AUTHOR’S NOTE: It’s not uncommon that seekers who resort to a professional diviner have reached a dead-end in their personal affairs. Either they have come up against the proverbial “brick wall” and feel like they can go no further without help, or they have not yet found their way to that barrier and are floundering aimlessly, unable to gain traction in their current circumstances.
Short of visiting a psychotherapist or other licensed provider, these individuals may find that an experienced tarot reader is uniquely equipped to assist them in sorting things out. Up to a point, of course; if we don’t already possess the qualifications, we should shy away from any engagement that involves government strictures such as formal training, monitored experience and official credentials, and remain vigilant for legal liability. (We may be artists, but we could be messing with our clients’ mental, emotional and physical well-being and taking on health, financial and statutory matters can be playing with fire.)
The word “empowerment” is tossed around lightly in tarot circles, but I think it’s a bit uppity. If we can motivate our clients to get off their backsides and do something constructive on their own behalf without burdening them with an inflation-adjusted “fifty-cent word” like empowerment, we will have met the objective. Inertia is the bane of ambition, and all too often it is the only thing standing in the way of accomplishment. If a reading can drum up some enthusiasm the battle is almost won but, as George Carlin said, above all else “Ya gotta wanna” and it’s “lackawanna” that bites you.
Tarot encouragement comes in two forms: upbeat cheerleading and cautionary advice. The first is frequently associated with favorable cards and the second more typically attends less fortunate cards. Turning the latter into any kind of behavioral reinforcement is the hardest task a reader faces when the cards are especially dire. It’s unwise to say “grin and bear it” when the bricks and mortar of the Tower are falling all around the querent.
I don’t set out to work my sitters into a frenzy of optimistic anticipation anyway, I read the cards in a calm, detached manner that covers all the bases but never flies off into hyperactive boosterism. It’s not my job to convince them to do anything they don’t see a good reason for doing, but it is my responsibility to point them at all the options described by the cards and let them choose for themselves. This is the kind of motivation the tarot excels at delivering as long as the reader has the skill to coax it out of the spread and the sitter is paying attention.
I tend to present my forecasts with a fairly high degree of equivocation. Rather than saying “This is or isn’t likely to happen,” I will advise the seeker “Here is a potential trend that you might watch out for, and it could manifest thus-and-so.” There is no point in getting them cranked up over something that is still open-ended and will stay that way until something breaks in the situation. My mission is to alert them to the pressure-points where such abrupt transitions could reasonably occur (in my spread designs I label them “turning-points”); theirs is to keep their eyes peeled and stay light on their feet. Sometimes a little judicious “weasel-wording” goes a long way toward prompting them to engage.
Then there are the clients who have no clue that I’m trying to steer them toward an epiphany about some action they should at least be thinking of undertaking. These individuals can be completely “at sea” about what they’re seeing and hearing, so I’m confronted with the challenge of becoming Virgil to their Dante. I have to spend precious time giving them their coordinates and apprising them of their inherent safeguards and vulnerabilities before I can consider handing them their marching orders. They want to know all about the mechanics but can come up empty when it is time to assimilate the guidance. I do my best, but I often leave the session with a “woulda/coulda/shoulda” feeling that I haven’t connected. <Steve Miller sings “Take the money and run” in the background.>
You answered my one-pass objection on the last thread, so let me take it: a pre-reading dialogue plus a post-reading Q&A is a longer pass, not no pass. Fine. But the Q&A is where a miss becomes a loose end to be tied up. Put the claim on the record before the questions open, or “tying up loose ends” means the reader smoothing the one that didn’t land.
On the new post: last week you told me you weren’t looking for unfalsifiable results. Here it’s “judicious weasel-wording,” and it’s the thing that prompts them to engage. Both can’t be true. Wording chosen because it can’t be wrong buys engagement for the reading, not for the sitter.
And “empowerment” swapped for “drum up some enthusiasm” is the same coin in plainer shoes. The word isn’t the problem, the stake is: a reading that only lands if the sitter acts has made the reader a shareholder in the outcome.
The piece of your practice I’d keep from this thread: sitters pulling their own cards and handing you the list. That draw isn’t yours to steer. Turning-points too. Drop the weasel-wording.
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I see the Q&A thing more as patching up a miscommunication than as an outright miss. I try to make a reading a mutual voyage of discovery and if we “pass in the night” I want to steer back on course. As I’m sure you can tell, my take on all of this is nuanced and primarily intellectual; mysticism counts, but not for much. I accept very little of it at face value, and I often enlist creative wordplay to dance around the less rational aspects. My early exposure was entirely esoteric, but now my intention is more pragmatic and I try to take what I learned back in the ’70s and ’80s and recast it in those terms. Some of it fits, much of it doesn’t.
A friend of mine said of the Golden Dawn “canon:” “Some guys made up a bunch of stuff but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work” to which I appended “after a fashion.” I generally leave the occult stuff out of my work except in rare instances, and when I finally took up the Tarot de Marseille seriously I excluded it entirely. Regarding the “shareholder” premise, I don’t see how we can avoid it since we helped plow the ground but we can’t force the crop to grow; that’s entirely up to the seeker.
I don’t read the cards for other people to hear myself expound and “count coup” on my successes, I mainly want to give them a shot at a different kind of awareness. Sometimes they expect more, but I’m leery of cooperating; I’ve turned clients away after two or three attempts at the same question using tarot, Lenormand and horary astroloy, even though they were willing to keep paying, because I had nothing more to tell them.
