AUTHOR’S NOTE: The above title was adapted from the Dan Fogelberg-Tim Weisberg recording Twin Sons of Different Mothers, but the inspiration for this essay came from Joe Monteleone’s Tarot Mysticism: The Psycho-Spiritual Technology of the Thoth Tarot.

In his discussion of the second tarot trump (the Magus/Magician/Bateleur), Monteleone observed that this card symbolizes human consciousness as a “meaning-making machine.” This comment prompted me to revisit my previous opinion that the mind of a tarot reader is first-and-foremost a “pattern-recognition machine” that performs an act of aggregation from which coherent meaning devolves.

When I first approach a spread, I acquire a visual snapshot of the associations and correlations between all of the cards, from which a meaningful narrative can be coaxed. This preliminary take is quite often fluidly impressionistic, relying largely on stimulus from my decades of exposure to the symbolism. Card-by-card details are then plugged into this broad-brushed theme over the course of the session.

I’m reminded further of the movie Twins, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger played the taller of the unlikely “twins” and Danny Devito was the (much) shorter one. In tarot-reading terms, we could say that the less-prescriptive hints of insight coming from the images represent the “Devito factor” and the rigorously “bulked-up” vision derived from the confluence of intellectual and mystical inputs provides the “Schwarzenegger quotient.”

I was recently involved in an online discussion that addressed the perennial question (as usual, prefaced by “I’m a beginner, but . . .”) regarding proper reading technique: “Should I apply published meanings to the cards or just go with freestyle improvisation (aka intuition)?” A great many responders advised a wholly intuitive approach while none of them advocated a narrow “canned-keyword” methodology, but the consensus was that to be well-rounded a diviner requires proficiency with both.

My personal belief is that intuition alone is an inadequate “net” with which to catch the profound interpretive fallout unleashed by a combination of visual free-association from the pictures and an appreciation for the literal content ascribed to the symbols. In his song Suzanne, Leonard Cohen sang (or more accurately croaked) about a “broken” nautical Jesus who “sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.”

The same thing can happen in tarot reading when an intuitive inquiry captures only part of the story and the traditional definitions that are preserved in the knowledge base “sink like a stone” beneath the reader’s comprehension. As far as it goes, the divination may still be on-target but it could have been so much more informative. If I were paying, I would expect the diviner to wring as much blood as possible from that stone. Anything less would just be psychic guesswork.