AUTHOR’S NOTE: First a disclosure. Ever since the day I returned to public tarot reading in 2011, I’ve been a vocal critic of remote divination in general, and especially of that offered by online practitioners in the form of “psychism-with-props” (cartomantic clairvoyance or precognition). But here I’m approaching it a bit differently, beginning in the third paragraph after my usual carping.

I have yet to be convinced that a psychic link between far-flung human minds can produce a level of detail that will enable a personalized outlook equivalent to that achievable by a reader and querent in a room with the cards between them. The type of idle curiosity that thrives on mind-reading about an absent third party’s thoughts or feelings is irrelevant when it comes to counseling an individual about life’s pressing problems, so the reader must use the images to fabricate observations from intuitive speculation and visual inference as a way to make something “click” for the client, all under the guise of receiving telepathic insights from a reliable distant source. It’s a nice theory but an implausible one given the modest nature of most empirical evidence to date.

When I began working with tarot in 1972 there was no internet and certainly no social media. If one wanted to be a public card-reader, the only option was to have a “sitter” literally parked across the table. (I recognize that Etteilla performed readings by mail in the late 18^th Century, but I had never heard of doing that until a few months ago and believe it must have been excruciatingly slow and awkward; the modern craving for instant gratification would never tolerate the delay.) During a face-to-face reading it is possible to forge what French tarot writer Joseph Maxwell identified as a critical connection: “. . . in the interest of making a full and helpful divination, it is necessary to verify with the enquirer at each step if the intuition is taking the right path.” While this can be done remotely via an electronic interface, there is little spontaneity in it, resulting in a calculated assessment of the situation that is closer to deductive reasoning than creative visualization. It can work well enough but it is too analytical for supple storytelling.

On the other hand, the local reading does have its drawbacks. In the 1970s, there was considerable discussion in the tarot community about “cold reading” or performing divination without knowing a single fact about the querent’s circumstances beyond the question or topic of interest, thus reading the cards “cold” (which is something I have always preferred). But this is at odds with an investigative technique used by police detectives in the 1940s that involved making a patient and painstaking examination of a suspect’s appearance and comportment as a way to form impressions about presumed guilt or innocence (think Peter Falk’s “Columbo” or Tony Shalhoub as “Monk”). Modern critics of fortune-telling often trot this out as proof that the diviner is a fraud who draws on superficial aspects of a seeker’s dress, manner of speech, body language, facial expressions, unique gestures and other telltale hints, and then makes up everything else to align with the cards.

This has always puzzled me because I find that when conducting a reading I hardly glance at the sitter at all, instead focusing intently on the cards. Only if clients are flapping their arms and crowing or standing on their head am I likely to pay much attention to their physical presence. I’m resolute in pursuing my goal of putting the pieces of a puzzle together, and I don’t require that kind of anecdotal input to arrive at conclusions until it’s time to bounce my observations off the seeker as Maxwell recommends. Alejandro Jodorowsky insists that it is impossible to keep personal projection out of our readings, but I find my assiduous mode of deflection to be relatively airtight although I do advise sitters that they can interrupt with questions at any time as I roll out the narrative card-by-card.

However, I suspect that there are readers who are heavily invested in the social dimension of tarot that will be more susceptible to the “cold reading” aspects of a client’s self-presentation than I am, and they could be swayed by the interaction to the point that what needs to be said in the reading isn’t mentioned. I don’t see it as fraudulent but more as overreacting to a perceived need for empathy. If the old cliche that we should end every reading on a positive note has any merit, we might understandably be more sympathetic to a clean, well-dressed and well-spoken client than to one who is rude-and-crude. The separation offered by long-distance contact takes that judgmental attitude out of the equation so it won’t cloud the reader’s vision.

My own perspective on this potential antidote to cold reading is that it still doesn’t outweigh the advantage of an “old-school” approach to in-person card-wrangling but, when that close encounter is not feasible, there are ways to accomplish the objective without resorting entirely to intuitive guesswork; they just aren’t quite as robust and stop short of clairvoyance. When I’m solicited for a remote reading, I do my best to engage the prospective client in the prep work leading up to the “oracular moment” without seeking too much advance information about his or her current situation. For me, letting the cards “speak their piece” in productive ways without undue prompting is attainable with a little judicious forethought.