Welcome back to the Hermit's Journey!
In today's post, we will explore the theoretical underpinnings of tarot cards to understand how they might work and why your readings tend to be correct.
When I first started to explore tarot cards, I immediately began to notice that my readings tended to be more accurate than not. While this was incredibly affirming to me and helped keep me motivated to learn more about the tarot, it did cause me to question the forces that were at work which made these readings so spot on. Was Satan himself picking the cards out of the deck for me? Was this an elaborate game of self-fulfilling prophesy? Or was there something more mechanistic in the architecture of the deck at work here?
In the past ten years I've tried to answers these questions and find my footing with regards to tarot. Over my life I have found myself in a particularly awkward position where I was raised southern Baptist with all the dogma and superstitions which come along with that religious heritage; I've since moved into a more esoteric space with my spirituality. Further, I come from a highly disciplined research background in psychology, which further complicates my relationship with tarot. Thus, I have not found a single parsimonious rational for tarot; but I do have a range of explanations, which tend to bounce around in my head and collectively give me the confidence that there is something to this deck of 78 cards beyond random error.
To explore these various explanations, I've clustered them into secular, religious, and esoteric categories to help conceptualize the different levels at which tarot operates. To this end, I hope that you can find pieces of insight to use as a cornerstone in your tarot journey. Obviously, you can be completely agnostic about tarot, acknowledge that it works, but not be terribly bothered in the "why"; but, what fun is that!?
Secular
If you are an atheist or agnostic reader, know that you are not alone. Many people use tarot without any specific religious or metaphysical beliefs and find it helpful, enjoyable, and engaging. When considering the reasoning behind how tarot works, two plausible explanations come to mind. One explanation involves the interplay between probability and self-fulfilling prophecy, while the other explores the memetics of tarot and how it triggers the activation of interconnected concepts in the reader and querent. These explanations complement each other and provide ample reasons to trust your readings.
Tarot operates as a closed system, eliminating random variables that could influence or confuse your readings. For instance, you won't accidentally end up with 79 cards in your deck or encounter two Aces of Pentacles (unless there was a mistake made, haha). This allows us to use probability analysis to understand the likelihood of drawing a specific card in a given spread.
Let's start with a one-card draw. Many people keep their tarot cards by their bed and begin their day by shuffling and drawing a card to contemplate throughout the day. Since each shuffle introduces an element of independence, we can say that there is a 1 in 78 (or 1.27%) chance of drawing any particular card from the deck. Let's say this card is The High Priestess (II).
Now, let's move on to a three-card past-present-future reading. If you want to know the odds of The High Priestess (II) appearing anywhere in the spread, there is a 4.16% chance. However, if you specifically want her to appear in the "future" section, the odds go back to 1.27%.
Now, let's consider a five-card spread and assume you want both The High Priestess (II) and the 2 of Cups to appear in the spread, regardless of their positions. In this scenario, the chance of this happening is 0.07%. If you desire The High Priestess (II) to be drawn first and the 2 of Cups to be drawn last, the probability drops to 0.02%.
As you can see, anticipating a particular card in a reading is extremely challenging. This is why people often get surprised when a card seems to "follow" them, appearing consistently across multiple readings.
Understanding the odds of a specific card appearing helps us appreciate the pure randomness of tarot. When faced with randomness, humans tend to seek order within the chaos. Our minds naturally strive to find connections and create meaning.
If we succeed in finding that order, we then work on assigning meaning to justify our system through the activation of interconnected concepts. This concept originates from cognitive psychology, where encountering a piece of information triggers related concepts and memories in our minds. Each symbol encountered activates its corresponding network, and the spread itself connects all those networks together.
This becomes particularly fascinating as these networks may not have been explicitly linked before, leading to a moment of realization or an "ah ha!" experience for the querent. Let's consider the following reading as an example:
The querent seeks solutions for their relationship problems. They express love for their partner, with no obvious issues, but they have a sense of growing apart.
