“Transparent Luminosity” in Tarot Reading
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Last night I dreamed that I was discussing with someone the unforgiving nature of watercolor painting, and when I awoke I drew parallels between that and the conduct of a tarot reading.
I’ve had some formal training in the art of watercolor, and one thing that stuck with me is that, unlike tempera and oils, it’s a semi-transparent medium that can be difficult to manage when trying to make corrections. For this reason I was taught to always lay in lighter colors first followed by the progressively darker hues; the other way around, if you don’t like the latter you’re usually out-of-luck since they can’t be easily masked by painting over them. The situation is different with oils. You can cover up a flaw and if the layers of paint get too muddy, you can slap on some white gesso primer and start over, although you might sacrifice the luminosity you were trying for the first time around. In short, the watercolorist must be a strategist where the oil-painter can get away with being a tactician.
Most tarot readers will occasionally encounter spreads that get too dense too soon and don’t relinquish their secrets easily, so we can wind up struggling to make sense of them and often repeat ourselves as we grope for meaning. Because a prolonged silence is the “kiss of death” for any kind of spontaneity, this redundancy is mainly a delaying tactic as we puzzle out what we want to say next, but it can make our clients doubt whether we know what we’re talking about. I try to keep my scrambling to a minimum and leave any recapitulation to what Monty Python once called “the old summing-up” in one of their courtroom sketches.
One way to counter this tendency is to deal all of the cards face up and do a quick scan for any “hard spots” that you know will demand extra effort. You can then organize your thoughts and ease into a brief overview before going card-by-card, during which you can sketch in the overall thrust of the reading without jumping to any specific conclusions. Once again, it’s strategy over tactics, and I think of it as “priming the pump.” (If there are harsher aspects to consider, they can be deferred to the detailed analysis. For example, I don’t want the querent brooding needlessly over Death or the Devil until I’ve put them in context, and I will say that during the synopsis.)
Above all, I can’t have the narrative lose momentum as I fumble for relevant ideas; it’s important to maintain a light touch that glides nimbly over the transitions between cards. I will often try to brighten the mood with what I hope are entertaining anecdotes and storytelling tropes like metaphors and analogies, and perhaps a little humor. As I’ve said before, I want the reading to be enjoyable for both the sitter and myself. To that end, I strive to be both transparently informative and vividly illuminating in my observations. It can be a tall order relative to the cards pulled, but it is well worth pursuing.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on March 27, 2024.
