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.