Today’s query is a good one. It’s something a lot of folx struggle with, particular when reading for ourselves. It goes a little something like this . . . : How can I check my biases or be aware of them? What are questions I can ask or approaches I can take to try and see the reading as “objectively” as possible? How can I be aware of blind spots? This reader specific reading for themselves, but it’s a thing all readers face at some point. So let’s explore it both from a self-reading and client reading POV.
I’m using a line of five, here, similar to the arc I typically use (less visually arresting). This particular method of reading comes from JM David’s brilliant Reading the Marseille Tarot. It’s a HUGE book, but it’s one of the absolute best out there. I think it flies under the radar because it’s independently published and isn’t done through Amazon, which is wise for the creator but makes it harder to find. The link above will take you to JM’s webpage where you can find it. (I bought the PDF and had it printed and spiral bound at Staples, which wound up being just as expensive as buying the book—but either way, get your hands on it. It’s excellent.) This line of five is read in progressing sets of three, a little something like this. First pass: 1, 2, 3 Second pass: 2, 3, 4 Third pass: 3, 4, 5 For this reason, I draw the cards in the order that you see them on. I didn’t start with the middle and work out as I typically do with an arc. The deck I’m using today is also an underrated one. The Radiant Tarot by Alexandra Eldridge and Tony Barnstone is a pip-style deck, with blends of animal and people—and animal/people hybrids—and reminds me a lot of the popular but long out of print Stella’s Tarot (another of my great loves). I recommend highly. Sometimes when I read at events I’ll bring a couple decks with me and allow the client to choose which they’re drawn to. When I bring this one, 95% or more of the people select this. First pass: 1. Six of Cups, 2. Six of Pentacles, 3. Queen of Swords I love that we start with two sixes and that they are the receptive suits. To my way of thinking, we also have an active suit and a passive one. This is something I haven’t talked about that much, but you’ll likely hear me talking about it more. Water is active, based purely on its behavior. It flows. It cannot stand still and in fact when it does stand still, that’s typically where disease festers. This is why I don’t gender the elements. Water is both receptive (you can get into it) and active (it moves). Earth, on the other hand, is receptive and passive. I mean if we want to get really technical, none of the elements are totally passive (nor, truly, is anything). The Earth moves and grows, too, but to our human eyes—our largely impatient eyes—we don’t see it, so we assume nothing is happening. Fire is projective and active. It consumes, it cannot generally be resisted (and this is a good chance to wish my friends on CA well . . . the images of the fires there are devastating and it is another signal of this country’s great sins that our leaders’ greed, ineptitude, and pandering puts all of us at risk of losing life and/or limb far too often). Air is projective and passive. It’s not necessarily that air imposes itself in the way fire does, which is what it’s “passive,” but it’s everywhere and we are literally desperate for it, so it is projective. There’s a little gift of a lesson for you! OK, two sixes and then the q/swords. I love this for us and for this question. Here’s how I would read this: Bias cannot be avoided, it is inevitable because it is built into who we are. It is innate (that’s not the cards talking right now, that’s science). Bias is actually part of our survival mechanism. It is how our brain decides whether we’re safe or not. The problem is that society takes advantage of these biases and teaches us that certain groups are safe and others aren’t based on bigotry. And society usually has it backwards. Society tells us that cops are safe and immigrants aren’t. But I think a quick glance around at . . . all this . . . demonstrates that we’ve learned the wrong lesson. So it’s not necessarily that our biases are the issues as much as the fact that our innate tendency toward biases has been exploited by powerful people to control us and marginalize groups that have been identified as “not our kind.” But I’m prompted to write about this by the cards, even if this isn’t in the meanings. Here’s why: sixes are beauty. That’s a typical meaning for the number. But in this context, for some reason I’m thinking of beauty in part as a filter. Why? The q/swords, actually. More on that in a sec. The two sixes feel good. Right? If we can extrapolate “beauty” into a feeling, which we want to because we have cups here, we can say “feeling beautiful” or “beautiful feelings” — and that leads us to “feeling good.” We get the same vibe from the 6/penties, but of course in the realm of earth. I might distill this