Tarot As Self-Exploration

It’s magic when imagery can express what language cannot

By Jessa Crispin

When I bought my first tarot deck around age 16, I wanted the cards to reveal the future to me. I looked and acted the part back then — lots of black clothes and Manic Panic hair dye, holed up in a bedroom shrouded in darkness. I was the self-absorbed, moody creature that made up the primary market for things like tarot cards, incense, and industrial music back in the 90s.

All teenagers are stuck in a terrible present tense, unable to foresee the consequences of their actions and unable to imagine that one day their lives might improve. It’s that lack of development in the frontal lobes thing. I wanted the tarot cards to fill that gap for me, for the gods or spirits or whoever to tell me when my life might improve: When I would get out of my small Kansas hometown; when I would have a boyfriend; when I would stop feeling like an outsider and a freak. But the Lovers card I so desperately wanted stayed hidden in the deck during my juvenile readings. I’d had about enough of the Tower that I could take, so I left the deck to gather dust in the corner of my room.

When I picked up tarot again in my mid-20s, I was asking questions about the past and the present. I had started to figure out in the intervening years that there was no magical way to predict the future, and anyone who tells you “in six months you’ll meet the man of your dreams” is just trying to make you feel good long enough for you to hand over your cash. So it was questions about the now I wanted clarity on. Specifically, why I seemed to repeat destructive patterns of behavior in love and work.

The imagery on tarot cards bypasses language and logic to get at something in the subconscious

The focus changed from seeing what would be happening to me to understanding what was happening to me now. I still used the deck for the occasional anguished why-doesn’t-he-love-me type readings, but the interactions with the deck I found — and still find — most helpful are single card draws as meditation cues. Every morning I draw a card, contemplate it, and use it to focus my attention on that situation, archetype, or feeling throughout the day. On a Queen of Swords day, when I’m overwhelmed by a deadline or fuming with anger over a nasty email, I think back to my queen and think detachment, dignity, coolness — and I readjust.

It would be nice to think I’m innovative, but people have been using the tarot deck for life cues since the late 18thcentury. Tarot has gotten a bad rap over its association with the mystical New Age movement, with its crystal-power and astrological-faerie-garden nonsense. The New Age movement still conjures up images of women in turbans, shawls, and beads, gazing into crystal balls and mumbling things about ancient curses. I mean, I have a turban — a very chic one from the 50s — but I don’t put it on every time I touch the deck.

The earliest surviving Tarot de Marseille deck, ca. 1500 / Public Domain via Wiki Commons

The cards, after all, can be anything you want them to be. They’re simply images on paper, some with very dramatic and official-sounding names like the Hierophant or the High Priestess; others are only numbered. Each card has an official meaning, but those meanings have changed dramatically over the centuries. (There was a time when drawing the Three of Wands meant someone was going to leave you a chateau in their will.) In fact, the cards were not even originally designed for divination or self-insight, but simply for a card game in the 15th century. Some people found the images so compelling that they filled in the meanings on their own.

The imagery on tarot cards bypasses language and logic to get at something in the subconscious. For a long time we’ve believed humans were entirely rational creatures, that there wasn’t any part of ourselves we could not explore by thinking or writing or speaking. And yet, under that rational surface we are sometimes strangers to ourselves. Why do we behave the way we do? Why do we want the things we want? And so we look to art and imagery to express those things language cannot.

The cards work in a similar way to dreams, making random connections that become meaningful due to emotional associations they generate. It’s no wonder, then, that artists and writers have embraced the tarot, particularly those who were already working with symbols, fairy tales, and dream imagery. Salvador Dali not only used tarot imagery in his art, he designed his own deck. The Italian fabulist Italo Calvino created a whole novel, “The Castle of Crossed Destinies,” structured around a tarot reading. In his narrative, characters that lost their voices use the cards to reconstruct their tales.

©2016 — Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc., St. Petersburg, FL

Tarot is having a resurgence, particularly with younger women in the DIY culture. If you search for “tarot reading” on Etsy, you will get thousands of results. Hundreds of independent decks have been crowd-sourced on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and I see “can you recommend a good tarot reader?” on Twitter and Facebook as often as I see requests for recommendations for accountants and therapists.

I see this shift happening with my own tarot clients, who are not as interested in asking “When will I find love?” as they are in exploring introspective questions: “Where am I messing up?” “Why do I have writer’s block with this novel?” “How can I move forward after this breakup?” People want insight into their own mysterious doings, and they see tarot cards as a way in.

For as long as tarot has been associated with the occult, it’s also been associated with art, storytelling, and self-examination. The cards themselves are not magic. It’s the space between you and the cards where the magic lies.

Jessa Crispin is the author of “The Creative Tarot” and “The Dead Ladies Project” and the editor of the literary magazines Bookslut and Spolia. She currently lives nowhere in particular.