AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’ll be in transit for the next week and I wanted to get this bit of absurdity out the door this afternoon even though it’s breaking my rule of one post per day.

File this one under “rhetorical raving” if you like; it’s a bit over-the-top. Every time I encounter someone reading the tarot cards with near-total reliance on intuitive speculation to the exclusion of more precise modes of inquiry, I can hear Lowell George of Little Feat singing faintly in the background “Foo-oo-ool yourself.”

While pondering Roman Polanski’s dark comedy, The Fearless Vampire Killers, I recalled that one of the tropes from the heyday of classic vampire tales was the premise that a vampire couldn’t enter your house without explicitly being invited in. With the current feeding frenzy of industrial-strength bloodsucker films, that constraint seems to have fallen by the wayside as being quaintly archaic.

Within a divination context I’m beginning to see that my posture toward the unchecked use of intuitive guesswork in tarot reading deploys the same interdiction: I’m mostly keeping it out and only letting it poke its nose (but not its fangs) into my work on my own terms, much like the way I treat AI content. If I’m not careful one will bleed me dry of my analytical precision and the other will corrupt my writing with its widespread (and largely unavoidable) plagiarism.

My reaction is that of the Yiddish vampire Shagal in Polanski’s film. When he was about to bite a beautiful chambermaid, who had shoved a gold Christian cross into his face to fend him off, Shagal said with a smirk and a dismissive hand-wave as he moved in on her: “Faugh! I’m not that kind of vampire!” In a similarly derisive vein (pun fully intended), I’m not going to be that kind vampire at the bloodless jugular of social-media tarot chicanery (I would starve to death) and I would propose that, if you have any presence-of-mind about the matter, you shouldn’t either. But don’t take it as gatekeeping, it’s just the hard-headed voice of experience speaking (plus an aversion to YouTube “talking heads”).

I came to the realization about intuitive dysfunction in 2011 when I returned to professional tarot practice after decades of private study and experimentation with more advanced techniques. At that time I also discovered the online tarot community that didn’t exist when I went on my extended hiatus (nor, for that matter, did powerful desktop computers). I was expecting great things of the interface, and for a few years I found it on the Aeclectic Tarot forum. But that site folded in 2017 and I was thrown into the dreary pit of Facebook’s tarot tokenism where most of the participants were newly-minted novices and those who weren’t were much too “woo” (and far too Jungian) for me, with very little philosophical cachet to show for their advanced experience level.

The majority of the latter were intuition-only readers who shunned most published tarot writing and all of the traditional baseline knowledge in their divination. They thought I was the benighted one because I read a lot of metaphysical books and preferred formal spreads, while I questioned their ability to remain objectively unbiased in their predictions. I began this blog in 2017 when Aeclectic closed and it has become my pulpit for criticizing the feeble state of social-media tarot discourse. I only recently ditched Facebook because Meta started shoving Hollywood garbage at me that I have no interest in. (My stance on this imposition is: “There is nothing less relevant to my life than Hollywood stars, professional sports figures and religious icons; I wish I could say the same for politicians.”)

I did go looking for the dispersed Aeclectic crowd, but I found only a few of them and when I did they had little use for my iconoclastic ways so I parted company with them once again. The rest – the esoteric deep-thinkers – never turned up. More recently I gave reddit another try, but the routine is the same: lots of beginners and a few seasoned readers who actually have something to offer. But I get tired of slogging through the pabulum to get to the meat. I currently spend some time on the Wizard’s Forum but the focus is 90% ceremonial magic with a yen for summoning demons. I left ritual magic behind in the 1980s, but while involved I had no use for calling on demons to do my bidding so I limited it to Qabalistic pathworking, banishing and talismanic work.

Which brings me up to date: writing my daily essays and posting them here. I’ve been on a roll for the last 100+ days, producing more profound written content (and – surprise, surprise! – it isn’t all curmudgeonly ranting), along with a number of more complex tarot spreads. But I’m leaving for Italy tomorrow for a two-week visit and I don’t plan on blogging while I’m gone. I have enough draft material in the “pending” queue to see me off and then I will be MIA for a while. I hope to find the tarot shops in Florence when we’re there.