AUTHOR’S NOTE: I recently plowed my way through a lengthy post on the r/Tarot sub-reddit in which the author discussed the true purpose of tarot reading, ending with the opinion that it’s all about igniting the seeker’s consciousness via an act of motivation.

I like this focus much better than the typical goal of “empowerment,” although they have a similar objective: to give querents the information needed to work out their own solutions. But “igniting consciousness” will ideally do far more than provide practical answers. It will awaken the individual to the circumstances that placed them in the situation in the first place, and supply the wisdom to avoid landing in the same predicament in the future. If a reading can accomplish the feat of broader and deeper enlightenment, I would say it “doesn’t get any better than that.”

Although I now fancy myself an action-and-event-oriented “fortune-teller” (with a sly wink to those psychological self-awareness purists who believe it to be scandalous), I’m always looking for ways to give my clients an edge in dealing with their private reality, which I submit they know better, at least subconsciously, than I ever could by consulting the tarot. My aim is to nudge them into thinking more deeply about it while having them communicate silently with the deck during the shuffle. This communion initiates an inner dialogue that induces meaningful order into the arrangement of the cards, by which they pick up on the seeker’s unspoken thoughts and bring to the top of the stack the ones that are most relevant to the question.

A growing number of online readers conduct their business in ways that disregard the benefit of having the sitter shuffle the deck, believing that divination is all about universal psychic energy that anyone can tap into at any time regardless of where the reading takes place and who is present at the session. I don’t deny that there are higher sources of inspiration available to the diviner’s art (i.e. Collective Unconscious; Akashic Record; Astral Plane; Plato’s Soul of the World; even the “Mind of God” if you’re so inclined) but I have a couple of problems with approaching it as a boundless mystical buffet.

First, cutting seekers out of tactile contact with the cards places them in a wholly passive and dependent state by vacating the invitation for the tarot to probe their affairs that should be coming directly from them, not routed through me. I want their hands-on involvement whenever possible, and I have no sympathy for the argument that letting them touch my deck will “contaminate” the cards with negative energy (one of the perennial myths of tarot).

Second, it breeds subjective bias on my part because I’m only seeing what I put into the ordering of the cards through my own intervention, making it my reading, not theirs. If I’m going to read the cards for another person, I want that individual to be the “master-of-ceremonies” who introduces the players, after which I will furnish the post-performance critique.

I find this avoidance of querent participation in favor of entirely self-directed spiritual inquiry to be wrong-headed and gullible because what the reader imagines to be “spirit guides” with the most noble of intentions may in fact be nothing of the kind. Although I’ve long felt this to be true, I was just reading a fascinating essay presenting the observation that, in primitive humans, the thalamus and the hippocampus were not yet fully integrated, so their belief that they were talking subliminally to their gods really arose from conversations with their dissociated selves.

There may still be vestiges of that delusion in modern psychic practices that resemble subjective navel gazing more than freestyle visionary excursions into the spirit world (or as a dermatologist, in deflating my conviction that doses of Bragg’s apple cider vinegar had cured my eczema, once said with a kindly smile “The mind is a wonderful thing,” without having to add “we can convince ourselves of anything” since his look said it all). At an earlier time, experiencing such disembodied voices would have raised an eyebrow or two in psychiatric circles.

I would rather keep the process on a “short leash” by effecting the immediate, personal engagement of the querent and reining in my reliance on intuitive self-encouragement of such doubtful pedigree. I trust my instincts when it comes to deciphering the tarot cards, but I won’t impose my insights unilaterally on clients who may have superior knowledge they have not yet tapped, I will simply use the revelations as prompts to elicit that all-knowing but elusive response during a reading, which I will build on in developing the narrative. Some think I give my sitters too much credit for self-awareness, but I’m willing to extend the benefit of the doubt and see what comes of it. If enlightenment ensues to provoke the “Aha!” reaction from the seeker, I will have accomplished my mission.