“What is hidden here requires a different view, the glance of one not looking straight ahead, letting their own perspective change1.”
A couple of years ago, I had reached a place in my life where it was difficult to see my situation just by looking straight ahead. Maybe you’ve been there too. I was in the middle of some growing pains. In the span of a few months I had started a new job, moved in to a new apartment in a new city, and begun spending more time with a new group of friends. It all felt wonderful and fulfilling and overwhelming and I struggled to keep my head above the water. All of these sudden, new changes in my life were hard to process together, and I felt increasingly overrun by it all. Journaling and talking through this hadn’t helped as much as I had hoped. But at this point, I had been working through a tarot deck, studying each card one by one, and felt like that might get me out of my rut and into a new field of vision. I drew up a spread, and I asked myself questions about the nature of this situation and what had led to it; and what needed to change to move forward. At the time, and still to this day, I was most moved by the card I drew describing the change I needed to take. The card, called Temperance, seemed to tell me to take it slow, careful, easy; to pay attention to what I was taking in and what I was giving out in my life, and to make sure that I was mindful with all of those things. Given the whole situation, it helped me be more conscious of my emotional relationship with the world, and to pay attention both to how I was processing and reacting to my life.
While this was a fairly small experience on the face of it, I look back at this and see a place where the practice and importance of tarot really clicked for me. And in the years since then I’ve continued my study of tarot to further refine my practice and philosophy, at times sharing these musings and experiences with other people in my life. So to articulate and share some of this, I offer you this sermon. As I mentioned before, this is a sermon about tarot, and at the same time ultimately it is not about tarot at all. It is a sermon about a spiritual, awareness-building practice that has impacted me a great deal. And it is a sermon about a way I have learned to turn over and examine myself in whatever situation I might land in. Here, I will say, it is also about the importance of creating such a practice and discipline, in order that we may always continue growing.
In order to do this, I will spend some time talking about tarot as a tool, a practice, and a discipline. But rather than giving a lecture on Tarot 101, or plumbing the depths of my spiritual musings on the subject, I offer a balance of these things that I think will give us all something in common to work with. I don’t profess to be an expert on this subject, and I only speak from my own experiences. Tarot has fostered a discipline of seeing my world differently when I am stuck or in need of guidance. It is a way for me to feed my thoughts and perceptions through a filter other than I would use moment to moment. So underscoring everything else, this is a sermon about finding and using tools to help us become more aware of our lives and our world.
My journey with tarot however did not begin with this clarity or conviction. It began when I was a young teenager, maybe 13 or 14. My first deck was one I bought at Ancient Ways here in Des Moines, back when it was on 17th and Woodland. That first deck is still the deck that I use most often – a pocket-sized edition of the Raider Waite Deck, a traditional deck widely used by teachers, students, and practitioners. As soon I was out of the shop and back in the car, I immediately opened the box and began flipping through the cards. I was transfixed – the bright colors, the symbol-laden images. It like I was having a hierophany, with the sense that I was connecting to something deeper and more expansive than myself. But the initial enthrallment gave way to a feeling of being up against an insurmountable task. How was I supposed to memorize all of these cards, know what all seventy-eight of them meant, with every reading? I never felt like this was something I picked up just for fun, or for the mystique of this – but at the same time I was daunted by the requirements of the discipline. Like Rachel Pollack, I began my first few readings with the cards in one hand and the Little White Book they came with in the other2. It felt exhilarating at first, like I was on the verge of tapping some hidden power. But going back and forth between book and reading soon became exhausting and unsustainable. The magic I felt fizzled. I put my cards away for years, thinking of them sheepishly on occasion, and in the meantime sifted through books and internet articles to find different perspectives in the hopes that I would find something that could stick and help me find a way forward. What follows now is something of an account of the things I’ve learned in that time.
We can begin talking about tarot itself as a tool, something material. All variables aside, there are some constants. With few exceptions, tarot decks have seventy-eight cards divided into two parts. The first of these parts, often called the Major Arcana, is a series of 22 cards. Each card has a name that is at once evocative and somewhat outside of ordinary context, names such as the High Priestess, or the Hanged Man. In more traditional decks, the scenes and characters they depict can have an archetypal feel. We can see they depict something specific, connected with their title, but the implications might sit just out of reach. The second part of the deck, often called the Minor Arcana, bears more similarity to the contemporary deck of playing cards. It is divided into four houses, with four “heads” (often styled as members of a royal court) and cards numbered one through ten. In many contemporary decks these cards can depict a narrative arc within each house. Other decks may portray them more sparsely, bearing closer resemblance to the playing cards we might be familiar with.
As I came to discover, tarot is an incredibly varied practice. There are almost as many ways read and derive meaning from tarot as there are readers. Readers begin by pulling cards from their deck with some kind of randomized selection. This could be through shuffling, or randomly pulling a card from the middle of the deck. A reader will then build a spread to answer a specific question. Spreads can involve as few or as many cards as you want. Each card usually speaks to a particular dimension or elaboration of the question, and together help provide a fuller answer to the question. As you can imagine, this gives a reader quite a lot of freedom to fit their reading to the demands of the situation at hand. Some situations need an answer that is simple and clear to help us re-focus. Other situations will present us with more to untangle and parse in order to make sense of them.
