The Threshold of Effectiveness
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This isn’t a new topic for me, but I think it deserves revisiting given the ongoing influx of younger people into the art who may not be well-served by the current “anything goes” mentality among some modern tarot writers and practitioners.
Having worked with the tarot for almost 50 years now, I’ve come to the conclusion that the smallest number of cards that can be relied upon to produce a coherent narrative about any substantive issue is three. Many people do one-card daily draws but I find that the best they can accomplish is to show the “tenor” or “tone” of the upcoming day; no convincing growth or movement over time can be deduced from such paltry evidence. Two-card pulls, although better, create a dichotomy in which it can be difficult or impossible to choose the card upon which to place greater emphasis, and considerable intuitive guesswork is required to make the call. Three-card spreads hit the “sweet spot” in that they can be read as a progression (past/present/future); alternatively (to use data-routing terms), they can be handled in an “if/then/else” sense (“If you do this, then that is likely to happen; if you don’t, expect this other result.”); a third common approach is the Hegelian model of “thesis/antithesis/synthesis” that examines the pros of a contemplated course of action, the attendant cons and a proposed compromise between the two.
In any good predictive spread, a degree of temporal shift can be observed, from Point A to Point C with a pivotal juncture at Point B. My long-standing position is that sufficient detail must be present from which to fashion a productive story, even if it’s just to tell my sitter “Well, it looks like this, that or the other thing.” Ideally, I like to see a clear-cut beginning, middle and end to the tale in the cards since an unambiguous forecast is what a paying client hopes to receive. I’ve previously written about what I call the use of slippery “weasel-words” in divination that allow the reader to squirm out of making definitive statements, and trying to proceed on inadequate information only fuels this insidious trend. There are better ways to communicate a “definite maybe” without damaging one’s professional credibility.
For me, the prime objective is to “just read the cards,” without projecting my intuitive assumptions upon them until I’ve exhausted all of the literal testimony in a spread. I have no problem with intuitive reading, just not as the main thrust of my interpretation. For that reason I prefer five-card layouts because they can be parsed in a larger number of different ways; the gaps requiring an intuitive leap of faith are usually less confounding, even if the sequential cohesion between the cards is impenetrable at first glance. That said, I consider myself a competent intuitive reader as long as my observations are moored to and stem from something I can pick up from the images. It harks back to my “three I’s” of visual extrapolation: inspiration, imagination and ingenuity. There are always insights to be gleaned from the images that will elicit the “Aha!” reaction from even the most dubious sitter; it may just take a little more creative effort to dig them out. Ungrounded psychic impressions, although I may receive them, are “wild cards” that I don’t mention to the querent except as a last resort when all else fails (although as a good practice I still like to call attention to the putative source card[s] for them). Usually I will try to tap my sitters’ superior (albeit subconscious) awareness of their own private reality for this input. After all, a tarot reading should be a conversation, not a monologue.
There is a powerful and alluring counter-current underway in the divination community that postulates: “I don’t need books, I just go with what I feel.” While this is to be expected in these shallow times of instant gratification and throw-away culture (“What, me read a book?”), I think it sets a dangerous precedent since so much profound thought has gone into past musings on the subject, and that documented history is a fabulous touchstone from which to draw motivation for the honing of one’s personal point of view (i.e. learn the ropes first, internalize the knowledge, then improvise later). There has also arisen an aversion to prescribed spreads, the thinking being that just throwing a mess of cards on the table, following one’s instincts for how many are needed, will yield a meaningful conclusion. Personally, I want to tell a story with economy and precision, not play “Where’s Waldo?” I would argue that there is an optimal combination of cards and structure that will be both efficient and instructive; too little or too much of either would be counterproductive to the purpose of the reading. So much of what is going on in the realm of modern tarot practice is revisionism for its own sake when there are perfectly sound conventions that meet the need admirably. My experience is that three to five cards arranged in a logical series are adequate for most simple inquiries.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on December 4, 2021.
