AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’m currently working my way through the court-card section of Benebell Wen’s Holistic Tarot, and one of her observations struck an agreeable chord: the presence of these cards in a spread signifies human activity, and the more of them there are, the higher the energy level will be. In other words, court cards aren’t just incidental sidekicks or personality flags, they are in fact “movers-and-shakers” that are key contributors to the outcome. This premise complements my personal take on what an action-and-event-oriented reading should look like, and I just realized that I’ve never explained that in one place before (which will require some unavoidable redundancy).

For the past ten years I’ve concentrated on mundane conditions in my approach to interpretation, distancing myself from the more spiritual and psychological side of things. In private readings I no longer have to chase my tail in a quest for self-awareness and self-improvement since I’ve already spent four decades doing just that, while when divining for the public I’ve found that most sitters aren’t interested in character analysis, they’re explicitly seeking insights about what is likely to happen and what they might do about it.

Therefore, the focus of this essay will be on tarot’s advocacy for “doing something” rather than on simply comprehending the situation described by the cards. Anything less emphatic risks speaking only in exalted abstractions that deliver transcendent speculation to no useful end, thus entering the realm of mystical conjecture that holds no allure for me.

While I refrain from offering actionable advice in the interest of avoiding legal liability, I intend my counsel to be understood in concrete terms if my client deems it worthy of pursuing to the proposed conclusion. This often involves exploration of day-to-day circumstances, and I discovered long ago that the 40 minor cards are all that are needed to get a fix on the “what, why and how” of daily affairs, with the addition of the 16 court cards if approximate identification of “who” is also desirable.

More recently, I’ve determined that the 22 trump cards seldom portend major events on their own and are more useful for defining the overarching theme or environmental backdrop attending the occurrences augured by the rest of the spread. This is not something that came to me out of the blue; my decades of experience have convinced me that, while they can certainly exemplify the prevailing climate for something big to happen, trump cards rarely make good on that promise unless the majority of the cards point that way.

So a reading that employs a subset of all 78 cards would break down into: 1) routine developments related to the minor cards that should play out in fairly unremarkable fashion; 2) more energetic exertions brought on by the presence of court cards representing other people or subjective traits of the querent emblematic of those efforts; and 3) a panorama of contextual cues supplied by any trump cards in the mix.

My approach would be to first examine the potential events and circumstances implied by the small cards, then the dialogue – whether transpersonal or internalized – between the court cards along with any other prominent fallout suggested by their interaction, and finally the archetypal or symbolic milieu in which it all operates. In this way the seeker will get the lowdown on “what it is” and “who cares” right out of the gate, followed by a more cerebral excursion into the big-picture “whys-and-wherefores” if necessary.

This methodology presupposes making a broad preliminary scan of the entire array to assess the lay of the land before attempting a card-by-card dissection according to the sequence I’ve outlined. Shaping the narrative in the way I envision could entail some jumping around in the spread, so it will be important to keep everything in perspective and let the client know what you’re up to in advance.

By elevating the commonplace to the first order of business, it will be easier for the individual to grasp the kinds of action that will promote constructive headway in the matter without becoming bogged down in personality profiling or philosophical pondering, and I believe this will establish a conducive atmosphere for the reader to come up with a rational response to “What should I do next?”