media (mis)representation

Some of us have been having a discussion about Tarot in print media like news sites and magazines. I've noticed a somewhat disturbing trend these last few years: they seek out instagram influencers and the like who are mainly using the cards as a kind of prop or accessory to brand themselves. And they say things like this:

"Before she starts a reading, she always prepares people by saying she can’t predict the future."

 “People think it’s about predicting the future, but it isn’t. It’s about the present, and it can be very empowering."

“I thought it was all about telling the future and predictions and making money off people’s fears. I went in very sceptical (sic) and thinking I would find it all hooey but instead I came out with a huge amount of respect for tarot readers and tarot as a practice. A good tarot reader doesn’t tell you what’s going to happen, they simply allow you to think your question through in a different way.”

And there's this:

“Tarot is great for anxiety. While you may not be predicting the future, you can slow down and shuffle and look at pretty pictures and say, ‘Oh yeah, I’m overthinking this.’ ”

They aren't even reading the cards, they're using them as a pacifier.

See where one draws a false equivalence between "telling the future and predictions", "hooey", and "making money off peoples' fears"? She then goes on to say that "a GOOD Tarot reader doesn't tell you what's going to happen." It's very clear what she means.

Attempting to destroy business rivals is nothing new in this game. I remember the certification rackets being really bad about that. But what's disturbing about this is that it's is not some fly-by-night blog or website. It's the Guardian, the WaPo, etc. It lends these bimbos a false air of legitimacy. And these publications are purposely not talking to readers like us, or even to established Tarot writers who have managed to make a name for themselves. These articles are simply bully pulpits for wannabe Kardashians.

If you think about it, the Celtic Cross is a longtime popular spread that everybody knows, and it has positions for Before You/near future and the Final Outcome. There are altered versions, but most of those versions have future positions. You can't tell me that these publications can't find anybody who uses the Celtic Cross. Surely they bump into a lot of people like that, but they're not writing about them. They're purposely marginalizing predictive readers like us.

To the little bimbette and her ilk who claim we're "hooey", "making money off peoples' fears" and add that "a GOOD Tarot reader doesn't tell you what's going to happen", I have one thing to say:
Honey, I was reading professionally when you were still hopping back and forth in your daddy's nutsack trying to keep from going in your grandma's mouth. Get bent.

Someone actually did manage to find ONE link with a predictive Tarot reader in it. Of course she's dead last, lumped in with disreputable D-list "celebs" who bill themselves as psychics of various kinds. She claims to access the Akashic records, doesn't seem to have progressed beyond single card draws, and relies heavily on cold reading techniques for the first two predictions. This is the third:

Um, the Magician is about potential. Some things will look promising, just like they did last year and the year before, but COVID isn't going anywhere. You don't even need cards for that. The people who study COVID say we're in it for the long haul. It won't be like this forever, but it's certainly not going away next year: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/10/29/1050465159/covids-endgame-scientists-have-a-clue-about-where-sars-cov-2-is-headed

Someone else managed to find a PDF copy of an old article that featured Rachel Pollack. It was in regards to her book about the Dali Universal Tarot, which dates it to 1985. Thirty-six years ago. And even that was a hatchet job.

I get it. There's a coordinated push to discredit and marginalize us. Some corporate overlords somewhere decided it would be profitable to push the "predictive readers are badwrong" narrative and hype the Gwyneth Paltrow-style flakes, for reasons I am not privy to.

So I am going to explain here what I do, and what I know card reading to be.

A person learns their system. This involves study, practice, and rote memorization (which does not mean using "canned meanings" or discarding instinct and intuition.) Cards mean things and we have to remember those meanings. It's learning a language. It's like remembering that the table is la mesa in spanish.You don't have to remember pages of meanings and combined meanings for every card. Just a core essence of each card that can be unpacked and put into context. And then we have to practice doing that, in addition to making the most of the visual cues and other techniques. It takes some years to gain fluency.

Predictive reading does work if you do it correctly. I can predict a lot more accurately with cards than I can by guessing. I don't call myself psychic. And I don't know what I'm interfacing with (if anything) that makes it work. Maybe it's something in my own bony skull. Maybe it's guides, maybe it's ancestors, maybe it's something else. I honestly have no idea.

People come to us and they have questions. These questions always come down to things like love and money. Nobody asks to be psychoanalyzed, and I don't have the degrees and licensing to do that anyway. I'm a fortuneteller.

Now to address the predatory scam reader trope. People pay traditional readers to read cards, so we read cards. We translate what's on the table. Very simple. We're not lying to people, we're telling them what the cards say. It's beyond our control if they want to believe it or not, act on it or not, or just take it with a big grain of salt and view it as all in good fun. They're adults capable of making their own decisions. We only relay the message.

That's it. It's not difficult to comprehend.