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THREE KINDS OF READING
In my last column for The Meta Arts I discussed two ways to read Tarot cards, which I called (after Chapter 71 of the Tao Te Ching), "Ignorance and Knowledge." This time I want to move from two to three and look at three kinds of readings people do: fortune telling, psychological insight, and spiritual wisdom. If you ask most people what they know, or think, about Tarot cards you will get some reference to psychics and fortune telling. If you go to a Tarot convention and listen to how Tarot readers describe what they do, many will dismiss the entire concept of fortune telling, and instead insist that they help people understand themselves and show them how to grow or to change-in other words, give them psychological insight. Perhaps a fewer number will say that they help people see their divine purpose in life (or in the current incarnation), or ways to connect to sacred truth. These are kinds of spiritual wisdom readings, but not the only kinds.
The split between fortune telling and psychological insight is an interesting one. The "Tarot Renaissance" of the 1970s and later coincided with the rise of therapy as a sort of mass movement, compared to the earlier assumption that therapy only mattered to people who were severely mentally disturbed. Many Tarot readers, and writers on Tarot, absorbed this therapeutic viewpoint, so that it seemed natural to use the Tarot cards this way.
At the same time Tarot retained its popular image as a semi-magical way to find out hidden information-what will take place in the future, secrets ("Is my husband sleeping with his secretary?"), and practical steps, such as where to look for work. Storefront Tarot readers do not simply reveal things, they tell people what to do. "Reader and Advisor" runs the usual title. And of course a great many people want this advice. People will say "I don't make any decisions without consulting my psychic." Interestingly, they will say this with great pride, presumably that they have found the best, the most infallible, Tarot reader.
Those who read for insight often dislike both the approach of fortune telling, and the Tarot's reputation for it. They consider such readings disempowering, that is, they take away people's ability to make their own decisions. And it frustrates them that clients come to them with the expectation of magical predictions. At a recent workshop I taught I led a discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of these different approaches and few people had anything good to say about fortune telling.
So let us look at fortune telling-as well as the other two approaches-and see if we can find both help and hindrance. Do predictions really disempower? If they work, if they give us accurate information, they can in fact empower us, because they can help us make decisions. If you know for a fact that your husband is sleeping with his secretary you can decide what you want to do about it. If you know that a business deal just won't work, you can avoid wasted time and money. This is why people look to psychic Tarot readers.
But fortune telling doesn't always work, and can lead to wrong decisions. So partly, the problem many of us have with fortune tellers is that they abuse the trust people give them. In other words, they claim to know more than they actually can see, and lead people in bad directions. And because the process seems so mysterious and powerful people indeed can trust the reader to make all their decisions rather than figure out their own lives. When you read cards this way you yourself feel powerful; it tempts you to give people orders, because after all, you can see the future. It also tempts people to focus only on events, not meaning. They look only at the fact of the husband's affair and not on the deeper lessons for the wife of her relationship or her own sexuality.
By contrast, the approach of psychological insight can focus almost entirely on meaning and ignore events. I've often noticed that the spreads that fascinate me from others or that I make up myself almost never have anything to do with prediction. Instead, they open possibilities of self-knowledge as they give us the chance to look at ourselves. I say "possibility," and "chance," partly because the Tarot works through random selection of cards, but also because these readings do not automatically tell us about ourselves. We must do a certain amount of work to get the message. And even that statement implies that a set message exists. In fact, the virtue of psychological readings is that we ourselves create the message.
Then what is the drawback? Well, for one thing we can get so interpretative that we forget a world exists outside our thoughts. We forget that events happen. And we can start to see everything, and everyone, as a projection of our own inner emotional states.
What, then, of spiritual wisdom readings? These are the kinds of readings I describe in my book The Forest of Souls. There are two kinds of readings I call wisdom readings. In the first we ask the cards questions about sacred truth, such as "What is the soul?" In the second we create a spread based on spiritual traditions. So, for example, we might do a spread based on Easter and ask how we die, and how we are reborn. These spreads can transcend personal issues and use the Tarot to go beyond our own narrow perspectives. But we also can translate them to self-knowledge. "What is my soul? How do I die and be reborn?"
The advantage of this kind of reading is that it opens us up to wider perspectives. Even when we do the personal reading we still look beyond our usual questions. They also can put us in a sacred framework. That is, we can use these questions and the answers we get to learn to see the world in a different way. But this can become the drawback. We can remove ourselves from the solid reality of our own experience.