card as “good life.” Inherent in six is desire. Why? Because we all want beauty, whatever that means to us. It nourishes us, as do food and water. We want to feel “beautiful,” we want our life to be “beautiful.” And when we’re reading for ourselves we smack up against the reality that life doesn’t always look good and we don’t always feel good. And when we lay out the cards, we worry that our bias will either make the reading be too happy or too unhappy, but either way that we won’t be getting the “real” reading because we’re not objective enough. The Queen of Swords is about as objective a character as the tarot has. She’s been through it and she’s highly experienced/educated (probably a combo of life and formal schooling, but take that as a metaphor for anyone who is “experienced” in good and wise ways). But she knows that she can’t escape the fact that no one is entirely objective about anything. She’s smart (swords) enough to understand that reality. Because she’s a queen and queens are typically associated with water (aggressive-receptive), she knows that we’re going to be at the mercy of our wants and feelings (water/cups) and that we want the best for our lives (6/penties). But she also recognizes that for all our bias, we’re also smart enough to know when we’re blowing smoke up our own asses. Because we have enough self awareness (a very q/swords thing—that sharp, clear mentality means that the court of swords “knows” itself and sees itself much more clearly than the others) to know we’re full of crap. “Don’t worry about your biases,” she says, “because your desire for a good life, to feel loved, to feel safe, is not going to get in the way of your reading. In fact, the reading will account for it.” (Note from future me: Here I want to point out we’re talking about you’re biases when reading for yourself. If you’re reading for others you have a responsibility to understand your biases about others and to face them. I’ve written about that elsewhere, but this is NOT a reading justifying your societal disengagement and anti-colonial lassitude. Wink.) How does she know the reading will account for it? Because she understands how divination works. She’s got enough of an understanding of how she believes that a reading functions to now that her biases will become part of the reading, not something that needs to be run from. More on that in a moment, too. Second pass: 2. Six of Pentacles, Queen of Swords, The Tower When things are going well (6/penties), we know (q/swords) things will eventually go to shit (Tower). Now, here’s where the queen’s “knowing,” her wisdom, is flawed. Because it’s being influenced by the imagination. Sixes and Sevens are numbers that I typically associate with the imagination, sixes fantasy and sevens intimate —but both in the imaginal realm. Sixes have a romantic worldview. And while “romance” usually is perceived as positive, romantic thinking can be negative, too. Ask anyone who fantasizes about breaking up with their lovers or about having fights with people they care about. Anyone prone to disaster thinking understand that romance isn’t just good stuff, it’s epic stuff in the literary sense. Anything “romantic” is usually over the top in the way that the romance movement was in both literature and art. Sure, we’re not entirely in the realm of romance—we’ve got a practical, earthy angle, here—but because the earth represents our lives, we’re not entirely in the logical mode. Our lives are important to us and the idea that they might be riddled with disaster is scary—romantic, too, in the sense that we imagine ourselves in a movie closeup with a single tear streaming down our cheek, lit beautifully—and that’s what this trio reminds us. We tend to expect the worst, especially when life is pretty good (6/swords). Even though the q/swords knows better, she’s still not immune from her tendency to expect the worst. Third pass: 3. Queen of Swords, 4. Tower, 5. Page of Swords Here, the tower is bracketed by two swords cards—both courts. We’ve already talked about the queen and the Tower, but each pass re-contextualizes the cards as it adds one and leaves another behind. This spread is really like doing three three-card readings, but you only use five cards instead of nine. The Tower flanked in this way reminds us that the concept of “disaster” is really contextualized by our perception (swords) of it. What’s that mean? The bigness (queen) or smallness (page) of an event (Tower) corresponds to the way we perceive it, regardless of it’s real bigness or smallness. What I’m saying is, shit will feel bigger or smaller based on how you’re receiving it. You might get a flat tire on a day when you were in a good mood, and it might be a giant hassle, and it may ruin your good mood, but it’s a thing that happens and you deal with it. Or, you might get the same flat tire on a day when you’re already cooking and this is the last fucking straw and you just fucking cannot. It’s the