AUTHOR’S NOTE: Near the beginning of Robert Anton Wilson’s book Prometheus Rising there is a drawing that shows a man contemplating a model of his private universe at its narrowest cross-section, completely ignorant of the sweeping, sidelong view that would have given him a much broader perspective on its true size. It’s as if he’s peering into a microscope when he should be using a telescope, and is therefore seeing only what is immediately in front of his nose, dominating his entire field of vision. Tarot readers who focus solely on the imagery and forego the explanatory text with its amplifying details might find this cautionary tale of self-willed blindness enlightening. The famous Lon Milo DuQuette quote is instructive here: “It’s all in your head — you just have no idea how big your head is.”
I absorb a lot of tarot and other metaphysical literature (as long as it is available on Kindle since that device fits neatly on the handlebars of the exercise treadmill where I do most of my reading). After simmering briefly in my consciousness, any useful insights I obtain invariably find their way into my essays, filtered through my own unique point-of-view. This has been ongoing since 2017 and it permeates a large percentage of my nearly 2,900 blog posts. (Since I offer my daily output at no cost to tarot enthusiasts, I think of it as a public service and perhaps a stimulus for individual growth.)
In my early twenties (1972 to be exact) I began my tarot journey like everyone else by taking the cards at face value with the aid of a little rudimentary information in the form of keywords. But I had the advantage of a burgeoning esoteric curiosity grounded in my previous exposure to Hermetic and Qabalistic principles that had jelled into a mystical philosophy within an occult framework. I stumbled upon Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth and Thoth tarot after flirting briefly with Eden Gray’s The Tarot Revealed and Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot (although in those primordial times I had yet to locate an RWS deck before moving on to the Thoth), and the rest, as they say, is history.
It has been asserted that human cognition is a pattern-making apparatus, and when we examine the scenery on a tarot card without enlisting related sources of knowledge we are tempted to immediately free-associate from the experience and form assumptions about the message it conveys based solely on that impressionistic appraisal. This uncritical “surface scan” is usually oblivious to the depth of symbolism the image bears, and therein lies the myopic flaw in the common take on the folkloric “canned narrative vignettes” of the RWS tarot and its ilk that I’m prone to disparage.
This is the foundation of the so-called “intuitive” approach to interpretation that all-too-often morphs into a divinatory rendition of Kubla Khan’s airy “miracle of rare device” so aptly described by poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In short, charming fantasy can hijack the narrative with its freestyle improvisation and dislodge any tentative foothold that reason may have presented to the reader’s awareness (not that the allure of more literal implications ever crosses the mind of a devoted mystic).
Unfortunately, these confections typically stray quite far from anything remotely resembling classical tarot values. This is where well-chosen source material comes into its own. I’m not talking about the endless flood of modern tarot books written almost exclusively around the intuitive paradigm, lightweight fare that scarcely deserves recognition, but rather more substantial works like the aforementioned Book of Thoth or even the dated but still compelling Tarot of the Bohemians by Papus. (A bit of digging will unearth many others of comparable worth.) This material demands perseverance and mental acuity to penetrate adequately, at least to the point that it will yield valuable lessons in tarot disambiguation.
From what I’ve seen of the social-media tarot community, I doubt that the worlds of visionary supposition and scholarly exploration will ever meet on an equal footing. Modern practitioners are simply too keen on the addictive “buzz” of resurgent tarot popularity to make time for a more measured contribution to the art, and developing a persistent philosophy of prognostication is the farthest thing from a collective mind that is awash in social infatuation. The locomotive seems to be accelerating in the wrong direction, toward a “dumb-and-dumber” destination, and I see little inclination for the beguiled passengers to de-train any time soon, certainly not while the party rages on.
That brings me back to my main point: a wealth of practical guidance is waiting to be discovered in the tarot’s historical baseline (going back at least to the seminal work of Jean-Baptiste Alliette [“Etteilla”] in the second half of the 18th Century), and to say that novice readers need not avail themselves of its bounty is naive at best and misguided at worst. Beyond an inability to concentrate on complex subject matter for more than a few minutes without becoming distracted or bored (the earmark of a deficient education, a stunted attention span and a reluctance to process anything more profound than a text message), I’m at a loss to explain what is driving this aversion to the pursuit of an informal course of study that can further one’s grasp of tarot’s wide and deep current of uncommon wisdom. For lack of a robust semantic “can-opener,” its benefits will remain out-of-reach and they will retreat even further as weak diagnostic habits become entrenched.
