AUTHOR’S NOTE: Back in 2017 I wrote an essay on the subject of “strictures against judgment” in horary astrology, those conditions pertaining to a horoscope that render it unfit for interpretation (i.e. it is not considered “radical”). …

AUTHOR’S NOTE: These are entirely my own opinions about what it takes to become an effective tarot reader in a face-to-face setting, based on over five decades of practice. (Online reading doesn’t count since it is not an interactive art requiring presentation skills; it falls under the “black & white”…

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Not long ago I answered an online question about how I would rank my favorite methods of divination. This required me to step back and re-examine where I’ve been going with prognostication over the last fifty-odd years. Tarot: Reading the tarot cards is the “fortune-telling” practice I’ve been…

AUTHOR’S NOTE: It’s a rare diviner who doesn’t occasionally encounter an almost entirely neutral tarot reading, one that is about as exciting as dishwater, and who doesn’t have a good feel for how to shine a constructive light on the forecast. A common practice is to simply keep pulling cards…

Here is a deceptively simple spread that permits the reader to examine four different approaches to a situation either singly or collectively: the Way of Action (forceful); the Way of Feeling (emotional); the Way of Thought (cerebral) and the Way of Prudence (practical). There are no specific “outcome” cards, just those that show the means to an end. The row(s) with the most fortunate series of cards should be considered the “advice” scenario. Conversely, the least favorable row(s) can be read as cautionary.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I was already a natal astrologer of the “psychological” school and had been for a couple of years before I began pursuing tarot study and practice in a systematic (primarily esoteric) way. …

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Those of us who follow a qabalistic approach to the esoteric tarot recognize that the roots of our study and practice lie in Hebrew religious mysticism that has been adapted for ritual use by the 19th-Century Hermetic occultists of the Western Mystery Tradition. We may invoke the words…

AUTHOR’S NOTE: As I’m using it here, to “sublimate” something means to “elevate it to a higher order of excellence.” I’m focusing this principle on the problem of how to deal in a constructive way with particularly discouraging cards in a tarot reading that stubbornly resist interpretive mitigation. We may…

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The Germans have a precise but rather fierce-sounding word for it: weltanschauung. As an esoteric thinker with Germanic roots and a decidedly rational (as well as curmudgeonly) approach to tarot matters, I’ve always had reservations about the metaphysical worldview that assumes everything in existence is mystically entwined in…