“Auspicious to Proceed”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The predictive text supporting the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching is full of brief advice that occurs with regular frequency. Two of these insights are “Auspicious to proceed” and its counterpart “Ominous to proceed.” There is nothing quite that formulaic in tarot divination, whose practitioners often pride themselves on avoiding such prescriptive statements, but it is a topic worth discussing.
Current thinking on the benefit of a tarot reading centers on the concept of “empowerment.” We want to give our clients reliable information that they can apply with confidence in making their own decisions regarding future affairs. It can indeed be perilous for the reader’s reputation and the seeker’s well-being to proclaim point-blank “Just do it!” when the outlook is more than a little ambiguous, so most of us hedge on advising the single-minded pursuit of specific goals. There are many creative ways that we can “duck-and-cover” (to use military jargon), but most involve the use of judicious language that places the burden of determining what to do squarely on the querent.
It’s also understandable that many of those individuals are unresolved in their own mind whether they should make a move in the situation. and the last thing they want to hear is “Decide for yourself,” even with instructive guidance from the cards. They would much rather receive encouragement of the “auspicious to proceed” variety that takes them off the hook for any responsibility, and they seldom exhibit much enthusiasm for getting their hands dirty with the details in order to make something happen. After all, they reason, it’s not called fortune-telling for nothing!
Another modern concept is “There are no good or bad cards.” All of them contain multiple shades of gray that depend on the context of the reading for their significance. This theory is largely useless when trying to formulate actionable advice, and it places inordinate pressure on the reader (and ultimately on the sitter) to sort out which angle to promote. I blame it on the incursion of Jungian psychology into the practice of prognostication back in the ’70s, in which all assumptions are relative and there are no absolutes. We are handed a moving target (the querent’s psyche) and are asked to come up with situational and environmental perspectives that will further their self-awareness in the matter at hand.
For the most part, I gave up the psychological approach to tarot reading some time ago as being entirely too “iffy” for something as elusive and ephemeral as human thoughts and feelings, even if the reader’s aim is to pin them to a more concrete framework. I much prefer an action-and-event-oriented paradigm in my own work because it has a greater chance of revealing what someone might do, not just what they think or feel. In the service of this objective, I’ve made a judgment call on the range of fortunate and unfortunate qualities in all 78 cards and captured the results in a table that uses a “yes-leaning; maybe; and no-leaning” structure as a basis for answering whether or not it is “auspicious to proceed” with a contemplated action (a nuanced way of saying “yes” or “no”).
These are obviously not iron-clad determinants but rather only a place to start when considering such an initiative; they should be “taken under advisement” along with other more commonplace considerations. They were developed primarily around the descriptions in Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth,* and will be less useful for those who prefer the Waite-Smith deck. Unless we are doing a single-card pull (not recommended for more complex issues), the entire spread must be taken into account before reaching a conclusion.
*Although the court-card titles below are those of the RWS deck, the qualities that dictated their placement in this table came from Crowley’s “moral characteristics.”
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on June 24, 2024.
