Welcome back to Dark Mirror Alchemy!
We will take a quick break this week from The Hermit's Journey to discuss
the combined arts of reading tarot and reading people. I have had the pleasure
and privilege to learning tarot while also getting my degrees in psychology.
So, I wanted to share in this blog series how the different levels of
psychology can help us read tarot better; especially if you are in situation
where you are giving a reading to a stranger.
With the help of the court cards in the suit of swords, this series will be
comprised of four posts, which will explore each of the following levels of
human psychology:
Biases and Heuristics with the Page of Swords
Motivation and Emotion with the Knight of Swords
Personality and Identity with the Queen of Swords
Groups and Culture with the King of Swords
The first two installments of this series will teach you about the very
basics of human behavior. If you like mixed metaphors, we are going to look
under the hood and examine the operating system of homo sapiens. These two
posts will be especially helpful as the concepts we will talk about are
universal, which means you won't have to do much guess work about your querent
to implement these principles in a cold reading.
For the last two posts, you will need to do some guess work to figured out
some basic personal and social qualities of your querent. Obviously, this is
much riskier as you are liable to get things wrong, especially as you venture
out and learn more about reading people. However, today, we are going to focus
on two concepts that I find indispensable when conducting tarot readings:
biases and heuristics.
The Page of Swords
The court cards in the Minor Arcana typically represent people in our lives
or persona for us to embody to reach our goals. In the suit of swords, these
persona push us to deploy logic, reason, and effective communication in our
day-to-day lives. From the Page to the King, the personas of swords walk us
through how to be practical and effective communicator, which is why I thought
they would be the perfect set to explore our topics in this series.
Starting with the Page of Swords, this youth is excited and driven to
succeed in his goal of mastering the element of air. He is studious, logical,
and is sharpening his blade and tongue to cut through the illusions and get to
the truth. As a novice tarot reader, you are often told to "feel"
your way through the cards to find meaning and interpretation, but this is not
the path of the Page of Swords. Instead, he looks for systems of meaning, looks
for ways to be direct and efficient in his speech, and analyzes patters and
synchronicities to draw conclusions about the world around him.
Because the Page is a novice, he looks first at the building blocks and
systems to help him scaffold into higher wisdom about the tarot. So, in this
blog post we will first look at the building blocks of human cognition in the
context of a tarot reading to use as a foundation for future learning.
Cognitive Processing Theory
Humans process information from their environment in two ways, manually or
automatically. Manual cognition (like holding attention during a boring
lecture), takes a lot of effort and energy, which our brains do not like. So,
we develop a series of illogical strategies to ease the process of existing
through our biases and heuristics.
At first pass you might think you need to be anti-bias, after all our
culture prioritizes being rational and fair minded, but not every situation
needs you to deploy 100% of your attention 100% of the time. Take for instance
driving a car; if you were to try and exert all of your attention on every
single aspect of driving, you would ironically not be a safe driver. You need
short cuts to take in and interpret information from the gauges on your dash,
you need a system to check all of your mirrors at different intervals, and you
need illogical rules to determine how fast you are going to go depending on the
situation. These are all biases and heuristics; they don't have to be the most
logical cognitive processes, but they are the most efficient for sorting and
drawing meaning from the world around you.
Returning to what I said about these shortcuts are universal, you will find
that if you pay close attention you can start to catch yourself using your
biases; however, most people do not pay that close attention to their own
thought processes or behaviors. Generally, if someone is introspecting on their
own cognitive processes, they are doing it post-hoc after making a decision,
and typically form of introspection only serves to justify the decision they
made, not to examine their real-time decision making (which, is also a bias
lol).
With that in mind, consider the following list of biases tools you can
deploy in your readings without the conscious awareness of your querent. Rarely
are humans paying close enough attention to even notice when biases are
activated.
Automatic Processing and Framing
When conducting a tarot reading, you want to create the conditions for your
querent to fast track themselves into automatic processing. The first, and
easiest, way to do this is through creating a seemingly complicated tarot
reading process. While the cards are already overwhelming, if you make the
process of dealing the cards complicated, your querent is going to space out a
little bit and rely on you to guide them through the wilderness.
For this reason, you shouldn't panic if you don't interpret a card 100% by
the booklet; your querent won't notice, even if they have a basic foundation in
the cards' meanings. Your querent is likely not paying close attention to the
cards themselves, but rather to you and what you are saying.
Next, you'll need to consider the framing of the tarot reading. Framing is
baked into the system somewhat in that the spread you chose will be the
backbone of your interpretive narrative. For this reason, it is crucial to pick
your spread well. If the spread does not lend itself to crafting a story from
the cards well, then you don't need to shoot yourself in the foot trying to use
it. For this reason, I do not use the Celtic Cross spread ever; I find it very
difficult to connect the cards into a coherent dialog with the hyper specific
points in the spread. I would much rather opt for the English spread, which
gives me flexibility to relate the cards to each other in new or interesting
ways.
