AUTHOR’S NOTE: The originator of a recent r/SecularTarot sub-reddit thread asked about the best way to pull cards: “Should I shuffle until I’m satisfied, let the cards ‘come to me,’ pick however I want, or another approach?”

Here is my answer:

As a convenient way to add structure to any pull, I normally use positional spreads and have been doing so for over 50 years. Except for the Celtic Cross and the French Cross (my personal variants of both), I create my own spreads and now have well over 300 topic-related layouts (many of them published in an ebook). The art of spread creation is central to my practice and frequently dictates my card-selection strategy.

When it comes to drawing the cards, I consider subconscious induction during the shuffle and cut to explain “how tarot works” by arranging them in the right sequence to tell the story. This brings the necessary cards to the top of the deck, and I pull them from there in series to populate the spread, a technique I picked up from Eden Gray back in 1972. (I’ve tried pulling from a “fan” but it defeats the whole purpose of the shuffle, which is not to randomize the cards but rather its antithesis, to instinctively align them.)

I don’t see it as a tactile phenomenon of “calibrated fingertips” (which would be absurd), just an unexplained consequence of focused concentration. “Shuffling until satisfied” is how I’ve always done it and how I tell my sitters to do it, without looking for any specific cues regarding when to stop. Another way that has some merit without being overly haphazard is to cut the shuffled deck into several (typically three) sub-packs and pull a card (or cards) from each pile. Here the cut shares equal billing with the shuffle in creating order from chaos.

Taking the idea of subconscious participation even further, we could have the client pick each of the cards “however he or she wants” (such as making a mini-cut for each card), which would eliminate the need for the shuffle altogether. A friend of mine does this in public settings, although he still shuffles the deck. I can see this happening in remote-reading situations where I tell the distant querent to just pull the correct number of cards from a personal deck without providing instructions.

Unlike the “proponents of woo,” I employ no fanciful techniques like holding my hand over the spread-out cards and feeling for a telltale “warmth” or “tingle,” which falls into the “gimme a break” territory of curious implausibilities and is almost certainly a product of autosuggestion or, for the sake of argument, maybe an embryonic precursor to full-fledged psychometry or psychokinesis, two of the darlings of New Age psionics.

I also pay no attention to the so-called “jumper” (aka “letting the cards come to me” by accident) which is only evidence of careless shuffling; if a card is intended to appear in the reading, it will show up in the formal draw. The same is true for “clarifiers” and other supplemental cards, which are mainly admissions of failure to comprehend the original pull. In the first scenario I stuff them back into the deck and keep on shuffling, and in the second case I never introduce them, preferring to ponder the cards on the table until they make sense. This is the “connecting the dots” challenge that can be so rewarding for both the sitter and the diviner.

As is often asserted, there is “no right way, only your way,” and the critical thing is to establish a consistent technique for pulling the cards that will demonstrate reliability over time. Coupled with intelligent spread design, this uniformity should greatly enhance confidence that the process will capture the proper cards to seamlessly advance the narrative. This has proven to be the case in my own experience, with only a little groping for significance on rare occasions. A random scatter of cards is often a casualty of subjective bias as the reader marshals free-association and intuitive speculation as the only ways to navigate the maze. Personally, I don’t want to work that hard when there are less roundabout paths to the destination..