AUTHOR’S NOTE: While reading Dr. Dean Radin’s book on yoga (Supernormal) I added a new word to my divination vocabulary: percipient. The specific reference was to scientific experiments conducted by Princeton University in which the subjects who were tested for precognition were called “percipients” (those who perceive the future).
Even when it isn’t deliberately fraudulent, fortune-telling with the tarot has suffered almost universal scorn from the online community because it is considered disreputable compared to the nobler goal of furthering psychological and spiritual self-awareness. Some even believe that it is impossible to predict the future with any degree of certainty, but the carefully-controlled studies of parapsychologist Radin and his peers are slowly proving otherwise.
There is also the opinion that the word divination (as in “Divine inspiration”) is more respectable than the prosaic label fortune-telling even when the latter is appropriately descriptive, but I once wrote an essay (linked below) that pointed out the difference as being only a matter of “degree,” not “pedigree.” (I’ll apologize in advance for the over-writing; I was on a roll in 2023.)
The attitude of the psycho-spiritual crowd is a carry-over of New Age Jungian enthusiasm that I would think has run its course by now. It isn’t the center of my own metaphysical universe, having been supplanted by an action-and-event-oriented focus that is more pragmatic in real-world terms. Not that I didn’t pursue self-understanding with both astrology and tarot for decades prior to my “conversion,” just that I no longer find the adventure enlightening.
These days I’m perfectly comfortable calling myself a fortune-teller even though my approach is much more nuanced than merely attempting to forecast upcoming events and circumstances. I’m fascinated with the “why and how” of a prediction rather than primarily considering the “what, where, when and who.” In line with this reasoning, I often create spreads that are more causally framed than would normally be expected, with position meanings that convey purpose and not just prophecy.
Before Jung (or more accurately prior to astrologer Alan Leo, who was criminally prosecuted for fortune-telling) cartomancy was concerned mainly with prognostication, giving little thought to psychological ramifications (except perhaps of the “Does Joe or Mary love me?” variety). The thoughts and feelings of another person were fair game, but trying to figure out the motives for their actions was not on the agenda. It was all about “Will they or won’t they?” and not “Why should or shouldn’t they, and how will they decide?” Although I don’t try to read minds with them myself, I think the cards can communicate intentions.
This literal application originated with Etteilla in the second half of the 18th Century and has been the standard formula for predictive tarot reading ever since. In the postmodern age we flatter ourselves with being far more sophisticated than that, but I see it as self-impressed posturing driven by the lure of social-media approbation, or maybe just monetized clicks on a web-site. Not all of it, of course, but too much for comfort when unpretentious spiritual aspiration seems more worthwhile from a developmental perspective.
We seem to be at a low point in philosophical credibility when it comes to the more profound uses for the tarot. All one has to do is judge the glut of lightweight modern tarot literature against The Tarot of the Bohemians by Papus or The Book of Thoth by Alester Crowley to appreciate the decline. The “fast buck” reigns supreme and inexpensive, high-volume output typically trumps meticulous craftsmanship among the electronic-interface tarot readers. In my own rare commercial forays into remote reading, I’m very much an outlier in that regard since I think the status quo gives fortune-telling a bad name.
Fortunately, blogs like mine don’t fail on down-votes, although erstwhile followers can certainly vote with their feet (and a few have when I became a bit too curmudgeonly). For the record, I don’t make even a fraction of a cent from my posts so I don’t care about clicks, I just call it as I see it and I’ve been around long enough to have seen a great deal that disturbs me in the current mercenary field of online tarot practice, particularly since there’s no face-to-face connection between client and reader.
I approach tarot as an interactive art because querents hold the subconscious key to the truth about their future circumstances and they should be present in more than spirit to impart it to the deck via the shuffle. If there is psychic “persipience” involved, it’s theirs, not mine. I make no claim of prescience except as channeled through the cards. When reading for other people I’m an interpreter, not a divine messenger or mind-reader. That said, in thinking about Radin’s two forms of persipience (presentiment, or premonitory feeling, and precognition, or foreknowledge), I realized that I shy away from the former as too “squishy” and put my money on the latter.
Parsifal's Wheel Tarot & Astrology 