AUTHOR’S NOTE: Unsurprisingly, as I sit here lulled by the Florida sun and surf, I’ve momentarily run out of profound ideas for my daily deliberation. So permit me to ramble on a bit with an updated riff on a couple of old autobiographical posts. Things have been moving again, albeit glacially, and it’s time for an addendum.

During online conversations I frequently mention that I’ve been involved with the occult tarot and other arcane pursuits for over fifty years. But it hasn’t been one long. seamless continuum; there have been ups and downs in my trajectory. Consider this an instructive tale for esoteric novices, who often ask more seasoned associates how they got their start.

As a graphic design student in New York City in the middle ’60s, I was enamored of anything to do with commercial art (the career path for my peer group clearly pointed toward either advertising or fashion illustration). But I didn’t graduate and instead was drafted into the US Army at the height of the Vietnam War. I was sent to Germany in 1968 for a two-year tour of duty, and that’s where my metaphysical saga begins.

Phase 1: Two things happened around the same time. I discovered the popular astrology book, Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs, which was more anecdotal than technical in its approach but still inspired contemplation of its attempts at character analysis. Concurrently, the girlfriend of an acquaintance mailed him a copy of David Palladini’s recently-published Aquarian Tarot, and its bold imagery was a perfect initiation for the graphic artist with mystical leanings. Although I had no chance to practice with it, the experience was galvanizing for my own art at the time.

Phase 2: When I returned to the US in 1971, I took up natal astrology more seriously and also encountered the Hermetic Qabalah and the body of abstruse knowledge codified by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, its offshoots and its alumni. This occupied me for a year or so before I picked up the Thoth tarot in its first (1969) edition. But I had no access to Crowley’s explanatory work, The Book of Thoth, so I had to make do with Eden Gray’s 1960 book, The Tarot Revealed, which was a user-friendly rewrite of Arthur Edward Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot, the companion volume for the Waite-Smith deck (although as a Thoth user I didn’t bother to buy an RWS pack for another 40 years).

Phase 3: The Thoth cards and Gray’s descriptions were a decidedly awkward pairing, but they still allowed me to advance and eventually establish a semi-professional tarot practice in Connecticut for a short time before I married and left the State in 1979. Simultaneously, my astrological studies were going strong and I joined the Astrological Society of Connecticut and the National Council for Geocosmic Research to connect with a larger population of competent astrologers. (Psychiatrist, astrologer and tarot author Anthony Louis was a fellow member and I believe he is still involved.) The Jungian mode of psychological horoscope interpretation was in full flower, nurtured by a generous helping of scholarly research, but it had yet to make inroads into the art of tarot reading, which was focused exclusively on fortune-telling (and that’s how I used it.)

Phase 4: In the autumn of 1979 we moved to rural Southwestern New Hampshire. Although I briefly connected with the local astrological community in Brattleboro, VT, the group disbanded and for the next twenty-odd years I settled into private study and experimentation while also working full-time and helping to raise a family. There was no internet connectivity in my area at that time, so I had no convenient outlet for social discourse with other diviners. Metaphysical shops came and went but nothing endured for very long; I even tried to start a meetup group, to no avail. My only recourse for external stimulation was my decade-long membership in Paul Foster Case’s California-based Builders of the Adytum. An inquiry to the Ordo Templi Orientis in upstate New York went unanswered, so I retired from public view for a couple of decades and took up other solitary occult pursuits, including ceremonial magic, scrying in the spirit vision, Tree-of-Life pathworking, gematria, geomancy and I Ching. I also launched my long-running analysis of missing-person “cold cases” using horary astrology and tarot.

Phase 5: Fast-forward to 2011, when I was invited to join the Massachusetts Tarot Society and began attending monthly meetings in Nothhampton, while also becoming active in the online Aeclectic Tarot forum, where I was eventually made a moderator. It was then that I discovered the pernicious intrusion of psychological navel-gazing into the practice of tarot reading. I can’t count how many times I’ve endured the self-righteous indignation of would-be experts who claim that “tarot must never be used for divination, it was originally intended only for enhancing personal self-awareness and self-development” (always without acknowledging that it actually originated in the 15^th Century as a card-game and then embraced fortune-telling in the 18^th Century, long before Jung’s contribution). As a consequence of this nonsensical attitude, I decided to direct my return to the public arena mainly toward action-and-event-oriented prediction, while dismissing the psychological pretense as just so much psychic “mind-reading-with-props.” Like a curmudgeonly metaphysical Mr. Rogers, I’m tempted to counter the complaints with “Can you say woo?”

Phase 6: This period also saw my introduction to the pragmatic disciplines of Lenormand, Kipper and Tarot de Marseille reading, all cartomantic traditions that make a wide detour around the psychological and spiritual obsessions of 21^st Century tarot practice, a fact that I found tremendously motivating for my personal growth as a diviner. Adding horary astrology to the mix gave me the ideal toolbox for dealing with questions of a utilitarian nature. The answers derived are literal rather than impressionistic, making it possible to address mundane matters with precision and confidence while avoiding most of the fuzzy intuitive guesswork. More recently, I picked up playing-card divination that operates in the same space.

Phase 7: The next chapter in this ongoing story was provided by my acceptance in 2014 of a professional tarot gig at a local metaphysical shop. This was an on-call arrangement enlarged by the occasional psychic-fair participation. There wasn’t much money in it after I split with the shop owner who provided the space and took care of the logistics, but I was doing it primarily for the exposure and to help her stay in business. It was a lot of fun while it lasted, but then we moved away from the area.

Phase 8: Aeclectic Tarot folded in 2017 and I tried with little success to track down where the more prominent members had landed on the internet. I finally gave up and started my own divination blog, the contents of which I organized by subject matter and published in five e-books on Lulu. They’re inexpensive (I neither intend nor expect get rich) but have been selling slowly because, with a little diligent searching, all of the material can be found on my blog for free, even though the printed (pdf) versions have everything in one place and are much more efficient to navigate. I’ve been priming my writing with constant reading of books on divination and judicious probing of the “hive mind” of various Facebook groups and sub-reddit threads. Unfortunately, with the notable exception of the r/occult sub-reddit, I’ve been encountering mostly beginners on these sites, and I don’t have the patience to answer the same questions endlessly.

Phase 9: In 2018 we relocated to a semi-rural area of the New Hampshire seacoast, a much more populous region that I hoped would prove to be a sufficiently robust environment for in-person reading. But COVID stopped that cold, and then I ran up against the reality that most nearby metaphysical shops already had their in-house practitioners. I tried the meetup route again, but the gatherings were: 1) held too far away to be convenient; 2) aimed more at shamanisim than divination; 3) religious outreach initiatives masquerading as spiritual events; or 4) shut down for lack of interest before I had a chance to attend. Local advertising also did nothing to increase client traffic.

Phase 10: Rather than beat my head against the wall or wait in vain for opportunities, I chose to ramp up my involvement with read-by-email scenarios, an option to which I had been resistant since I first recognized the shallowness of tarot’s social-media contingent in 2011. However, I soon learned that few prospective clients will pay a reasonable price for a professional online reading when they can send $5 or $10 to an Etsy provider for an electronically-generated narrative, or even for a so-called “collective” reading with no personalized content. People have been crowing about the resurgence of interest in the mystical arts among younger devotees, but from what I’ve seen it’s a sad state of affairs rife with gullible followers being duped by posers and opportunists who are only interested in making a fast buck. I suppose, though, that I could just paraphrase Bachman Turner Overdrive and say “Any reads are good reads, so I’ll take what I can get.”