Just Read the Cards! (Telling the Tale for its Own Sake)
AUTHOR’S NOTE: In my opinion, every tarot reader should adopt the modest approach of the best Medieval writing by simply “telling the tale for its own sake” as described by C.S. Lewis in The Discarded Image.* In other words, we should “just read the cards” without trying to inject our own rational and ethical preconceptions, principles and prejudices into the narrative. (While it has been said that this impartiality is impossible to achieve, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.) No matter how sure we are of our footing, it’s the querent’s story, not ours.
It’s not our place to impose existential or moral accountability on our clients but only to assist them in either celebrating their likely successes or “airing their dirty laundry” as the case may be. We might be tempted to exploit “an opportunity for the lavish and highly individual treatment” of the subject on our own terms, but we should resist any such stylistic virtuosity as an obtrusive form of grandstanding that is often more show than substance. Tarot reading may be a performance art but among serious practitioners it is first and foremost a counseling platform that should not be put to the purpose of self-aggrandizement at the expense of its helping potential.
Any imagination we bring to the table should be of the “realizing” variety embraced by the common run of authors in the Middle Ages (another historical case of anticipating the “It is what it is” aphorism of 21st-Century culture), and not the “transforming” or “penetrative” kind employed by later scribes like Wordsworth and Shakespeare. (In the first instance the aim was to elucidate the point of the tale in “factual word-painting” that excelled at the “vivid close-up” exemplified by Dante, while the second mode — Keats is cited as one offender — was intended to embellish or perhaps sublimate it in an atmospheric manner and the third endeavored to meticulously dissect it.)
By “just reading the cards,” we can strive for a middle ground of inventive but well-founded observation by employing transparent language that is both aesthetically pleasing and explicitly informative while at the same time dodging the “mystical woo” that is so prevalent in modern divination. As I see it, the scale has tipped much too far in the direction of psychic and intuitive impressionism and ought to swing part-way back toward literalism of a more logical persuasion. (As a community we could definitely learn something from the practical focus of Lenormand readers.)
I’m much taken by the idea of Dante’s factually-descriptive “close-ups” and suggest that this is a technique with great potential for the tarot reader in that it defines a scope falling midway between the exacting artistry of the Dutch miniaturist and the sprawling, cut-paper murals of the later Matisse. Personally, I lean toward the storytelling tropes of metaphor and analogy delivered within a matrix of analytically robust insights, maybe offering a whiff of metaphysical symbolism if I can get away with it while not coming across as overly “high-brow.” (As an interpreter I’m trying to maintain my standing as “half mad-scientist, half mystic.”)
In any event, the aim should be toward substantial, lucid exposition and away from charming but inconsequential fluff of the “tastes great, less filling” sort. I’m not the least bit interested in what Joe or Mary “thinks or feels” about you, and you shouldn’t be either; we should both be vitally concerned with what one of them might do to you that you would not appreciate. One is idle conjecture while the other is actionable, and the latter is more likely to appear plainly “in the cards” than the former.
*Many of the academic phrases and terms I’ve quoted were derived from this source.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on January 1, 2025.
