Tarot Isn't Magic, You Are...

Where is the magic?

Is Tarot where the magic is at? Despite centuries of obscurantism and decorative mystique, the true beauty, magic and mystery is within the very selves all of us are. The cards are simply doorways leading to the constellation of meanings in our minds.

Lines and curves

These lines and curves your eyes are seeing are just lines and curves until your mind self-renders certain meanings you have stored away. And so too is Tarot just a load of pictures, yet what a miracle! What magic! Out of the depths of our consciousness, without any effort, meanings are bubbled up simply by looking at pictures on cards. 

Words vs Pictures

However, whereas written language has only existed for five per cent of the time pictorial representation has, Tarot as a visual language, shares a continuum from the earliest known human abstractions, i.e. cave paintings. This may lend Tarot its perceived sprinkle of fairy dust - through its greater power to access subconscious responses, tapping into our limbic system, and assisting nonlinear, gestalt perception¹.

You are the magic

In any case, the ‘magic’ resides in our consciousness - Tarot simply facilitates a way of connecting us into this vast web of meanings, often especially those in the sub-verbal layers of our psyches. A particular deck may enable particular nuances to come forth, but they are always at the mercy of the individualised meanings we carry in our minds. The more nuanced and layered your set of inherent and learned meanings are, the potentially better your readings will be. And perhaps more pertinently, your ability to let go of all learnings and receive what is beyond memorisation.

Forget Everything

When starting A-Level Chemistry aged sixteen, a teacher asks the class to forget everything they were taught at GCSE about atomic bonding, proceeding to teach a more complex and nuanced version, i.e. replacing the atomic shell model and moving to quantum orbitals etc. 

Strictly speaking, neither model is correct - it is a working theory, both are not the reality they seek to reflect. Yet societal consensus posits one as ’truer’, more nuanced, and possibly more helpful. 

Nuancing Death 

So too with Tarot - we may have to toss out prior cultural conditioning in favour of ‘more nuanced’ understandings, especially around charged symbols such as ‘death’, ’the devil’,  or ‘Pope/Hierophant’. Which definition below is more helpful? 

1) The Death card means someone will die, it is bad, very bad, something is going wrong. These are dark and scary times. 

2) The Death card represents an essential process whereby all things that have come into being will meet their end - moments, people, ideas, cultures, nations, species, galaxies, relationships and so on. Yet for every moment that ends, a new one has begun; death and birth are two sides of the coin of life. Without one, the other cannot exist - without each other there is no coin. 

Conversation, not conversion. 

It isn’t always the case that ‘more nuance’ or ‘more complexity’ = better. Presenting a 14 year old the basic, GCSE model of chemical bonding is more appropriate than teaching PhD level quantum theories. And so having deeply profound insights into the depths of each card’s symbolism may lead you to overlook some very simple and ‘mundane’ interpretation that would better serve the querent. A Tarot reading is not a transference of information from one mind to another, it is a dialogue of body, mind and spirit. 

The truest compass

And so from the dawn of human intelligence we journey onwards - broadening, nuancing and complexifying the nations of image in our minds; our imaginations. 

However, at the risk of losing touch with the living, breathing life that came before our abstractions, we must hold close to the knowing that all meanings we have are only ever reflections of reality. No matter how nuanced, beautiful and deep our systems of reflection are, they are only ever a working knowledge. Tarot is suggestive not conclusive, your own heart is always the truest compass.  

Footnotes

¹ Visual language more readily activates the amygdala, whereas written language must go through the intellectual and reasoning faculties, involving the neocortex etc. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3687251/#:~:text=third%20experiment%20we%20found%20that,to%20how%20they%20are%20encoded for more information.

Magician and Death Tarot images are from the Spirit Keeper's Tarot by Benebell Wen.