Whenever I pull out a deck of Tarot cards, there are a few questions everyone not already familiar with the Tarot immediately asks me:
"Why are there pictures on them?"
"Can you really tell the future with them?"
"Can anybody do that, or do you have to be psychic?"
My answers vary to some extent, depending on my mood and the tone of the question, whether it is casual or sarcastic, for example, but generally I say something like:
"The pictures are symbols that impart information."
"Occasionally, but more often I can offer advice about what may happen."
"I believe everybody is psychic, just some more so than others."
Inevitably, if the person is really interested -- not just in getting a reading but maybe in learning how to read the cards for herself (and it's more often "herself" than "himself") -- the next question is:
"So what do all those different cards mean?"
The answer to that is both simple and complicated. There are 78 cards in a standard Tarot deck, and each one of them is distinctive and different from all the rest, and they all mean something right side up and something else upside down, and for many of them there is more than one possible meaning to be read from them in either position, depending on the situation in which they are found, their position in the layout, their relationship to the cards around them, etc. Learning to read the Tarot takes a lifetime, in the sense that someone like myself, whose relationship with the Tarot has lasted close to 40 years, can not only still learn but occasionally feel like a beginner. On the other hand, someone with little training or familiarity with the cards at all can fairly quickly learn enough to dazzle friends with insightful readings (though at first she may need to keep a book close by for occasional help).
When I was about 12 or 13 year old, I first started reading cards, using a standard poker deck. I made up my own layout and made up the meanings I assigned the cards, though it was informed by growing up in a family of card players and absorbing by osmosis some traditional associations with certain cards and suits. Some are so obvious as to be universal in our culture -- hearts are obviously love, and diamonds must be money. Spades I thought of as bad luck, and the Queen of Spades in particular I had somewhere heard was supposed to be the Death card (probably part of why I associated the suit with bad luck).
It was all just fun, until I gave a reading for my mother. Not only did that Queen of Spades turn up, but it turned up next to the Jack of Spades, and in another part of the reading, the Queen of Hearts was surrounded by more spades. A cold feeling came over me and I felt absolutely certain that my mother was going to lose the baby she was carrying. I can't tell you why I thought that -- even accepting my reading that the Jack of Spades indicated a young boy was going to die, and that he was someone my mother loved (the Queen of Hearts), you'd think it could just as easily been my own death that I was seeing. And I did think of that, afterwards. But at the time I saw it clearly as her losing the baby.
I stammered and stuttered, not wanting to say what I thought I saw and trying to come up with something else to say when that was all that I could think of. I don't even remember what I ended up telling her. But two weeks later, my mother did have a miscarriage. And the baby, if it had been born, would have been a boy.
I eventually did have a baby brother, so the story had at least a bittersweet, if not entirely happy, ending for my mom and dad. But that's not why I bring it up here. I bring it up to illustrate a few important points that anyone should know who is thinking about embarking on a relationship with the Tarot cards.
The first thing is something that I realized even as a child: don't tell people something horrible is going to happen to them. For one thing, you could be wrong. In my experience, absolute predictions like that are extremely rare, so when you think you see one you should think twice and even three times about it -- and even them you should keep it to yourself.
Generally, the cards dispense advice. This is likely to happen if you continue on your current course, but you can avoid it by doing this. Those are the kinds of predictions you generally see in Tarot readings, and you should always keep in mind that the reading should be useful to the person it is for. Otherwise, what's the point?
The second thing is that the Tarot is a tool for your intuition, not a mechanical device for producing answers. Some people believe it is indeed the latter, that there is some kind of magical property in those little cardboard rectangles that gives them the power to answer questions all by themselves. I think this is a complete misunderstanding of how Tarot works. The Tarot focuses your own mental, emotional, and spiritual energies toward developing assistance for the person who is asking for the reading, and also the energies of that person, as well, who is a participant at least to the level of formulating the question and cutting the cards, and often emotionally and even verbally involved in the interpretation.
