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 tells you how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
In the wake of news in recent years that the government in the UK is aiming to regulate what they consider to be ‘psychic’ industries, there has been a response from many quarters in the tarot industry to provide a greater emphasis on ethics as a disciplinary framework for tarot readings.
Whatever I think of the government’s efforts at regulation (and don’t get me started!), I believe that if it has managed to get more readers talking about, and implementing, an ethical framework to tarot, then that’s no bad thing at all. This isn’t just to protect prospective clients from those who are simply in it to make a fast buck: it’s also to try and establish some fundamentally important boundaries between reader and client.
So while many of us are laying the foundations for the coming year, I thought we could look at ethics in terms of laying the foundations for an effective and responsible tarot reading. I’m going to draw quite a bit from the ethics set out by the Tarot Association of the British Isles — on which my own work is based. But I’m also going to be re-emphasizing some, and adding other, observations based on my own experiences as a counselor and psychotherapist-in-training, and which delve into areas that are less easily definable. I wouldn’t expect to find them stated explicitly in any published code — they are concerned with a reader’s inner world and the boundaries that I referred to earlier — but they can play a critical role in a client’s experience of both a reader and a reading.
Given that ethics as a subject is wide-ranging and often open to debate, this list is far from exhaustive; but I hope it covers the basics. If not, then it is mea culpa entirely.
Confidentiality
Maintaining your client’s privacy is a cornerstone. And not just privacy around the content of the reading, but around the fact that a client has had a reading at all.
Although in some circles tarot reading is, if not the norm, then widely accepted, it is definitely not accepted everywhere. As a tarot reader, I’m more than willing to engage in lively debate with someone who views what I do with scepticism or disapproval (although these reactions are few and far between). In fact, bring it on! But don’t assume that your clients are equally enthusiastic about sharing their experience with others. In fact, they may be sceptics, or at odds with themselves about the notion that what they have actively sought out can actually assist them. Keep quiet. Always.