Hello, hello my loves!
I’ve been pissy about something for a bit and since this is my blog I get to bitch about it! Yay!
I’ve noticed in some of the online communities I’m in that folks will start talking about how they can’t do a tarot reading if their “senses” aren’t in total alignment. This, to me, has felt like a kind of fluidity around tarot that sounds spiritual on the surface but is actually just a very elaborate way of avoiding accountability to the craft. Wait a second, hear me out.
Tarot is a tool, not something that shifts and morphs based on how you are feeling on any given Tuesday. A tool. Same as how my car is the tool that gets me to work even on days when I realllllllly don’t wanna go.
The 8 of Pentacles classically means hard work/mastery through dedication, focused effort, and the unglamorous work of building a skill. It meant that in 1910 when the Rider Waite Smith deck was published. It means that today. It will mean that next week when Mercury is retrograde and you have a headache and your coffee went cold. The card has a meaning, and that meaning is the foundation of the practice.
When we decide that our readings are only valid when our energy is perfectly aligned, when the vibe is right, when we feel “called”, when the universe gives us a sign, what we are really doing is making tarot about ourselves rather than about the querent in front of us. We are making it about our comfort rather than our commitment to honest, grounded, skilled reading. Wait, wait, a second hear me out some more.
If you have volunteered to read for someone, then that is an obligation. Tarot reading is a service, and when someone trusts you with their questions, their fears, their hopes, they deserve a reader who shows up with skill and steadiness, not one who cancels because the energy feels off. So yes, this is specific to those in the online communities that I’m in which someone offers to do a reading and then lo and behold they can’t do it anymore because the energies are off, and they claim the Gods have “yoinked” their senses. Call me a witch Boomer but that is not how tarot works.
Now all that said, are there absolutely times when you should not read? Yes. If you are in acute crisis, if you are too emotionally entangled in the situation to be objective, if you are genuinely unwell, those are real and valid reasons to pause. Rest is sacred. I am not arguing against that at all.
What I am pushing back on is the pattern of using spiritual language to dress up what is, at its core, an avoidance of showing up for something you committed to. There is a difference between genuine discernment and a beautifully worded excuse.
The readers I respect most are the ones who have done the work. Who know their decks. Who have sat with the symbolism, the numerology, the elemental associations, the court cards they used to dread, until the knowledge became second nature. Who can pull the Tower for someone and deliver that message with clarity and compassion, even on a hard day, because they are grounded in the craft itself rather than dependent on feeling inspired.
Tarot is a beautiful, powerful, complex system that has withstood centuries. It deserves to be treated with the same seriousness you would give any spiritual discipline. Study it. Practice it. Show up for it consistently, not just when the candles are lit and the vibe is immaculate. If you are going to call yourself a reader, then do the tool the service it deserves and study it and don’t rely purely on intuition…
Love you, be well!
Autumn || The Untamed Priestess 🌙
