The Limits of Divination
a.k.a. Why your tarot cards hate you and other mistakes you might make while seeking insight
We fear the future, which is why you can make a lot of money by being able to tell people what the future holds. Companies pay tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars for trend forecasters to tell them what colors, fashions and products will be popular in the coming months. An average professional tarot reader can charge between $50-$100 for a reading, and the really good ones can command a minimum of $250 an hour or much, much more. Psychics are equally expensive. People cram the halls when there's a soothsayer or a medium doing a session, and might pay hundreds of dollars just for the chance to be in the room where it's happening. Nearly every spiritual tradition has some form of future-telling that adherents may access -- runes, bones, bibliomancy, i Ching, mediumship. Divination, or the contacting of spirit for the purpose of knowing the future, is a time-honored practice that takes many, many forms.
As you may have heard me say before, I spent decades as a student of the tarot, and worked for a long time as a professional tarot reader (although for reasons, I no longer read for money.) I still teach tarot and over the course of my life have probably given hundreds of readings. I can't really say I have seen it all (because saying that is an invitation to the Universe to surprise you in unfortunate ways), but I've seen and heard a lot.
Like most divination systems, tarot has a lot of lore, mythology and weirdness around it. The cards are fairly accurate in the right hands, and this can be disconcerting to people who want to play the skeptic. Sometimes your querant will say they are asking a question about one thing, and the cards as they come out are very clear that they are answering an entirely different question from the one the querant has asked. This is usually indicative that the querant has a question they would like to ask, but they didn't ask because they were scared for whatever reason.
It’s also my experience that the cards have a mind of their own, and yes, different decks will feel different to the point of having different “personalities” — I find some decks like spell work better than divination. Some like to work with deep existential questions. Some are more gossipy and want to talk about that guy you met at the wedding and his whole family. And ever so rarely, you will find you have a deck on your hands that is downright snarky and even grumpy. It will find the most passive aggressive, or even downright aggressive, way to tell you what you need to know. I can't tell you how many times I have heard a budding tarot learner say, "I think this deck doesn't like me!" I'm pretty sure that other divination systems can behave in a similar way.
Now, it might be the divination tool that is acting up. But it also might be the reader, especially if the reader in this case is also the querant. There are some folks who say that you should never do readings for yourself for this reason. But I don't agree with this. I DO think that readers can and should do readings for themselves. But you have to be wary of all the ways that you as a querant are distorting what is happening.
And the thing is, in nearly every divination scenario, whether it is reading tarot (for yourself or receiving a reading from someone else), or seeing a professional psychic at your local witch shop, or participating in a divination ritual of some kind, there are several ways in which you as a querant are going to undermine your own experience.
The most common way we do this is what I call the "daisy syndrome." Every grade school girl has played the "daisy game" -- taking a flower and removing the petals one by one saying "they love me," then, "They love me not" with the idea that the last petal standing is revealing the truth of the matter. And every grade school girl has also grabbed another flower and started the game all over again when the flower gives the wrong answer, and we will KEEP TORTURING THE FUCKING FLOWERS UNTIL THEY TELL US WHAT WE WANT TO HEAR, DAMMIT!
When the cards tell you something, believe them the first time. If you keep starting new spreads, in hopes that this time the cards will tell you something different, eventually, you'll notice the cards getting more and more..... snarky about their response. Likewise, if you keep pestering your ancestors about the same question over and over again, hoping that if you find the right ancestor they will give you the answer you want, don't be surprised when the responses become more frustrating, either because the ancestors are less kind about what they say, or simply stop answering altogether.
All of this stands to reason. I mean, how much do you like it when someone asks you the same question over and over again, hoping that if they do it enough times you'll give them the answer they want instead of the answer you have? You can ask my teenage son how well that works for him (and no honey, you still can't have that video game for your birthday).
There's a version of this that is slightly more subtle, where the querant thinks they are asking different questions, but really all the questions boil down to the same thing. And the reason the querant isn't satisfied with the answers they are getting is because they are convinced that when they get THE ANSWER that it will feel a certain way. And if they haven't had their revelatory moment, then clearly they have to keep searching for the answers. I call this "chasing feelings."
Look, I think one of the greatest things about the Craft and the path is that it helps us recognize the power our feelings can have, and how important it is to honor them. American culture, like most patriarchal societies, devalues emotion as being less valid than "logic." (And the people who tell you this most often are doing so to validate their feelings, but that is another rant for another time.) But the biggest mistake that you can make in the Craft is to expect that you know what something is going to feel like before it's happened.
Feelings are not biddable. They do not come when you want them to, or in the form you want them to, and once they arrive, they don't go away when you want them to. And if you are waiting for the right feeling to come when you call, you are setting yourself up for a life of nonstop disappointment. You will spend your life so fixated on finding the feelings you think you ought to be having, that you will completely miss the feelings that you are actually experiencing right now.
