By Sarah Taylor
In light of the prevailing themes and discussions on gender, gender politics, the roles of the masculine and the feminine — I thought I would bring the debate into the tarot arena. It isn’t going to be an overly long article, because my aim here is to provoke thought rather than to describe it, but what prompted me to write about this today was the question I asked myself:
“Is tarot sexist?”
This came to me after reading one of the Daily Astrology posts this week, and because I have recently started reading the Richard Wilhelm translation of the I Ching. I don’t claim to know a lot about the I Ching. I have had several I Ching readings in the recent past, and Taoism is something that has indirectly informed my writing as well as my own spiritual practice (as unstructured as that practice tends to be). I knew that psychiatrist and father of analytical psychology, Carl Jung, was a personal adherent of the I Ching; and it was the fact that he had written the foreword to the Wilhelm version of the book that brought me to its pages.
I digress, but to make this point: from the perspective of this writer, the I Ching’s language and imagery can be construed as being sexist — misogynistic, even. A woman’s place is subservient to men, in line with the hierarchy of Chinese social structure at the time when the I Ching first came into being. In which case, when I read an interpretation of a hexagram, I first have to come to terms with language and imagery that can be quite jarring, then re-interpret it in light of my own beliefs without compromising its deeper meaning.
Which brings me to tarot. Tarot, in the incarnation that we know it, has its roots in more recent history, though history tells us that the gender divide in terms of roles and status was still very much in effect then. It still is today. But is tarot intrinsically sexist? Would a woman take umbrage at the idea of a helpless ‘damsel in distress’ in the Eight of Swords, for example? Conversely, would a man feel pigeon-holed into the traditional role of ‘knight in shining armour’ when he saw the Knight of Cups? I have my own ideas, but I’m interested in opening up a debate.
What I would add are a few points that I offer up for discussion, in no particular order:
The tarot is an image-driven form of divination — unlike the I Ching, for example, where meaning is couched primarily in words and where consequently the hexagrams are less separable from their corresponding written meanings. This means that we are more free to put our own interpretation on tarot cards.