AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’ve become irritated by the fatuous claims of self-styled experts in the online tarot community who insist that the cards should not be used for divination because they were “originally intended” only for the attainment of psychological self-awareness and self-improvement. If that’s the case, why are the tarot pages flooded with requests for predictive reading assistance?

It seems to me that not every seeker after glimpses of the future is abysmally deluded (although it may be naive to suggest it given the current state of the art), so there must be more going on than the naysayers care to admit. I can only assume that the critics have been told that fortune-telling tarnishes what should be a noble calling, and they’ve taken it to heart. Although tarot entrepreneur Marcus Katz once observed that “the oracular moment is sacrosanct,” that doesn’t mean it is applicable only to high-minded psycho-spiritual pursuits; it’s the act itself that is being celebrated, not the end to which it’s put, and nothing says a diviner can’t be a “holy seer” of the shamanistic kind.

Since we’re speaking in absolutes here, I would say instead that tarot was never intended for exploration of the psyche. It emerged in the first half of the 15^th Century as an Italian card game and in the 18^th Century it was pressed into service for fortune-telling by French occultist Etteilla, whose work and that of other Continental masters was furthered by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in England at the close of the 19^th Century. Although Aleister Crowley made a stab at proto-psychological definitions for the court cards in the early 1940s, it wasn’t until the mid-20^th Century “Jungian enlightenment” ushered in by the New Age that it was enlisted as a tool for self-analysis, so its pedigree in that function is less than 100 years old.

My own experience with it going back to the early ’70s is that it is not particularly well-suited for that purpose since it speaks most eloquently to mundane conditions and it’s a stretch to see anything more profound in it. I used to think that the Major Arcana were a cut above the rest of the pack in metaphysical prominence, but decades of practice have shown that it just isn’t true in pragmatic terms, and I’m supported in this realization by European readers who don’t assign them any more importance than they accord the other cards. We can talk all day long about archetypes, but I never met one that wasn’t more than an abstract philosophical concept that had to be brought down to earth to deliver a logical conclusion. There are even times when I leave them out of a reading entirely rather than wrestle with their high-flown ambiguities in situations where they aren’t needed.

Consequently, I now see all of the cards as variations on a theme with individual significance that increases or decreases depending on the context of the reading. The tarot is organically “all of a piece” but exhibits 78 different facets, kind of like a mirrored disco ball. Every card has a relationship with every other card, differing only in denotation and degree. This is why apparently dissimilar cards can deliver the same message (within reason), a fact that those readers who have inadvertently left a card in the box can confirm. In short, it is an elastic system that I’ve called “infinitely flexible and adaptable.”

This is not to say that fortune-telling with the cards is a prescriptive affair; there is plenty of “wiggle-room” for trends, tendencies and probabilities to assert themselves without in any way constituting “carved-in-stone” certainties. This is where the premise of “empowerment” enters the picture; ideally, querents will be given the insights necessary to make their own decisions regarding potential events and circumstances. This will be in the form of encouragement for making the right moves, or dissuasion from attempting the wrong ones, and the reader’s task is to help differentiate between the two as revealed in the cards.

The seasoned diviner taps into accumulated knowledge and experience in making this call and may augment those assets with intuitive judgment; the more of all three the practitioner can muster, the more credible the prediction is likely to be. I enjoy the role of “power-broker” where I can strive to improve my client’s chances of success and reduce the likelihood of failure. It won’t always work out that way since the Universe can be fickle, but anything that offers a “leg up” on an unpredictable scenario is where I’m going to stake my claim. Beyond that, it’s a matter of “wait-and-see.”