The State of the Art
AUTHOR’S NOTE: In light of the schizophrenic persona that modern tarot culture displays, you might call this my “State of Disunion Address.”
The tarot as most English-speaking diviners know it today is largely a product of the British Occult Revival of the late 19th Century, which was itself a further iteration of the work of Jean-Baptiste Alliette (“Etteilla”), Alphonse Louis Constant (“Eliphas Levi”) and other Continental occultists who built on the ideas of Antoine Court de Gebelin and Louis-Raphael-Lucrece de Fayolle, Comte de Mellet. Initiates in the Outer Order of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn were expected to undertake the study of tarot as an esoteric pursuit during the course of their early development. The tarot deck of Arthur Edward Waite (aka the “RWS” pack) was the progenitor of a vast majority of the decks that have emerged since its publication; although it was designed around Golden Dawn principles, much of its occult architecture was intentionally obscured by Waite due to his vows of secrecy.
Unfortunately, Waite’s reluctance to reveal his source material left a vacuum that was filled by Pamela Colman Smith’s thematic vignettes, prosaic scenes that have become the standard for most common interpretation of the Minor Arcana. This emphasis on form over substance introduced an enduring convention that can only be avoided by adopting the cryptic Tarot de Marseille (which offers few visual clues to its meaning) or the Thoth deck of Aleister Crowley and Frieda Harris (and its numerous clones) with its semi-scenic minor cards.
This situation persisted right up to the beginning of the “New Age” and its preoccupation with Jungian psychology; the esoteric approach to the tarot was largely intact when I became involved around 1970. Nearly all of the available English-language books were of the scholarly occult type; only Eden Gray’s popular 1960 volume The Tarot Revealed stands out as an exception, but it was just a more user-friendly rewrite of Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot. At that point in time the tarot played “second fiddle” to natal astrology within the US metaphysical community, and it was left up to organizations like Paul Foster Case’s Builders of the Adytum to perpetuate the legacy of the 19th-Century masters. In the mid-70s I was involved with groups in the Hartford, CT area that were regularly infused with more sophisticated input from New York City; Theosophy was big but beyond my contribution there was little tarot activity to speak of, so I was petty much “flying solo.”
Between then and now the social-media juggernaut has caught up with the tarot and turned it into a charming symbolic language for exploring day-to-day human experiences, both our own and those of others, with almost no interest in traditional esoteric concepts. This has led to what I consider to be a “folkloric” approach to reading the cards that is driven by fanciful free-association from the mundane pictures rather than by the application of core knowledge as a firm foundation that should be augmented but not replaced by intuitive extrapolation. (I find that the bulk of new tarot literature promotes this attitude.)
The deeper philosophical import that is buried in the images is typically passed over in favor of a more superficial point of view that speaks mainly to immediate circumstances with little focus on broader, longer-term consequences of a potentially life-altering nature. The reader becomes less a wise counselor of the human condition and more a convenient foil for the seeker’s emotional hopes and wishes, in which case the narrative can succumb to “confirmation bias” if the diviner isn’t attentive to the risk of merely catering to the client’s assumptions. This amounts to what I call “hiding behind the tarot” in situations that would benefit greatly from proactive engagement by the querent in dealing with them.
This installment of my long-running rant on the subject was brought on by the fact that over 90% of recent posts on the r/tarot sub that begin with “I’m totally new to the tarot, but . . .” invariably involve some kind of emotional angst (as Aleister Crowley put it, the very “fact of consultation implies anxiety or discontent”). While relatively few people ask for a reading when they are completely satisfied with their lot, the opposite extreme craves positive reinforcement showing that the Universe isn’t completely against them, and they expect this affirmation to be served up by a sympathetic diviner.
The reader, not wanting to rain on their parade, may bend over backwards in trying to find encouragement where precious little appears in the cards pulled, to the point that both reader and seeker may be deluded by an overly optimistic forecast. Unflinching honesty on the part of both is the key to getting the most value out of the exercise; there is no point in doing it if avoidant behavior is going to persist in the face of overwhelming testimony to the contrary. These is a common belief among empathetic readers that every session should conclude on an upbeat note (I call it the “Bobby-McFerrin-don’t-worry-be-happy” syndrome). Personally, I strive for “constructive” closure (by giving them something to work with) when “affirmative” just isn’t “in the cards.”
The “disunion” mentioned above occurs among a second segment of the population that is comprised of skeptical holdouts like myself who take a more analytical approach to divination in the classical style that some label “fortune-telling.” Many of them are involved in the r/seculartarot sub, but I believe they go too far in the opposite direction by striving only for psychological self-awareness and dismissing any use of the cards for prediction of events and circumstances. They don’t seem to (or want to) recognize that foreseeable tendencies, trends and possibilities are fair game when consulting the tarot about likely future conditions.
As I see it, even if something doesn’t turn out exactly as foretold, there is still value in being aware of the nascent opportunity and positioning oneself in advance to make the most of it (short of investing heavily in the desired result based solely on the evidence of the cards). In this way we will have our eyes open and won’t be blindsided by unexpected developments, whether favorable or unfavorable. The tarot should not be wielded as a tool for wish-fulfillment or psychological prompting alone, but can also greatly empower a seeker in terms of successful alignment with external circumstances.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on March 6, 2024.
