As I was reading through the equinox Tarot blog hop over this past week, I noticed an interesting pattern. The blog hop wrangler, Morgan Drake Eckstein, had asked us all to relate stories about major changes in the way we saw Tarot over the years. I had my own shift, which I related here, but I noticed that a some readers really didn’t have any great epiphanies; the cartomantic thing just came 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 approaches to reading, which turn out to be quite useful for the types of questions most querents ask.
As a result of being mentored by a really great practical tarot reader (Vivianne Kacal), I’ve seriously expanded my own perspective on reading cards and have relegated my spiritual/contemplative/big life question approach to just the situations where those types of questions are actually asked. So, if someone asks me about their prospects for marriage over the next year, I won’t disempower them by saying that because they got the reversed Two of Cups there’s just no way they’ll find a good match, but at the same time I’ll let them know that the prospects are not that great, unless they change something in the meantime.
The problem with the direction taken by folks who put a New Age “pollyanna” spin on every reading is that the Tarot and the quantum energies may actually be pointed in a challenging direction, and always putting a positive spin on things may be doing your querent a disservice by not empowering them with information they can use to change or at least prepare for things.
I’m assuming that the whole idea behind the use of the cards for fortune-telling was to draw back the veil of the unknown future and take a peek at the prospects. This view has been coupled with a certain fatalism about the future that is part of the basic human condition of living in a big world with big forces we don’t have direct control over. But there are many things in life that we do have some influence on, so I think it’s a mistake to be totally fatalistic about the future. To me there’s a constant movement of forces that we can influence through our own attitudes, if we have some awareness of them. And that’s where guidance from people like psychic counselors and Tarot readers comes in.
A reading is like a “heads-up” from the universe, so its important that it include both the good news and the potentially 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.
The point of doing a reading, for me, is ultimately to be helpful, and to maintain my integrity, it also means not being afraid to call ’em like I see ’em. 🙂
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