Sooner or later a crossroads will be reached where we must decide which path we want to take: one limping toward a future of trivial subjectivity or one of ever-growing predictive confidence and potency. Hopefully the current crop of young readers will grow up in time to make the right choice before the whole shebang lands in “metaphysical purgatory.” After all, we can’t all be accomplished psychics with flawless foresight; some of us must aspire to analytical acumen and logical feasibility. Personally, I try to keep one foot in each camp but my heart lies in the longstanding objective tradition with minimal reliance on subconscious projection.
To satisfy the premise of the title, here are a dozen of the most important tenets in my personal tarot philosophy. These are the key provisions; there are numerous corollaries.
A tarot reading partakes of both literal and mystical dimensions, with a major analytical and minor speculative component; the latter is not fundamental to success and should mainly be tapped as needed to amplify and elucidate the former.
The traditional wisdom and its established knowledge base serve as the initial input for a competent reading, with more intuitive or psychic suggestions fleshing out the narrative as it evolves. The interpretive core also acts as a dependable “safety net” or fallback position when the augury ventures too far out onto a shaky limb of unfounded conjecture and must be reeled in to bring it back on course. (An observant and perhaps skeptical querent will usually let the reader know when this occurs.)
A reading builds organically, with salient points forming the cornerstones of the architecture and supplemental insights providing the “connecting tissue” and “color commentary” that respectively strengthen and enliven the presentation.
A strong tarot vocabulary is founded largely on organization, internalization and integration of cardinal and ordinal principles, not on a jumble of rote memorization and subjective navel-gazing.
Although each card is a jewel of metaphysical precision, in practice the images are primarily cues or prompts for instant recall. On-the-fly visual extemporizing amounts to secondary and often superfluous embroidery that can hobble the interpretation with an overload of personal bias. Keeping it simple and to-the-point is always preferable to artful grandstanding.
Scenic and folkloric content (i.e. “canned narrative vignettes” as exemplified by the RWS Minor Arcana) can lead a reader astray by sabotaging the symbolic import and hijacking the plot. The practitioner should proceed cautiously in that direction and consider adopting a non-scenic deck such as the Tarot de Marseille or a semi-scenic one like the Thoth, both of which strongly resist prosaic mystification.
Esoteric correspondences (e.g.elemental, astrological, numerological and hierarchical associations), while intermittently useful, are not essential to every reading and should be held in reserve. When applied, they should be rephrased in conventional language that purges the arcane technical verbiage to ensure comprehension and avoid confusion. Indulging in abstruse broadsides is one of the fastest ways to shed clientele.
The scientific method and the Hegelian (more properly “Fichtean”) dialectic can be applied to tarot reading as long as a feedback loop is established and the diviner is diligent about recording and archiving results for further analysis. (I’m not referring to “journaling,” which is too often left open-ended.) But this would be a rare and daunting feat of academic gymnastics that is beyond the ken of average tarot readers (nor do they truly care about such empirical evidence as long as they get a nod of agreement from their clients).
The storytelling modes of inspiration, imagination and ingenuity and their reliance on anecdotal “tropes” such as metaphor and analogy are more germane to public tarot reading than raw intuition, a “catch-all” term that is routinely overused and poorly understood. Coming across as purely intuitive is the spurious “high-water-mark” of the modern diviner that is inclined to produce empty rhetoric. Give me an analytical “thinker” with a flair for creative speculation and not a mystical “guesser” to work with and I will hand you back a crisp, coherent account of the matter in question with no fuzzy “soft-focus” insinuations to puzzle over.
Tarot reading is at its most effective when undertaken as a “performance art” in a face-to-face setting: two people in a room with a deck of cards between them while the seeker “induces” his or her subliminal awareness of future conditions into the arrangement of the cards via the shuffle. In the right hands, remote prognostication is a legitimate form of psychic contact between two minds, but far too much of what the seasoned esoteric practitioner finds online hints at “young girls playing make-believe with cards” to be taken seriously. The querent’s crucial role in the divination is not one that can be assumed with absolute authority by the reader if subjective bias is to be avoided.
Preconception, projection and subconscious partiality, along with catering to a sitter’s confirmation bias in the hopeful pursuit of “empowerment,” are the greatest risks faced by any diviner who attempts to conduct a remote reading. “Just reading the cards” in a fortune-telling manner without trying to get inside the distant querent’s head from a psychological or spiritual perspective is one way to minimize these hazards when an in-person session can’t be arranged. Mind-reading with props by amateur card-slingers with no psychoanalytical experience or training is not going to convince anyone who stops to think about it.
Whenever reading the cards for other people, it is essential to engage your brain before opening your mouth. Think first and regret nothing later. If we land in “woulda/shoulda/coulda” territory after the sitter departs we’ve missed the mark.
Postscript: If these arguments strike a chord, you might also appreciate my slightly less-nimble (who am I kidding? . . . much more ponderous, a true “wall-of-text”) 2022 essay, “The Post-Rational Diviner.”
