Emotional Bias in Cartomancy: A Case Study
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The adverse impact of intense emotional upset on the task of shuffling the cards is a topic that often surfaces in conversation. I’ve seen endless hand-wringing in online discussions over whether being distressed when consulting the cards should be viewed as a “show-stopper.” Most people who bring it up are afraid that their overwrought state of mind will bias the cards pulled, making the spread seem less favorable than it would have been if the draw were not “contaminated.”
Since I believe that tarot operates on the principle of subconscious induction via the shuffle-and-cut, I can sympathize with their concerns. But I don’t scrap a reading if the card selection seems to have been skewed by overly anxious or distraught feelings, I just peel back the layers of meaning for the affected cards so I can get “under the skin” of any emotional distortion. Rather than approaching them from a superficial event-based perspective, I may explore their deeper psychological nuances or attempt to flush out any abstract, impersonal implications. In this way I can “desensitize” the interpretation and turn it into a more dispassionate assessment of the client’s circumstances. (I should note here that I’m assuming the querent will shuffle the deck when I conduct a session.)
I recently performed a reading that brought this issue into sharp focus; it was a follow-up to one I did a couple of weeks ago for an individual who was experiencing a medical problem. At that time the prediction was that she would come through it without incident, and that turned out to be the case. However, once home she began dwelling on her fears that the same condition might afflict her in a related area of the body, and she wanted another reading to look at the long-term risk of it reoccurring (a probability about which her surgeon is noncommittal). I used my personalized Celtic Cross spread* with two additional cards following the inconclusive “End of the Matter” to take the narrative a little farther into the future; I call those extra cards “the Rest of the Story.”
Of immediate note were the three “anxiety” cards that showed up in the initial pull: the 5 of Disks (“Worry”) in the “Present” position; the 5 of Wands (“Strife’) in the “Querent’s Fears” position; and the 7 of Swords (“Futility”) in the “Final Outcome” position. (In the opinion of French tarot author Joseph Maxwell, these odd-numbered cards are unstable and are seeking to regain their equilibrium.) This convinced me that emotional bias had overwhelmed the deployment of the cards, and that the more stressful ones should be taken with a grain of salt. The fact that none of them were reversed indicates that they can be accepted at face value.
“Heart of the Matter” Position (Card #1): Temperance/Art reversed suggests that concern over becoming destabilized (if not entirely overthrown) by the situation is an all-consuming preoccupation.
“Crossing” Position, Challenges and Opportunities (Card #2 as “Major Motivators”): The Knight of Cups is the court card that we use to represent her husband, and here it shows that he is in a position to help her avoid “going off the deep end” over her perceived plight. (Elementally, it portrays soothing Water tempering restive Fire.)
“Distant Past” Position (Card #3): The 10 of Cups (“Satiety”) reflects the long, uneventful period of calm that preceded the recent developments. Nothing to see here except perhaps a hint of self-indulgent complacency.
“Recent Past” Position (Card #4): The Ace of Cups reversed conveys the nature of the health scare that brought her to this point, and it was adequately covered in the earlier reading. Suffice it to say that it serves to “validate” the legitimacy of the present spread.
“Present” Position (Card #5): The 5 of Disks could not be any plainer in depicting her current state of apprehension. It has been preying on her mind relentlessly.
“Near-Future” Position (Card #6): The 6 of Disks (“Success,” which in the Golden Dawn system was titled “Lord of Material Success”) is a piece of good news since it portends no physical set-backs in the short term, allowing her time to heal.
“Querent’s Fears” Position (Card #7): The 5 of Wands is a card of antagonism, and in the position of self-defeating attitudes and behaviors it can only mean that she is becoming much too bleak in her appraisal and needs to cut herself some slack. (I call this position the “psychic basement” where all kinds of negative emotional debris accumulates, and the 5 of Wands implies that she is “beating herself up.”)
“Querent’s Environment” or “Home Base” Position (Card #8): This position represents “where the querent lives” regarding the matter, including anyone who shares that environment. The 4 of Wands (“Completion”) reversed implies that — although she is closing in on becoming “whole” again — her status is still unresolved because closure is deferred for the time being. It’s not a harsh card even when upside-down, so reversal mainly imparts a “wait-and-see” inertia; only time will tell.
“Querent’s Hopes” Position (Card #9): The 2 of Disks (“Change”) definitely asserts the desire (and the incentive) for physical improvement. Things can’t stay the way they are if she is to regain her peace of mind. But in another sense it strikes me as the second half of the message in the reversed 4 of Wands, which conveys the inferred promise of eventual completion. Aleister Crowley’s “formula” for the 2 of Disks is “Change = Stability; Stability = Change,” meaning that a situation is at it’s most stable when — like a spinning top — it is in constant, steady-state motion; in this case the 2 of Disks is tapping the bottled-up momentum of the 4 of Wands, creating an avenue for its release. (It’s interesting that this card appeared reversed in the “Present” position of the earlier reading, which emphasized its instability at that time.)
“End of the Matter” Position (Card #10): The barrenness of the 7 of Swords can be attributed to the frustration that has been dogging the querent for the last year. It’s another mental-block card that reflects attitude more than actuality, and it presents an inconclusive outlook that led me to pull two more cards to extend the duration of the forecast.
“Extended Outlook #1” (Card #11): The Princess of Disks carries a connotation of material stability similar to the 6 of Disks; although Aleister Crowely doesn’t succeed in pinning down this earthy Princess in suitably concrete prose, he alludes to her as the “complete woman” and tosses around terms like “nourishing and vitalizing” in connection with her attributes. It seems to me that the invigorating Princess will lay the nagging “defeatist mentality” of the 7 of Swords to rest, and that nothing more harmful than lingering uneasiness will come of it
“Extended Outlook #2 (Card #12): The 7 of Wands (“Valour”) invokes a strenuous posture I interpret as “extraordinary courage in the face of daunting odds.” However, I believe the card’s reversal here tames this predicament to the point that it is rendered fairly innocuous. At most the querent will have to submit to periodic testing which, while an imposition, is already planned.
Overall, this is a uniformly low-energy pattern that is mostly about residual fallout and doesn’t carry much in the way of threatening surprises. The “anxiety” cards and the reversals suggest hypersensitivity to unpleasant possibilities that are not convincingly borne out by the rest of the spread, but rather are presumptive or anticipatory contingencies rooted in past difficulties. I would be inclined to say the querent has little cause for concern in the foreseeable future, but we plan to do subsequent readings to track her progress.
This essay has convinced me to begin asking my clients before I begin a reading to state in their own words (maybe with a tiny bit of prompting) how they would describe their current emotional state: calm, agitated, uncertain, indifferent, etc. By doing so I propose to gain a heads-up on how much exaggeration to expect from the shuffle and pull, and then adjust my approach accordingly as I did in the above example.
As an aside, I once wrote an essay on the Fives and Sevens that may have relevance to their multiple appearances in this reading.
*In her 1960 book, The Tarot Revealed, Eden Gray altered the original Celtic Cross of Arthur Edward Waite to make it more coherent and less irrational. I’ve always preferred her version and in the 1980s I tweaked it further to satisfy my own vision of perfection.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on April 15, 2024.
