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Tarot Reading: Words and Pictures
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I believe I’ve found the perfect aphorism to describe the art of tarot reading. It was in a 1989 short story by science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling, of all places. According to a quote in the story, “underground” (an old cultural buzzword) cartoonist R. Crumb (he of Fritz the Cat fame although you may…...
“Putting A Face To It”: Physical Profiling with the Tarot
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Most of us have felt the quandary expressed in the trope “I know the name but I can’t put a face to it.” I’m often asked whether the court cards of the tarot can be used to reliably describe the physical characteristics of someone involved in the querent’s life. Here is my answer…...
Breaking Into Spreads: A Beginner’s Syllabus
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Here is another essay prompted by a “frequently asked question” from the online tarot community. Tarot beginners who follow the conventional wisdom of learning the cards one-at-a-time, both in a sequential “card-a-day” manner and via single-card pulls, are often unsure how they can break out of that narrow box and into more complex…...
Schrodinger and the “Fabric of Reality”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I once described divination in fanciful terms as “running my mental fingers through the warp-and-woof of the fabric of reality, trying to tease out threads of truth.” More recently I encountered the ideas of physicist Erwin Schrodinger, whose example of a metaphorical “cat” that can be both alive and dead at the same time…...
Rolling Back the Golden Dawn’s Syllabus
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’ve known for some time that those who prefer classical decks like the Tarot de Marseille to the esoteric reveries of the post-Occult Revival don’t subscribe to the conflation of Hebrew letters and trump cards in general, and particularly not to the model proposed by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Rather…...
The Star, the Moon and the Sun: An Optical Analogy
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Here I’m using the analogy of a telescope to examine the transition between the three consecutive “lights” of the Major Arcana. As the series of tarot trumps nears its end, we are faced with the necessity of refocusing our view of the world from all angles – mental. emotional, spiritual and practical –…...
The High Priestess and Fidelity
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The High Priestess is above all a paragon of fidelity. Sallie Nichols describes her archetypal mission, in part, as “obedience to true spirit,” but here I will attempt to ground that observation in more mundane terms. When the High Priestess appears in a reading, it suggests the need to root out any irregularity…...
Detachment, the Master Key to Objectivity
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’ve yet to meet a tarot beginner who hasn’t agonized over whether an emotionally unsteady state of mind will improperly bias the outcome when reading for themselves.* This can certainly happen (for example, in stressful romantic situations), but it doesn’t have to. For the record, divination with the cards is an emotive storytelling…...
Circular Thinking and the “Simultaneity of All Opposites”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The Wheel of Fortune is a card that is passed over lightly by many tarot writers, and by most readers who think they know exactly what it means: some kind of change that can go either way, favorable or unfavorable. The reading then moves on to the next card in the spread to…...
By Any Other Name
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Current divination culture shuns as unethical any attempt to forecast the death of an individual, even when it is clearly imminent due to a terminal illness. (After all, it doesn’t make sense for amateurs to overstep the legal and professional bounds of a medical diagnosis.) The final “moment of truth” is usually the…...
