What is the tarot good for?
It can do what it says on the tin (and I actually have a tarot in a tin) which is to help you imagine the future.
Later in the article I explore some ideas about how a deck of cards could have any relation, other than chance, with your individual life and future events, but what tarot has done for me was not at all what I expected.
Until I met the tarot, I had a standard time’s arrow view of reality, where a road of limitless progress stretches out towards a distant, but maybe reachable, ideal. In this vaguely imagined utopia, there was no war or inequality, and illness and pain had been eliminated by technology. I kept the radical teenage ‘let it all start anew’ belief long into my thirties and forties. I assumed that what had gone before me was disproven, superseded and obsolete and that those left clinging to any of it would be rightly swept away by the tides of time.
Like most people, I accepted, more through trust than personal conviction, the selfish gene doctrine; that is that humans are driven by forces of desire and competition in a blind quest to perpetuate our blood line. Although I was superstitiously afraid of any imagery of the devil, my entire world view was pretty much identical to his i.e. human motivation was greed or lust.
My model of reality contained inherent contradictions. Humans were perfectible and could work towards an ideal society but we were also just animals whose only real motivations were self-promotion, self-perpetuation and consumption. Unable to reconcile these two visions, there was a long period of my life where I stopped looking beyond the surface of things because it was confusing, pointless and lead ultimately to despair.
After years of studying and reading tarot, the great lesson I’ve taken away is not perhaps that the future can be read, although I believe it can, but that our faulty model of reality leads us away from self-knowledge and understanding of the world. We’re wandering through life assuming we’re poor map readers because the landscape around us almost never looks anything like the map we were given to navigate it with.
Life is not a line leading to perfection. The tarot might be laid out in ascending numerical order, but it is really a series of spirals in the image of our natural human pattern, where impulses become choices, then manifested reality, gaining power, and finally dying to give birth to a new cycle.
The scientific, or rather scientism, model superimposes a line onto the true pattern of life, which is cyclic and born from the empirical observation of the seasons and the stars, itself rooted in the very sane assumption that we are a part of a far greater whole.
The arrow, which confines us to a narrow band of reality, and from which so much must be excluded in order to maintain any semblance of logic, causes us to reduce ourselves, disown and deny the parts that are non-conforming and leaves us living in a state of spiritual amputation and confusion. There is no natural way to conform to the unnatural.
The second great illusion that a study of the tarot will undo is the placing of the scientific method above the reality it sought to understand.
After science had banished spirit, linguists told us that meaning too was an outgrowth of the capacity for language in the human species. Language was merely a randomly assigned set of symbols and phonemes that built an architecture for all meaning on the void. There was nothing to find beneath the words, except more words that will only disintegrate as you cut them apart and try to extract meaning from them.
Before this, the scholar read the signature of things, observed the forms of the plants, the events that correlated with celestial movements and tried to divine the meaning. People understood that some reality was too complex, too alien to our chronological minds to be processed, and so it had to be referred to and understood obliquely and symbolically.
Meaning was inherent and intrinsic to the fabric of reality, and a seeker of knowledge would try to integrate as much possible of what our species had already uncovered, but also directly observe nature in various states of awareness. Learning also meant working from the inside, trying to discipline the mind through various practices, or to voyage in states of trance to obtain gnosis, either alone through meditation, or in shamanic journey using plant medicine or chanting and dance.
We still have the instinct to alter our mental states but with no clear destination in mind other than pleasure. Conventional ‘wisdom’ states there is no sense to find, culture, spirit, revelation, love, are all merely illusions excreted from electrical activity in our meat minds and so dancing in the abyss is the best this brief and senseless life has to offer.
This line we’re all riding goes ever faster. We’ve been fitted to the speed of our so-called labour saving devices; in the steam age we were still on the earth but our landscape blurred because we travelled faster than the eye could assimilate, then, in the jet age, we flew among the clouds unable even to see the land, and now, here we are, once more virtually physically static, but with streams of endlessly multiplying information flowing into our heads in quantities we cannot assimilate and that forbid understanding.
If we’re following the arrow, we will want to ‘upgrade’ our heads with transhumanist biotech in order to be able to process it all, and still we try to optimize to gain yet more speed. What for? To satisfy endless meaningless appetite? Are we there yet? Are we happy yet?
The tarot is one of the antidotes to all of this. Each card is encoded with information about the powers of the life force working in the field of human experience. It shows how the procession of numbers, arriving as a culmination and end of cycle, bears the seed of the new, even as it dies. It intimates that we relive the same archetypes in different forms over and over again, until we have been through the kaleidoscopic matrix of experience enough times for it to become transparent. It describes how the elements, here called earth, water, air and fire, work together to produce actions and states of different qualities, and it speaks in a language the soul understands.
For me it is as if I always knew the world was speaking but that my senses were too small, too heavily filtered and that the processing capacity of my brain was too limited to be able to extract real knowledge. The tarot is like a device, a low-tech but still complex device to help me interface with perceptible reality.
Nature is a language. Can’t you read?
The Smiths
In later articles I’ll get into the details of different cards but to end this one, I’ll address the big question, or one of them. How does it work? How could a pack of 78 printed cards say anything about the life of a stranger to the tarot reader?
In a 3 card spread there are 456,456 possible combinations; when a reader does a Celtic Cross comprising 11 cards, the numbers become absurd. Why would a reader be able to identify someone who’d recently been separated because of infidelity, from another who had just been offered a well paid job, but was confused because of their father’s disapproval? How tell someone locked in a court case from another fighting gambling addiction?
It suggests that everything speaks about everything else, just as an individual pixel in a hologram, if isolated, can give information about the hologram as a whole. It confirms the basis of the signature of all things, where any element, particle, leaf, road sign, song on the radio, post on your feed or repeated number is, however obliquely, information about the whole.
Everything talks about everything else, and tarot combines systems of symbolic thought into an intelligible system you can learn in order to get a glimpse into what lies behind appearance.
When we zoom out far enough, there is a level of orchestration expressed through number and form and archetype that can be perceived and given the name of fate because of the forbidding complexity of elements.
The tarot is a symbolic map of more than one level of being.
At the moment it has become popular and Instagram pretty. As a writer friend of mine said, capitalism strip-mines things of their complexity in order to make them appealing to the maximum number of people. Seeing tarot grow popular encourages me to think that people are searching outside the ‘'walking meat bag in the void of space’ paradigm, but I know it also means that it’s being turned into a cash cow. It’s being approached as an oracle that must always give good news, or serve up a psychological pep talk ‘know your worth, girl!’, ‘the old must die for the new and better to be born!’
Let it be helpful, and know the vernacular of the age, and let it give comfort but also let it be true to itself.
The tarot re-enchanted my world and by doing so gave me a second life, but it’s not Disneyland, and like anything with power, it has the capacity to harm as well as heal.
It’s a great place to get lost but also wiser.