AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’ve been inspired by something I just read in T. Susan Chang’s Tarot Correspondences: Ancient Secrets for Everyday Readers to revisit a subject I covered a few years ago in my essay “Correspondences: How Much is Too Much?” (linked below). Her section on “putting it all together” provides useful techniques by which the wealth of metaphysical detail can be organized and brought to bear on practical reading scenarios. I won’t enumerate them but will just note that they are almost all different from the “preponderances and shortfalls” that I use (for example, an excess of any factor and a consequent absence of its peers).

Chang advocates using “word clouds” (carefully-chosen groups of keywords that coalesce around a single theme such as “love”) to create a “mosaic” or “collage” of meaning that will become a touchstone or place to start for most if not all readings on that subject. I would advise grooming the population into language that is more flexible in tone and not closely tied to the literal descriptions in the esoteric lexicon. The specter of a discouraged client showing up for a love reading and being fed a dry litany of astrological terms, occult number theory, elemental associations and Tree of Life connections is invoked by Chang as illustrating a surefire way to alienate the sitter and destroy the reader’s credibility at the same time. For this reason I normally keep the specifics to myself and just paraphrase their intent in broad strokes.

While I prefer the view of Enrique Enriquez that there is “visual poetry” in the cards, Chang’s proposal to write personal haikus and rhyming couplets for each one has some merit as a way to embed vivid snapshots of its character into one’s consciousness.  (I’ve done something similar by building card sequences around classical poems.) But I’m more partial to her idea of employing proverbs, parables, allegories, anecdotes and other storytelling tropes to accomplish the same thing.

My own approach has been to enlist shared cultural, social, historical, literary and academic metaphors and analogies to energize my reading of a spread. This has the added advantage of offering the querent something familiar to latch onto when trying to make sense of my more abstract observations, while also lightening the mood and ideally generating the “Aha!” reaction when it has been slow in coming. (I even created a full set of “tarot euphemisms” for the Waite-Smith Minor Arcana that you can find elsewhere in this blog with a bit of digging.)

There is a pervasive attitude among modern tarot enthusiasts that any amount of analytical embellishment is excessive when the goal should be to interpret the cards from an intuitive perspective based entirely on free-association from the imagery. In my estimation, the best readers are those who can bring to the table both a canny appreciation for the inherent mysticism of the tarot and a well-honed grasp of the traditional knowledge base, both mundane and occult.

I urge those journeyman practitioners who aspire to such versatility to apply every device in the diviner’s toolbox, adapted as necessary to suit the seeker’s level of sophistication, and don’t shy away from complexities that can furnish both depth and refinement to the narrative. I would rather throw my sitters a lazy curve-ball and help them stretch to field it than play it safe and speak only in vague generalities. After all, I want the reading to be entertaining for both my client and myself, and the best way to do that is to “stir the pot” just a little.

Correspondences: How Much is Too Much?