great article! i've always considered tarot to be both a parlor trick and an introspection tool. the cards are so rich in symbols that your mind will find some way to connect the dots to make them applicable to your life. in this way the cards can bring to the fore certain things about yourself that maybe you wouldn't have consciously thought about otherwise.

if you're interested, the best book on the subject that i've read is "the way of tarot" by jodorowsky (yes that jodorowsky).

This sounds very similar to a basic technique I find useful for making difficult decisions: the coin flip.

If I can't seem to decide between A or B, I flip a coin. If, in doing so, the answer is A, one of three things happens: I find I like the answer, and it turns out it was my preference all along. I find I prefer B after all, and just didn't realize it. Or, I really don't care in which case the coin flip was as good an answer as any I could've come to.

The coin didn't tell me anything. But by forcing a decision it revealed something I didn't consciously understand.

Piet Hein wrote a "grook" on just this:

  A PSYCHOLOGICAL TIP

  Whenever you're called on to make up your mind,
  and you're hampered by not having any,
  the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find,
  is simply by spinning a penny.
  No -- not so that chance shall decide the affair
  while you're passively standing there moping;
  but the moment the penny is up in the air,
  you suddenly know what you're hoping.

Yes, precisely that - I use I-Ching instead.

I plan to write a bit more about this, but I haven't got around it yet. In the meantime, everyone interested in using I-Ching (or any other kind of "oracle device") to re-evaluate your options can read this: https://aeon.co/essays/forget-prophecy-the-i-ching-is-an-unc...

Funny, while I stray from mysticism of any kind after growing up in a Christian church (most of my youth, anyway), I enjoy the I-Ching for that very reason and have for a few years. It's taken me down the road from a life where I was far more miserable than I realized, and to one that more aligns with my hopes.

I have to say it also, just the practice of re-evaluation of my own opinions and feelings, has helped me to be more honest with myself and the people I care about regarding my feelings -- shirking the old "stiff upper lip" until I'm miserable again. It's freeing, even if the practicals don't change on the timeline you want.

The problem with the coin flip is that you have established (narrowly, I think) one of two outcomes. Tarot allows for the possibility of a third. Or fourth. Or fifth.

So, almost exactly how Socrates told people to use oracles.

i learned this the hard way, after doing what the coin said, and having to reverse course a couple of times. on minor stuff only, of course. on anything important i'll sleep on it and the answer will usually come to me the next day or two.

Introspection nails it, I think.

I remember a woman volunteering to give me a reading. The question I wanted divined was about "relationships", the answer she interpreted from the lay of the cards was "work".

I leaned back and thought, "Perhaps the relationship thing will take it's own course, I should be thinking about getting my financial house in order."

And so it did and so I did.

That's actually really good advice considering that finances are one of the biggest stressors in romantic relationships. Getting your financial life together makes the romantic life much easier and more natural.

Yes, I have read "the way of the tarot" and watched several videos regarding the idea of using the tarot for healing. I agree with the idea that the tarot is not a tool for "seen the future" instead as a tool to dive deep in the unknown of our daily life. What mean is, it can really help you to be aware of things about a situation or about yourself that you aren't aware of.

Exactly this. I appreciate tarot cards because the symbolism stimulates your imagination and helps you to think of new ways to solve problems, or new perspectives on things in your life.

The approach of mentally asking a question or thinking about something such as "my future" and then selecting a random card gives you one of 78 different lenses through which to think about that topic. From there your mind takes over and does the rest of the work to figure out if that particular symbolic lens applies to the subject at hand, and sometimes it helps you to realize things that you already had subconsciously.

I'm solidly in the "soft" camp mentioned in the article, but I'm also pretty into tarot, enough that I've gotten a large half sleeve tattoo that features various tarot cards that I felt were especially meaningful at various points in my life. I plan to continue it as I experience life events that I think are meaningful enough to be associated with a card from the deck.

