“Neat Borders:” A Further Case for Tarot Spreads
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I was just reading a fascinating post in which a miscellany of famous authors expounded on why they (often vociferously) disliked a variety of important books by other esteemed writers (some of them very popular). I came across this gem from Charlotte Bronte, who was eviscerating Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: it was, to her critical eye, “a carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers-but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy-no open country-no fresh air-no blue hill-no bonny beck.”
Perhaps it’s entirely due to my early experience with the tarot in 1972 that I prefer using formal — and almost always “positional” — layouts when reading the cards, a habit I picked up from Eden Gray’s 1960 book, The Tarot Revealed. At the risk of “bludgeoning the reader with data” (another quote from David Foster Wallace regarding American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis), I’ve usually felt compelled to emulate Jack Webb as Sgt. Joe Friday in the old Dragnet TV show and provide “just the facts, ma’am.” It’s entirely too easy to get carried away with imaginative rhetoric fueled by free-association and the intuitive insights teased from the imagery by psychically-inclined diviners who serve up their own inspired guesswork to the detriment of more grounded observations. The resulting narratives are often messy, open-ended affairs that speak more to wishful thinking than to a coherent version of the truth. Once decoupled from the organizing principles of a definitive structure, they can become a stream-of-consciousness “free-for-all” that may be entertaining but ultimately uninformative for any practical purpose.
The great advantage of using carefully-designed spreads is that they furnish reasonable boundaries that effectively rein in an excess of visionary fluff (pardon me, “creative extemporizing”). This is especially true when tarot is proposed as a source of psychological self-awareness and self-improvement. I believe firmly that most querents who seek a reading don’t want or need to be told “who they are” (if they did they would clearly benefit from a visit to a psychoanalyst, not a prognosticator); instead, they want to know what the future holds for them in a range of “life-topic” scenarios. A spread that is crafted to speak directly to those concerns while dismissing other extraneous threads that might arise from too much disconnected theorizing is a boon to both the client and the reader who seek an intelligible answer.
Creating our own spreads isn’t rocket-science. It’s simply a matter of determining exactly what we want to know; how much we want to know about it; and how we want it delivered, all of which contribute to an economical plot-device that discourages wandering off into the “open country” of too much heady “fresh air” of the woo-addled kind. It isn’t necessary to become completely inured to a more mystical approach that can add inflection to the bare bones of a reading, but I submit that we should have an interpretive “rock” to stand on before we dive off into the murky depths of random conjecture and unsupported assumptions, even if our credulous sitter warms up to such off-the-cuff improvisation.
I think we owe our clients the courtesy of professional circumspection when it comes to being too enamored of our own impressionistic legerdemain. I don’t know about you, but I value crispness and clarity far more than Bronte’s gauzy, atmospheric vistas (if I wanted that I would frequent YouTube fortune-tellers). These goals are furthered by settling on specific position meanings, a lean mix of positions that delivers “just enough information,” and a concise pattern of cards with an architecture that promotes vivid storytelling without inviting too much verbosity. Anything more complex will typically amount to oracular “piling on” that completely overruns the borders of common sense and good technique. I task myself with knowing when to shut up and let the seeker weigh in on what the cards are saying before spinning the yarn out any further, a move that transforms the reading from a monologue into an instructive dialogue.
Autobiographical Background:
For those who value such ephemera, my attempts to speak with authority on matters related to divination are anchored in over five decades of study and practice covering a range of esoteric disciplines, from the ceremonial magic of the Hermetic Qabala to natal and horary astrology, tarot, geomancy, I Ching, Lenormand and lithomancy. As an engineer and eventual manager, I had a long career as a professional writer on technical and legal matters that ran in parallel with my occult pursuits (activities that I kept scrupulously separate). I’ve been a lapsed Mensan forever, having renounced the social inanity of flaunting one’s pedigree in the company of other intellectual posers. Having retired fifteen years ago with an excess of mental horsepower and nowhere to put it, I decided to spend it on examining the state of the art in metaphysical inquiry.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.org on January 22, 2025.