This is the querant who thinks that if she asks the question in just the right way, she'll find the feeling she wants. And in doing so, she has completely missed the answer that she got that really WILL change her life in exactly the way she is hoping. Divination is at bottom, a practical tool, and the feelings you are having are part of understanding the message you are being given. If you aren't feeling relieved at what you've been told, and you aren't feeling the way you expected to, you might want to stop and explore why the feelings you are having are coming right now. Get some professional help with that from a therapist if you need to. The chances are pretty good that your authentic reaction to the results of your query are going to lead you to the revelations you say you want.
Unless of course, that's what the whole point of why you are chasing feelings to begin with -- the more you can pretend that the advice you're getting is "wrong" because it doesn't "feel right," the more you can avoid actually doing the work that might change the situation you've been asking about.
In contrast to the querant who wants to seek the answers but is scared of finding them, we have the querant who is too eager to find ALL THE ANSWERS. Some querants ask question after question, on issue after issue, because they do not trust themselves enough to act without first getting what they perceive as "divine approval" for their decisions. Divination is a powerful tool, no question. But it is not a substitute for your executive function as a human being.
My experience as a professional tarot reader was that in the vast majority of cases, if you are dealing with a reasonably self-aware human being, you will very rarely deliver information that is a complete surprise to your querant. Most of us carry our wisdom with us, and the chief value of divination as a tool is its ability to help you access that wisdom when you are confused or otherwise twisted up on yourself and not thinking clearly. While there are benefits to doing meditative exercises like daily Tarot or rune pulls, most people really don’t need to consult a serious divination tool for looking into the future more than once every few months. If you’re in a particularly difficult place in your life where you are making lots of deep and rapid changes, more frequent use might make sense.
And then there are the clients who would try to make appointments every week, or who would want in a session to cover every little decision they were currently facing, including where to go for dinner. Although these kinds of clients are ostensibly a gold mine for a professional reader, because they buy often and need lots of readings, I couldn’t in good conscience recommend that they have all the readings they seemed to want. The cards had said what they said, and no amount of repetition would change that, and quite frankly, their deep need for someone to make their decisions for them runs counter to everything that I believe about people owning their own path. My continuing to take money would have not been consistent with my ethics. But I am very certain they easily found others more than willing to milk them for their hard-earned cash.
As I’ve said elsewhere, in pagan circles, our gods are not interested in our helplessness or humiliation. We're not meant to be prostrated before our deities, begging for every scrap of guidance and grace. Pagans stand in power, not penitence, and own our lives and the choices we make with them. So it's completely understandable when one attempts to overuse divination tools, they begin to weary of us and start being less than helpful. Divination is meant to be a tool that provides information and insight. It is not meant to be a substitute for your own judgement and decisions.
Lastly, there's the moments when querants decide that they want the reader to prove themselves before they will allow themselves to fully engage with the divination experience. This can either be a moment where the querant tries to play "stump the reader," by asking a question they think they already know the answer to, or give wrong information to try and elicit a false reading so that they can play "gotcha." It can even be a subtle as being super vague and uncommunicative, because honestly, if the reader is worth their salt, they should know what the querant wants to ask about without them having to say anything.
It's important to understand that the ability to use divination tools well does not automatically come with clairvoyance or telepathy. Readers read cards and runes and other tools, not your mind. The expectation that they will automatically know what you are on about is unfair. That said, my experience as a Tarot reader is that the cards are usually able to read the querant, even when the reader can't. Most of the time, the cards themselves foil the "stump the reader" game, delivering a very accurate "read" of the querant more appropriate to an episode of "RuPaul's Drag Race" than might otherwise have happened. It's not a fun experience to be on the receiving end of. And as I noted above, I've also seen it happen that the cards will deliver a reading based not on the question that the querant spoke out loud, but the one that was really on their mind that they were holding back on because they were too embarrassed or shy to ask it.
I always advise people who are seeking divination to be cautious of who they seek a reading from. Ask questions about how your reader comes by their skill. Ask them about pricing and upselling and how they work BEFORE you commit to a reading. If you're going to a seidr ritual or a medium's event, do some homework before you go and prepare yourself for the experience beforehand. And always, always, always recognize that you have the right to leave if you feel too uncomfortable with what's going on for any reason. Anyone engaging in divination who isn't cool with you having complete autonomy over your experience or who isn't willing to give you a reasonable amount of information to ensure your informed consent to what's happening should be avoided.
That said, you can contribute to your own negative experience by making some of the above mistakes. Don't set yourself up for failure. Bring the right attitude and your experience with divination can be fully productive and positive. You might not get everything you'd hoped for, but you'll be working with divine energy, instead of at cross-purposes with it.