Tarot: a tribute in seven parts

By Sarah Taylor

As of this week, I’m changing tack away from the mid-week tarot article to focus on other areas of my professional life. I’ll still be writing the Weekend Tarot Readings. Planet Waves has been an amazing forum in which to write, hone my craft, and take part in a community that is both stimulating and supportive, and I don’t hesitate to recommend it to those I meet in my day-to-day and online life. If you’re thinking of becoming a member, consider this special membership offer here. See you on Sundays! — Sarah

Over the years, tarot has revealed much more than the answers to the questions I have brought to it either for myself or on behalf of someone else. It has accompanied me through experiences high and low.

Each and every time, it has spoken to me in the same gentle but firm and steady voice — whether I was able to listen to it or not. It has insisted through its imagery on a reckoning with reality rather than dream, illusion or ideal.

Ah, tarot — how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

1. Tarot speaks a universal language

Unlike most other methods of divination and mapping, such as astrology, the I Ching and runes, tarot decks tend to speak in pictures — and pictures are a form of expression that is universally accessible. Even someone who has never seen a tarot card before can make an educated guess about what a particular card means.

The Rider-Waite Smith tarot deck is one of the most popular and widely recognised tarot decks, and for good reason. Its images have a simplicity that unfolds meaning to us immediately, but which houses in those folds layers of meaning that continue to provide revelation to seasoned readers. I can think that I’ve reached a level of understanding of a card that leaves little room for anything new, and then I am reminded that my understanding was only limited by my own understanding of life; when I grow, another veil is lifted.

I believe the reason for this continued sense of expansion is due to the next point:

2. Tarot is a doorway to the archetypes

No archetype can be reduced to a simple formula. It is a vessel which we can never empty, and never fill. It has a potential existence only, and when it takes shape in matter it is no longer what it was. It persists throughout the ages and requires interpreting ever anew. [Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Vol. 9]

Archetypes represent the blueprints of life, insofar as we can describe them — because they are indescribable, as Jung points out in the quote above. Therefore, tarot cards are not archetypes, but they serve as a means of transporting us to an encounter with an archetype. It isn’t a full encounter — it cannot be. It is the point at which our life is a reflection of an archetype, a state only hinted at, which cannot be mapped by the mind, but which can be felt intuitively.

The tarot lets us into the world of archetype in several ways, depending on the card we are looking at: the 22 major arcana cards speak of soul — invisible forces at play which are then experienced in the everyday minor arcana. The court cards frequently represent archetypal characteristics, while the Aces feel to me to be the purest representation of archetype in the deck, because they describe potential rather than something that is manifest. They reside in the world of spirit, available to us if we choose to acknowledge that they can be a presence in our lives.

3. Tarot connects us to our truth

What is our truth? We know it when we encounter it — that’s the only way I can describe it, because it is a personal realisation.

We know tarot has connected to our truth when we have a moment of recognition, or an opening into insight, while looking at a card. Sometimes this recognition is validating or affirming; other times it comes in the form of a feeling of resistance or fear. The first kind is usually considerably easier to take on board. Nevertheless, the tarot deck contains as many undesirable experiences as desirable; it’s the nature of duality, which defines our world.

All the tarot cards will speak to your truth at one time or another, because you are the macrocosm expressing itself in microcosmic form. The cards that are active in your psyche at any particular time, however, will be the ones asking for personal recognition, because they have something to show you about who, and what, you are. In that lies your truth.

4. Tarot pokes fun at our need to control

Egads! I’ve railed at the cards when they have showed me something I didn’t want to see. In a desperate attempt to ‘undo’ this, I’ve pulled more and more cards to counteract the spiritual bummer it’s induced, only to find myself in the centre of a cartomancy soap opera, the plots getting more ridiculous by the moment, the central character more hysterical.

This is what tarot does: it gives you the truth, and if you don’t like it, it will reflect that dislike back to you, ramping up the emotive content so that it mirrors your own spiralling emotions.

If you like soap operas, you can keep going until the reading makes no sense whatsoever and you feel the manipulations of a plot line created to keep you hooked in. If not, you can take your medicine, and walk away. It doesn’t taste so good? Then fortunately you can choose to keep the dose as small as you can. You only need as much as is prescribed for it to work.

5. Tarot doesn’t always give us all the answers — just enough to work with

The bigger the question mark over a situation, and the greater the potential for change, the less able we are to focus a question enough to bring us satisfying answers. This is obvious: no one question can cover everything that we need to know; no one card, no matter how directed our enquiry, can give us all that we want. We are left wanting more.

What might not be as obvious is that there is merit in this sense of dissatisfaction. It is the dissatisfaction that we have not only about our limited ability to know what’s happening and what’s coming up (hence asking the tarot); but our dissatisfaction with our own limits. And we want the cards to give us as clear a map as possible — preferably one that’s so clear we don’t have to explore the unknown ourselves.

“Give me the answers right now, even to the questions I don’t know to ask, and let them explain myself to me in a way that saves me from having to venture beyond the outer reaches of my comfort zone.”

Life starts to get interesting when we become willing to navigate using the inner compass that we were born with, relying on that over instructions from anyone, or anything, else. Tarot is not that inner compass; tarot points us to it.

6. Tarot helps us see how everything is connected

Imagine a tarot deck on the surface in front of you, uncut, the cards stacked one on top of the other. All of them are the same in one sense, all are different in another, all of them are connected through the shared condition of their existence. It might seem ridiculous to look at an uncut tarot deck to contemplate the interconnectedness of all things. But it is as good as anything. Tarot, like everything else, is a fractal — a part that, in its totality, represents the whole. It is the human experience in 78 cards. There it is; there you are; there is everything.

7. Tarot opens up other avenues of discovery

Returning to my first point, tarot is a ‘gateway’ tool to other methods of mapping and divination that require more theoretical knowledge. Through my study of it and through writing for Planet Waves, it has led me to a greater understanding of astrology. It has also introduced me to Hermeticism and Qabalah. And with every new thing that I learn, I take it back to the tarot and see something new in it, and by extension, in myself (see point 6).

From an intellectual standpoint, this is deeply rewarding. As a gateway to a deeper relationship with who I am, it is invaluable. Sure, I still want to know whether it’s better to go with decision a or decision b, and whether something is going to work out or not. That can still be markedly useful. But that’s like buying a laptop just for the games. There’s a lot more on offer besides. While some of it will be dross, some will glint with the promise of gold.

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.