AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’ve long been a critic of the purely intuitive approach to tarot reading because I think it encourages subjective bias in the narrative, and when in a less charitable mood I’ve called it “subconscious navel-gazing” with no immediate objective confirmation.

It’s understandable that, were we to rely entirely on free-association from the images and our own psychic guesswork, we would inevitably have to fall back on our personal storehouse of prior experience and whatever wisdom we can glean from it in the way of storytelling content. Either that or totally wing it with no guardrails, which I think is unfair to a paying client who has to wade through our fantasies in search of concrete meaning and actionable advice.

This is speculative imagining plain and simple, and may have little or nothing to do with the querent’s private view of reality and its future prospects. In short, the reader is making it up rather than deriving it from the volume of historical interpretation that comprises the “knowledge base” and its wealth of conceptual substantiation.There is a widespread belief that “learning the ropes” is too constraining for the freestyle reader who wants to give quixotic insight free rein, unfettered by rigid “book learning.”

This perception of skewed priorities is behind my long-standing commitment to “just read the cards” in a literal sense at the beginning of a session before allowing more impressionistic conjecture into my deliberations. In that way, intuition becomes an adjunct to analysis rather than completely supplanting it. It’s more straightforward to work from a well-defined, observation-based perspective into a looser, more imaginative one as inspiration suggests than it is to reel in an initial “wild-ass guess” that has gone completely off the rails, leaving the querent more puzzled than informed.

I often think that readers who rely on wholly mystical and psychic input are giving themselves (and their spiritual sources) far too much credit for veracity, as well as being too enamored of their own visionary prowess. It’s another demonstration of my premise that “a rational Universe just doesn’t work that way” even at its quirkiest. As I see it, there is an abundance of interpretive testimony regarding use of the cards that goes back as far as the 18^th Century, from which it is possible to “cherry-pick” the most compelling guidance to explain a seeker’s present and future circumstances, and these “root” ideas can then be fleshed out with more expansive assumptions.

All it takes to master this approach is the ability and persistence to read a few of the better tarot books (not a foregone conclusion given the sorry state of higher education, the prevailing instant-gratification mindset, and the insouciance of the “woo generation” that dominates the pseudo-metaphysical landscape of social media), and then think critically about their more profound implications for the art of divination. All I can say to them is that, while it doesn’t have to be as mentally strenuous as I prefer, the philosophy behind the tarot just isn’t that simple-minded, and it’s a mistake to behave as if it is, particularly when aiming to help others with their problems.