Editor’s Note: Regular participants in this page are familiar with the contributions of Sarah Taylor. For years I’ve been wanting to run a feature on tarot, and when I found out that in addition to being an excellent writer, Sarah is a professional card reader, I asked her to step up — and she did. This is her first article, which introduces the tarot and some of the concepts behind it. Future editions will cover how to work with cards on your own, how to choose a deck and specific cards. We will take direction from readers who comment, so please let us know what you think. You can visit Sarah’s website at this link. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
We are symbols, and inhabit symbols. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
I’ll go one step further than that: everything is a symbol. There is nothing in life that is not a symbol, and which does not serve as a representation of something else. Not one thing. This is a new series on Planet Waves, designed to provide an introduction to the tarot. The tarot is a set of symbols, usually presented on cards, that contain a core set of ideas that represent different people, situations, ideas and stages of growth. So it seemed wise to begin the discussion of the tarot with a discussion of symbols.
Objects, spaces, and spaces between spaces – all of these are fingerprints of the presence that informed them, and all offer ways of communing with it and the wisdom that it holds. Creation is a hologram, where every small, separate part contains the whole. Or, at least this is true for a mind that is in some way connected to the whole; to the holos.
Symbols are doorways to greater meaning, and all doorways ultimately open to the same destination, which is reconciliation with ourselves. But they do it in different ways, and each of us will find some more effective than others. Many of us are, by nature, visual people. We communicate and commune through images. Our ancestors told their stories and expressed their beliefs on rock faces. Artists today may call on the muse to speak to them through paint, pastel, clay. Our dreams are worlds of visual metaphor where the unseen comes out to play.
Through images, consciousness – our waking lives – is spoken to by the unconscious – the unseen. And they are effective, because we tend to identify with images to a degree that isn’t reached by words. Images feel visceral, often transcending the interference of intellect.
And this is where I believe tarot holds its greatest power: it is based on, and draws from, a rich well of archetypal imagery and symbolism. An archetype is a kind of proto-idea or image. We’re familiar with them, though we don’t always know we’re encountering one. For example, we know the difference between “the presidency” and “the president.” We know that certain presidents fill the presidency better than others, at least in our personal experience. The presidency is an archetype. The president is a person.