same event, same cost to fix, takes the same amount of time to resolve, etc., but your reception of it depends on the context. Not unlike the cards in a reading. And so what the fuck does this have to do with our inability to be objective in tarot readings? Glad you asked. Say you do a reading and it predicts a flat tire. Objectively craptastic, but not, like, life altering (context-dependent—if this flips your car or makes you let for a dream job interview, maybe it does . . . but we’re being super general here). When that event comes to be, whether or not it is annoying or devastating will depends on what else is going on that day. And this is the case for, like, everything. Say you’re thumbing through Amazon while watching TV and you see the thing that you’ve been missing that you must have or you simply won’t be able to go on. It’s a little pricier than you want and you’re a little broker than you’d prefer, but, fuck it. You deserve a little treat. This is the fucking thing you’ve been waiting for and it is the single solution to all your problems. FUCK YEAH! BUY NOW, BABY! You’re flooded with dopamine and you spend the next day fantasizing about it, checking the delivery status, watching the driver on the map. And you get it and you tear into the package and . . . it’s fine. We’re so afraid of predicting bad things, especially for ourselves, especially when we’re new and/or or especially if we’re given to disaster thinking. We know bad things will happen to us and we know they’re just around the corner. Most of the time for most people in most contexts, even if the reading portends something “bad” or disappointing, the probability is that it’s not going to be THAT bad in the scheme of things--and the degree of badness won’t depend entirely on the thing, but on the context of the thing. Meaning, a flat tire is a flat tire—but whether it’s just a fucking pain in the ass or literally the worst thing that has ever happened on the day will depend on so many more things than just the event. And we also fail to consider that good things, the things we desperately need and want and must have oh my god or we’ll simply DIE are also sometimes contextually . . . meh. That may sound flip, given what a fuckton of despair is happening in the world right now. But when we’re in the throes of that kind of despair, chances are we’re not breaking out our tarot cards and checking in on the progress of our spiritual journey. We’re literally surviving. We tend not to read for ourselves in moments when we’re in the midst of catastrophe. And because of that, we don’t have to worry quite as much about bias as we think we do. Let me step out of the reading for a moment and add a little sidebar, here. This question of course stems from the anxiety that we’re not going to be able to read for ourselves and get a good answer—and from the tendency humans have to either over-catastrophize or completely under-catastrophize. And we worry, say, that we might do a reading and see something like what is happening with the wildfires in California as I write this. What if we miss this in a reading and could have done something? Or, what if we see it in a reading and it turns out not to be true. Here’s where my experience kicks in and takes over from this reading a bit. When you’re worried about seeing or missing good or bad things in a spread, when you’re worried about whether your interpretation is slanted either by desire or fear, you don’t need to rely only on the cards. Remember, there are contexts at play in a reading beyond the cards that we’re seeing—and that a reading does its best to reflect likelihoods based on current conditions and energies and behaviors. So, let’s say you’re looking at a spread and you’ve asked the questions, “What if anything should I be prepared for in coming month?” Let’s say you lay out cards and you see The Sun and a metric fuckton of wands. Fire! “There’s going to be a major wildfire,” you think. And because it’s in the news, you’re particularly sensitive to this and it’s a great phobia of yours. Fair. And you could do another reading to see whether your interpretation is correct—in this case, maybe a yes/no based on the question “is my interpretation of that reading accurate.” But another thing you could do is pause and consider your world. Are you in an area prone to wildfires? Are you in a season where wildfires are common? Are you experiencing drought? As you answer yes or no to these questions, you immediately begin to understand whether the likelihood is high or not. If you’re presently living in a humid, wet, rainy location where wildfires have never happened, that certainly doesn’t mean that they can’t happen—but the likelihood is slim, and so it might be wise to consider another interpretation. If you’ve predicted something, it’s worth considering how likely it is even the existing conditions. If it’s extremely unlikely, probably you’ve let your anxieties guide you and it’s wise to return