“Logic Me This, Cardman!”
“Riddle me this, riddle me that” said the Riddler to the Dark Knight.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: An online acquaintance recently described the tarot as a logic-based system, adding “. . . if you want to develop intuition, block off the right nostril with beeswax for twelve years and maybe carry a cobra on your head.” I’m always game for a little sarcasm, and this definitely qualifies.
My take on this observation has always been that, no matter how much visionary insight we obtain from looking at the images on the cards, we must still turn our visual impressions into compelling words in order to communicate them, and selecting just the right turn-of-phrase to make a point should be a logical decision and not an intuitive leap-of-faith. Obviously, having a well-rounded vocabulary can soften the hard edge of an overly literal mode of expression, but we must also guard against an over-reliance on mystical ambiguity in our language.
I strive to cultivate a conversational style of presentation that encourages dialogue during my readings instead of just pushing a lopsided monologue. My goal is to make the experience as enjoyable for my client as it is for me, and doing so requires a nimble sense of word-play. In the C.S. Lewis book The Discarded Image he examines Medieval culture from a literary and artistic perspective, offering numerous cogent remarks that are relevant to this essay; I will attempt to “sort them out and tidy them up” (his definition of the Medieval preoccupation with organizing) for my purpose here.
The first thing that caught my attention was this amalgam of quotes from his commentary on the “bookish ways” of Medieval humanity. Their penchant for “sorting out and tidying up” evolved around a belief in the aphorism “A place for everything and everything in the right place,” which demanded “ordering of very diverse particulars.” Lewis further describes this fixation on order as “. . . the tranquil, indefatigable, exultant energy of passionately systematic minds bringing huge masses of heterogeneous material into unity. All the apparent contradictions must be harmonized.”
I think you can see where I’m taking this — although on a much more modest scale — as it relates to reading the tarot cards. Any random subset of the 78 tarot cards requires that we “order the particulars” in a way that makes the most sense to a narrative explanation of their combined meaning. It’s not necessarily an exercise in “A place for everything and everything in its place,” but it shouldn’t spill over into sloppy extemporizing that has no coherent structure, thus baffling the recipient of our putative sagacity. Well-designed spreads will help rein in this tendency, but we must still clothe them in a convincing web of words.
Lewis notes that one theory about the dubious quality of Shakespeare’s less-impressive output was that “the bad bits . . . were all put in by adapters.” When it comes to tarot-reading, I think we can safely say that there is a broad and deep reservoir of established “core knowledge” available to the diviner, and any attempts to forcibly adapt this information to our private assumptions — or to toss it out entirely — will often result in “bad bits” creeping into and sabotaging our best intentions. Becoming too impressed by the supposed infallibility of our intuition is the first sign that we are heading off into the wilderness of flawed comprehension, and abandoning finesse by attempting to force-fit conventional wisdom to our subjective viewpoint will only take us farther afield. As the Wicked Witch of the West famously said “These things must be done del-icately!”
The knowledge base has endured for the simple reason that it offers a reliable “touchstone” for our more extravagant departures from rational interpretation. To have the best of both worlds, we should try to coax our intuitive conjecture into standing on the shoulders of “book-learning” rather than turning it loose in a completely arbitrary way that flouts precedent. The idea is to create a complementary pairing of logic and inspiration that doesn’t stray too far in either direction. If there is a riddle here, it is one that will succumb to intelligible “sorting out and tidying up” with even-handed aplomb. All we have to do is back away a step or two from our myopic self-indulgence and embrace a clear-eyed sense of proportion.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on November 26, 2024.
