AUTHOR’S NOTE: If we are savvy in the self-empowering ways of practical magic, our encounter with a given tarot card in a reading won’t invariably deliver a foregone conclusion. We can choose how much of its influence to let into our life and how to engage it. The fundamental energy won’t change, just our handling of it. This doesn’t mean we should attempt to ignore any evidence of discord, only that we have some latitude in coping with it through an exercise of subjective willpower.

Most of us have had the experience of feeling unjustly “put-upon” by an especially hostile card like the 10 of Swords. The ideal response would be to emulate the elasticity of water, in which no wound can leave a permanent mark. It suggests the defensive posture of the martial artist who uses an opponent’s momentum against him. One doesn’t attempt to vigorously blunt or cancel the intrusion, but simply to redirect it into less harmful channels. This usually requires a philosophical rethinking of our reaction to adversity, perhaps along the lines of “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” The result is an act of accommodation that can deflect the blow before the intensifying severity of a threat reaches our breaking-point. The perfect long-range attitude is obviously “This too shall pass.”

Aleister Crowley observed that magic is “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity to will.” The “change” I’m talking about here occurs within the practitioner – or at most within the interface – and not in the external circumstances represented by the card in question, which may be more environmental than individually-targeted. We retain control by resisting the “knee-jerk” impulse to blindly push back when confronted with an inauspicious card, and instead try stretching as necessary to attune ourselves to the frequency of the incoming wave and thereby transmute its antagonism into creative stimulus. This is my normal method for dealing with reversals, and it works just as well with upright “cards of ill omen.”

The same premise underlies my view of the “crossing” card in a Celtic Cross spread as a “major motivator,” an obstacle or an opportunity and sometimes both rolled into one. No useful purpose is served by trying to aggressively block or fastidiously avoid an energy when we can almost always “entrain” it within our personal trajectory (think “matching speeds” with it) and marshal its power toward our own ends. The more thoroughly we understand where it’s coming from, the better we can harness it.

This is precisely how I’ve approached the cards going back to my first exposure to the tarot in 1970. Crowley’s description of them as “living beings” encourages us to form an intimate, organic bond with them that offers both sympathies to encourage us and antipathies to challenge us as we interact with their presence in our orbit. We can anticipate either a pat on the back or a poke in the eye, one an endorsement of our ambitions and the other a “wake-up call” that warns us off our intended course. In either case we will obtain useful guidance that will steer us toward the optimum solution for the prevailing conditions.

We can pretend there are “no bad cards” until we get one in an awkward situation, and then we must figure out what it is trying to tell us about our misapprehension of the matter that demanded its appearance at that juncture. We receive the nudge we need at the time, no more nor less, and we can choose whether to align our ongoing efforts with its emphasis or disregard it at our peril, in which case our mandate becomes a logical exercise in risk management. But we will literally have “all the cards in our hands” when approaching the pitfall if we accord each of them its proper due and don’t overreact to the insinuations it throws at us (or the shrill reprimands with which it sometimes beats us over the head). Thus, we should never be at a loss for creative countermeasures that won’t overextend or cripple us with their imposition.