AUTHOR’S NOTE: In Tarot Currents, Paul Hughes-Barlow recently observed that the true aim of tarot reading is not solely the telling of fortunes but rather the delivery of relief from suffering and liberation from a feeling of entrapment. In Paul’s words: “The proper use of TARO is not simply to predict events. Its purpose is to identify the causes of suffering and limitation in the life of the seeker and to provide a path toward liberation.”

Although in my own work I now position myself as a pragmatic fortune-teller and no longer as primarily a psychological or spiritual advisor (“been there, done that” for over 40 years), I agree with Paul. In the past I’ve mentioned that those who sit for a tarot reading “already know who they are, they just want to find out what they should do” to resolve their problems. As Paul so aptly puts it: “Clients rarely come seeking philosophy. They come seeking relief.”

When I stop and think about it, all of my readings are predicated on helping clients understand what is going on in their situation by analyzing the testimony in the cards for extraordinary insights that emerge from the sitter’s subconscious via “inducement” while shuffling the deck. I subscribe to Joseph Maxwell’s view of “vaticination:”

“Coming events cast a shadow before them; each individual has a presentiment about his own destiny, which may remain latent: the normal processes of consciousness do not include such presentiments.”

In other words, the seeker holds the subconscious key to liberation and the role of tarot is to introduce him or her to the lock that matches it, while the reader serves as a hired “locksmith” with the right lock-picking tools if the key won’t fit. Although I like the analogy of “handing them the ammunition and pointing them at the target,” the “lock-and-key” metaphor is also a good one. It brings to mind the off-color allusion in the first Ghostbusters movie to the “Gatekeeper” and the “Key-master,” but if I were to pursue that inference in the present discussion I would be compelled to relate it to “auto-eroticism.” In less lurid but no less evocative terms, I see it as akin to the “Start” button on an electronic device with its combined circle-and-slash icon.

However, as Maxwell surmises, “The sitter usually needs help to do this.” The Kybalion illustrates the plight of the distraught seeker as “the squirrel, which frantically runs around and around the circling treadmill of his cage, traveling ever and yet reaching nowhere – at the end a prisoner still, and standing just where he started.” Maxwell’s solution is to “verify with the enquirer at each step if the intuition is taking the right path. Useful though rational perception may be to the cartomant, it is only an adjunct to the gift of vaticination, that is, the faculty of being able to read the information possessed by the enquirer about his past, present and future.”

But as a professional diviner I certainly don’t want to shoulder the burden of a liberating “army of occupation.” The inmates must still engineer their own escape from the prison camp. I will fly over and drop “propaganda leaflets” from the tarot playbook (or maybe broadcast an inspirational message over the “Voice of Esoterica,” which seems more appropriate), the purpose of which is not to “lead by the nose” in an enabling fashion but rather to stimulate an edifying self-awareness that will ideally precipitate a healing episode. Colonel Klink and Sgt. Shulz are no match for the power of the oracle!