Anatomy of a Horary Failure

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Back in 2017 I wrote an essay on the subject of "strictures against judgment" in horary astrology, those conditions pertaining to a horoscope that render it unfit for interpretation (i.e. it is not considered "radical"). Although I don't adhere rigidly to this principle, I recently cast a missing-person chart for an Oregon "cold …

Reading Skills: Black & White or Technicolor?

AUTHOR'S NOTE: These are entirely my own opinions about what it takes to become an effective tarot reader in a face-to-face setting, based on over five decades of practice. (Online reading doesn't count since it is not an interactive art requiring presentation skills; it falls under the "black & white" category of the title.) This …

“Personal Favorite” Predictive Methods

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Not long ago I answered an online question about how I would rank my favorite methods of divination. This required me to step back and re-examine where I've been going with prognostication over the last fifty-odd years. Tarot: Reading the tarot cards is the "fortune-telling" practice I've been pursuing the longest (since 1972) …

“Turning the Page”

AUTHOR'S NOTE: It's a rare diviner who doesn't occasionally encounter an almost entirely neutral tarot reading, one that is about as exciting as dishwater, and who doesn't have a good feel for how to shine a constructive light on the forecast. A common practice is to simply keep pulling cards until something more inspiring or …

“The Wish, The Will and The Way” Self-Realization Spread

Here is a deceptively simple spread that permits the reader to examine four different approaches to a situation either singly or collectively: the Way of Action (forceful); the Way of Feeling (emotional); the Way of Thought (cerebral) and the Way of Prudence (practical). There are no specific "outcome" cards, just those that show the means …

Tarot and Astrology: Convergence or Collision?

AUTHOR'S NOTE: In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I was already a natal astrologer of the "psychological" school and had been for a couple of years before I began pursuing tarot study and practice in a systematic (primarily esoteric) way. So I have an abiding appreciation for astrological principles even though …

The “Equal-Opportunity” Skeptic

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Those of us who follow a qabalistic approach to the esoteric tarot recognize that the roots of our study and practice lie in Hebrew religious mysticism that has been adapted for ritual use by the 19th-Century Hermetic occultists of the Western Mystery Tradition. We may invoke the words and concepts but we don't …

Sublimation as a Reading Strategy

AUTHOR'S NOTE: As I'm using it here, to "sublimate" something means to "elevate it to a higher order of excellence." I'm focusing this principle on the problem of how to deal in a constructive way with particularly discouraging cards in a tarot reading that stubbornly resist interpretive mitigation. We may not be rewarded with a …

Tarot Worldview: A Matter of Perspective

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The Germans have a precise but rather fierce-sounding word for it: weltanschauung. As an esoteric thinker with Germanic roots and a decidedly rational (as well as curmudgeonly) approach to tarot matters, I've always had reservations about the metaphysical worldview that assumes everything in existence is mystically entwined in a matrix of perfect congruence, …

A Confluence of Perfection: The Hermit by Threes

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Several years ago I came across the revelation that the numbers Three, Six and Nine represent the "Three Perfections" of ancient Greek (or possibly Hindu) philosophy. I was unable to discover the historical source of this information, but the idea has stuck with me. The "magic number" in the following meditation is the …