Once the cards are before you, the method of interpretation can vary widely. Some people read cards through a faithful memorization of meanings inherent to each card. They may have seeped hours, months, and years into committing to heart the meaning of cards like the Lovers or Seven of Wands. No matter the deck, no matter the spread, no matter the query, each reading is composed of the immutable meaning of each card involved. On another hand, others may spend little of their study in committing the meaning of cards to memory, focusing more intently on the visual details of each card and the stories it might tell. For them, a card’s meaning could vary by deck, by spread, by query, even by reader and querent. Each card has the power to evoke something different every time it appears, like a story that shines a little bit differently with each telling. And of course, there are many ways between and beyond these. There is no right or wrong way to make sense of what’s before you in a reading. What’s right, what’s helpful in overcoming the gaps in our vision, will depend on the reader, and the querent.
In our first reading today, we heard Rachel Pollack touch on some of these methods and her relationships with them3. Over the course of her studies with tarot, she came to focus less on wrote-memorization and pay more attention to the stories that the cards were telling alongside each other. As I read her words while preparing this service, I saw my own process of learning to read clearly in the words of another. When I first began, I felt intimidated by the pressure to memorize each card and imprint that memorization into every reading. I avoided reading tarot for years because of this, but with time a more narrative approach helped overcome this intimidation. It took an oracle deck that wasn’t a tarot deck, one that wasn’t even meant to be taken seriously, to help me really get in to the rhythm of strictly reading what the cards were telling me alongside each other. While a narrative approach still helps me no matter the spread, no matter the deck, at a certain point I realized I couldn’t rely on it solely. As I continued my practice, I found it worked really well with the more archetypal cards of the Major Arcana, but left me stuck with the Minor Arcana whose symbolism can build within a house from one card to another, and in and of themselves might not say a lot of obvious things.
From here I worked my way toward a sort of compromise, or cooperation, between wrote memorization and spontaneous narrative. At the time I described at the beginning of this sermon, I had begun an (almost) daily practice of pulling a tarot card, meditating on it, and at the end of the day free-writing about my impressions of it. Without relying on a book to lead me fumbling along, I used this practice to develop a sense of what each card could tell me. And as I worked through it, I found other disciplines of self-awareness coloring my interpretations of the cards. At this time, I was part of a Jungian reading group at this congregation, and much of our class’s examination of personality, ego, shadow, and interpersonal dynamics informed the interpretive work I did in this practice. And as I did this work, I saw a lot of the issues I was trying to untangle at the time come undone and become a little clearer. I was able to see pieces of my situation that before had been so obvious I took them for granted, and overlooked them.
This is where I think Jessica Dore’s perspective of tarot becomes informative. In her article we read today, she discusses some of the therapeutic and cognitive ways that tarot can be helpful. While she writes this from her practice as a psychotherapist for the professional use of her colleagues, what she touches on points to some of the reasons I’ve found tarot to be broadly useful in shifting perspective.
“Tarot cards can provide fresh perspective to a stuck situation,” she writes. “Sometimes, despite our best efforts we cannot see the full spectrum of possibilities4..."
...we cannot see past the mental and emotional scenery we have grown accustomed to. Tarot, I have found, shakes this scenery up by injecting a new set of symbols and visions into the reading of a situation. It urges us to express the situation before us in new words, phrases, and symbols in order to see differently. She further suggests that tarot can give us words when we think we have none, presenting us a way of articulating situations we find hard to evoke or verbalize. Through symbol and imagery, it can give us new ways to connect the dots of our challenges.
In our reading today she talked about how tarot helps us get around our blind-spots, and can help us process experiences that are hard to verbalize. And this is, over the years, the purpose I’ve found in tarot as a practice. If Rachel Pollack has touched on the way I do tarot, Jessica Dore has helped me understand the processes behind why it’s been so impactful. In the story I opened this sermon with, I was faced with a complex situation that felt at the same time too big and too personal to fully parse and wrap my mind around. By identifying questions about the situation, and then feeding them through the imagery of the tarot cards I pulled, I could focus on something just adjacent enough of my present situation to help me process it and see it through to the other side. That reading I gave myself two years ago is one that I have returned to and drawn guidance from many times since then.
What I have found – no matter the reader, their philosophy, or their practice – if the reading helped you answer your question and move forward in your life, then it worked. Tarot is a tool and a practice which leads me to a discipline of seeing things differently. Of asking, how can I look at this situation in a way that makes sense? What am I overlooking? What do I need to take a step back from? Tarot has presented a combination of many different things which come together to help me work through problems and mental blocks. It gives me a disciplinary structure to follow through with finding the answers to my questions.
The discipline I’ve found in all of this is a practice to step back from my questions without running away from them. Tarot has taught me to slow down with finding answers to my problems and the situations I find myself in. To thoughtfully break them down into manageable pieces, to find ways of turning them over until I can see clearly. In it, I’ve found a “place just right”, a way of living that allows me to be centered and grounded in my life, better able to weather the turns and bends I may encounter. A way to this in your own lives is what I want to leave you with. What will help you build a discipline to see past stuck situations and on to fresh perspectives, to realities and visions we were previously unable to articulate? Perhaps for you it will be another form of divination; perhaps journaling, or guided meditation, or any number of other practices. Perhaps it will look nothing like tarot at all. Perhaps though, it will be a way you keep growing.
1. Jared Carter, “After the Rain,” American Academy of Poets, accessed May 28, 2024, https://poets.org/poem/after-rain
2. Rachel Pollack, “Preface to the 1997 Edition” in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: Revised with a New Introduction (San Francisco, CA: Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC, 2007), x.
3. Ibid., xi.
4. Jesscia Dore, “Using Tarot in Psychotherapy,” PsychCentral, September 2, 2017, https://psychcentral.com/pro/using-tarot-in-psychotherapy
[Note: as of November 14, 2024, this link directs to an article titled "Can Tarot Readings Predict the Quality of Your Health?" by Jenna Fletcher. The original article is not available elsewhere.]