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]