Can Tarot Predict the Future?
February 13, 2023 filed in Tarot
I consider myself a skeptic, or at least a realist. I’m not religious, having come from an atheist father and a lapsed Christian mother. I think it’s important to try to stay grounded in what the world actually is (as much as is possible with our fallible human brain). Religion and spirituality give people hope and a guiding light in a difficult world, but I haven’t really felt like I needed that solace. Religion and spirituality are powerful stories that we use to sooth ourselves in the face of uncertainty and complexity.
I take a similar approach to Tarot. I don’t think the cards have special powers. I don’t believe that they gather energy that needs to be dissipated with crystals or some chant of Ohm. I think they are pieces of thin carboard with pictures on them and that they don’t mean anything more than the meaning we give them. BUT the meaning we give them is important and that meaning is where I do feel the power of tarot. We are narrative beings and we use our stories to guide us. Tarot provides a framework for us to create stories that have meaning in our lives and can guide us towards the change we want or the questions we need to think of. This is magical, but it is a gentle magic, an everyday magic. It is the magic of looking at our lives and creating a future. The magic of deciding that we do have some small sliver of power.
Sitting still and looking at the cards gives a perspective of life that we often don’t get. If you can tie the images of the cards to the life you are living you can see yourself from a distance, and I’m always trying to get distance from my tumultuous emotions, my automatic negative thoughts. Seeing yourself as part of the great story of light and dark, masculine and feminine, the mundane and the divine can give a much needed perspective on the petty details of life. Not that the details in tarot aren’t important. They are very important – each card exists in its symbols, but there are so many symbols that almost anyone at any time can relate those symbols to their lives.
You need imagination to read the cards, you have to tap into a deeper part of yourself. There are secrets there, in that shadowy place of imagination. There is power in that place that lives just below the surface. The place where artists dive for inspiration, into which we pass when we take drugs or mediate or try to reach for the profundity of life. It is far to easy to skate on the surface of life, but Tarot cards ask to take a little time to imagine where you came from, where you are, and where you are going. That can be incredibly powerful.
But back to the idea of telling the future. After reading Tarot for over ten years, I do have a certain respect for the stories the cards tell me. There have been a number of times that readings did seem to predict the future. In one particularly intense reading the querent (the person who questions) pulled both the devil and death. A year later she died from taking Ativan after drinking all night. I will never forget the way she looked at those cards. She was a sad soul and she somehow seemed to know the truth. It could have been coincidence - it probably was a coincidence, but it showed me that it is powerful and sometimes scary to delve into people’s hearts and minds and whatever magic the cards hold shouldn’t be taken lightly.