Tarot Isn't An Excuse For Your Bullshit
Some bits of cardstock can’t dictate your path, but they might help you walk it.
As White Lotus made the pop culture sweeps, I very intentionally avoided watching it.
My Pisces Sun and Cancer Moon (Libra rising, if you’d care to know,) regularly make quite enough drama on their own without my having to watch characters destroy their own lives and others’ in order to make the point that “overly wealthy white people are a real mess.” Did we not know that already?
My husband had been merrily watching White Lotus on his own when one day he said “There was Tarot in the show! Come watch!”
(You’re probably already familiar with it, but just in case you’re not,) the scene takes place in Season 2, when Jennifer Coolidge’s character, Tanya, asks the hotel’s concierge for a local Tarot reader to be sent to her room.
When the Tarot reader arrives and asks Tanya what she wants guidance about, Tanya begins talking about her marriage.
“I wanna know if we’re gonna make it. I mean… I just wanna know if our marriage is gonna last.”
I was already making a face 😒 (IYKYK.)
The Tarot reader proceeds to pull five cards (ALL Majors, by the way…) and starts talking:
“The cards say… your husband is in love with someone else…”
And then everything goes RIGHT to shit.
As the Tarot reader begins speaking in rapid Italian and pointing emphatically to the cards, Tanya releases a mumble-murmur of dismay (in the way that only Jennifer Coolidge can,) that quickly escalates to yelling:
“This is VERY negative—I can’t believe I paid for this. You are SO. NEGATIVE! It’s not supposed to be like this!
“You’re supposed to build me up!!”
She then tells the Tarot reader to take her cards and GTFO (we are not surprised.)
And so ends another scene where Hollywood makes Tarot look absolutely nuts.
From the people doing the reading to the people looking for guidance, anyone giving time and attention to metaphysical pursuits is somehow weak or lost.
Delusional, manipulative, unrealistic, impulsive, unhinged, misled, cruel, eccentric, living on the fringes.
People don’t know what to make of it.
If you’re not into the idea of intuition or the ability to access information beyond the five senses, Tarot and other divination arts likely seem nonsensical at best. At worst, they’re the work of the Devil or friends from the other side.
On the other end of the spectrum are the people who get into intuitive tools because of the aesthetics. Looking “witchy and mysterious” is cool. And, like, yeah. It is.
But also—
The reality, I’ve come to find, is this: truly tapping into inner knowing is one of the ugliest, messiest things you can possibly do with your free time.
The immediate assault on your carefully constructed facade and coping mechanisms is, well: immediate and a-SALTY.
Yes, it is also incredibly rewarding—but there is no reward to be had here without diving headfirst into the dark, stinking sludge of personal growth.
It is the willing traversal of the Bog of Eternal Stench in order to make it out of here both alive and ✨living✨.
Using Tarot does not give you license to lie to yourself or others, nor does it excuse you from being responsible for your own actions. If anything, it holds up a mirror that doesn’t allow you to escape the truth.
But where does that “truth” come from? How do the cards end up in our hands? And why should it even mean anything when they do?
Did you know that, statistically, within a three-card spread using a standard 78-card deck, (like the ones I do in The Weekly Three every Monday,) there are 73,920 permutations possible? That number obviously increases REAL fast when we start adding more cards and pulling larger spreads.
Undeniably, chance has a lot to do with the cards that come up. But, I think we can agree that the possibility of repeatedly pulling the same three cards in the same order is slim. (Another reason I pay VERY close attention to what Theresa Reed aka The Tarot Lady calls “stalker cards”—the cards that show up more than once within a very short period of time and in the context of the same issue.)
The chance, probability, statistics of the cards is one thing—the other half of the message is in the intuition of the person pulling those cards. In the interpretation and the thread being followed that finally weaves together what these cards have to say to this querent in this situation.
Yes, there’s the tangible part—the almost meditative physical aspect of shuffling the cards, selecting cards and placing them in their positions.
There are the visual elements that have generally recognized associations. There are the visual elements that have personal associations (which is incredibly important given that the workings of intuition itself are personal.)
And then there’s a moment where we leave tangible, hard evidence and data behind and enter a space of knowledge that we feel. (I get actual physical sensations as I’m picking up information, and I know other professional Intuitives who also experience this! Kinda nifty, right?🤓)
This moment is also (unsurprisingly) the moment when, for some, the perceived validity of a tool like Tarot goes right out the window. If there’s no tangible evidence of what’s occurring here, then there’s no way it could ever be something helpful or useful, say the skeptics and cynics.
But where, then, do ideas come from? What even actually IS brainstorming? How does inspiration work? What is an emotion?
If these phenomena are also intangible, but still valuable results of our brains processing information that we have somehow received, perceived, synthesized—why wouldn’t intuition work the same way?
I recently co-hosted some coaching sessions with a friend and fellow Magic-Maker, Bridget Shoquist.
A lot of our clients’ reactions ran along the lines of “This is uncanny,” “How did you know that?” and “That’s exactly what’s going on right now.”
In the middle of her session, one of our clients said “I want to ask how this is happening, but also I know that’s not important right now, and what matters is just: that it’s happening.”