If you want to just open the deck and layout the cards however you feel appropriate and read them just by looking at the pictures and deciding for yourself what they mean, fine. I think you will eventually want to do more than that, but starting out that way is every bit as valid as reading a book or taking an online course or any other method of starting out.
I'll go further than that. If you have a strong association with a card that is at odds with every other source you can find as to the meaning of that card, your interpretation is right. For you.
Let me give you an example. I have a friend who looks at the Six of Swords in the familiar "Rider-Waite" deck by Pamela Coleman Smith and sees a woman and her son on the way to her husband's -- the son's father's -- funeral. Moroever, the husband has been killed. If pressed, she'll point out that the boy is young, and most men with such young boys don't die of natural causes, but she didn't really come to this conclusion by a rational process of logically figuring out the story elements in the picture on the card. She looked at the card and saw a woman and her son on her way to her murdered husband's funeral. That doesn't mean that when the card comes up in a reading that she believes it means that the woman she's reading for is about to lose her husband to murder. What if she's reading for a man? No, while her response to the card is quite powerful and specific, in a reading to her it means grief and loss and the aftermath of violence. In some fashion, those things will intrude into the life of the person she is reading for, she believes, when she sees this card.
You'll find a very different interpretation of the Six of Swords here when I get around to it. You couldn't look at the Crowley-Harris Six of Swords, with its keyword "Science," and understand how anyone could think the Six of Swords could possibly mean that, although it certainly does fit with the picture on the RWS pack.
But my friend's interpretation is absolutely right for her. The powerful nature of her immediate and visceral response to that card the very first time she saw it trumps the meaning assigned to this card by whatever authority you want to look to (pun intended, for those of you who get it). There are no absolute authorities. There is no "one right meaning" for any of the Tarot cards. If you want to be absurd, you could probably come up with wrong meanings, things that were so outrageously at odds with any reasonable assessment of either the significance of the card's place in the deck or the picture on its face (if it has a picture -- not all Tarot cards have pictures on them, though all Tarot decks have cards with pictures) that you could get me to say, "OK, that's just wrong." But on the whole, interpretations of the Tarot are neither "right" nor "wrong." They are useful or not useful. If they are useful to you, then they are right.
And one final lesson illustrated by my story of my first powerful reading (I'm not sure how many I had done before that -- not many, but it was not my first; my first deck of Tarot cards was purchased not long after): the world is a strange place.
If you're the type of skeptic who thoroughly disbelieves in the supernatural and psychic abilities and is sure that there is nothing to Tarot or Astrology or any of that New Age nonsense, you probably think I made the story up. And I certainly can't produce any evidence to convince you otherwise. My mother passed away this year, and in any case I don't know that I ever told anyone about it at the time, and by the time I did, well, it was already after the miscarriage and indeed after my little brother came along a few years later and even if I found someone who remembered me telling it then, that would only prove to you that if it's a lie I've been telling it a long time.
But if you yourself have had such an experience, if you have had the hairs on the back of your neck stand up as something happened to you or in front of you that just can't be explained by the rational laws that the skeptics insist answer all the questions of the universe, then you know exactly what I mean, and how I felt. This is one of those things that separate people into two camps, seemingly. Either you've felt the presence of the unexplained or you haven't. If you have, no one can convince you that the universe is nothing but atoms and electricity and forces we understand and can manipulate at will. If you haven't, no one can convince you that there is anything beyond what you yourself perceive.
I can only offer that to assume someone must be lying because his account of his experience is at odds with your understanding of how the universe is structured is not really the sign of an open mind. You suspect I may be lying? Good. I have no problem with that. But that's one of dozens of experiences I have had that you would be hard pressed to find a "natural" explanation for, and several of them were shared and witnessed by others. Are we all lying? Are we all mad?
I'll climb down off my high horse now, because I doubt if many reading this are truly so narrow-mindedly rejectionist. If you're reading a blog called "Tarot Musings," you probably have some interest in the subject. So I'll stop here and call it a night.
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