The cards drawn are:
- King of Pentacles
- 10 of Wands
- Two of Cups
When the tarot reader weaves together these diverse networks through interpretation, the querent's networks also intertwine. They experience an "ah ha!" moment, realizing that their work-related challenges and issues with their boss are influencing their relationship in ways they were previously unaware of. Now, not only do the cards appear accurate, but they also guide the querent towards actionable steps for resolving their own problem.
However, the drawback for this mechanism is that it opens the reader and querent to self-fulfilling prophecy. In this scenario, the reader may have preconceived notions about the querent's issue and tailor their reading to what they believe the querent wants to hear. Additionally, the querent will have assumptions about their own situation and selectively listen to the tarot reading for what they want to hear. Thus, a feedback loop is created where both the reader and the querent both feel like they've had a good reading, but in reality they only created a self-fulfilling prophesy to feel good about themselves.
For this reason, it is rare for me to have a querent give me a specific question or concern when I read for them. I prefer as cold of a reading as possible.
Religious
Alternatively, if you find yourself drawn to tarot as more of a religious practice, you are far from the minority. Many people use tarot as a method of connecting to the divine and supernatural. For them, tarot is used as a means to connect and communicate with the metaphysical. Obviously, this rational defies rational or empirical explanation, as one cannot "prove" that one is or is not speaking with the paranormal.
One popular use of the tarot is as a means to facilitate prayer with a deity. I have read accounts of Catholics who use tarot to communicate with saints, angels, or YHWH. This practice assumes that theses persona are all knowing or some-what-all knowing and can deliver messages and signs to the reader with this supernatural insight to help guide the reader toward living a life in-line with biblical principles.
Alternatively, tarot can be used as a séance tool to communicate with either the spirits of the dead or other non-corporeal, non-human entities. As you will see at the end of this blog post, there are methods of establishing contact with the supernatural with tarot. Some pagans will use tarot to communicate with house spirits or other elementals (e.g., Fae, jinn) or seek counsel from ancestors.
Esoteric
Lastly, and probably the most popular explanation for tarot's accuracy, are the esoteric or spiritual camps of tarot. While tarot was originally a card game for Italian aristocrats, during the 19th century the deck became incorporated into the pagan revival of England and the United States. As the cards underwent changes in their appearance and use, practitioners (primarily from The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn) began to create systems of esoteric meaning in the deck.
As demonstrated in this blog, the tarot today is a multilayered meaning system. On one hand, you can stick to the surface details of the cards to draw interpretations (which everyone starts out doing); however, as you learn more you begin to see the connections with astrology, numerology, and alchemy. This is on purpose, as the members of the Golden Dawn were heavily invested in Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) and redesigned their tarot decks to reflect the process of working through the four levels of the Tree of Life (or the emanations of the divine). While Kabbalah is beyond the scope of this particular blog post, just note that this is the origin of modern uses of tarot as a self-reflection, introspection practice.
From this base, tarot has been used as a method of moving toward enlightenment in the tradition of Jodorowsky; where the Major Arcana outlines the map toward self-actualization. Additionally, the Jungians use tarot as a method of tracking the process of individuation through the unification of duality.
Conclusion
As you can see from the outlined explains of tarot, there are both synchronicities and contradictions between the positions. For example, I believe that memetics and the collective unconscious go hand-in-hand, whereby our memes are expressions of archetypal energies configured for the current time. However, some of these explanations are mutually exclusive; if you believe that you are having direct communication with your deity through the tarot deck, then I'm not sure how you can square that this is just probability and self-fulfilling prophesy.
I tend to take a generally agnostic view of tarot, but I try to stay flexible for when particular situations arise.
To conclude this post today, let's go into the far left field and look at how you can do a séance with your cards and talk to a ghost or other entity inhabiting your space.
Contact the Beyond Spread:
Comments
Post a Comment