AUTHOR’S NOTE: Anxiety over the intrusion of emotional bias that might sabotage the accuracy of self-reading with the tarot is epidemic in the online community, to the point that some novices avoid it completely. This risk appears most often in romantic forecasts and similar scenarios where wishful thinking looms large. Such avoidance is unfortunate because reading for oneself is a tried-and-true method for becoming intimate with the cards as quickly as possible, and an example of what Aleister Crowley described as “the practical, everyday, commonplace way” to do so.

During the era of pre-digital electronics, maintaining strict separation between channels was critical to signal integrity; failing to do so allowed “cross-talk” that resulted in distortion and garbled transmission, whether in communication or analog recording. This exclusion normally relied on various types of preconditioning or filtering. Regarding the subject of this essay, Benebell Wen put it precisely in her book Holistic Tarot, noting that a diviner who would undertake self-reading must wear two hats:

“You can read the tarot for yourself if you can wear both the hat of the practitioner and the hat of the seeker as two independent and separate entities in two different states simultaneously.”

Trying to be both seeker and reader at the same time without creating some distance between desire and dispassionate self-scrutiny can cause dissonance that reduces the credibility of the reading. This has never fazed me because I have no problem segregating my analytical mindset from my more anecdotal outlook. (It’s not so much my “steel-trap mind” as my steely resolve to resist being deflected by speculative what-iffing.) I admit that this is most likely due to a certain fatalism about “life as we know it,” which at its most clinical (and cynical) observes that we breathe; we consume; we eliminate; some of us procreate with mixed results; we eventually decline; and we ultimately die. The story has been written innumerable times over hundreds of thousands of years and the protagonist never “lives happily ever after” (at least not on the physical plane).

I had a friend who once told me that he believes a human being is no more significant than an ant. I won’t go that far, but I can still appreciate self-analysis with the tarot as being akin to studying a bug under a microscope. Over the last fifteen years I’ve performed hundreds of experimental readings with myself as the subject, and developed hundreds of tarot spreads for that purpose, but I’ve never felt the slightest twinge of apprehension over the possibility that I might be subconsciously contaminating the results. To be honest, it has never crossed my mind since almost all of the readings were conducted to test my metaphysical assumptions. In other words, they were more about the process than the fate of the person. (I had already spent forty years doing the psycho-spiritual thing with both astrology and tarot.)

The “filters” I’ve applied have mostly been tied to: 1) reading the cards strictly for content and not emotional import; 2) taking two steps back from the immediacy of the question or topic (which was often hypothetical anyway); and 3) approaching the whole thing from the “40,000-foot level” of scientific detachment. These presumptions are cast aside when I read for other people because my style is to encourage the “induction” of their subconscious awareness of future circumstances into the cards via the shuffle, regardless of the nature of the issue they’ve brought to the table. I still “just read the cards” but in a more patient and sympathetic manner that allows space for their input.

I suppose we must first ask why we want to cross-examine ourselves with the cards. Is it a learning exercise? Are we trying to assess our thoughts and feelings about a matter in which we’re involved? Do we have more abstract psychological or spiritual motives? All of these are worthy pursuits, and if we’re honest in how we approach them we will most likely receive a straight answer. If, on the other hand, we’re merely indulging in confirmation bias with the hope that it will validate our preconceptions, we will wind up “preaching to the choir” and only hear what we want to hear. I’ve never felt the need to go there.