AUTHOR’S NOTE: The professional tarot community is understandably dismissive of the journeyman reader’s reliance on memorized keywords as a shortcut to flesh out the bones of a rudimentary narrative. This is a perfunctory technique that I’ve called “Lego-Block^® divination” in previous essays because it promotes the stacking-up of tailored snippets of language in the hope that they will render a coherent story. What usually emerges is a threadbare patchwork of cliches devoid of any semblance of spontaneity.

There is always room in the beginner’s toolbox for a certain amount of rote assimilation, and I assume that we all start out that way with our guidebooks and our journals. But at some point this mental harvesting can become a counterproductive crutch that stifles any further growth in mastering the nuances of the cards. The internal voice that should be nurtured by giving it space to develop its own creative style will never mature if we insist on forcing a scripted sermon on it and providing a pulpit from which it must preach.

However, an equal and opposite error lies in flying entirely by the psychic seat-of-our-pants, blind and deaf to any form of traditional wisdom, a lamentable condition that an online acquaintance, tarot author Tony Willis, once described to me as a “free-for-all” with no sensible rhyme-or-reason beyond “It just feels right.” My own contribution to the dialogue was to offer my observations about “subjective navel-gazing” masquerading as intelligence received from a higher source.

In one of my very first essays for this blog back in 2017, I tackled the subject of book-learning versus intuitive speculation with the following rant:

“Frankly, as a story-teller, if all I gave my Muse to work with was my presumptive groping after what I vaguely supposed the people in the cards might be up to within the context of the reading, she would run down the road screaming and tearing her hair out. Effective story-telling requires substance, not tissue-thin assumptions based on free-association from the images, even if it only comes in the form of metaphor and analogy derived from social, cultural or historical common ground.

I would argue that diviners who never crack a tarot book aren’t reading the essence of the cards so much as foraging eyeball-deep  in their own subconscious navel lint. The literature provides deep reservoirs of accumulated meaning that serve as a wellspring of useful material for narrative wordsmithing, and a reliable interpretive touchstone when the psychic channels run dry. I love an unexpected flash of pure insight as much as anyone, but I don’t count on it happening every time with every card in a spread.

Most of the time I would rather trust my  workmanlike understanding of the fundamentals, augmented with inspiration, imagination and ingenuity drawn from my own experiential storehouse, than a vagrant whim that may or may not have anything whatsoever to do with the querent’s personal reality. Intuitive guesswork feeding off the reader’s own lop-sided preconceptions about the matter in question could very well be the worst case.”

The veracity of intuitive conjecture might be brought under the microscope of a criticism that was attributed to physicist Wolfgang Pauli:

“Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!”
(That is not only not correct, it isn’t even false!)”

In other words, the diviner’s hunch may have no legitimate frame of reference within the scope of the question it was summoned to elucidate, so no judgment of its accuracy is possible and it becomes a “for entertainment only” proposition.

The main problem I face after decades of tarot practice is that my cognitive retrieval system serves up so much experience-based recollection that I have to judiciously pare it down to the essential details before offering it to a client. Somewhere buried deep in the pile is the core knowledge I absorbed during my formative days, but so much anecdotal commentary has been grafted onto it that – without digging out my old source material – I would be challenged to identify and segregate it if I ever had a reason to do so.

But this embarrassment of riches was hard-won, and it has been proof-tested and adjusted countless times in real-life reading scenarios. I like to take the kernel of a related idea and work through it with my sitter, layering it with our joint understanding of its significance like a snowball rolling downhill, and then move on to the next link in the chain. Each root-idea usually has its origin in something very basic that jumps out at me as soon as the cards are dealt, and I pursue it with the querent until we’ve mined all of its potential or it proves to be a false lead.

My way of working is very much a “cut-to-fit” evolution that is always performed in concert with the client’s input, and I don’t permit them the luxury of staying mum. They get the “it’s-your-reading-not mine-I’m-just-the-translator” spiel right at the beginning as part of my brief “how tarot works” discourse so they don’t harbor any illusions about their responsibility for the outcome. If they’re in the room (and I try to make sure they are), they’re going to participate in the “mutual voyage of discovery.”

Here is a link to a previous post that examines the memorization-vs-internalization dichotomy in more specific terms:

https://parsifalswheeldivination.org/2020/06/20/dont-memorize-internalize/