AUTHOR’S NOTE: No, this essay isn’t about preventing Grandma from being eaten by a grizzly bear; I swear it’s divination-related. The relative and the absolute are metaphysical concepts I picked up while re-reading The Kybalion.

Those new to the tarot who approach it with an eye toward becoming a diviner are immediately confronted with a wealth of traditional lore regarding the symbolic and archetypal significance of the cards, and sooner or later they must make their peace with it as best they can. This often means defaulting to visual free-association from the images, a spontaneous stopgap that lets them beat a hasty retreat from the recondite wisdom encoded in the allegorical scenes.

Novices don’t need to puzzle their way through any of it if all they want to know is whether “Joe or Mary likes them;” it’s sufficient to just bin the cards as either favorable or unfavorable for their purpose based on intuitive impressions and leave it at that. There are numerous examples of this abundance of indigestible esoteric abstraction in the Major Arcana, but here I will focus on three of the most instructive.

The Lovers (originally “Lover”) card is at the top of my list. The modern view is that it relates to one’s “souls-mate” or “twin flame,” and the romantically-besotted are usually overjoyed when it appears in a reading. Newer tarot decks are prone to display two naked people erotically entwined when no such intent was conveyed by early decks like the Tarot de Marseille, nor in their spiritual reinterpretation by Arthur Edward Waite. (Even though the man and woman in the RWS card are nude, it was an allusion to the Garden of Eden “before the Fall.”) I almost never see it as an amorous card, although I don’t go as far as Camelia Elias who described the TdM version as “A nasty card, methinks.” For me, it’s the “crossroads” card with both a “high road” and a “low road” leading out of the intersection, entailing the “choice” inferred by the conventional definition: we can either descend into the realm of the Devil, its numerological counterpart, or ascend to that of the Star.

It’s something of a “tipping-point” proposition, and the number Six is a stable expression that signifies a state of rest in which we pause briefly to get our bearings before proceeding along the path. When confronted with a clear choice, the man in the TdM card doesn’t have to entertain it; he can always walk away and the angel will accede to his wishes. (I once wrote an essay proposing that he can just climb into the Chariot and escape his dilemma.) Declining to commit is itself a mode of decision-making, a “third way” that assumes events will take their own course wherever that may lead so there is no point in getting worked up about it.

Another prime example is the Moon card. Those who are enamored of the “Hallmark” take on the Moon as an avatar of “motherly affection and nurturing” (a viewpoint that is fostered in the astrological definition and represented in the tarot by the Empress), are scandalized that it actually has to do with confusion and deception, and its impact on emotional well-being is much less salutary than they were expecting. I once described it as casting the perilous half-light of nightfall under which thieves and burglars operate. Less-experienced readers stubbornly cling to the notion that it stimulates compassionate feelings, but it is much harsher than that. Aleister Crowley called it “the waning moon, the moon of witchcraft and abominable deeds,” and it is more sympathetic to Hecate than Diana.

For my third instance, I waffled between the Devil and Death. The Devil is often construed as “temptation” from a mundane perspective, which may or may not be enjoyable, but Death is much more distressing in its connotation and thus has been “papered over” with bland innuendos that avoid confronting its stark reality. My online friend, author Andy Boroveshengra, once took issue with these muted excuses that treat the uncompromising nature of Death as being only a “major transformation:” he observed that “There is nothing more transformative than rotting in the ground.” I choose to read it as a definitive “ending” and not just a change of scenery, but it can also foretell a drastic turn of events or transition in which we must let something go to allow something new to emerge, although without placing a value judgment on its perceived impact.

All of these deflections are relativistic attempts to fashion encouraging personal truths from largely discouraging or indifferent archetypal absolutes. As the sly locals in rural Maine were once fond of telling clueless tourists who were asking for directions, “You can’t get there from here,” so another route has to be found on the regional map (or in tarot terms, within the contextual frame-of-reference). But sometimes you just have to suck it up and “take your medicine” no matter how bitter it tastes. In such cases, the premise that everything is relative becomes moot, right up there with “It’s all good” when it clearly isn’t. I’ll settle for “It is what it is” in these situations.