Tarot: To Predict or to Enlighten

Well, both, of course. Here’s how I came to use both “spiritual/psychological transformation” and “where’s my best next house move this year?” approaches to reading the cards.

When I was originally learning the Tarot in around 2012, I brought with me a sense of satisfaction from the little “New Age enlightenment” readings I’d done for friends and family over the previous twelve years. Reading for “strangers,” however, was another dimension altogether. At first it was hard for me to trust my intuition and the voice of the Tarot cards themselves to advise someone I did not know on their prospects for marriage within the next year. I didn’t have much confidence in speaking to traditional life’s-fortune questions that every professional reader deals with.

And so, the performance anxiety began. Would I get cards that made sense for the question? Would I be able to make sense of them in a way that resonated with this stranger from far away whose life I had no direct knowledge of? Really, I do take that very seriously, the call for an accurate reading. I don’t just “make things up” but really do interpret the cards as I see ’em in the present moment.

After doing a number of grounded predictive-style readings, I began to get more comfortable with what I now see as the quantum connection between the symbolism and the energies and the collective unconscious of humanity. Those connections did indeed bear fruit, and the universal human experience began to be accurately expressed in the Tarot cards. And I experienced uncanny synchronicities, in fact. Concrete ones.

What’s interesting to me, originating from a non-Tarot family tradition (Catholic in USA) is that some veteran readers I know didn’t have any great epiphanies like mine; the cartomantic thing just made sense naturally over time or was part of their family tradition. I also noticed that those who took this gradual approach tend to have a more down-to-earth approach to reading overall, which turns out to be quite useful for the types of questions most querents (clients) ask. Learning to trust intuition without choosing in advance how to approach the cards seems to be most accurate.

I value my training in traditional Tarot reading to give people an idea of the energies at play in the present moment, but I do not try to purposely predict the future. I believe that the energies in the present can lead in a certain direction, and knowing those can help make decisions. But ultimately, as my favorite Tarot reader and astrologer Theresa Reed says, “The Tarot tells a story, but you write the ending.” We are always at choice in any matter in the present moment.

Not that there aren’t larger waves of change that can be tracked for an individual or a collective and projected into the future with some confidence. In the end, though, all such conclusions will depend on nature and other humans making choices, which can turn our projections on their heads.

As part of my intuitive mentoring practice, I prefer to use the Tarot as a collaborative tool to explore emotional issues, life goals and passions, and generally help people make decisions on what they really want to do next rather than predicting what will happen next. Tarot symbolism is archetypal, so people from many different cultures can find resonance in these symbols of the human experience. Seeing what the shuffle reveals can prompt emotions and ideas that help my clients create transformations in their own lives.

I find this collaborative style of reading, where my clients and I discuss all the possibilities in the card combination to be very rewarding. The read is still grounded in the client’s experience, but it feels like we are both participating in the “write the ending” bit of the Tarot reading that Theresa talks about.

Just because we are focused on positive possibilities, though, does not mean we ignore the challenges presented by the cards. Sometimes a “spiritual awakening” approach to reading can devolve into a Pollyanna positivity that ignores those challenges and puts pressure on people to be positive all the time. Very unrealistic. We are meant to go through challenges rather than avoiding them, and we’re meant to feel all our feelings as we go. We can still end up with major inner transformations after processing the card symbolism, but it’s definitely a journey through and not around.

To me a good reading for any type of question is like a “heads-up” from the universe, so its important that it include both good news and bad news. Folks do seem to find both types of news helpful as long as they feel like they’ve got some time to make choices.

I think I’ve found a good mix of methods to make for quality readings for different questions. What about you, if you read the cards? How do you approach them?