“Coherence is the sole quality demanded of us.”
– Aleister Crowley in Magick

AUTHOR’S NOTE: In The Eye in the Triangle, his biographical study of the life of Aleister Crowley, Israel Regardie referred to a quote from Crowley’s Liber 185 that, with a little paraphrasing, has a direct bearing on the title of this post:

“One may become expert in all of these” (the technical drills assigned to a Probationer in Crowley’s magical order) “without necessarily making any real progress, just as a man might be first-rate in grammar, syntax and prosody without being able to write a single line of good poetry, although the greatest poet in soul is unable to express himself without the aid of those three elements of literary composition.”

In other words, “practice won’t make perfect” if one doesn’t already posses the soul of a magician that can make the best use of the training. Germane to the subject of this essay, I’m rewriting these words as follows:

One may become intimately familiar with the traditional wisdom associated with the tarot cards without being able to preform a single fluent reading, while a practitioner of the most acute intuitive sensitivity will not be fully versed in the diviner’s art without a thorough grounding in the core knowledge.

Tarot novices are often nonplussed by the realization that they are being tasked with absorbing a complex litany of published meanings when all they want to do is give their imagination free rein. Part of this reluctance is almost certainly due to the fact that students in US schools are no longer being equipped with the skills to read text with a discerning eye for nuance (if they can comprehend declamatory language at all), nor taught the fine art of critical thinking, instead being loaded with sociological and ideological baggage that might serve them well in the world of social discourse but does nothing for their intellectual prowess in more profound matters. In this environment, Crowley’s “coherence” as it applies to the act of tarot reading doesn’t stand a chance, and tarot gurus who coach beginners to ignore “book-learning” in favor of freestyle interpretation are doing them a tremendous disservice.

I may not be the best one to speak to this topic because I’ve had a life-long fascination with the literature of the tarot and other esoteric disciplines, and my cartomantic practice is more analytical than intuitive. (I characterize it as a 60/40 split but I’m being generous on the intuitive side.) I’ve joined and then left Facebook groups when it became abundantly clear that many of the participants didn’t have a clue what they were doing, and I didn’t have the patience to teach them from scratch. The online spiritual community is an insular, self-serving entity that relies on YouTube and other platforms to impart information that in far too many cases is no more competent than “the blind leading the blind.” The sad thing is that they are convinced they are on the right track.

I once hired an engineer for a nuclear-power-plant position who told me that his college peer group was explicitly cautioned not to exercise any creativity or imagination in applying their education, the assumption being that it would detract from their technical precision. As a teacher I wouldn’t go nearly that far when instructing tarot neophytes in the historical background and guiding principles of the craft, but on the other hand I would ensure that a complete disregard for precedent would not reduce their pronouncements to unschooled incoherence. I’ve seen too many online readings that are chock-full of high-flown psychological gobbledygook but almost entirely devoid of practical advice, making it plain that the spirit of Carl Gustav Jung that so impressed the New Age crowd back in the 1970s is still alive and well even when it has proven to be a poor fit for pragmatic divination. As I’ve said in the past, most seekers after a reading already know who they are, they just want to be told what is going to happen.