“Name Your Poison”
(For lovers of useless minutiae, June 8 is “Name Your Poison Day.”)
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Among modern tarot enthusiasts there exists a fundamental dispute regarding proper use of the cards that has been smoldering since the Jung-besotted 1970s. It typically surfaces in the divide between those who believe that a tarot deck should be employed solely for highbrow purposes such as psychological self-examination and self-improvement, or for heightened awareness of mystical, spiritual and universal truths, and those who see it as an ideal tool for practical divination. (In between are the pop-culture dabblers who are just having fun with it.) I’m in a unique position to weigh in on the subject since I’ve been using the tarot for both purposes for over 50 years, although these days I side mostly with the diviners.
In 1969 when I got my start in esoteric studies with Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs, everyone was beguiled by the Jungian approach to self-analysis. Natal astrology was first out of the gate with a psychological slant on character development that replaced the classical view of personality based on humors and temperaments; its “humanistic” revisionism owed much to the earlier prosecution of astrologer Alan Leo for fortune-telling. There was a determined push to legitimize horoscopic astrology in the eyes of science, and numerous databases of empirical evidence were being compiled and analyzed. Astrology was perfectly positioned for such an electrifying renaissance because it boasted a number of august Greek, Arab and Western European forebears and distinguished 20th-Century experts, along with more than two millennia of anecdotal observation and bookshelves full of scholarly literature under its belt, while modern computers made it possible to leverage that depth of knowledge and experience. It didn’t hurt that “New-Agers” went gaga over it, giving voice to their collective sentiments in the musical Hair (which I was fortunate to see at the Shaftesbury Theater in London in 1969). Thus began the “Golden Age” of modern astrology.
On the other hand, the much milder resurgence of tarot was the province of New Age mystics, psychics, spiritual iconoclasts, psychedelic artists and “flower children.” Nobody was gathering reliable testimony on predictive successes and failures; we were a motley bunch of novice practitioners more than an organized movement of the kind enjoyed by astrologers, a rabble of youthful innovators standing on the solitary (and in my opinion shaky) shoulders of Arthur Edward Waite who largely made it up as we went along. More was going on in communes and dorm rooms than in lecture halls, and tarot toddled along in the wake of the burgeoning astrological revival. As an art student and explorer of the Hermetic Qabalah, I was right at home in both worlds.
At that point few aspirants in the USA were aware of tarot’s antecedents in the seminal work of Etteilla, Papus, Oswald Wirth, Eliphas Levi, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and others throughout the 18th and 19th Centuries (it was a different story in continental Europe, with its long exposure to the Tarot de Marseille). There weren’t many decks and books available to us, for the most part consisting only of Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Eden Gray’s 1960 volume The Tarot Revealed and a choice between the Waite-Smith (aka “RWS”) tarot and the Thoth deck (my preferred “poison”), followed shortly thereafter by the Aquarian Tarot. At least where I lived, no readily-available English translations of French tarot writing existed at that time, and new English-language volumes in a more populist style didn’t begin appearing until the 1980s. (Those of an esoteric bent had Aleister Crowley and Paul Foster Case to fall back on.) We were content reading one another’s fortunes in a casual, laid-back way, and very little coin changed hands.
Somewhere along the line it was decided that tarot had to “grow up.” I was absent from the scene when that happened, having taken a long break to pursue a career and help raise a family, but I assume that it came at the hands of the “money men” (mainly book publishers and entrepreneurs) who had hijacked astrology and other New Age pursuits by the late ’80s. When I returned, the internet tarot community was in full swing and I began hearing things like “Tarot must never be used for divination, it wasn’t originally designed for that purpose.” This seemed to come primarily from people much younger than I am (as well as a few unreformed, aging hippies) who were never told that tarot was originally used only for playing card games in Italy and didn’t take on metaphysical mystique until the late 18th Century when Antoine Court de Gebelin and Etteilla revolutionized its focus and irreversibly altered its course. A study of Jean-Batiste Alliette’s writing shows just how much he contributed to what became the discipline of cartomancy in the closing decades of the 1700s. But of course he was entirely immersed in hardcore fortune-telling, not hypersensitive psychic delving with illustrated cardboard props.
In the beginning (long before the ’70s) tarot readers were plainspoken diviners with no elaborate psychological agenda, but by the time I re-emerged they had become quasi-therapeutic lifestyle counselors evincing all kinds of psycho-spiritual “empowerment” potential. I sat back and scratched my head. I knew that natal astrology has a very robust routine for developing a character portrait with features that span the spectrum from purely functional to entirely spiritual. I felt (and still feel) that tarot has nowhere near the horsepower of astrology for psychological profiling. It just doesn’t exhibit the depth or precision to be convincing, and too much of it is based on intuitive conjecture of a clairvoyant nature. It is all too easy for us as consultants to speak in terms so general that our observations can apply to almost anyone, and the vigorous confirmatory head-nodding we receive from our clients demonstrates the unfortunate truth of this suspicion. Tarot has yet to experience a “Golden Age,” and in my opinion it is now moving in the opposite direction by slowly degenerating into a social-media curiosity reminiscent of a carnival sideshow complete with Gypsy mind-reader’s caravan.
I had been a diligent practitioner of tarot-driven self-analysis for over four decades when I finally realized that there is no future in that approach for me since I’m no longer convinced of its effectiveness, or it could just be that I’ve mined my own depths to the extent that I’m psychologically “tapped out.” Whatever the reason, I decided that I would go full-tilt into mundane divination and only use psychological principles as an adjunct to my more pragmatic action-and-event-based prognostication (I change gears when clients can’t relate to the practical angle in a reading). So I did that in 2011 and I’ve never looked back; a couple of years later I went even further down that road by adopting the explicitly literal Lenormand system of prediction. My objective here is not to convince anyone that my way is the right one, just to point out that psychological navel-gazing with tarot cards may not be everything it’s cracked up to be, strident advocates notwithstanding. So I will just sit here and continue to throw curmudgeonly darts at what I see as its more obvious foibles. Thanks for reading and have a nice day!
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on October 6, 2023.
