AUTHOR’S NOTE: One of the strangest questions posed from time-to-time in the online tarot community (even stranger than “Do you think the cards have personalities?”) is “Do you talk to your decks?”

As if we can be expected to cozy up to a pack of cards on the sofa over tea and have a meaningful tete-a-tete. I know, I’m no fun. But after all they are just tools, artifacts of cardboard and ink, and even dumber than Omar Khayyam’s clay with its “all-obliterated tongue.” We can talk at them in the form of self-projection but not really with them. It’s the artists who express themselves through the images that give the tarot a voice (along with Pythagoras, Empedocles, Etteilla and the occult architects of the Golden Dawn, among many others, but they can’t be reached for comment), and the only way to start a conversation is to send the publisher a request for contact information.

When I first took up the Thoth tarot in 1972, I discovered the essay “The Behaviour of the Tarot” in Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth (BoT), in which he observed that the student “cannot reach any true appreciation of them (that is, the cards) without observing their behaviour over a long period; he can only come to an understanding of the tarot through experience. It will not be sufficient for him to intensify his studies of the cards as objective things; he must use them; he must live with them. They, too, must live with him. A card is not isolated from its fellows. The reactions of the cards, their interplay with each other, must be built into the very life of the student.”

As any married-with-children person knows, one cannot share a home with another individual (or several of them) and expect blissful silence all (or even most) of the time. The tarot cards can be annoying just like kids; they won’t let us be. (Full disclosure: at present I only have grandchildren at home and can give them back). If we don’t engage with our decks, they will lurk at the back of the shelf and glare sullenly at us, grumbling to themselves whenever we pass them over for a more genial companion.

I currently have over 80 of them and the vast majority almost always have a case of “the sulks.” The ignored decks simply don’t speak to me in a way that encourages creative cooperation, and I don’t bother trying to coax anything serviceable from them when there are many others that don’t fight me. If I refuse to talk to them, maybe they will stop whining in my metaphorical “inner ear” and just stew in peace. Selling them would be an even more blatant admission of poor judgement in the original purchase, so they sit . . . and sit.

The closest I come to an informal chat with the cards occurs during the customary “new deck interview.” But I don’t ask leading questions of them as many people do. Instead, I have a layout that I use to develop a “quasi-psychological personality profile.” It has specific positions that I fill with cards drawn randomly from the deck that are intended to reveal the kind of attitude it will exhibit in professional practice. I call it the “Tell Me No Lies” Deck Personality Profile, and lately it has become one of my most-viewed blog posts. The spread does the interrogation and I take notes like any attentive psychoanalyst.

I’m pleased to say that the Thoth deck is in no danger of being exiled. I commune with it daily in one way or another, normally by doing readings with it or by enlisting its insights (and those of the BoT) in the conduct of my writing. I lived with it exclusively for almost 40 years in a Crowleyan one-on-one relationship, and its imagery now sits at the top of my head like a phantom conductor orchestrating my every tarot thought.

Of course, it has worthy competitors for my attention, but I typically give it the last word in matters of profound divinatory significance, and I prefer to substitute its Qabalistic sensibilities (in the way of symbolic words and concepts) for those of any other deck I happen to be using except the Tarot de Marseille, which is something else entirely. You could say we trust one another implicitly without exchanging a word that hasn’t already been pondered at length.