Subconscious Bias in Remote Tarot Reading
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a companion piece to my essay of yesterday. I’ve been spending some time on the r/seculartarot Reddit sub, where nobody believes in the power of divination. The difference between them and me is that I’m firmly convinced of French author Joseph Maxwell’s premise that “coming events cast a shadow before them” and it is possible, through the technique of vaticination (“the faculty of being able to read the information possessed by the enquirer about his past, present and future”), a skilled diviner can plumb the individual’s presentiments about what is likely to happen (that is, the act of reading the cards can tease out the seeker’s subconscious hunches about his or her future circumstances). What I have no use for is the “cottage industry” of psychic (so-called “intuitive”) prognostication in the name of tarot that has grown up around YouTube, IM and other social-media platforms in which guesswork is the name of the game.
I recently read a post about a Fox News consulting psychic who pulled a card for Donald Trump’s political future and interpreted it as an indication of imminent failure. My response was “I would find that prediction credible only if Trump had shuffled the deck. Anything else is just intuitive guesswork based on the subconscious bias of the individual who pulled the card.” This is my latest broadside on the subject of non-interactive tarot reading for other people. My belief is that this one-sided approach is not conducive to success since it cannot hope to be even-handed. (I’m also wondering why a professional psychic would need to use tarot cards unless it was intended solely for the entertainment of the TV audience.)
In a previous essay on my first encounter with The Tarot of the Bohemians by “Papus” (Gerard Encausse), I’ve mentioned that A.E. Waite (who wrote the preface to the third edition) understood that all divination in the late 19th Century consisted of reliance on published books or on “uninstructed intuition,” by which he seems to have meant personal introspection uninformed by the documented experience and knowledge of earlier authorities on the subject. This attitude is still prevalent among those modern readers who find learning the rules of interpretation “just too damn hard” from an intellectual standpoint; inspired guesswork is so much easier to manage and nobody can fault them since, as Waite grumbled, there is no formal “canon of criticism” underlying the practice. It’s like the “Wild West” of divination: “Anything goes because nobody knows.” My first thought when I encounter glowing reviews for a reader is “OK, so it ‘resonates’ with you, but did it come true?” I haven’t seen a landslide of credible evidence to that effect despite the huge number of readings being performed; more often than not the reaction is one of disappointment: “Why didn’t this situation work out as predicted?”
This brings me to the subject of remote tarot reading, usually performed via some type of electronic platform. As I see it, the fundamental flaw in this mode of prediction is that there is no active involvement of the seeker in the process of selecting the cards for the spread other than asking the original question (and with so-called “collective” YouTube readings, not even that). All else is left up to the diviner at the other end of the comm link, and my experienceis that the cards tap directly into and record the subjective self-awareness of the person who shuffles them (it’s basically unavoidable “navel-gazing”). Despite an honest attempt by the reader to: a) fathom the querent’s situation clairvoyantly and decipher it; or b) enlist the aid of sympathetic energies in the effort, the cards too often reflect back only what the shuffler projects into them, and that could be unrelated to the querent’s situation in every way. What we intend and what we inadvertently accomplish could be miles apart and, in our self-absorbed psychic cocoon, we may not even be aware we’re projecting our own ego into the reading. It stands to reason that a little humility will go a long way to combat unwarranted overconfidence in these pursuits.
To the extent that the reader is a faithful mirror for those numinous sources of hidden wisdom, I can accept the premise of spiritual enlightenment regarding the matter, but I’m more inclined to believe that most pretenders to the claim of perfect spirit-vision operate “as if through a glass, darkly” by relying on mind-reading and intuitive conjecture for their answers. In other words, I don’t trust them to escape their own subconscious bias in converting the “received knowledge” into a reliable message for the querent. It is difficult to imagine a scenario in which such commentary is not tainted by the reader’s unchecked assumptions, especially if there is no communication with the seeker during the conduct of the divination to correct any errors in perception. While every attempt to comprehend the situational import of the cards is unavoidably subjective (it is after all an entirely internal mental exercise that is “the nature of the beast”), we place ourselves at a severe disadvantage if we don’t engage the querent in at least ensuring that the narrative has not strayed off-course. Usually, we just blithely bundle up the supposed insights obtained in this “cognitive vacuum” and shoot them off to the seeker without a second thought.
Despite striving for total impartiality and objectivity, we will inevitably “see what we expect to see” based on our unconscious rapport with the cards and our prior experience with their testimony in similar cases. Our intuitive faculties are mainly “preaching to the choir,” and we will have no clue if and when they strike a false note unless the querent has an opportunity to weigh in on the sermon. This ideally happens during every face-to-face session, and I believe its lack during online readings is the reason that so many people have unsatisfying encounters with remote readers; they’re receiving a soliloquy when they should be engaged in a colloquy, preferably by shuffling the deck and providing immediate feedback on the narrative. It’s why I think remote readings are largely suspect, even though I recognize that the practice goes back to Etteilla’s postal exchanges in the 18th Century. It’s also why I like to have remote clients pull their own cards and send me the list for interpretation; by eliminating the mind-reading factor, it puts to bed at least one of the glaring inequities in the online circus.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on February 2, 2024.