In the moment I didn’t know what to tell her, but the truth is actually quite simple. As Intuitive Development Mentor Gina Spriggs says: “Intuition works with what you know.”
One thing I know about Tarot is that my cards don’t lie to me. Learning how to read 78 different cards—reversed and upright, learning how to trust my own intuition and interpret my inner knowing through the cards was a messy and multi-layered process. It’s also a process that’s still unfolding (and that I don’t think will ever stop.)
But by now, I know that I can trust the cards that show up in my hands. And a big part of that is the fact that I know I can trust myself.
See, the person doing the reading is just as important as the cards in the reading itself.
If intuition works with what you know, then what you know, how you process information, the lenses through which you see the world all makes a huge difference in the way your intuition will interpret the messages you receive. When it comes to the responsibilities of reading Tarot for other humans, this matters A LOT.
In the end, Tarot readers are just human people who have their own knowledge, beliefs, understandings.
All people who read Tarot will not read alike. But I do believe that all professional Intuitives have a moral and ethical responsibility founded in the autonomy, agency and empowerment of their clients.
Faking control where we have none, taking away our power to exert it when we can, removing our agency to decide which is which—that’s not Tarot. That’s just plain old spiritual bypassing.
To borrow from my series Why Launching Is Broken—Funnels & Freakouts & Faking, Oh My!:
“The definition of the term “spiritual bypassing” as described by the person who coined it, John Welwood, goes like this:
Spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep personal, emotional ‘unfinished business,’ to shore up a shaky sense of self, or to belittle basic needs, feelings, and developmental tasks.
There are entire business empires that have been built on selling and using intangible concepts that rely on manipulation and gaslighting dressed up as “gut-feelings” and “intuition.”
I believe in the power of intuition and forces outside of ourselves that we can’t always see and touch—
But any spiritual practice that is not firmly grounded in the realities of the world we all live and operate in is a scam.
Using intuitive tools does not entail perverting them for your own gain, using them to manipulate other humans or placing responsibility anywhere it does not belong.”
This includes:
reading for someone who’s highly distressed or feeling desperate
reading on a query that removes the querent’s responsibility
reading on a query that falsely attributes responsibility to the querent
lying to clients to make sure they have a “happy” reading instead of truly reading the cards
Remember when Uncle Ben (or was it Voltaire?…) said: “With great power comes great responsibility.” Tarot is like that.
In a reading, both reader and querent hold both the power and the responsibility.
Tarot can never tell you how to live your life. It can’t be used as a crutch to uphold inaction or delusion. It’s not inherently evil, nor is it just a game.
In short: Tarot isn’t an excuse for your bullshit.
It’s a tool. And it’s meant to help us uncover the truth and act.
In that White Lotus scene, the Tarot reading was headed the wrong way from moment one:
A distressed and disrespectful client with a disempowering query and an unwillingness to assume any responsibility for the situation.
A Tarot reader who was willing to pull cards anyway.
And this is precisely when intuition becomes a joke. Woo-woo nonsense that doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
Because if the only people who “do” Tarot are people like Tanya, and Tanya is a hot dumpster fire mess, then by the transitive property (if A=B, and B=C, then A=C,) Tarot and anyone who uses it is also a hot dumpster fire mess, right?
The power of self trust, intuition and inner knowing are completely undermined and invalidated, reinforcing the illusion of control provided by what’s tangible, and only what’s tangible.
But in any facet of life, decoupling the tangible from the intangible means only getting half of the story. Relying completely on one over the other means that our understanding is forever incomplete.
We have tangibly felt experiences of the world as well as intangibly sensed experiences—that doesn’t make one or the other any more or less real. Our complete understanding of life on Earth is made of many things: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.
We’ve all reaped the consequences of binary thinking before. The idea that there is a This or a That, a winner or a loser, a real or a fake. It’s never quite like that in real life, is it?
Taking a binary approach to life’s issues is like trying to build an IKEA dresser only using the instructions that come in the box.
There are extra parts that don’t seem to go anywhere and will inevitably be saved for “later” in the Miscellaneous Items drawer of your abode. Parts that seem vital to the item’s structural integrity are, of course, nowhere to be found, but will be brought sharply to mind every time you open a drawer a little too enthusiastically causing an almost-collapse.
With Tarot, as with the rest of life, we are dealing with both/and, not either/or.
We have to accept responsibility for our own lives and actions where we can, and relinquish control where it isn’t ours to exert.
We have to trust the intangible of intuition and inner knowing alongside the tangible of taking action in the world around us for either thing to make any kind of a difference.
We’re working so much in the Grey when it comes to real life—there’s often no black or white to be found, leaving us to create our own best answers.
Accessing and utilizing Tarot as a tool, effectively and responsibly, helps to shine a light on the path in front of you.
There’s no way to see every hill and swerving turn on the path of life, but you can work with what you know right now to take the best next step for you.
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About The Author:
Zoha Abbas is an Intuitive Tarot Reader, Business Coach and writer who aims to explore the small business conversations around doing business better, together, and in the grey-area of real life through data, divination and dismantling harmful systems. She is the CEO and Creator of The Ownership Method, a coaching practice where she helps fellow small business owners make change in their own businesses and beyond.
For inquiries, please email: zoha@theownershipmethod.com