Bit of an overthinking problem...?

Hi Barleywine,

I very much agree with your approach to evaluating the cards in a spread. Hard and fast rules regarding isolated factors (i.e. elemental dignities) just don't work for me. After all, there is so much more to take into account! Trying to figure it all out analytically would be tedious; so I let my intuition (synthesizing thinking) provide me with the answer.

By the way, that's also how I read a horoscope chart; I initially take the planets' dignities, elemental positions, house positions etc into consideration, of course, but I never draw my conclusions in a mechanical fashion. That, for instance, Mercury in his fall and detriment in Pisces can belong to an ingenious thinker demonstrates that one needs to look at a chart in broad terms. I have spurred certain more rationalistic practitioners into disagreement by Statements like these, but I believe that having a good intuition is key - both in astrology and Tarot reading.

Michael Sternbach said:

Hi Barleywine,

I very much agree with your approach to evaluating the cards in a spread. Hard and fast rules regarding isolated factors (i.e. elemental dignities) just don't work for me. After all, there is so much more to take into account! Trying to figure it all out analytically would be tedious; so I let my intuition (synthesizing thinking) provide me with the answer.

By the way, that's also how I read a horoscope chart; I initially take the planets' dignities, elemental positions, house positions etc into consideration, of course, but I never draw my conclusions in a mechanical fashion. That, for instance, Mercury in his fall and detriment in Pisces can belong to an ingenious thinker demonstrates that one needs to look at a chart in broad terms. I have spurred certain more rationalistic practitioners into disagreement by Statements like these, but I believe that having a good intuition is key - both in astrology and Tarot reading.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the acknowledgement, Michael. That's pretty much how I've worked since the early '70s when the Thoth first grabbed me and wouldn't let go. I find it lends itself much more readily to dynamic interpretion than the Waite-Smith deck and its off-shoots, which I didn't come to until almost 40 years later. In both tarot and astrology, I try for the holistic impression - nailed so well by that wonderful German word gestalt - that winds up being more than the sum of its parts. I could never see it in "Lego-block" terms, although the modern psychological astrology I first learned was highly particularized and compartmentalized, and I didn't see beyond that until I was exposed to Ebertin's Cosmobiology. Come to think of it, my brother and I were experimenting with 8-fold chart division (vs. 12 houses) way back then, before we knew anything about the "eight watches" of archaic astrology. I think Marc Edmund Jones (with his "temperament types") and Dane Rudhyar (with his "lunation cycle," later elaborated on by Marc Robertson for all of the planets) had something going with the idea of "patterns" and "phases" but I suggest they tried too hard to shoehorn it into a ready-made Jungian psychological model. That's where a return to traditional astrology (although it had even more "stuff" - triplicities, terms, faces, sects, joys, perigrination, antiscia, etc.) was such a liberating experience, and more in line with how tarot works for me.

ETA: Just wanted to add - quite often intuition gives me the conceptual "envelope" and closer analysis illuminates the rationale behind why something struck me the way it did. Sometimes no further scrutiny is necessary and I just go with an overpowering first impression, but "checks-and-balances" create a valuable internal dialogue for continued learning.

Well, Barleywine, I find traditional astrology very interesting and continue to study it, but as you mentioned, it comes loaden with even more rules than its modern equivalent. I too find the synthetical (as opposed to analytical) approach represented by astrologers like Rudhyar very useful, but after all, we do need a balance between the analytical and the synthetical method. This is my aim in Tarot reading as well.

Tarot readers as a rule don't call themselves psychics, and psychics, even if they are in fact using the cards to guide them, don't usually refer to themselves as Tarot readers. I, for one, continue to work on both my rational understanding of the cards and the systems that they are based on and the unfolding of my psychic perception. The two should support and supplement one another.

Michael Sternbach said:

Well, Barleywine, I find traditional astrology very interesting and continue to study it, but as you mentioned, it comes loaden with even more rules than its modern equivalent. I too find the synthetical (as opposed to analytical) approach represented by astrologers like Rudhyar very useful, but after all, we do need a balance between the analytical and the synthetical method. This is my aim in Tarot reading as well.

Tarot readers as a rule don't call themselves psychics, and psychics, even if they are in fact using the cards to guide them, don't usually refer to themselves as Tarot readers. I, for one, continue to work on both my rational understanding of the cards and the systems that they are based on and the unfolding of my psychic perception. The two should support and supplement one another.

Click to expand...

I've been kind of puzzled by the indignation I get when I suggest that remote, third-party readings about how someone not the querent "thinks or feels" about some other person basically amounts to psychism or "mind-reading." I have trouble with the legitimacy of remote tarot reading in the first place (guess I'm just "old school") but having its target twice- or thrice-removed from the person handling the cards makes me wonder how it could be anything but psychic vision (if it isn't simply trawling of the reader's own sub-conscious).

