AUTHOR’S NOTE: One of the directives of the Golden Dawn’s “Opening of the Key” (OotK) method and its five-step progression is to abandon the reading if the cards pulled fail to accurately identify the seeker’s unspoken reason for pursuing the divination. This is the “tell the Querent why he has come” stipulation that must receive the client’s concurrence if the session is to continue.

In my own practice I’ve always ignored this caveat as being little more than mystical grandstanding. It’s conceivable that seekers don’t even know exactly what brought them to the reader’s table beyond a certain subconscious malaise that requires deeper probing than the limited insight furnished by the OotK’s top-level analysis. Although it does eventually offer more detailed elaboration of the testimony in the cards, we will never get there if we can’t satisfy the initial “gatekeeping” provision. This has always seemed too much like elitist posturing for its own good. A seasoned diviner should be able to make sense of any combination of cards without resorting to this level of validation and still produce a legitimate forecast that the sitter is able to endorse.

Seekers don’t arrive expecting to be turned away on a technicality; what may start as speculation on the reader’s part can always be dialed in with enough diligent scrutiny and sensitivity to the nuances, of which there are usually plenty. Who am I to say that I can instantly answer the question due to my life-long involvement with the cards when in fact they could be off on an entirely different tangent? I may have to run down all the random byways and blind alleys served up by the spread in search of a lead that doesn’t jump right out at me or my client. Elemental correspondences can help here because they have high-level “area-of-life” connotations that can enable a better understanding of the message.

These are “talking points” that can apply to many circumstances, and they will often trigger a chain of associations that jell into a meaningful narrative. With Wands or other Fire cards we can talk about anything from ambitious hopes to promising trends that may emerge under those conditions; with Cups or Water we can undertake the exploration of emotional matters of all kinds; with Swords or Air we can decipher the impact of ideas and their practical ramifications; and with Pentacles or Earth we can mine the ore of purely mundane affairs. The idea is to present the elemental quotient with broad strokes and then zero in on the specifics guided by the responses received from the sitter, making the reading a “cut-to-fit” proposition driven by the dialogue.

This sympathetic interaction spells the difference between effective counseling and oracular presumption. The kind of hubris apparent in the “tell the Querent why he has come” mandate has no place in a “helping” discipline that aims to assist clients in figuring out how they can recognize and embrace opportunities for improvement. I may fancy myself a “fortune-teller” due to my focus on the future, but my obligation doesn’t end with a simple prediction; the goal is always to provide the seeker with actionable pointers that can steer them in the right direction once they realize what the cards are trying to say about the matter. I don’t presume to tell them what they should do, only what seems to deserve consideration based on the possibilities disclosed by the interpretation. The rest is up to them.