Look But Don’t Touch!
AUTHOR’S NOTE: As an old-school tarot reader who expects face-to-face clients to shuffle and cut the deck, I find it amusing that so much fretful agitation exists in the online tarot community over the prospect of someone other than ourselves laying hands on our precious cards.
The source of this aversion seems to lie in a couple of assumptions. The first one I can understand at least in principle. If we have rare, OOP (out-of-print) decks that we prefer to protect from the risk of damage, we may not want to allow what A.E. Waite regarded as uninitiated “commoners” to handle them. But the obvious answer to that argument is “Why on Earth would we bring them to a public reading session when there are loads of perfectly serviceable (and easily-replaceable) mass-market decks for that purpose?”
We may desire to use them because we love them and they perform well for us but, in all honesty, any working deck is just a tool and they all function pretty much the same. As is often said, the magic is in the diviner and the art of interpretation, not in the cards, and as long as we can make sense of all the images we should be fine. Ideally, we will have already internalized the meanings and just need a visual prompt for the specific reading.
The second objection is less defensible. There is a persistent belief (one of the myths of tarot) that the cards can be tainted with undesirable energy from distressed clients, so they shouldn’t be introduced to the threat of contamination by permitting sitters who might be emotionally traumatized to touch them. It’s all well-and-good to say we shouldn’t read for such querents but, as Aleister Crowley observed, “The fact of consultation implies discontent,” and those with no problems seldom have a pressing need for a tarot reading.
This perceived vulnerability to defilement emerges from the same mindset that insists decks must be “cleansed” from time-to-time to rid them of lingering negativity. I tend to wax sarcastic when I see this sort of thing, responding “ Obviously the tiny psychic receptors on the cards might glom onto ‘bad vibes,’ and we certainly don’t want that to happen.”
C’mon, people, tarot cards are made of cardboard and ink, they’re incapable of capturing any form of ethereal imprint, good or bad. (The same can’t be said of dirt, so don’t let unwashed auto mechanics and ditch-diggers near them.) Use them respectfully as you would any precision instrument, then put them back in the box and forget about them until next time. Bathing them in moonlight is a charming mystical practice, but completely unnecessary. If you want to purify something, take aim at your own unchallenged intentions and attitudes toward the act of reading. We could all do better in that regard.
The cards themselves are blameless since they have no personality that might be warped by contact with unwholesome characters. They can neither like nor dislike us as their owner and handler, nor can they mock, scold or toy with us, so any such impressions arise solely from our own skewed self-image. If we’re duping ourselves, why wouldn’t the cards pile on simply by association?
Any apparent character traits were put there by the artist’s ingenuity and reinforced by our willing suspension of disbelief. We could wipe our backside with them and they wouldn’t complain in the least (although we might wince a bit at the sharp edges). I just re-read a fascinating old science-fiction story by Harlan Ellison titled I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Do you really think they would?
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.org on February 12, 2025.