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‘Made up but it works’ holds until the made-up part is also your evidence. Strip the occult from the TdM and the meanings are convention plus your eye; what do you tell a sitter who asks where they come from? Turning paying clients away when you have nothing left to say is the one anti-shareholder move in this thread. Keep it.
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When I wrote my short TdM book, I was standing on the shoulders of Yoav Ben-Dov and Enrique Enriquez without plagiarizing them, especially the latter’s idea that the TdM images are “visual poetry.” I relied on my graphic-artist’s sensibilities to deconstruct the pip designs into meaningful “shapes” that I then turned into a personal vocabulary of definitions. It was eye-opening and allowed me to penetrate the non-scenic inscrutabilty of the images.
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Ben-Dov 2013 (The Open Reading) + Enriquez’s Tarology: the meanings have a birth certificate and two named authors. Better than “ancient wisdom.” But it makes the vocabulary your craft, not a source. So when a sitter’s life won’t fit your shapes, do you read them, or hand them the shapes to fill?
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The vocabulary is of my own device, the sources were only my inspiration. I developed it based on my visual deconstruction of the graphic features that I translated into symbolic meaning. I had been told by those who know more about the TdM than I do that there is no historical tradition for its interpretation, so it was obviously the right thing to do if I didn’t want to just parrot the modern literature (which I found wanting anyway).
I took it on because I was dissatisfied with the parsing of every last flower, bud, leaf and branch into some kind of divinatory significance as many TdM writers (Ben-Dov included, as well as Jodorowsky, Marteau and Jean-Michel David) seem to find so important. It seemed like a personal system, as is my own.
It’s still very much a work-in-progress, so whenever I read with it I take the interaction as input for further development. I don’t expect to find a perfect fit, so for the most part I rely on suit-and-number theory for my basic interpretation of the pips and hierarchical conventions for the courts; purging the trumps of the taint of esotericism was the most difficult, but Cherry Gilchrist’s Tarot Triumphs pointed my in the right direction. In that vein, although Sherryl Smith of Tarot Heritage gave my little book high marks for the pip and court sections, she demurred on the trumps so I took the hint and rewrote that material (although I didn’t republish the book, just posted the update in my blog).
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“No historical tradition” is the half of it I’d push on. There’s an anonymous Bologna manuscript from around 1750 with rudimentary divinatory meanings for the Tarocco Bolognese (Pratesi, The Playing-Card 17:4, 1989), and the tradition proper starts in Paris in 1783: Etteilla’s Maniere de se recreer avec le jeu de cartes nommees tarots, read on the Tarot de Marseille, by a man who made his living at it. The trumps were not untrodden ground. You’re not outside a tradition, you’re rewriting one that’s 240 years old, which is a stronger position than a vacuum.
But notice where your two load-bearing rules stop. Suit-and-number covers the pips. Hierarchy covers the courts. The trumps have neither, so they rest on your eye plus Gilchrist. That is the section Smith demurred on, and you rewrote it without republishing. The only part of the system with no external floor is the part nobody but you has read.
So when a sitter sits down: do they get told which meanings are inherited and which are yours, or does the deck speak in one voice?
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That’s a fair question. By the time I sit down with a client, the deck should be speaking in one voice because I would only confuse them by trying to parse it too finely. They didn’t come for a history lesson, after all. If the seams are showing, I haven’t done a good job of integration. I handle it the same way I do in the non-TdM world with, for example, astrological correspondences: they may give me useful insights on occasion but the sitter never hears a word of it because I finesse the details. They’re usually seeking actionable advice and don’t want to look under the hood, so the mechanics should remain invisible unless they specifically ask “why.” Since I see tarot as a storyteller’s art, I will turn to metaphors and analogies before I hand them punch-lists of technicalities.
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One voice is the tell. Not a dig. A system with seams is one someone is still building, and yours is yours. But if the sitter can’t see where the voice comes from, they can’t tell a reading from a mirror. I’d rather hand them the seam. My whole practice is saying which card, and why. Not to teach. So they can argue.
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I wouldn’t mind a little push-back from my clients but most of them aren’t equipped for it unless I first give them something easy to swallow that they can then regurgitate and chew on. I do encourage questions at any point during the reading but my style tends to be comprehensive so I don’t receive many.
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Decide in advance they can’t take it and you never find out. Same shape as a forecast that can’t miss: ‘not equipped’ means no reading gets tested by the sitter. ‘Comprehensive’ is the other half. Fill every gap, nothing’s left to push into. The seam isn’t for them. It’s what stops me mistaking my voice for the deck.
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I think you may be misunderstanding me. I make no presumptions going into a reading, I just take it as it comes, but my experience has been that trying to go too deep into the minutiae just earns me a quizzical stare and I don’t usually have the time to backtrack and coach them through it when the result may still be the same. Anyway, I’m perfectly comfortable with the professional methods I’ve been honing over the last fifteen years and, while I appreciate your insights, I won’t be rethinking them at this point. There is always room to grow, but I usually follow my own muse.
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Fair. Fifteen years of honing beats three weeks of arguing, and the reading is yours to read. I’ll keep the receipts desk on the other side of the table. Thanks for going fifteen rounds with me. That’s rarer than agreement, and I mean it.
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Well-met, I’d say, so don’t take the essay I’m posting tomorrow personally. It’s titled “The ‘Medium’ is Not Always the ‘Message.'” (Remember Marshall McLuhan?)
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