AUTHOR’S NOTE: Although my previous multi-decade retirement from public divination was a consequence of my rustic circumstances, this time I’m going back into relative hibernation by choice. I plan to continue blogging at my customary rate, but I’ve decided not to seek broader external exposure unless it finds me first. I suppose at this point I will just ride off into the sunset.

I’ve received very little reward in either income or recognition for presenting tarot content online over the last nine years, and even less satisfaction in trying to create local buzz. I don’t really need the money, but the acknowledgement would be nice. The convenience of electronic media has pretty much replaced first-hand contact with like-minded people, and I think it’s because anonymity and privacy are valued more than direct engagement. If nobody knows who you are, they can’t “put anything over” on you that you might regret, and you can define yourself as anything you choose with no-one being the wiser. Gamesmanship trumped relationship skills in human affairs over the last twenty years when we weren’t paying attention.

There is a decided lack of trust, and I’m as guilty of it as anyone given my cynical take on humanity that has only been exacerbated by the online circus. Robert Anton Wilson would probably have called it “bad conditioning on top of bad imprinting” that occurred in my late teens, loosely characterizing me as the emotional “walking wounded.” Let’s just say I have my reasons that go back at least fifty years and now contribute only a mildly jaundiced outlook since I’ve outlasted the perps, all of whom are either dispersed or deceased. You might say “He laughs best who gasps last.”

I’m reminded of the years between 1980 and 2018 that I spent flailing away at esoteric studies and practice in private. Culturally and socially, I was in the middle of nowhere in rural New Hampshire, with few metaphysical peers anywhere in my vicinity. There was no internet, and my experience with local tarot and astrology groups was disappointing; there just wasn’t the population or the interest to support it, and the local shops with community events came and went, although I was briefly engaged with one of them before moving out of the area.

I’m not much of a self-promoter, preferring to stand or fall on the quality of my output. I’ve occasionally tried to get something going on Meetup or join gatherings already in progress, but it has never worked out since most of the latter were “for-profit” ventures, not open discussion forums. More recently I’ve been doing some remote tarot reading by email, but I’ve been finding that few people want to pay more than a pittance for a professional reading, and they ghost me when they hear what I charge. I don’t work for free and I offer excellent value for the money, but the $5 and $10 Etsy readers have cornered the market and I refuse to compete at that level. My time is worth more than that.

Tarot may be experiencing a renaissance of sorts, but it is nowhere near as sophisticated as it was back in the 1970s at the height of the New Age movement with its focus on Jungian psychology and esoteric theory, or even prior to 2017 when Aeclectic Tarot was still active. While things may be going great for the social-media crowd, the threadbare content has me thinking of the fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes, or more recently the scene from the high-fashion satire film Pret-a-Porter where the supermodels walked down the runway nude. I’ve certainly been unimpressed by most of what I see in online tarot culture, to the point that I recently took my leave.

The experienced “old guard” is not hanging around the internet water-cooler much; if they haven’t disappeared entirely, they’re mostly squirreled away on the more dignified tarot history and classical tarot sites, or they are busily writing books that few social-media-besotted neophytes will read. I was there for a while too, but when I dumped Facebook I lost access to those platforms, and I think I’m done publishing my own books. There has been nothing large-scale that is comparable to Aeclectic in its depth of coverage and its savvy participants, even the tarot page that was formed by some of its alumni. (They didn’t like my curmudgeonly dismissal of “young girls playing make-believe with cards” anyway.)

Reddit tries but it just doesn’t have the concentrated horsepower to get very far and it is too often superficial or egotistical. Much like Facebook, the tarot subs consist of approximately equal groups of novices with nothing to say and poseurs with nothing to add, and as Billy Preston sang in 1974, “Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.” There isn’t much room in any of these venues for intelligent debate that doesn’t toe the mystical and intuitive “psycho-spiritual empowerment” line, and I abandoned that form of cheerleading when the New Age counterculture faded in the mid-1980s. For the scholar and philosopher of tarot with a pragmatic approach to divination, it’s all a waste of time. Maybe I’ll ditch metaphysics and take up quantum cosmology.