Barleywine said:

I've been kind of puzzled by the indignation I get when I suggest that remote, third-party readings about how someone not the querent "thinks or feels" about some other person basically amounts to psychism or "mind-reading." I have trouble with the legitimacy of remote tarot reading in the first place (guess I'm just "old school") but having its target twice- or thrice-removed from the person handling the cards makes me wonder how it could be anything but psychic vision (if it isn't simply trawling of the reader's own sub-conscious).

Click to expand...

Right. As every successful and experienced Tarot reader should know, we look into people's minds with the help of the cards, into the past and future, and uncover many secrets... Mind you, it's us doing this - the cards do nothing by themselves! This is most certainly a kind of psychic perception to me - the latter can take many different forms.

Michael Sternbach said:

Right. As every successful and experienced Tarot reader should know, we look into people's minds with the help of the cards, into the past and future, and uncover many secrets... Mind you, it's us doing this - the cards do nothing by themselves! This is most certainly a kind of psychic perception to me - the latter can take many different forms.

Click to expand...

I have slightly fancier words for how I've always thought tarot works: "subiminal communion of the querent's subconscious with the cards through the agency of shuffling and cutting the deck." This is why I refuse to do remote readings where I shuffle for a distant person. Although a "sensitive" of sorts, I don't consider myself primarily a "mind-reader" (and I'm also not scuffling to make a living at it): I firmly believe the querent's physical engagement with the cards opens a channel of communication with the images, and I as the reader just interpret what springs from that interaction. So the ordering of the cards in a spread "belongs" to the querent and I'm a facilitator in promoting self-understanding. Simply put, I'm explaining the querent to him or herself through the medium of the cards. As I said, strictly "old school"

I have done pro remote readings ...

we do it here all the time in the reading exchange section of the forum...

As you well know distance is no restriction to communications or imaginations.

The real difference is what one believes...our resistances definitely restrict our abilities...

It's back to that trust thingee...and the understanding of the essence of that FOOl card.

re-pete-a said:

I have done pro remote readings ...

we do it here all the time in the reading exchange section of the forum...

As you well know distance is no restriction to communications or imaginations.

The real difference is what one believes...our resistances definitely restrict our abilities...

It's back to that trust thingee...and the understanding of the essence of that FOOl card.

Click to expand...

Perhaps . . . or it could just be shared mass delusion or gazing into our own subconscious navels. I wonder how much empirical data there is to show any meaningful difference between the effectiveness of remote and face-to-face readings. I kind of doubt it exists. As we've been discussing, "long-distance communication" of this type (unless you believe in divine intervention in the shuffle) is fundamentally tapping into something other than the cards (querent's subconscious, collective unconscious, akashic record, etc.) Nothing at all wrong with that, but it really is psychism, pure and simple. The cards become more like incidental "stage props" to lure in the customers than a true medium for interactive exchange, the launchpad for a one-way monologue rather than a cooperative dialogue. I made a conscious choice back in 2011 when I returned to practice and discovered this was going on; it's not so much "limiting" as "shaping" how I work (and have worked through most of a long lifetime with the tarot) at an interpersonal level.

But of course we've had this discussion here on the forum numerous times in the past, and I still see no reason to change. I might feel differently (and perhaps a bit more cynical) if I had to make my living this way. I've come to see electronic media as cheapening much of what it touches in the way of human discourse (although it's an unparalleled marketplace and "opinion-mill"), mainly because we can become whomever we choose to present ourselves as, with little to no risk of accountability. But then, it's all "for entertainment only," right?

There are as many different worlds as there are people in this one...all are the same yet totally different...

That difference is in the beliefs held by the individual and their associated feelings towards them.Hence I use the saying "in my world".

Some of your beliefs I agree with ,some I do not...this is one of those in the negative.


Your world is right for you and you can produce the personal evidence to back your statements...Some will even surrender their lives for their versions of their personal realities .
In the end they are all simply ideas...and when the believer is long gone so is the idea...even though another may decide to carry on the original idea it will be their own personal understanding of the original.

The reference to the FOOLS card is not an unfounded reference to help with overthinking something...It helps the individual to understand ,from their own personal perspective, the outcomes when unconditional trust is encountered.

Mostly this world and it's controlling personalities (at all levels) rule by the application of fears...This hasn't changed since the fall from the branches of the tree of life and it's continuing bouncing antics of the fallen...some I'm sure haven't stopped bouncing and have suffered concussions from that fall....and think all others should do the same...