Tarot, the vertical and the astral: two kinds of truth

By Sarah Taylor

The more I work with tarot, and the more I watch others working with tarot (including impromptu readings around the dinner table — great fun and useful for analysing different reading techniques!), the more that I have come to see a distinction in the voice in which a reading is given. By ‘voice’, I don’t mean the sound of what is coming out of someone’s mouth, but the quality — like the way ‘voice’ is used to describe whether a verb is active or passive, for example.

This voice originates either from one of two places, and both of these places are home to a certain form of truth — ‘truth’ in this case being knowledge. Because when we are doing a tarot reading, just where is it that we are getting our knowledge from? Where are we finding this information that makes itself known to us? And — more important — what is knowledge (read: truth) anyway?

The tarot is not knowledge in and of itself. That’s like looking at something in a mirror and thinking it’s the real deal. Knowledge lies beyond tarot, and we can use tarot as a vehicle to reach it. To continue the mirror analogy, tarot reflects knowledge. As to the question of what kind of knowledge we are reaching through that reflection, and where it might reside, I’ve come to see the following as a good working hypothesis:

When we do a tarot reading, we can receive knowledge from a number of places — some of them more mundane than others.

A couple of weeks ago, I referred to the idea of seeing our experience from the point of view of a cross, which has a vertical and a horizontal axis. The horizontal is our time-based experience; it is life on this planet, in this cosmos; it is physical reality. The vertical is time-less; it is matter-less; it is the world of Spirit. Ideally, when we are working with tarot, we are accessing the vertical: we are ascending into the world of Spirit, receiving knowledge, and bringing it down into our world as information that we can then use. When we do this, we are in communion with the Divine.

I find working on the vertical hard. Psychologically and emotionally heavy, (physically) dense, intellect-driven beings that we humans are, we’re generally not used to putting ourselves into a space that is confining in its requirement of us, reached through a surrender to faith and to the unknown, and which demands a form of listening without ears and preceding thought. Our brains want to try and quantify and qualify what we find there. Much of our psyche is geared up either to mistrust our experience or to believe that we are somehow special to have reached it. And as soon as we are in either of those states, we have lost our connection to it.

But what’s going on when we aren’t working on the vertical in a tarot reading and yet we are receiving knowledge that also doesn’t quite feel like it is wholly from us? It can feel like we have plucked it out of the ether; unlike the vertical it often brings with it a sensation of the expansive.

Welcome to the world of the astral. Through my own learning process, I have come to identify the astral with information that is defined by what it is not, rather than what it is, simply because it is a vast repository that houses many different forms. What the astral is not is direct knowledge of Spirit — or, rather, the revealing of Spirit to us.

I’m sure that there are many other definitions of the astral, but I see it as including, but absolutely not limited to, the following: what we create through our emotions; ghosts; neuroses; our fears; our wishful thinking; auras; most of our dreams; plenty of drug-induced experiences; what we disown in ourselves and others; our psychic connections to others.

The last two of these play very active roles in many tarot readings. Think of the concept of the wounded healer who seeks to heal in others what it is that resides in her- or himself. We invoke the archetype of the wounded healer when our tarot readings align with this particular role that we are playing out (often unconsciously). Instead of seeing Spiritual truth, we see our personal truth reflected in the cards. From a psychological perspective, we tell the story of ourselves to ourselves through the cards, rather than giving the person for whom we’re reading an insight that is entirely their own.

This can work, however — and this is where we start to encounter shades of grey in the frequently black-and-white story of what does and does not make an effective tarot reading. It works because we tend to attract those people into our lives with whom we have a vibrational affinity. And we are attracted to them. Therefore, when two people with a similar vibration come together in a tarot reading and the reader is working in the astral, it may well be that there is a message for both people. There can be truth in that.

Then again, there might be no truth, and that is the risk with the astral. As with any profession, there are those who work within it who are unwilling or unable to take responsibility for what they are disowning, and will then project it onto others to deal with. In which case, as a client, you might walk away with an experience of tarot that you had no idea you were signing up for. The effect of this can be a sense of disappointment and annoyance at being swindled (the best outcome), or believing something about yourself that is patently untrue.

Our psychic connection to others can also play a significant part in a tarot reading — and, again, it can be to positive effect as well as negative. I see this most often at the dinner party readings that tend to happen spontaneously when a tarot reader is invited. Strange as it may seem (it seems a little strange to me, anyway!), the reason that this psychic component works particularly well at dinner parties has something to do with alcohol sometimes being a remarkably potent way of getting on another person’s wavelength (almost as remarkable as its propensity to help you get in another person’s face).

I’ve seen the recognition of truths uttered by people who have never worked with cards before. Conversely, I have felt a complete disconnect between reader and the person being read for. It can be a largely hit-and-miss affair. But it can be fun!

When it isn’t fun is when this ability is misused, knowingly or unknowingly — although I find this to be far less common than projection, which is rife. The result can be the same, though: someone walks away carrying far more than they need to, and so the work begins to divest themselves of what is not theirs.

When we are working with a psychic connection, it can be productive. It can feel energising. Unlike ascending the vertical, we can maintain working on the astral for relatively long periods of time. It is sometimes a key part of the work we undertake for ourselves and with others. But what it is not is vertical. It can complement our work on the vertical, or it does not. We can use it for both.

I can’t give you a fool-proof way of identifying when it is that we have brought knowledge down from the vertical, i.e., Divine truth. All I can say is that it has a tendency to whisper rather than shout, to be firm and unwavering, and has its basis in love rather than fear — although we have the uncanny ability to attach all manner of judgments and emotions to that truth, which can then obscure its message.

The most obvious example of this is when we try and do a repeat reading using the same question, or we keep drawing cards around a card we would rather not have received. The more we question the wisdom of the tarot, the more we start to focus on fear, the more cards we draw to ‘take it all back’, the more negative they become. That’s not truth; that’s our truth. And in that moment the cards reflect back to us our fear. We aren’t working on the vertical (which may have given us a so-called negative card, yes, but only one that is eminently useful to us); we are working on the astral.

Another reaction that tells me I might just be on the vertical track: there is a burst of recognition of that truth — a feeling of something breaking into consciousness in the same way the clouds part to reveal the Sun. If it is a personal revelation, it is often accompanied by laughter or tears, or both. It reveals something about ourselves to us in the form of a felt sense that touches our core. At the heart of what we are doing — the very heart — is there love, or is there fear?

Two realms, two different kinds of truth, one absolute, the other conditional. Tarot can access both, and both confer knowledge, but to confuse the two is to confuse what we can take from them. To know which one we are accessing at any one time? Time, discernment and practice.

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.