AUTHOR’S NOTE: Here is another installment in my long-running “beating-a-dead-horse” criticism of online tarot as my impatience with its superficiality continues to simmer.

I’ve reached a new low in my opinion of the self-indulgent shallowness exhibited by so much of what I see going on, and have retreated to my hermitage to contemplate it. I don’t know where all the occult philosophers and metaphysicians have gone, but I tire of misspending my esoteric capital on such pedestrian conversation and can only grumble irritably in emulation of Rudyard Kipling: “Pearls are pearls and swine are swine/And never the twain shall meet.” Merely having an outlet is no longer enough when I feel like I’m talking to myself.

Ever since the Aeclectic Tarot forum folded in 2017, I’ve been scouring the online tarot community looking for an equally rewarding experience but it has become an exercise in futility. There is an old jest that goes “If you hold a conch shell up to your ear, you can hear the ocean.” I once attended a music event where the artist presented a clever play on this trope by telling his current audience “You guys are great. Last night the crowd was so dull you could put your ear up to their mouths and hear . . . “

That wisecrack neatly sums up the quality of a large percentage of the online discourse I’ve encountered over the last eight years. Around 80% of what I’ve seen is variations on the fatuous “What does Joe or Mary think or feel about me?” theme, submitted for comment with only a few words of personal analysis. This ubiquitous sidestepping of the rules of engagement seems to slide right by the moderators, who are obviously overwhelmed by the landslide of such trivial fare. The other 20% of the communal content hews far too closely to the well-trodden Waite-Smith path for my taste as a Thoth user, and worthwhile experimentation tends to be negligible.

I suppose it depends on what we’re trying to do with the tarot. Many purists argue that it should only be used for psychological self-understanding, while others insist that its proper focus lies in spiritual quests that ideally put the inquirer in touch with divine wisdom. But the majority of young-ish aspirants are only interested in what it can tell them about their love-life, and their fixation on trying to eke out hints of someone else’s romantic intentions from the cards is profoundly disturbing in real-life terms. I once observed that the English bulldog “fails at dog” because you can’t walk it for more than a few hundred feet before it becomes exhausted, and we could say with similar justification that people who trust in the tarot to solve their relationship problems have “failed at human.” Understandably, as a self-respecting professional diviner I refrain from participating in these endless forays into wishful thinking.

In my estimation, the “thinks-or-feels” query amounts to a mind-reading charade that is nothing more than intuitive guesswork piggybacked on a thin tissue of card meanings. The motive may be innocent but the practice itself offers little beyond appeasing idle curiosity since I doubt the average seeker will follow through on any encouragement they receive, while if the forecast is disappointing they will just nod sagely and tell themselves “I knew it!” I’ve been calling it “hiding behind the tarot” because it is obviously a twist on the old “ask a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend” deflection but even more anonymous in its execution. Nobody wants to stick their neck out and have their head rudely chopped off, so they nibble around the edges of their private yearning and hope to find solace in divination.

This blind faith would be laughable if it weren’t so sad. I judge it to be a symptom of social-media “distancing” that insulates those involved from direct engagement with their peers and keeps any kind of interactive accountability at arm’s length. As I see it, anyone can present themself as anything they want to be in an online platform, and trying to get down to the literal “heart of the matter” can be a fruitless pursuit if the goal is to find a meaningful connection. “Smoke-and-mirrors” is the name of the game when lack of trust is endemic to the population, and enlisting a tarot reader to cut through the murk strikes me as an act of desperation.

Despite the blithe assumptions of the post-New-Age Jungian crowd, tarot on its own has never been particularly effective for psychological profiling (that honor belongs to astrology), so I now bring its strengths to bear mainly on observable phenomena of the “What is likely to happen?” kind and steer clear of emotional entanglements that are almost entirely subjective. Call it “fortune-telling” if you must, but at least it deals in objective trends, tendencies and probabilities rather than indulging in wide-eyed speculation of the psychic variety. If I were to dive into that ocean I would want to hear more than echoes of the querent’s self-obliging fantasies, and I believe that “tarot sonar” is simply not reliable enough for discerning truth from fiction when it comes to such nebulous distinctions.

As I cue up my blog focus for 2026, I realize that over the last eight years I’ve exhausted the role of esoteric mentor in the Golden Dawn tradition for the more casual aspirants, with numerous side-trips into Lenormand instruction, the Tarot de Marseille, horary astrology, spread creation, book and deck reviews, and a few forays into my tenuous grasp of historical subjects. I will continue to hunt for books new and old that excite my interest, and I’ve noticed a growing enthusiasm among Thoth neophytes in being stepped through The Book of Thoth, something I had already done in a general way in my esoteric Tarot 101 material. I will contemplate how to approach that subject in the most useful way and at some point will begin a series of Thoth tutorial essays. At the moment my energy and enthusiasm are at low ebb, so I’m going to back away from daily posting for a while.