to zero and start again. And I think that’s a decent summation, too, of these three cards (to remind you, the q/words, Tower, p/swords). Perception and insight are both swordsy realities. “I perceive this as terrible, what insight do I have to validate whether that danger is real?” There’s a logic to swords that applies here and says, “Is this disaster or is it an inconvenience?” Swords have an investigative nature, don’t they? Another thing we don’t talk about, but if we think about the world of investigative reporting, it’s very airy—tenacious, oblique, intellectual, even somewhat cold, as investigative reporters aren’t known for their empathy when trying to get a juicy story. All very swordsy to me. Investigate the evidence you’ve got to see if it fits, if it makes sense. Swords are sensible, at least in theory; anyway, the “get” the idea of being sensible, and in this spread, I think that’s the gift they bring: clarity, logic, investigation, sense. “No, it does not make sense that I would face a wildfire next month given the current conditions. Let me retry this interpretation.” A fourth pass - mirroring: Have read the three sets of three, I feel compelled to explore whether mirroring the cards (paring cards on oppo sides of the reading) offers any additional context or insight. This matches the Six of Cups with the Page of Swords, and that is quite a useful pairing. The Page of Swords is curious and unsentimental. The Six of Swords is quite sentimental, moony, dreamy. The page comes along to this dream and attempts to pop the bubbles. “Is this too good to be true?” They see something good, but they don’t take it a face value. Like the example above, “how likely is this to be true?” And because they’re fairly ruthless in their ability to question what they think they see, they’ll tease out that likelihood. And page’s curiosity allows them to approach without judgement. Meaning they don’t “care” whether or not the answer is what they want. And this reminds us to be a little ruthless. If we get a positive answer, is there any way to poke holes and see whether or not that’s truly likely? By the same token, this implies doing the same with negative answers. If you get a big fat terrible answer that you hate, do the same. How likely is this to be the reality? Poke holes in it. Pairing the next two, the Six of Pentacles marries The Tower. This reminds us that life happens, to borrow a phrase. How many annoying, bad, shitty, and/or crappy things did you put up with last week, things that totally ruined your day—and then you forgot about completely? How many things that seemed totally devastating to you on one day wound up being completely non-issues days later? Bad shit happens to us all the time. We tend to think that if a bad thing shows up in a reading, then it must be a really bad thing. Why? Tarot doesn’t judge the size of what happens to us; it answers the question. “Will I get into grad school?” “No.” For you, perhaps the worst thing that ever happened. But the cards don’t judge that. You asked a question, you got an answer. (I guess this is a reminder, too, not to ask about things you don’t want the answer to.) The Queen of Swords sits in the middle, resolutely holding up her sword. Trust yourself, she says. You know when you’re bullshitting you and when you’re not. You know when you’re being dramatic and when you’re not. You know when you’re overthinking it. Yoav Ben Dov, whose work I greatly admire, said in Tarot: The Open Reading that, in essence, everything that happens during a reading is part of the reading. It all means something, from the little hungry belly noises you make all of a sudden, to the client’s stoic face, to the way a sentence forms itself in your mind. Does that mean we stop and interpret everything around us? Of course not. But it does say that if you’re worried about your biases impacting the reading, then that is part of the reading. Again, I want to veer away from the spread for a second, but this is inspired by the spread; particular, the queen there in the center. Divination is an act of trust. And while we may trust our guides, the cards, even our technique, it all means nothing until we trust ourselves. And that is fucking hard for a fucking lot of us. We have been taught not to trust ourselves. We have been taught not to listen to our instincts. Jesus, sometimes I wonder if over-thinking and anxiety actually aren’t innate mental states, but come from a lifetime of being told to ignore what’s right in front of you. We hear constantly that critical thinking is essential in life, and it is—but that’s not what the structures we serve mean when they say that. They mean to do the exact opposite. Let them (the structures) do the critical thinking, and you . . . you just be a good boy and obey. The so-called American education system is actually designed to stop you from critical thinking. You don’t experience the need for it until college, which is one reason that