AUTHOR’S NOTE The inspiration for this brief essay came from a Stephen Wright quote in Dean Radin’s book Supernormal: “I was a peripheral clairvoyant. I saw the future, but only way off to the side.”
I’ve always been skeptical of intuitive (and, more specifically, psychic) tarot readers who claim they can learn everything they need to know about the importance of any card to the subject of a reading by staring at the picture and drawing conclusions from what they see. They use imaginative free-association and anecdotal conjecture to relay clues received from the artwork to a subjective interpretation that is confidently offered to the seeker as reliable.
Inspired insights supposedly materialize out of this visionary stew that can be related without hesitation to the topic of interest. As one who is steeped in the traditional wisdom underlying the cards and who doesn’t critically inspect them after acknowledging their presence on the table, my normal response to this obsessive preoccupation is “Gimme a break!” I’m particularly annoyed when the deck is one that wasn’t designed around the customary symbolism. Clara Peller (of Wendy’s fame) would have groused “Where’s the beef?”
My practice when contemplating the cards in a spread is to take two mental steps back, de-focus my superficial scanning faculties, and transfer narrative oversight directly to my classical estimation of their significance. If I were to favor the scenes with any recognition at all, it would be to give them a sidelong glance in passing to see if anything useful jumps out at me. I will generally file this information away for future reference as the reading progresses, and may not invoke it except as described below. I appreciate Yoav Ben-Dov’s premise that “Everything is a sign,” but I apply it with my wary “side-eye” peeled.
As you might suppose, anything I glean from this fly-by encounter with the cards is supplemental to what I already know about them from years of study and practical experience. I treat any transient visual impressions as memory-joggers that help me retrieve the assimilated cache of meaning from wherever I’ve temporarily stashed it at the back of my cerebral filing-cabinet. In my literal way of reading, the images are not the stars of the show and the pictorial hints serve only as a safety net; I sometimes use them to jump-start a stalled presentation when I can’t think of anything more compelling to say.
Fortunately, I have plenty of oracular artifacts from past sessions squirreled away with which to flesh out my analytical working model in creative ways. If I didn’t have something to jazz up the storytelling I might as well be reciting from a list of keywords. This is where peripheral vision in the mind’s eye comes into its own. A glimpse of the future that is “way off to the side” can be spotted, hauled to center stage and made to deliver its lines for the advancement of the plot.
This lurker is rarely a callow understudy waiting nervously to be tapped for the role but rather a seasoned veteran of many campaigns “behind the footlights.” When you’ve been reading the cards for decades as I have, you’ve most likely collected a motley crew of supernumeraries that can be dragged out and dusted off when the production demands a few background characters. I don’t rely on intuition to sniff them out for a specific appearance, I’ve run into them many times before and they will come when called. Their dependable contribution is what I would describe as a “known quantity” that augments my internalized understanding of the main theme.
I find the Thoth tarot with its evocative Minor Arcana to be superior for this purpose; the Waite-Smith deck contains far too many of Waite’s intentional “blinds” (not to mention his emphatic disdain for divination) and Smith’s prosaic “staged” scenarios (along with an occasional misleading “red herring”) for it to be valuable even as a source of metaphorical backup for less-figurative interpretation. It’s a bit too pedestrian for my taste; I use it sparingly, and seldom in the critical situations where the Thoth excels.
