The Map and the Territory: Precision in Tarot Reading
AUTHOR’S NOTE: “The map is not the territory” is a celebrated statement by semanticist Alfred Korzybski that points out the cognitive disconnect between viewing a printed map and physically walking the land it represents. I’ve used it often to convey the idea that a tarot prediction is only an approximation of one possible future, and the quality of the roadmap it symbolizes is a function of the cartographer’s sensitivity and skill in capturing the traveler’s subliminal itinerary via the cards.
A tarot spread resembles a ground-plan of the querent’s subconscious “inner landscape,” and the extent to which it offers a three-dimensional “isometric” view with visible peaks and valleys and not a featureless, two-dimensional plain depends upon the reader’s proficiency in teasing out such nuances for the individual’s consideration. It’s easy to just reel off the card meanings as “sea-level benchmarks” but making their true elevation come alive in the sitter’s mind is where the payoff occurs, and it demands a finely-honed sense of precision and economy in relaying just the right insights in sufficient number to explain the subject without plunging the sitter into confusion.
C.S. Lewis observed that a man who is content with his academic understanding of the contour lines on a topographic map as showing the “lay of the land” without cultivating an appreciation for whether they offer the climber an easy or difficult ascent is coming nowhere near the reality they illustrate. He may possess an abstract knowledge of contour lines as a geological principle but no wisdom about what they denote in the “real world.” Anyone who has wandered the woods as I have with such a map in hand certainly knows the practical difference between narrow-spaced (steep) and wide-spaced (gradual) contour lines as an expression of slope.
Lewis goes on to point out that creating a valid model (or in this case a “map”) of a postulated truth requires factual testimony, and “nature gives most of her evidence in answer to the questions we ask her;” in other words, “the character of the evidence depends on the shape of the examination” and “in relation to the total truth in the witness’s (our client’s) mind, the structure of the examination is like a stencil. It determines how much of the total truth will appear and what pattern it will suggest.” For the purpose of a tarot reading, this “stencil” is provided by the spread (the “roadmap”) in which the card meanings provide the “isometric” gradients; some will stand out in high relief while others will sink into the ground, leaving a sculpted surface for reader and querent to negotiate.
Conventional wisdom is that “an accurate reading requires a good question.” Personally, I can’t (and really don’t feel that I have to) speak to this assumption because I’m a long-time follower of Eden Gray’s advice that the specific question need not be articulated for the reader’s benefit; it will be communicated during the “silent communion” between the querent and the cards while shuffling the deck. This “subconscious induction” arranges the cards in the right order to tell the tale, and the necessary precision to develop a detailed “high-resolution” answer will come from the reader’s expert grasp of their inherent nature, their position in the layout and their interaction. Once the initial scenario has been described, the subsequent dialogue with the querent can steer it where it has to go to assure full comprehension of the message.
Obviously, all of this breaks down when performing remote divination where the querent has no contact with the cards, and it’s the main reason I choose not to do it under most circumstances. Although it can be conducted to my satisfaction when certain conditions are imposed, there is no synergy in the act other than the purely psychic kind, and I’m not much of a believer in that when it comes to reading tarot. I don’t see how there can be precision when the querent’s half of the equation is missing and the reader must replace it with intuitive guesswork. A reading that is not interactive is just a “fishing expedition” into the uncharted waters of someone else’s subconscious mind, and I would rather have querents serve up their subliminal awareness by inducing it into the cards than have to go digging for it via “mind-reading.” If the mechanics aren’t sound, the result could be “all over the map.”
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on January 10, 2025.
