Structured Intuition
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Buried in the strident chorus of “Just go with what you feel!” and “You don’t have to read books!” emitted in self-righteous certitude by a significant percentage of 21st-Century tarot “influencers,” an occasional quiet voice is raised in defense of developing a method of reading the cards that is both rational and instinctual. Mary Greer has said it in online conversations, as has Michael Snuffin in The Thoth Companion (but of course they are both in the business of selling tarot books). I’ve frequently added my own tuppence to the pot, and this is another contribution gleaned from my recent study and practice.
Around the same time in 1971 that I became a metaphysical explorer I joined Mensa (I’ve long since lapsed, of course, but you can’t escape your DNA) and I’ve always been a tirelessly heuristic Scorpio personality, so I have a strong penchant for diving deeply into any subject to understand its inner mechanics at a logical level. Astrological methods that aren’t esoteric are mostly a nuts-and-bolts affair, so when I took up the more fluid, impressionistic tarot I had to begin relying more on the storyteller’s art and the elusive power of inspiration, imagination and ingenuity for my insights. (The modern rallying cry “intuition uber alles” was not yet in vogue, so I cultivated the other “I-words.”) From my point of view, inspiration, imagination and intuition all have much (and perhaps too much) in common. Ingenuity is an “on-demand” adder that complements the other three, but when inspiration comes calling, it just “feels right” from the beginning so we don’t question its pedigree; imagination is freestyle extemporizing: “Let’s open the box and see what falls out;” intuition by itself is like the “poor relation” of the other two. It basically means “hunch” rather than more substantial information, although many diviners consider it to be the “gold standard” of mystical interpretation.
Any subtle energy requires a structure of some kind if it is to be put to its most effective use, and intuition is no exception; otherwise it would evaporate into idle conjecture without leaving a trace. In tarot reading this involves placing two essential ingredients in creative juxtaposition: the rudiments of a card’s core meaning extracted from the “knowledge base” and a bit of visual stimulation courtesy of free-association from the card’s imagery. Together they form a complex duet in which each acts as a check on the other and neither is irrelevant to success. This is capped by figuratively pouring the elixir into a linguistic vessel formed by the context of the question or topic of the reading, after which it may be shaped into more cogent words through further improvisation and “applied ingenuity.” Lacking any of these, the process can diverge in one of three directions, becoming: 1) a dry exercise in a what I call “Lego-block divination;” 2) a hopeless guessing-game with no anchor in plausibility; or 3) a vague stew of generalities and platitudes akin to the so-called “general life-reading.”
I don’t know where purely mystical readers come up with the notion that their subjective pronouncements are both infallible and germane to the situation (in the linked essay I called the phenomenon a self-referential, “closed-loop” paradigm). I know many are convinced that they’re talking to God, angels or spirit guides, but that’s a whole different “snipe hunt” demanding faith in the validity of the source and the integrity of the channel, not to mention that these supposed founts of wisdom are both hypothetical and debatable (when they aren’t merely imaginary). Personally, I prefer to offer what I think of as an “educated guess” (check out the link below for more on this): my observations are informed by profound experience of the traditional kind and enlightened by a standing invitation to any and all visionary impressions that arise from meditative reflection on a wide range of related arcane topics. (It helps to be widely read in these matters since outright clairvoyance plays a very small part in my readings; I just read the cards as they lay and trust “subconscious induction” during the shuffle to load the spread with the right data.) Structured intuition coupled with dynamic narration can ignite further inspiration and imagination that will ideally yield fresh insights followed by more intuitive exploration; its a revolving carousel of ideas that doesn’t decelerate until I run out of meaningful things to say.
As you can probably tell from my writing for this blog, I like to augment my narratives with shared cultural, social, historical, literary and educational experiences in the form of compelling metaphors and analogies that are extant within a culture and are often cross-cultural in the emerging “one-world” sociopolitical environment. Many of these spring up intuitively because I’m looking for a way to coax at least a little recognition out of my client that the reading is on-target. It’s amazing how many sitters will just, well, “sit there” and never let on whether they’re being moved by the whole thing. If I can make their eyes light up with awareness of the connection between the anecdote I’m presenting and their own reality, I will have at least made a reasonable start.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on March 21, 2024.
