The “Wrong Answer” Dilemma
Lately I’ve been frequenting the “r/tarot” sub-reddit forum since it is one of the more active public tarot platforms. What caught my eye is the regular appearance of posts that express dismay over the incorrect results of self-reading: “Why did the cards tell me this when exactly the opposite happened?” Most of these observations come from self-confessed “newbie” readers who expected to be wowed by their first experience with the cards and came away disappointed. My take on it is that their expectations for precision in the narrative were inflated to begin with, and that putting too fine a point on one’s assumptions about accuracy is doomed to failure much of the time. After all, even at its best tarot reading is an imaginative storyteller’s art rather than an empirical “truth dispenser;” its power of suggestion can be compelling but it should be recognized as just that: hints seen “through a glass, darkly” that we may choose to embrace or reject on our own initiative.
After a great many years of doing it, I’ve reached the conclusion that tarot-reading is more impressionistic than literal; more symbolically allusive than unconditional; more conjectural than deductive. Its forte is the exploration of emerging tendencies and trends: we should be looking for potentials, possibilities, plausibilities and — if stretched to the limit — probabilities. It may offer intimations of what is to come (which, it must be said, are rooted in the querent’s own subconscious presentiments about future circumstances), but it doesn’t reliably produce action-and-event-based predictions that we can “take to the bank.” It’s all well-and-good to treat our insights as likelihoods if we intend to act upon them with certainty that they’re going to materialize as envisioned (a form of positive reinforcement or “affirmation”), but they shouldn’t be expected to just fall in our laps with no substantial effort on our part. This direct engagement is what “empowerment” is all about; anything less proactive amounts to an unjustified sense of “entitlement” ( Law of Attraction stuff). If we are forewarned about the chance of an upset, we can arm ourselves to confront it; if we are notified of the opportunity for a windfall we can position ourselves to make the most of it, but we shouldn’t just hold out our hand expectantly. Tarot is a fine preparatory tool but it shouldn’t be taken entirely on faith, and if it doesn’t deliver what it promises, we should have a “Plan B” to fall back on.
The first reaction of disillusioned novices is to back away from divination completely, especially if they have been badly burned by a flawed forecast that they should not have taken entirely to heart in the first place. They were never told that the wisest way to approach it is to begin with the understanding that it may provide useful information to augment their other decision-making faculties, but that it doesn’t automatically supplant those more conventional measures. This is the assumption that underlies my belief that a tarot reading is best used to show the general “tone” of the period in question — what kind of activity is it most conducive to? — rather than the specific nature of any likely events. If those events are in fact “in the cards,” they may only be incipient and we must usually take some kind of action to make them happen as predicted (or prevent them from occurring, as the case may be).
These cautionary observations are nowhere more applicable than in the “psychic fishing expedition,” in which the reader is asked to judge what someone else is thinking or feeling about the situation as reflected in the cards. This is mind-reading, plain and simple, in which the cards are only “props” to the psychic act of intuitive guesswork. Not to denigrate the effectiveness of accomplished psychics, but this ain’t card-reading, it’s something more tenuous and elusive. If a querent complains that the cards said their love interest would be receptive to a relationship, but upon being approached about it they were anything but, the fault lies with the querent’s wishful thinking projected onto the cards and not with the tarot’s inability to “get inside the head” of an unaware and disinterested third party. The cards only have the subconscious input of those present at the reading to work with via the shuffle and cut, so they will quite naturally hand back to the querent (or to the reader in remote reading scenarios) whatever veiled presumptions were imprinted upon them. This may be perfectly fine if the reader is a seasoned psychic skilled at translating their impressions into the arrangement of the cards, but it begs the question “Why do they need the cards at all?” unless it is simply a marketing strategy.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on August 19, 2022.