These are some of the benefits and hindrances of the three kinds of reading. Readers of this column, or The Forest of Souls, will know that we do not need to stop with our own observations. We have a valuable tool at hand, the Tarot itself. The following reading contains six cards, two each for fortune telling, psychological insight, and spiritual wisdom. For each approach I drew two cards after a shuffle, one for the advantage and one for the disadvantage. The deck is the Shining Tribe Tarot, designed and drawn by myself (available, like The Forest of Souls, from Llewellyn).
Fortune telling: The Fool and the Nine of Stones.
The first thing I need to report here is that the Fool was on top of the deck before I shuffled, it fell out while I was shuffling, and then after the shuffle and cutting the deck three times it ended up once more on the top. To me, this is the Tarot's sense of humor. Fortune telling is meant to be magical, and when I ask about it the Tarot shows off with a little razzle dazzle. Looking at the card itself we see that unlike some versions of the Fool, where a young man is about to dance off a cliff, here we see a child who has leapt off the cliff after a bird and can fly. Fortune telling, as Tarotist Zoe Matoff says (she did the reading with me), allows us to leap into the unknown. We can use our instincts and psychic flashes. It allows us to speak fearlessly. Like the bird, the cards can lead us to unknown places.
The hindrance card is the Nine of Stones. Here we see another bird, but now it's hooded, contained. Zoe Matoff comments that we may try to control the reading too much, or even the questioner. She also suggests that as nine is the final single digit number, so the reader may assume that she or he has all the answers. For me, the bird stood out as the prime symbol. In the Fool we follow the bird of instinct, but here we seek to control the bird. What has happened? Fortune telling is indeed risky, and hard. What happens if no psychic flash comes to you? To get past this, many fortune tellers fall back on set formulas they learn from books or teachers. They blind the bird by putting a hood of fixed meanings on its head.
Psychological Insight: Tradition, and the Sun.
Tradition is a variation of trump 5, called in modern decks The Hierophant, and in older decks The Pope. Some people dislike this card because they see it as a Church doctrine telling people what to do. It seems the very opposite of the advantages of psychological insight readings. In a sense, however, these kinds of reading have become the High Church of modern Tarot readers, with books written about them, and workshops given, and decks designed for this purpose (such as the Osho Zen Tarot). When we read this way we have access to a tradition and all the wisdom it contains. Zoe says that such readings can allow us (like therapists) to play the important role of a sort of secular priest.
The drawback card is the Sun. Quite simply, when we focus only on insight we can become too sunny, too positive and upbeat, ignoring some of the darker truths we might find in fortune telling. Instead of genuine insights, we can give out platitudes. In a sense, the problem is similar to the Fool and the Nine of Stones. If we don't really commit ourselves to the true power of this kind of reading we can fall back on easy answers.
Spiritual Wisdom: Five of Stones and Place of Birds
The Five of Stones is a variation on the Five of Pentacles. That card often shows sick people outside a church, with no door visible, as if their afflictions have cast them out from spiritual sanctuary. Here in the Five of Stones we see an image of deep spiritual healing. The ghostlike images (based on Native American rock paintings) seem to rise out of the stone, or to come forward. Readings for spiritual wisdom can produce such deep healing, connecting soul to spirit. They ground us in a sacred reality that is both as genuine as stones and mysterious as ghosts. Through wisdom readings we confront spiritual ideas directly and can begin to see that such things may after all be real.
The Place of Birds, on the other hand, removes us from the real and concrete. Like the Page of Swords, its traditional counterpart, it looks out on the world from a high place, and the danger is of removing ourselves from ordinary reality. We can get so lofty that we lose any sense of what it means in our own lives. Zoe says that we get caught in the overview and don't actually live it. Here too we see the same sort of split as before, that the disadvantage comes when we back off from the real power of the reading. With fortune telling it was a mistrust of intuition leading us to set formulas. With insight it was going away from the complexity to simplistic sunny answers. And here we see how we deny the hard realities of spiritual truth and go for grand ideas. Notice that in fortune telling the flight of the Fool becomes grounded and stuck in the Nine of Stones. Here the grounded reality of the Five of Stones becomes lost as we lift up into the sky with the birds of intellect.
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