Nourishing and Enriching: A Tarot-Reading Paradigm
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Hexagram 27 of the I Ching is titled “Receiving Nourishment.” The oracle begins with a discussion of “nourishing language,” advising that the words we use in communicating with others should be carefully chosen to nourish and enrich them rather than striving to draw personal nourishment and enrichment from them. After that it moves on into the idea that the nourishment we take into ourselves should feed both our body and our spirit. (By the way, I would like to heartily recommend Benebell Wen’s accessible I Ching book as a worthy companion to the Wilhelm-Baynes translation due to its less-academically-meticulous prose, which in the latter is most likely a consequence of the original German translation.)
Reading this text reminded me that when I perform a tarot reading — although my observations may be couched in entirely pragmatic terms — what I’m seeking to do is put the querent in touch with their own storehouse of mystical “food for thought” that dwells in (or enters through) the subconscious, although how it arrives there and accumulates is a topic for another essay, one that I’ve already addressed in past posts regarding the multifaceted nature of spiritual wisdom and its role in intuitive comprehension.
Modern thinking on the purpose of divination is that it should be aimed at “empowering” the recipient to make the best use of any knowledge the diviner is able to provide. (My way of putting it is to “give them the ammunition and point them at the target; it’s up to them to pull the trigger.”) But I find the idea of “nourishing and enriching” much more compelling because I’m always tacitly encouraging my sitters to look beneath my words to contact their own profound well of inner awareness that I’m also attempting to draw on for my insights through their interaction with the cards. It’s part of my “how-tarot-works” introduction to the session.
I make the point of telling them it’s their reading not mine, I’m just the translator; the cards respond to their concentration on the question or topic. Through the act of shuffling and cutting the deck, they insert the “hooks” (just the right cards) into the spread that I use to “pull the thread” on the narrative. This is why I call every reading for another person a “mutual voyage of discovery:” they write the story and I read it back to them. But of course it’s only effective in a local setting where the querent handles the deck, an approach I much prefer to remote reading because I believe that direct engagement with the cards is critical to the best results. Anything less immersive can be a psychic guessing-game.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on August 1, 2024.
