I started looking at Tarot cards because I liked the illustrations. I wanted a pack for a while but I’d heard that you weren’t supposed to buy your first deck, it had to be a gift. This speaks to a lot of what I now love about Tarot - the space it carves out for itself, demanding your patience and humility.

 

There seems to have been a clear revival of witchy superstition, from horoscopes to crystals, but what’s even clearer is that not everybody’s happy about it. For a long time I was the last person to listen to this stuff and the first to roll my eyes at it, so I have some empathy for the kind of science-bro skepticism that laughs at anything not supported by science and logic. I still think it’s arrogant though, I know I definitely was. I don’t want to attempt a deep dive into culture and belief and knowledge, I don’t want to convince anyone to believe in or practice anything that doesn’t appeal to them. I just want to say that if you criticise Tarot or anything ‘airy-fairy’, ‘wishy-washy’ or superstitious for being irrational then I think you’re right, and I think you’ve missed the point.

 

 So much of the appeal of these things is that they resist many of the basic, and often misguided, assumptions of our culture. That rationally and logic always hold the answers, that we can control everything down to minute details of our lives, that our emotions are excessive, that pain and loss should be avoided at all costs, and that we must keep up to an often unnaturally fast pace of life, always pushing and reaching for progress, desperately scrambling towards a reward promised but still out of reach. Other philosophies have also filled in the gaps, but for the most part they’ve been quickly co-opted by consumer-capitalism: meditate to improve your productivity at work, buy something made from bamboo to feel eco-friendly, do yoga to get a great ass. None of these things are wrong, and if you want to work on your productivity or your glutes power to you, but I appreciate the respite from this goal-chasing that Tarot gives me.

 

Tarot is personal, it’s emotional. Each card carries complex meanings and the stories they tell depends on how they fit together. Any spread could be read in a number of different ways, and to interpret them you need to trust your gut and follow your intuition. The cards do nothing without you, they don’t tell any stories if you’re not there to read them. What you get out of a reading is completely dependent on your intention - if you’re looking to prove they don’t work you’ll probably find the meaninglessness you’re looking for, but if you participate fully, if you trust that they have something to reveal to you and attentively consider what that might be, you’re sure to find value in the process. 

 

The balance between powerful symbolism and the ambiguity surrounding its implications is precisely what makes Tarot such a valuable guide to self-reflection. As Michelle Tea writes in ‘Modern Tarot’, “you have a tool to dig under the surfaces you present not just to the world but to yourself: the ways we hide from ourselves, lie to ourselves, engage in denial, the Tarot cuts through these with a single undeniable image”. And in the face of sometimes brutal realizations, Tarot is non judgemental. The worldview implicit in the cards is one where pain and joy are both inevitable and transient. Luck comes and goes, we all fail and there is always the possibility of redemption. Nothing is the right answer to every question - there are times to be gentle, compassionate and vulnerable, and times to be firm, determined, and ambitious. These are things I learn and unlearn all the time, and I always appreciate being reminded of them every time I come back to my deck, and open my heart and mind to what it could teach me.