Off-Center and Off-Balance or Completely Off-the-Page?
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’ve begun reading the second (1773) edition of Jean-Baptise Alliette’s seminal book on divination, Etteilla or The Only Way to Read the Cards. In an example reading he mentions that failure of the card representing the querent to appear in the draw meant that she was not “at the center of her affairs.” The unstated but obvious implication was that these affairs would continue apace without her immediate involvement and she would just have to accept the consequences. This insight provides some justification for the way I currently approach the First Operation of the Golden Dawn’s “Opening of the Key” method.
The initial steps in the First Operation are to: 1) select a card (the “Significator”) to represent the querent, leaving it in the deck: 2) shuffle the cards and cut the deck into four piles from right to left; and 3) locate the Significator. These four piles are the “elemental” subsets — Wands/Fire; Cups/Water; Swords/Air and Pentacles/Earth — that are intended to show the topic areas of potential interest to the seeker. Aleister Crowley labeled them, respectively, “Work, Business, etc;” “Love, Marriage or Pleasure;” “Trouble, Loss, Scandal, Quarreling, etc;” and “Money, Goods, and Such Purely Material Matters.” The premise is that the querent has arrived with an unspoken question in mind and the Significator must necessarily land in the elemental stack most closely related to that question, thus allowing the reader to accurately apprise the situation at the time of the reading and “tell the Querent what he has come for.” The instruction is to abandon the divination if the topic-area prediction turns out to be mistaken.
I’ve never handled it in such a prescriptive way because I believe, along with Yoav Ben-Dov, that “everything is a sign;” useful information of some kind can be gleaned from almost any pattern of cards even if it seems utterly foreign to the subject of the reading (see my previous post on “voodoo metaphysics” for a more curmudgeonly viewpoint). In this case, if the Significator doesn’t show up where it’s “supposed to be,” I don’t halt the reading but instead treat the apparent error as identifying secondary matters of a different elemental quality that will most likely intrude to some degree upon the main theme of the reading. When I move on to the next phase I take this information under advisement since the heretofore “inconceivable” has a habit of rearing its ugly head and becoming “inevitable” when least expected. The notion that the querent could be “off-center” (or even completely “off-the-page”) and therefore unbalanced when this happens is a compelling one, and in the interest of making what Joseph Maxwell called “a full and helpful divination,” I want to leave no stone unturned.
Suppose, for example, that an individual is seeking guidance regarding a romantic prospect but, rather than landing in the domain of Cups, the Significator appears in the Pentacles stack. The unavoidable impression is that the seeker’s amorous hopes may depend upon having the financial wherewithal to undertake any kind of commitment at that time.* I would then look for the presence of cards denoting material hardship in the main reading to see if this is likely to be a “show-stopper.” Finding nothing ominous, I would continue along the querent’s original line of inquiry; in short, unless it dominates the narrative, this digression may reveal a point of interest that merits attention but won’t be a substantive factor in the outcome. Our affairs often develop along parallel paths and the reading can delve into one or another of them with no deliberate intent on our part; trying to make it fit a preconceived idea of truth can become a futile exercise in “pretzel logic.” The tarot reader, perhaps more than any other disciple of the esoteric arts, must take to heart the waggish definition of the word “assume” (it makes an “ass” of “u” and “me”), especially when contemplating a proposition as “iffy” as the random location of any single card among a total population of 78. That may be how tarot “works,” but if we are prudent it’s not the metaphorical “basket” we want to put “all our eggs” in when it comes to prediction.
*Something I just picked up in my reading of this morning deserves mention. Although he was taking it in a different direction, Alliette used the expression “Wealth falls into water” in his reading, which seems admirably fitting for my purpose here: the relationship could become a “money-sink” for the querent, an open spigot hemorrhaging wealth.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on October 17, 2022.
