Since there is no reason to associate the Tarot with supernatural power, there is no cosmic mandate regarding its use -- no rules, no consequences for handling it wrongly. You can use it for whatever purpose you wish, in any manner you like. Play card games, frame your favorite cards and hang them for display, use them as a prop in a tabletop role playing game. In my case, as stated earlier, I wish to use them as the foci of regular meditations.
In this context, I define "meditation" as the taking of a few minutes to reflect on my life at that moment. Even without the spiritual baggage that meditation often carries, the act of calming oneself and getting lost in one's thoughts can still be beneficial. A
directed meditation -- a period of a few minutes spent contemplating a specific topic -- could be a chance to "get your bearings," to quietly brainstorm.
We get so consumed with thoughts regarding works in progress, appointments, our children's school performance, work projects, and other specific "to do list"-type items that we fail to take time to work on understanding who we are and how we fit in the world. Asking myself, for example, "How would others define me?" or "How do I impact others at work?" or "What am I doing to achieve my most valued goals?" challenges my often distorted self-image. Each of us are just as inaccurate in our understanding of ourselves as others are in their understanding of us.
A rationalist values objectivity. Information is more effective the better it maps onto reality. Reality is not fully understood by anyone; we each grasp more or less of it, depending on the amount and quality of the information we store in our brains. If a stimulus, like a randomly drawn Tarot card, inspires me to question how I define myself, my work, my status as a father, citizen, or artist, then I may find myself confronting a hard truth, or considering a strategy that I didn't think enough about previously.
There is nothing miraculous about this. A meditation on the Tarot is like talking to oneself. Or you might compare it to flipping idly through television channels, until something inspires you to take action -- ordering Chinese take-out, calling your mother, organizing a family game night, whatever the case may be.
The Method
One could invent whatever process they wish to explore the Tarot. There are no rules, no matter what the supernaturalists might claim. You can work your way through the deck sequentially, or draw cards at random. Lay out a full spread, or draw one card at a time. Consult existing interpretations, or make up your own. Use multiple cards to tell a story, or consider each card as carrying a unique message. Your deck, your rules. In fact, you might not even care to use the Tarot as I do, for the purpose of inspiring reflections on real life; perhaps you are an actor, and you'd like to treat each card as a character trait you want to explore, or the subject of an improvisation exercise. Maybe you're a writer, and you could weave a narrative from a string of cards, then see if it can be turned into your next short story. This deck is a dumb object, a subject of reflection. Never think of it as more than what it is -- a mass-produced collection of images. It is a prop, which could be wiped from existence with no consequence. Avoid the impulse to imbue it with personality or intrinsic meaning. It has always been, and will always be a deck of cards.
Here is my personal approach that I'll be using as I regularly consult the deck and report to this blog:
- Shuffle the deck, and draw a single card from the Crowley Thoth Tarot.
- Spend a few minutes gazing at the images on the card, allowing my imagination to respond however it will. Then record my initial impressions of the image.
- Consult Tarot: Mirror of the Soul by Gerd Ziegler, to compare my initial impression with that of the "initiated," and perhaps to learn more of the symbolism that I might not have caught.
- For the benefit of the reader, consult Arthur Edward Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot, which applies more to the Rider-Waite Tarot.
- Combine my personal insight, and both published interpretations into a message that can be useful for contemplation, and generally applicable to multiple versions of the Tarot.
Two Rules
Okay, I suppose a couple of rules have to be followed, no matter what your personal method. These should be pretty obvious to the skeptic:
- Avoid the temptation to prophecy. This is not an exercise in fortune-telling.
- Tarot interpretations that prophecy good or bad fortune must be converted into something less predictive. For example, "betrayal" becomes "risk of betrayal."
Beginning with the next entry, I will share my experiences of reading the cards, one at a time. If all goes as hoped, even if you stripped my journal of Tarot jargon, you'd have a nice collection of subjects for personal reflection.
