do is chain them together with a bit of creative flair that tailors them to the occasion. On top of this framework we can apply a more impressionistic “wash” of intuitive insight. In my own practice (which Fenton-Smith also elucidates) I often bring storytelling tropes like metaphor and analogy into the mix to create a bridge of shared cultural, social, historical and anecdotal knowledge and experience between myself and my client. This will frequently break down any barriers to mutual understanding.

I have no problem with the spiritual aspirations of the mystical crowd, although I do think they could be a little more critical – even skeptical – of their sources. Where I draw the line is at the unstructured use of free-association from the images to come up with notions that are totally at odds with the traditional wisdom that provides the experiential basis for tarot divination. I suspect that it derives from an aversion to studying tarot books (or perhaps any scholarly books).

This is not reading the cards, it is coercing them into visual vignettes that impose their partisan outlook on the querent’s circumstances, often under the guise of tapping into a pipeline of universal intelligence. (I cringe every time I see the opening statement “My guides told me . . . “) In the past I’ve called it “subjective navel-gazing” that is filtered through a private view of reality, and I’ve had no reason to change my opinion.

By way of contrast, treating the cards in a spread as an interlocking puzzle of logical associations allows us to create a more objective picture of their significance that can be offered for the querent’s enlightenment. It’s far easier from an interpretive standpoint to have something right in front of us to point to as we make our observations than to build imaginative “castles in the air” from our more visionary excursions.

As I see it, this is the essence of “pattern-reading:” to draw a compelling portrait of the situation from the evidence at hand without having to stray too far into the beguiling realm of mystical “woo.” While I love making clever references to less-obvious but still inspired relationships between the cards, I won’t substitute ad-hoc “reaching” for a thorough-going exploration of their more literal import. As Monty Python’s Graham Chapman (playing a stuffy Shakespearean actor) once quipped in a sketch about his theatrical style: “The words are there already, we just have to get them in the right order.”

There is certainly more to tarot reading than rote memorization, but I hear him loud-and-clear: there is a profoundly articulate script in place and anything outside of it amounts to ad-libbing. Few diviners come close to the genius of Robin Williams in that regard, nor would I expect them to measure up to his standard. It’s not about the reader anyway, it’s about the querent and the cards, and advice for our clients comes most trenchantly from deciphering the pattern on the table, not from the nimble, freestyle speculation of an overactive imagination that can resemble entertainment more than wise counsel.

While I pride myself on being an effective storyteller, I harbor no pretensions about also being a sage with all the answers on the tip of my tongue. Like poet John Masefield in his vivid Sea-Fever, when navigating these waters “all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,” affording me a glimpse over the horizon from the “crow’s nest.” But a short stack of tarot cards arranged in a revealing array will do in a pinch.