“Feigning Clarity”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: One again, I’m indebted to Benebell Wen’s I Ching the Oracle: A Practical Guide to the Book of Changes for giving me a pithy phrase than can be applied to tarot reading. I’ve covered this ground before so my skeptical attitude is well-known, but I’ve acquired some fresh inspiration.
In her analysis of one of the hexagrams, she uses the term “feigning clarity,” which in its most sincere form can be rephrased as “ trying to see clearly but ultimately having to fall back on surmise.” This strikes me as a perfect analogy for those cynical (or perhaps just credulous) YouTube tarot readers who profess to do “collective” readings that supposedly apply to a broad spectrum of followers. Artful disclaimers aside, these impersonal predictions are almost always worthless at the individual level because subscribers will see in them what they want to see, much like the old daily horoscopes in the newspapers. Confirmation bias gone wild!
I doubt that there is a single serious practitioner of tarot reading who doesn’t privately acknowledge that what we do resembles the Biblical expression “looking through a glass darkly,” and that our pronouncements may be nothing more than “howling in the wilderness.” In other words, there is little certainty in our predictive observations, only likelihood at best. I, for one, am content with any slender insights I can glean from my divination although I would seldom “bet the farm” on them. Objectively, I prefer to think of my counsel as “getting a leg up” on circumstances, or as describing a state of preparation that conveys “forewarned is forearmed.” Nothing says that we have to do anything with the information, but it’s there if we choose to be proactive.
What I see among online readers is largely self-promotion, with entrepreneurial enthusiasm masking a weak premise: that a remote card reading can have an unequivocal bearing on a querent’s private experience. I wouldn’t even make that claim for every face-to-face reading, and “going remote” just adds another layer of ambiguity. These purveyors of decoupled prognostication almost invariably rely on the bromide that “it’s all energy” that can be tapped by anyone with an adequate degree of sensitivity, but this seems more like pure clairvoyance than exclusively reading the cards, which merely become “props” in the realm of psychic presumption.
Why not just call it what it is rather than pretending that the cards have anything to do with it? A talented channeler who can work directly with the Unseen doesn’t need them anyway, so in remote reading scenarios they are more “theater” than substance. Social-media outlets have made it possible to “get a tarot reading” (pardon my derisive quotes) without ever seeing or touching the cards, which to this old-school diviner seems entirely too vulnerable to baseless conjecture coming straight out of the reader’s subjective imagination (or someplace much lower on the anatomy), perhaps seasoned lightly with a little generic knowledge of card meanings that in an online setting can always be looked up in a book and nobody will be the wiser. Give me a “live” querent across the table and with their immediate feedback I will make a valiant effort not to feign anything since there is no place to hide; we will be caught out by an unconvinced sitter almost every time if we indulge in too much intuitive fabrication.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on June 28, 2024.
