AUTHOR’S NOTE: In their debut recording Bert and I . . . and Other Stories from Down East, rustic Maine humorists Robert Bryan and Marshall Dodge referred slyly to “thems that knows” in one of the monologues. I recall this quip whenever I encounter the tarot community’s online ranks of zealous Jungian partisans who are staunchly united against the lowly act of fortune-telling and aren’t shy about making the rest of us aware of their disdain. It’s enough to make the thoughtful “armchair philosopher of tarot” weep; I’ve been accused of elitist gatekeeping myself when it comes to dismissing psycho-spiritual group-think as tone-deaf, but what I really am is an agitator against single-minded smugness.

We might call these self-anointed guardians of metaphysical purity “thems that think they knows.” We could also paraphrase Monty Python from their “Happy Valley” sketch: “They tenaciously grokked away in their mystical observatories.” As diviners we can convince ourselves that we are in touch with a transcendent source of awareness, but we really don’t have to go there for our motivation when approaching an ordinary matter from a purely mundane standpoint. My favorite metaphor for this kind of interpretive overreach is “swatting a gnat with a sledgehammer.” What makes us think the exalted wardens of Spirit will tolerate our audacity in prodding them for such pedestrian advice anyway?

Intuition has its rightful place in the practice of divination, but it is only “one arrow in the quiver” that tarot readers bring to their quest for the unicorn of truth, and it won’t necessarily be the most well-aimed bolt due to its vulnerability to subjective bias. A solid grasp of the core principles behind each card should be the benchmark by which excellence is measured, and intuition can enliven the narrative by acting as the elastic expansion joints between traditional factors that can aid in stretching the canvas and connecting the dots in imaginative ways. A budding storyteller can’t get by without its annotative strength (often in the form of allusive tropes) but at the same time should not be a slave to its glamour.

It strikes me that, if the Universe is in fact scrutable but not particularly forthcoming with its knowledge, we need all the help we can get when striving to understand its numinous intelligence. At least for me, faith in its benevolent omniscience is simply not enough and I’m always looking for ways to unravel the mystery with methods that escape the “futility of speculation” described in The Kybalion. One of those avenues is divination in its most prosaic form of predicting the future This is not the fatalistic realm of “What is going to happen to me?” but rather “What will be the result if I take or fail to take this specific action?” There is a subtle difference between the two that introduces “force of will” in the second case.

The path of the “enlightened skeptic” is the one I chose. The cards are declamatory enough in their depth and breadth of meaning for me to acquire all the insight necessary to make what Joseph Maxwell called a “full and helpful divination” without having to indulge in baseless conjecture. When applied astutely, intuition (which I prefer to disambiguate as “inspiration, imagination and ingenuity” to avoid the taint of populist overuse) can expand their vocabulary with a creative brio that adds to the vividness of the raconteur’s offering.

But I insist that it operate in deference to a cultivated wisdom that is more profound than my own unsupported surmise even though I’ve been honing that for over five decades. I’d rather stand “on the shoulders of giants” from tarot’s long history than hop from foot-to-foot trying to find an unassailable position that I can claim as original. In something as time-honored as cartomancy there is really no need for contrived innovation, so I will remain content with long spells of sturdy, workmanlike commentary punctuated by brief flashes of wit every now and then that I could summon at will but have resolved to keep in check. I’m an outsider by choice in the cosmic guessing-game of “Button, button, who’s got the button?”