You can get rather specific with framing when reading for a querent. If you know some details about the question they are seeking advice for, you then know how to reinterpret cards to match the context of the topic at hand. Additionally, you can also pull information you've gleaned from the querent (e.g., appearance, prior conversations, worn symbols or tattoos) to frame your interpretations based on the small details you've learned about them. Be warned, this is trickier and can sometimes lead you to crash and burn, so make sure if you are making assumptions about the querent that you do not overstep and take too many risks.
Basic Biases
With these two principles in mind (automatic processing and framing), let's
now look at some specific biases that you can activate in your querent while
giving them a reading:
Anchoring: The tendency for people to over rely on the first bit of
information they hear and disregard other pieces of information. Consider your
first part of the reading the most important; if you can grab the querent's
attention at the beginning and help them resonate with the reading, then it
won't matter too much what you say during the rest of the reading.
Barnum Effect: The tendency for people to identify with vague descriptions
of their personality (see astrology sun signs, Enneagram, and Myers-Briggs). If
you can make a person feel seen during a reading by providing them a generic
list of values or personality traits then your querent will become more
invested and feel like the reading was designed for them.
Clustering Illusion: The tendency to see order in randomness. One way you
can activate this bias is by outlining some of the patterns that you notice in
the spread before you go deep into the interpretation. Point out the ratio of
masculine and feminine card. Draw the querent's attention to that corner of the
spread that only has cup cards. Speculate about the symmetry of the Major
Arcana placements. By pointing out the order in the randomness, the querent
will feel "in on it" with the reading and place more significance in
the cards.
Consistency Bias: People will assume they are more consistent than they
actually are by reinterpreting their memories from the perspective of their
present self. This bias pretty much gives you as the reader free range when it
comes to cards which deal with the past of the querent, especially if you couch
those interpretations in the context of their present self. People will
actively rewrite the past to maintain a continuous sense of self.
Illusion of Transparency: This bias is the tendency to believe that our internal
states and thoughts are observable by others. If you can identify different
emotional states that the querent has experienced about the content of the
reading, share those delicately, then you will establish a rapport with the
querent, which will give you permission to venture further and make some less
informed interpretations. Remember the consistency bias, most introspection is
used to rewrite the past to match the current self and your tarot reading will
be used to do that; be warned.
Lastly, let's consider a fun bias you could try if you're particularly
lyrical: Rhyme as Reason effect. This bias is the tendency to judge statements
that rhyme as truer than those that do not. So, if you are quick on your feet,
you could start to introduce rhyme schemes into your interpretation to seem
more accurate than they are.
For example, your querent asked for a reading about moving to a new town and
wants to know what strategies she should use to get connected with others
quickly. You draw three cards:
You could say: "It looks like with all of this animal imagery in the
cards that you should start to look at opportunities to volunteer with the
human society, wild life refuge, or state park to get connected."
OR
"Animals are featured heavily in these cards, to make connections you
should look for ways to be a helper. Maybe with a wild life refuge, state park,
or animal shelter?"
While the rhyme is cheesy and not very good, it would be both funny as well
as hook the querent into the Rhyme as Reason effect. Remember, we are dealing
with the automatic processing of the querent, so you can be as flexible and
illogical as their processing.
Final Thoughts
You can think of the basics of human cognition in terms of the initial
obstacle course of conducting a tarot reading. While many people think of
themselves as logical and consistent, they are in fact not. But that does not
mean this is a vice in the human condition, as these biases and heuristics help
us navigate a very complex world and using shortcuts to save time and energy
for the important stuff is both wise and impressive.
As a tarot reader, your job is to construct an environment for your
querent which enables them to both feel good and derive meaning and insight
from the reading. It is important to consider how both your tarot ritual and
the spreads you choose facilitate that final goal. Remember, humans are
constantly looking for ways to both feel good about themselves AND maintain a
sense of consistency in their lives. So, your readings should account for both
of these motivations.
New Spread
For this week's spread, I wanted to give you an opportunity to be more
flexible in your readings to practice using framing and the consistency bias in
your readings. This spread is all about reframing the past to help a querent
make decisions in the present and move into the future.
You'll notice that this spread is an expanded version of the basic 3-card
"past-present-future" spread. However, in this version, I have
planted two key elements to facilitate some of the principles we have covered
today.
First, you'll notice that the spread asks for the querent to choose a
signifier card. By doing this, you as the reader will have a wealth of
information to make decisions about the framing of the reading for the
querent.
Second, you can also use this card to make a good first impression in the
reading by leveraging the querent's anchoring and Barnum effects.
Third, there are three cards in the spread that focus on the
"past" of the querent; use these to play to their consistency
bias.
Forth, with four of the seven cards as your foundation for building trust
and rapport, use the future cards offer support, advice, and insight into their
problem.
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