AUTHOR’S NOTE: Excuse the minor autobiographical redundancy in this essay; its repetition was essential to my purpose.
A few years ago my son asked me how a guy who cuts down trees with a chainsaw can make such “girly” cocktails, an anomaly he found to be out-of-character (not that he doesn’t quaff them willingly). Short answer: I do it for the ladies and he just happens to be there. (To that rustic profile I would add “drinks scotch whisky neat, drives a pickup truck, fly-fishes for trout and is pleased to identify as half-Canadian . . . but don’t tell Monty Python that last bit, they would see it as “a fate worse than death,” like being Scottish or Australian.) I told him tongue-in-cheek “To truly be a 21st Century man, one must know these things.”
The same is true for the art of divination, the performance of which may seem peculiar for someone who had a Canadian lumberjack grandfather and an American truck-driver father as male role-models who shaped his early development. But beyond that it gets complicated since I always had an artistic, poetic and visionary temperament that can’t be traced to any of my forebears except perhaps my psychic, playing-card-reading grandmother but she would never demonstrate or even talk about it (most likely because she was too absorbed in cheating her young grandsons at card games, which we eventually caught on to).
While in the US Army I accidentally discovered that I have an IQ of 145 based on standard military testing (I had been wondering about that for some time), which eventually got me into Mensa. That distinction coupled with my insatiable curiosity about all things out-of-the-ordinary (exemplified by my teenage love of speculative fiction) and my year as an art student in mid-60s New York City brought me to astrology and then tarot at twenty years old. (I know, a Mensan certificate and $5 won’t even buy me a latte at Starbucks, and I soon found membership to be a narcissistic dead-end.)
I had always been an iconoclast and my maverick tendencies found a perfect fit in the esoteric field and its disavowal of religious dogmatism. My first major fascination was the Hermetic Qabalah, with which I spent a couple of years before doubling back into tarot reading under the spell of Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth and Thoth deck. (Note that the Tree of Life still lies at the heart of my numerological approach to the Minor Arcana.)
I’ve been pushing the envelope ever since, first in tinkering with the Golden Dawn’s Qabalistic formula for trump-card correspondences that I never found to be 100% convincing, then in adapting the Thoth tarot to my own reading style to the exclusion of all others, and most recently in departing from the New Age psychological model of astrological and tarot delineation in favor of a pragmatic focus that makes more sense in real-world terms. I adopted the premise that most clients already know who they are and don’t need to be told, they just want to find out what’s going to happen.
It might be called fortune-telling with a twist. I don’t look only at “what” is on the horizon but also make a stab at “why” and “how” it is going to manifest (with a minor riff on “when” if it should come up) to give a complete assessment of the situation being examined. Just advising a sitter of possible future trends and tendencies in the matter may be of little use if no counsel is offered on ways in which the developments might be confronted and handled should they play out as predicted, and I’m rarely let off the hook on that score anyway.
The key thought in that last statement is that any forecast is a moving target and things may change before they come to closure. Promoting a state of readiness for whatever arises is sometimes the best the diviner can do, and that shot at “empowerment” is really all that can reasonably be expected of any prediction.
For that reason I’m normally leery of giving advice, but querents often won’t relent until they receive at least an estimate of the full scope of the divination, including what might be done to optimize its value. I can’t just walk away from that appeal, so I try to couch my answer in terms that offer a range of options. I find this approach to work best for getting clear of the reading with minimum risk to my credibility while leaving my integrity intact.
Although it has its moments, divination is – as asserted by Enrique Enriquez – an “irrational act” that is seldom reliably literal in its pronouncements and such precision should not be taken for granted when a fluid impressionism (the “visual poetry” of Enriquez) is much more prevalent. There are ways to speak to the essence without being overly definitive about the details, which leaves room for the seeker’s improvisation. If, by engaging in dialogue, I can get them to do a bit of inspired projecting on their own based on my coaching, they are well on their way to a personalized solution.
I’m not sure how many modern tarot readers scrutinize their own responsibility as prognosticators to that visceral level of self-analysis. It comes from thinking (and caring) deeply about how we can best serve our clients’ needs and not just take the money and run. I’m not going to toss off a casual ten-minute reading when the cards are pointing to much more profound concerns. The challenge is to become proficient at shoehorning this broader perspective into the time allotted, which in my estimation is what separates the professionals from the amateurs. Chalk it up to “something one must know” to succeed.
