AUTHOR’S NOTE: Before I dive into my subject, I should mention that I no longer use tarot for the purpose of psychological self-awareness and self-development after doing so for the better part of four decades. I decided beginning in 2011 that natal astrology (which I’ve also done since 1972) is a far better tool for character analysis and personality profiling. Psychic tarot reading, particularly when used to plumb the thoughts and feelings of an absent third party with the cards, involves too much intuitive guesswork to be reliable, so now I focus on results that can be validated through direct observation.

By and large, the tarot community has never outgrown the Jungian approach to reading the cards that I first encountered near the start of the “New Age” in the early ’70s, and it seems to be alive-and-well in the current resurgence. Now it is layered under a mystical veneer that purports to be spiritual, and it is impossible to engage with the online tarot population without encountering this rather ingenuous mindset with its “spirit guides” and benevolent angels. I’m too much of a literalist to find ethereal inspiration and divine wisdom in a set of printed images, which is probably why I’ve taken so well to the Lenormand oracle and its practical applications, in addition to adopting the non-scenic Tarot de Marseille cards for personal prognostication.

This means that I’m more of a “fortune-teller” than an avid booster of psychological self-mentoring. When I returned to active public reading in 2011, I set myself the task of exploring, in a structured way, use of the cards for event-based divination while acknowledging that to assume they’re going to provide “carved-in-stone” conclusions every time is absurd. An individual’s future is far too prone to both internal and external variables for that to happen consistently, especially when too much time has passed since a forecast was made to continue relying on the insights received. It’s commonly observed in the online tarot groups I frequent that trying to predict the future is wrong-headed, an opinion with which I’m not in complete agreement. It is possible to glean hints of future circumstances from a reading without “putting too fine a point” on our assumptions.

For this reason I tell my clients that the insights delivered by a reading will show no more than tendencies, trends or probabilities regarding what may come to pass. In almost all situations, the outcome will only manifest as predicted if the client accepts a hands-on role in making it happen (or, for a less encouraging outlook, preventing its occurrence) through his or her intervention as envisioned by the cards. The least certain of these modes of realization are tendencies, in which the environment surrounding the matter is portrayed as being conducive to certain consequences. Next in dependability are trends that may already be in motion, requiring more resolute participation to either steer them straight or turn them around. Lastly, probabilities – while not quite “locked-in” – can instill the greatest confidence in their likelihood, although getting to this degree of certitude will normally require confirmation from the seeker that things are indeed on track to develop as prophesied.

You can probably tell that I treat the tarot more as advisory than as a dispenser of absolute truth, and I recommend that it be used in combination with more conventional decision-making inputs. Can the cards be wrong? Sure they can, when they pick up misleading or distorted subconscious intimations from the person shuffling the deck. By their alignment during the shuffle, they will render exactly the answer furnished to them by our sitters via their subliminal awareness of the situation that should ideally be superior in credibility to anything we as tarot readers can fathom from an analysis of the cards. But the phenomenon by which a reading will sometimes answer a question that wasn’t consciously posed is a measure of the deflection that can creep in due to insufficient concentration, and if the querent is too distracted or distraught when interacting with the cards it can be a clear case of “garbage in, garbage out.”

As I perform it, tarot reading can be deterministic in small ways, but in a larger sense the accounting of it is mostly impressionistic, and my storytelling tends to be polyphonic (a fancier way of saying “nuanced”) rather than open-voiced. What it is not is a game of “20 Questions” where I try on multiple answers to see which one sticks; this clueless approach is far too sloppy for my taste and can only damage my professional image in the eyes of my clients. I find the “pulse” or main theme of the narrative shown in the spread, identify its apparent source, and pull that thread for all its worth. There may be multiple tendencies, trends and probabilities to investigate along the way but one usually stands out above the others, and this is where the sitter’s validation is crucial to success. If I can avoid it, I will never do monologue, always dialogue.