Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
The only physical tool that you need to bring with you to a tarot reading is a deck of cards. However, it is one of the non-physical tools that you can choose to bring with you that I want to focus on this week: that of intuition.
I’m still not sure that intuition is an essential ingredient of a tarot reading. After all, there are many online reading programs (one of which, above, has been designed specifically for Planet Waves) that use a piece of software to generate a spread — and which I believe work in their own way. The laws of synchronicity still apply — you still get the message that is meant for you — but the allowance for the existence of intuition is limited by the fact that you are essentially being read for by a machine. Heck — who knows? Who’s to say that intuition doesn’t play a part in online readings? That seems to be beyond the scope of this article. But for argument’s sake, I am going to posit two things:
1. Intuition has the potential to play a significantly larger role in a reading when the reader is human.
2. Using intuition effectively can make the difference between a good reading, and a great one.
So now that I’ve harped on about intuition for a couple of paragraphs, just what does it mean? The Oxford English Dictionary has several definitions of intuition — some of which I consider erroneous if not downright contradictory — but the one that stands out most in terms of what I understand intuition to be is:
“Mod. Philos. The immediate apprehension of an object by the mind without the intervention of any reasoning process; a particular act of such apprehension.”
In other words, intuition bypasses the thinking mind and communicates with us without mental analysis. For me, it is the language of the soul, spoken in shadows, smudges and whispers. Of course, how we choose to translate what our intuition is telling us then requires thought, or words; but there is, in essence, a mismatch between the two modes of communication, which requires us to listen carefully and translate in as accurate a way as possible if we are going to make the most of what it’s saying to us.
An effective tarot reading is made up of an interplay — an exchange — between intuition and intellect. Sometimes they work seamlessly with each other; sometimes they work in counterpoint. Neither of these is completely positive or negative; both can create sparks of meaning and insight that would otherwise remain absent from the reading. Intuition is to a tarot reading what ‘chemistry’ is to sex: a certain indefinable quality that leaves you in no doubt as to its presence, and which has the ability to transcend the limits of those involved. It is the absolute knowing that we are in touch with something greater than us.