the right wing wants to make college as inaccessible as possible. Primary and high school are designed to make you follow instructions, which is helpful for a country whose economy is built on manufacturing. Does it matter that the wealthy owners of factories realized they could make more money by moving manufacturing to other places and then not replacing those jobs with anything? Nope. Because obeying and following rules is still helpful for that class. So is not thinking critically. Problem is, we are critical thinkers by nature. Because we’re told not to listen to that instinct, because we’re told to believe what we’re told not what we see, we start to doubt ourselves. In fact, self-doubt is another valuable tool for the oligarchs, because you will see what they’re doing and hear that their words don’t match and you might be tempted to ask, “Wait—but you just said—” That would be bad for them. So you’re taught to doubt yourself. And then you lay out a divination and you doubt what you see and your lifelong conditioning to not follow your gut kicks in and it becomes really complicated. I cannot tell you how to do this, friends, but you must do it: Believe in your reading abilities. Don’t get cocky and arrogant about them. But believe them. Believe in your ability to read. Believe what you see in a reading. Not every reading speaks in literalisms. Sometimes readings yield a message that requires further parsing. But assume that every reading you do is correct and if the answer doesn’t make sense, it’s only that the answer doesn’t make sense yet. There’s more to do to discover it. I used to be pretty uptight about answers in readings coming completely from the cards. I think I push that agenda pretty hard in Your Tarot Toolkit, which I didn’t write that long ago. And I still think that. Like, I don’t think we should start espousing our personal viewpoints or philosophies to clients unless it’s contextually relevant or we’re asked. I also think we need to be able to point to the reading and justify whatever we say as the “final answer.” But I’ve also realized, especially after putting myself in reading situations where I’m 99.9% certain to get 99.9% percent general readings, that there are times where a readings answer will offer an allegory, poetry, or myth that needs to be further clarified before it makes for a relevant answer. In Tarot Toolkit, I use the Celtic Cross as an example of how a reader is forced to answer a question obliquely, telling a story about a relationship and then making value judgments about that relationship. It’s actually a good example! If I remember right, the example in that book is a reading about a relationship. The “reader” interprets the cards in such a way that they “realize” that the relationship is toxic and the client should breakup with her partner. Now, this is a bad answer for a few reasons: it’s telling the client what to do with no evidence, and that’s super gross. But it’s also putting the reader in the position of judging the health of a relationship they’ve only done a single reading on. The reader could say, “I see a huge amount of conflict in this relationship. Like it seems to thrive on disagreement. Am I misreading that?” But saying, “this is a toxic relationship and you need to get out” would be bad. Why? The first invites additional context; the second makes a huge value judgement based on a card reading. A good way not to let bias impact your readings, particularly for others, is not to judge the situation but to describe it. The client gets to decide what’s toxic or not. You say “I see a lot of combat.” They say, “Ah yes, this is toxic.” They may also say, “Yes, we role play as soldiers when we fuck.” Anyway, I’m digressing a bit. If you have reached the end of a card interpretation and you lack clarity, then interpret your interpretation. Maybe you’re simply not done that. That’s OK! Some readings are more complicated than others, and that’s particularly true when reading for yourself. I’ve written about this elsewhere in this blog, but sometimes the reading tells you a story and that story is a myth that yields the answer. Sometimes the reading says “dump him” (rarely), and sometimes it says “there once was a man from Nantucket . . .” And then we have to figure out what the story of that dude means in relation to our life. The Oracle at Delphi was known for being inscrutable. You might have to figure it out on your own. But you, my friend, you: are a fucking READER. And readers read til we get the answer . . . unless the reading us just for ourselves and we’re being lazy. OK, I actually really have digressed here. But not unhelpful digressions, if I do say so. What I was getting at is that we have to trust ourselves in our readings. Because tarot works. Trusting yourself, if you’ve never done that, can be a radical act, friends. Bigly. If you can’t trust yourself, for some reason, if you just cannot afford to grant yourself that grace, think