“Answer Me This If You Can . . .”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: There is a persistent myth among diviners who haven’t carefully thought it through that tarot can’t be used to answer “yes-or-no” questions with any degree of accuracy, and that such use is a miscarriage of its narrative prowess. To which I reply “Nonsense!”
Like any form of inquiry, binary or otherwise, tarot can handle yes-or-no questions with some precision as long as we narrowly define our parameters and don’t deviate from them unless the evidence over time indicates we should. We should rigorously examine our results and our methods, and record our findings over a long period to see what works and what doesn’t (not much room for sloppy intuitive conjecture there). It’s basically the scientific method, and I think it’s far more engaging than swinging a pendulum, flipping a coin or rolling a pair of dice. But then I’m not much of a mystic and I believe that cartomancy functions through the querent’s latent foreknowledge of the future via some kind of subconsciously-guided tactile induction; we just have to get the cards to speak to it. That’s about as far into psychism as I’m willing to take the tarot; anything more seems like baseless speculation with spiritual pretensions.
As with tarot timing, an uncritical approach to “yes-or-no” questions is about as reliable as putting on a blindfold and trying to navigate a room full of armed mousetraps while barefoot with only verbal cues from a partner (an old business-management “teamwork-building” ploy).`Over the years I’ve tried a number of different methods involving various degrees of complexity, but I finally settled on taking a hard look at all 78 cards and determining to my own satisfaction which ones lean toward “Yes,” which most likely mean “No,” and which can muster only a lukewarm “Maybe.” This does not sit well with the “There are no bad cards” crowd, but it draws its inspiration from Lenormand, in which there are most definitely less fortunate examples that carry “negative” and “neutral-negative” connotations in mundane reading scenarios. Since I’m not after fine-tuned psychological nuances leading to elevated self-awareness in most of my tarot readings, I feel perfectly justified in doing this.
The next challenge is how to use them in a spread. Many readers employ a single-card pull for “yes-or-no” questions, but I have little respect for one-card readings in most cases. While they can provide a simplistic answer, they are silent on “why” it is the correct one and “how” it evolves. A better choice would be the three-card line. I would shuffle and deal a random card into the middle position as the “Yes,” “Maybe” or “No” answer and then draw two more cards, placing one before the “answer card” and one after it. The leading card would describe antecedents to the outcome (the circumstances that made it possible or even unavoidable), while the following card would suggest consequent ramifications (the “yes, but,” “maybe, if” and “no, unless” implications that inspire many a bout of second-guessing) that could provide a little wiggle-room for the querent in adjusting to the conclusion. The answer itself would be deduced from whatever set of positive, neutral and negative qualities the reader has assigned to the cards, while the rest of the line will briefly “tell its story.”
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on August 29, 2023.