Seconded. I have seen Jodorowsky perform in public in a couple of occasions and he was always very interesting. Also, he is humble, warm and funny and a pretty fascinating speaker.

My girlfriend used to be read them. I thought it was silly. One day I said to her: "Maybe the cards don't tell the future. Maybe they make the future." She stopped reading them after that.

I think that's the wrong perspective. They don't tell or make the future. They have very little to do with the future. They take advantage of psychological archetypes to encourage examination of the present in a new context, which might lead to thinking about the future differently.

A fun speculative fiction book involving Tarot cards is Last Call by Tim Powers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Call_(novel)

Surprised to not see my personal metaphors for the suits and trumps: the four alchemical elements and the steps in the Hero's Journey, respectively. Probably goes to show how open to interpretation it is, and how it can be used to channel meaning when you can ascribe whatever meaning fits.

The idea behind ascribing meaning to the tarot is one of reinforcing symbols.

Think of the Tarot as a programming language for the mind. The more one uses it, the more the rich symbols become grounded to one's individual psyche.

In the Western esoteric tradition (Hermetism), the human mind is viewed as a collection of disparate, autonomous, intelligences. What one considers to be his "Ego", his personality, can be modeled as an emergent illusion that arises out of the interplay of these underlying intelligences that are buried in the unconscious mind. What the alchemists called the King and Queen, the Eagle and the Lion, Mercury and Sulfur, what Carl Jung described as Anima, Animus and Shadow, what the Jewish Kabbalists describe as Sephirot, are all essentially these different aspects of the unconscious mind.

Using the Tarot in this fashion is an essential technique for bridging the gap between the conscious and the unconscious, as through repeated symbol reinforcement the unconscious obtains a way to "talk" to the conscious mind. Initially, through abstract "impressions" and "daydreams" and, if the process continues, through further crystallization and rigidity -- one may start seeing visions or hearing voices in his mind -- till the dissolution of the conscious ego and full-blown mystical experiences. One of the axioms of Alchemy -- Solve et Coagula -- refers to the practice of taking the human mind apart and reintegrating it. In the Hermetic tradition this is called Initiation. Carl Jung calls it Individuation.

The Tarot has been used in this fashion for hundreds of years, but this practical knowledge kept occult whilst different explanations ("divination") allowed to propagate in the popular sphere.

While Jungian archetypes describe compelling characters in terms of mythology, I don't believe they represent fundamental dimensions of the unconscious mind. Our neural wiring is unique enough that I don't think it can be reduced that way. If you look at brain activation in response to stimuli, it's remarkably inconsistent between individuals.

I do like the idea that Tarot cards let people more easily assume alternate positions with conviction. If this is accompanied by a mystical experience all the better - as long as it doesn't lead to doing something stupid.

Yet the brain still relies on hierarchies of models (or archetypes) to make any sense of the world at all. I mean, surely there is little variation in what people consider a nose or the sensation from touching a bumpy surface and how they would describe it. (I'm speculating here, of course.)

Thee difference you're referring to in activation in response to stimuli, as I understand it, is a result of the way and timeline that the models were learned, but it doesn't change the fact that the cortex relies on hierarchies of models to form a representation that we understand to be reality.

That is, if I understand you correctly and am not too outdated here.

I hope you have seen the Alchemical Tarot: http://a.co/gcRQpfJ

The most beautiful tarot I have come across. (I like the more sparse, earlier editions though if you can find them.)

the four suits are explicitly tied to the classical elements (swords = air, wands = fire, pentacles = earth, cups = water) and the source material for the cards is drawn directly from Western esoteric traditions, especially Hermeticism and Alchemy.

The Hero's Journey is Campbell's analysis of archetypal themes present in most mythologies, and especially in Ancient Near Eastern and medieval Eureopean hero stories. It maps well to the Major Arcana because they are both archetype maps of the same underlying cultural milieu.

I like thinking of the cards as a language system like any other: there are semantic units (the cards) and syntactic units (the layouts).