Tarot can be used as a meditative device, a way to assess decisions, or for divination depending on your world view and spirituality. Each of these facets has different implications on how you should approach learning tarot and practicing it. You also have to pick a deck which works for you. The “why” behind you practicing tarot can impact this as you learn more, especially if you’re interested in the more esoteric side of tarot.
We can go over the history, but it doesn’t really help much unless it’s part of the “why” behind you learning. Tarot may just be some fancy playing cards someone used for divination or fortune-telling, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is why you want to learn and what tarot means to you in modern practice. The cards have gained a life of their own in the form they’ve taken.
Tarot for Meditation
I primarily use tarot as a meditative device. What is a situation troubling you? Do a reading and think on the meaning of cards as what-ifs to the situations presented in the spread. Think of the symbolism and the abstraction of a card’s meaning on the situation. How would you react with the card as the prompt for the thought experiment?
When you run into the magician for the present, what does it mean? Is it power or is it passion? Is it innate talent or inspired action? How does the symbolism relate to you and your situation? Meditate on each aspect of the card and drill deeper. Meditate on what changing it or developing it would do for your situation. What is the desired outcome? How does this card work for or against you?
You may not believe in any of the new age aspects, but using various archetypes and symbols are going to trigger some sort of intuitive response when you see them. Tarot cards work as catalysts to gauge your natural reaction while controlling for certain variables. You get a more profound assessment of your subconscious decisions in a playful context which removes the pressure. It’s like writing to a prompt, you don’t need to care if the topic is good or not if you have to write anyway.
Tarot for Decisions
A slightly more new age interpretation is something along the lines of non-deterministic divination. Your casting changes the future because it changes your knowledge. The very act of making some sort of divinatory action innately changes the outcome by changing the present. The lowest impact of this world view is if you fail to act on it. You feel a regret you wouldn’t have had otherwise because the cards pushed you to think on something else. Some part of the result is now changed.
The goal of this sort of divination is to see paths to a specific future. What factors are in the cards and how do they relate to the potential future? You can also view this is a deeper meditation if you don’t believe in the future-telling aspects as much.
The usual occult theory for this type of situation is an interpretation of quantum mechanics. Basically, it views the future as the collapse of a quantum state on observation. Before you did the divination, you had a fuzzy function for certain parts of the future, but now your observation has collapsed the wave into a definite reading, which then injects new information into the present which creates a new future wave state which hasn’t been read.
It makes plenty of sense if you make the assumption that modern science is missing something fundamental. This interpretation certainly supplies more than a few metaphysical answers to physical questions as well. Many written interpretations of this sort of theory don’t rely on science proper either which leaves most relegated to just pseudoscience. They’re just throwing quantum physics into the mix to give a justification to reconcile their metaphysics with physics. Sometimes less is more with how exactly this theory works.
Tarot for Divination
The tarot can also be used for more deterministic fortune telling. The cards lay out the events and the outcome. There is a soft deterministic interpretation and a hard deterministic approach to this sort of fortune telling.
This isn’t really a theory I subscribe to at all. My information on these theories comes largely from practitioner’s mouths rather than readings, so some of it might be a bit more colored than my other writing.
Soft Deterministic Approach
The soft deterministic approach basically boils down to the future has a fixed amount of determined clarity. A certain number of events and interpretations are written in stone, but past a certain point, the threads of fate can be pulled one way or another… But, just a little.
Many events are roughly fixed, but many others are flexible. The flexible ones may not impact the future or play a major role in the determined events. If you know you’re going to get in a car crash, it doesn’t matter what color the car is. Fate has determined this event will happen, but the exact “how” is immaterial.
The major events are determined (they are predestined events to test you by God or similar in many of these theories), but the events in between are just noise. This type of interpretation goes along with certain Christian faiths and many other Judaeo-Christian traditions.
Hard Deterministic Approach
The fully deterministic approach views each event as being predestined. Your knowledge or lack of knowledge is immaterial to the results. For this sort of world view, some methods may be more accurate than others.
A common reason for failure is the difficulty in determining the fantasy from future. Think of it as having someone give you part of an article or book and you have to reconstruct it. Maybe you got the very beginning, the ending, and a few sections in the middle. You can write a story which matches all your given plot points, but the parts in between are the method’s limitations. You fill in the blanks, but there’s a determined result even though it feels like a mad-lib.
The goal is for the reading to get the information that does matter. This philosophy is used by certain branches of Christianity to explain missing information. The Bible has the meat, but some of the pieces in between are things the author couldn’t interpret properly. View this theory as the mind of man trying to understand the mind of God. You basically get people touting these sorts of predictions, but some of the inaccuracies are just filler that didn’t matter or served a different purpose.
How These Theories Apply to Tarot
A lot of deterministic schools of thought attribute the fantasy to the divination being less accurate. Tarot cards lack exact details on specific readings. Different people, (arguably) different decks, different phrasing (of the question), different interpretations of words, and even different moods cause different interpretations of the cards.
What exactly is the tower? Is it destruction in a positive or negative light? How can you tell? Does it fit in your situation or is it something which is a metaphor? There aren’t any right answers to these. Many of these metaphysical philosophies rely on believing that you have some psychic edge that others don’t which allows the correct reading to occur. This can also be explained by practitioners as a connection to God or the Godhead.
The Esoteric Side of the Tarot
The tarot is often used in some form for ritual magick and other western magick traditions. It can be used for future-telling or limited to occult purposes only. While the underlying theory of how or why it works can largely vary, it’s usually immaterial to the practice.
Certain decks, such as the Rider-Waite Tarot have a more occult side to them. They’re worked into certain forms of the Kabbalah and other occult practices. Most western ceremonial magick works in or at least ties in with the tarot. Wicca usually works with tarot. Many practices use it in some way either for divination or for reflection.
Why Learn the Tarot?
Why do you want to learn tarot? How does it help you and how does it fit into your worldview? Even if you think there’s no way possible to tell the future, it can be a great mental preparation method.
Can the cards see the future? Maybe not, but I can at least think about how I would respond to a situation I may not have thought of. Force scenarios with the cards and figure out how you would handle it. See the future, and figure out how you would handle it.
The reason doesn’t matter, the results do. You don’t have to believe the cards are magick, but you do have to believe they can help. The right reading can help you work through thought processes you’ve never had or can give you special insight. Who knows exactly where it will take you until you try?
Shopping for a Deck
How you shop for a deck depends on what you want. A fantasy themed deck might get you get into the mood for certain types of readings, while a plainer deck makes more sense for more mundane readings. What are you doing readings on and why? How does the system work to you?
How do the cards feel and how do they look to you? A beautiful deck might be meaningless to you if you don’t like the style of art it’s in. A different beautiful deck may be less symbolic, but may just call to you. There isn’t a right or wrong way to pick a tarot deck as long as you like it and it works for you. If you practice ceremonial magick, you want a more traditional, symbolic deck, but if you just wanna think on the cards, something you like works as well as any other deck.
If you want to work with traditional tarot resources, you need a standard deck and not oracle cards, Thoth tarot, or some other obscure variant. How you plan to do a reading is as important as what you do the reading with. Find a deck which works for you and gets you where you want to be.
See reviews of several decks here:
A Review of Everyday Tarot
A Review of Stephanie Pui-Mun Law’s Shadowscape Tarot
A Review of The Essential Tarot Kit
Or if those don’t work, get started here!
Image by Mira Cosic from Pixabay