of it this way. (This is a SHOCKINGLY spiritual answer from me, by the way, so . . . gird your loins.) Let’s assume for a second that tarot is a tool our guides use to give us messages. The guides understand who we are and what we’re going through, they know more about us than we do, and so they account for all our weird tendencies. They know we’re going to have biases because they’ve experienced them. And they’re going to do their best to select the correct cards to get you closest to reality. They’re going to account for your wonky humanity. And so when you’re trusting yourself, what you’re really doing is trusting your guides. And that means when you’re doubting yourself . . . well, you’re really doubting your guides. And do you want to be the one to tell them you don’t believe them? I don’t. A final thought. I could go on. And in fact I haven’t really summarized the reading yet, but before I do that I have one more thing to add. It, annoyingly, also falls a bit into the spiritual category. If you truly do not trust yourself—and if you truly believe that your readings are incorrect or not helpful more than they’re correct or helpful . . . it might not be that you’re inept and can’t do this. Maybe you first need to build a relationship with your guides. I know! That’s such a fucked up thing for me to say — and actually not just because I don’t really discuss this stuff. It’s worse because I have been so insanely lucky that my guide knew far better than I did what I was heading toward—and I’m fairly certain managed to subjugate his own ego for most of my life while I came to terms with the fact that between the obliterating fuckupery of Catholicism and the depressing nihilism of atheism, there is something else and that I’m part of it. But. Who knows? It may be that you’re not a “bad” reader. It may be that you benefit from developing the relationship first and understanding how you can talk more fluently together. Summing up: Shit happens in life. Most of the time, the shittiness of that shit has as much to do with what else is going on and our general mood and whether we had lunch as it does with the actual shittiness of the thing. This is born out by the amount of shitty shit that happens on any given day, week, or month that we erupt over and then forget about in minutes, hours, days. Few of us over-estimate our luck, but if tend to image the best for ourselves more often than is possible, we also should remember that even getting stuff we desperately “need” can still leave us feeling cold. “Good” or “bad” in a reading is a matter of perspective and context, and because we tend not to read for ourselves near or in the throes of horrible events, most readings probably won’t take us to the graveyard. Even if it does, we have context clues—our actual life conditions—that can tell us whether this disasterous interpretation is likely or not and/or whether we might benefit from going back to square one. Scrutinize all answers for likelihood and “plot holes” — try to pop the bubbles, as the Page of Swords does — and then trust yourself. If the news is bad, what can be done to prevent it? If it can’t be prevented, what can be done to endure and learn from it? If it’s good, is it really good or merely the hit of dopamine needed to make it through another Sunday night. Remember that sometimes the cards offer a myth that needs to be interpreted in the same way the cards were. If an answer doesn’t make sense, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong; it’s probably just that the reading isn’t over yet. Finally, trust yourself and your guides—and built a relationship if you find that your readings lack clarity or accuracy. This was a long one! Pardon if I beg off on creating a spread and an example. If you do want to do a reading, choose one of the points in the summary and use the cards to see whether or not you might benefit from digging into and experimenting with that topic. Until next time! Happy reading!
1 Comment
Tamara Charles
1/16/2025 12:13:05 pm
It's funny that we all get this kind of download drip, at the same time. I am calling it the astrological weather. I JUST left a comment on a video I might not have watched because the title had that hated word, "rules" in it. I know we all get answers from the cards that make us pause, and think, "How do I put this in such a way..." because you don't want to tell a querant, look, that guy you're planning on hooking up with, super shitty, don't do it. We want to be more oracle-y and say, stay safe and responsible, you're present decisions are questionable, but you can be strong and smart if you choose - bleh, my brain and my tongue are cramping.
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AboutEach post is a tarot reading about the tarot, a lesson about the cards from the cards. Each ends with a brand new spread you can use to explore the main concepts of the reading. Archives
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