How Tarot Divination Actually Works
Is How Tarot Works A Mystery?
Some tarot authorities are fond of telling their students to promote the “experience” of a reading through maintaining a mysterious atmosphere. The upholding of tarot’s mystery implies that tarot readers possess the knowledge of it to reveal. Yet, when it comes to the mystery of tarot, most tarot readers are wallowing in it.
In this article, we will unveil the mystery of tarot works with the following topics;
Is How Tarot Works A Mystery?
Why care how the tarot cards work?
How to read tarot for yourself
Intuiting the esoteric; asking “Why”
Popular Opinions On How The Tarot Cards Work
Explanation 1: Psychology – The Tarot Cards Work Through “Synchronicity” or Conceptual Blending
Explanation 2: Tarot Cards Work Through The Quantum Quantum of the Quantum Quantum
Explanation 3: Pseudo-Occult – Tarot cards work through the whatness of the nothing
How Tarot Works
The Astral Light
Deception and the astral light
How to read the astral light accurately
Implications of How The Tarot Works
Conclusion
Reading List
Why care how the tarot cards work?
Before we can deal with how the cards work, we must point out why the answer matters.
The question of how tarot works have been previously discussed in various places, such as in a YouTube hashtag (#HowTarotWorks). The founder of this hashtag was curious on the community’s opinion of tarot’s mystery. He asked people to comment on two things; whether the answer to how tarot works actually matters (and why), and how tarot works. He asked the questions in this order, presumably because if we answer the first question apathetically then we need not worry about the second. I was one of the people who made a VR (video response) to the hashtag. However, my video is long since deleted.
Other people’s responses to this hashtag were demonstrative in their sample of an apparently much wider trend. A lot of readers who use the cards for divinatory purposes do not care how the tarot cards work. They are concerned with only the instrumentality of the practise. They get the information they were seeking, whether predictions, creative inspiration, self-awareness or whatever else. And that’s where their curiosity ends.
But is such a blaze attitude appropriate? I think not. Pursued deeply, investigation into how tarot works leads us ultimately to philosophical inquiries. Topics such as the nature and location of consciousness, the formation and nature of the universe, the existence and possible nature of God and what & how much knowledge is discoverable (i.e. epistemology) all become imminent.
In general, those who read tarot for others should probably care how the tarot cards work, if for ethical purposes alone.
It is a cliche that most professional tarot readers claim to want to “help others”. But are they doing this successfully by ignoring how tarot works? I don’t think so. Until we consider how tarot works, we cannot possibly discern whether we are really helping others - or doing more harm than good.
We must, for example, rule out deception from demonic entities. You may think that the answer to this and other pertinent questions are self-evident but unless you operate under a consistent worldview which precludes such tarot reading issues, your incuriosity as regards tarot’s mechanism can only be an abdication of responsibility, especially if you are a professional reader.
How to read tarot for yourself
Although tarot has gone somewhat mainstream, trends in this area have hardly impacted the pious occult readers in terms of their beliefs about reality. Thus, although reading for oneself is common amongst the crowd, most divinatory readers still refrain from taking on the role of tarot querent as well as tarot reader simultaneously; they refuse to read for themselves.
The practise is therefore an open secret amongst divinatory readers. Among other things, this demonstrates a striking incuriosity of many divinatory readers towards tarot’s workings. If the community became sincerely interested in the subject, how to read for oneself would be openly acknowledged and much harm would surely be avoided. By harm I mean the dangers of tarot reading, spiritual, psychological, physical and moral. Tarot authorities may deny such dangers, but this helps no-one in the long run and ultimately leads to more “New Age to Christianity” testimonies in which the revert points out that the community is entirely ignorant of some very real dangers.
Indeed, there is not yet a single tarot authority who has even attempted to make a good effort at describing how the tarot cards work, never mind one who has been able to deduce comprehensible instructions for tarot’s divinatory use based on it’s occult mechanism (see pseudo-occult explanations).
It seems like common sense to suggest that, bar mitigating measures, reading for oneself will cause enough personal bias to interfere with the reading. But to other tarot professionals, this is either not obvious or is considered an insurmountable obstacle, even to a superstitious extent. One experienced reader avoids reading his own cards, he says, in fear of interpretative distortions from his national egregore.
When I had recently decided to read tarot for others, A tarot reader with six years of experience (whom I had originally contacted so that I could learn from him) messaged me. In an emotional mess, he requested a second opinion on a tarot reading which he had just done on himself. Basically, he did a love reading on whether he would get a second date with a girl and felt something was off when all the cards came back sunshine and sixes.
Disregarding his sentimentality, it is remarkable that an occultist reader of six years experience Devil’d himself here at all.
Regardless, I answered his plea with mention that ‘tarot works through the Akasha’. Therefore, I suggested, he should not read when emotional; he should calm himself down before commencing. The idea of “Akasha” is a New Age term for what is really the astral light.
Anyway, I had looked for the answer, positing an ether and astral realm, to explain how the tarot cards work in multiple aspects; mainly intrinsically and across time & space.
My explanation back then was very undeveloped but still helpful for that particular case. I knew even back then that one should do the following before reading for oneself;
Fully relax mind and body (as much as possible).
Sincerely will to discover Truth. At the time I would have said explicitly ‘for the Highest Good of all and everyone involved’. Nowadays this ethic is built into my life so it does not need to be stated merely for the sake of a reading.
Although partial and exoteric, this advice is helpful to any tarot reader. And importantly, such advice is based on how tarot works.
We will introduce this subject soon, but first we will debunk some popular yet false ideas on the matter.
Popular Opinions On How The Tarot Cards Work
Let us go through some popular theories which shall be divided into the following broader approaches;
Psychologized explanations
Pseudo-skeptical explanations
Pseudo-occult explanations
Explanation 1: Psychology – The Tarot Cards Work Through “Synchronicity” or Conceptual Blending
Synchronicity was a term used by the eminent 20th century psychologist Carl Gustav Jung to describe the phenomena of subjectively meaningful coincidences. Jung was a mystic but had to be careful how he worded things under the watchful eye of his pseudo-skeptical, materialist colleagues who held undue assumptions about the world.
These materialist assumptions include:
Consciousness exists within the brain
Positivism is the only reasonable way to discover objective truth about the world
Physicalism trumps objective idealism as a metaphysical position.
When misused as such, synchronicity is certainly no explanation for how tarot cards work, despite what some have claimed.
Here are some main reasons why;
Synchronicity is merely a description of how we derive answers from tarot cards, not an explanation of how tarot works.
Used psychologically, synchronicity is reductionist in it’s description.
To posit synchronicity as an explanation for how tarot works is to imply one of two absurd things a) that until Carl Jung came along, no ‘explanation’ was sufficient b) that synchronicity makes more sense than any previous explanation
Another “proposed “explanation” is conceptual blending.
This is an idea developed by Fauconnier and Turner (2002) within cognitive linguistics. Conceptual blending deals not with how the tarot cards work but with how language is processed through symbols.
Claiming that conceptual blending is an adequate explanation for how the tarot cards work is like claiming that how our eyes process is how we attain it. In fact, how our eyes process information determines only how we perceive reality and fails to tell us what is going on in the objective world. For example, is the tree really out there or is it just in our head? It is the answer to such deep questions that provide explanations. To say that we first see images upside down and in negative colouring before we correct it in the brain, is insufficient.
For tarot reading, cognitive blending is one way of describing how we process connections between the emblems of the tarot cards. It says nothing about what is going on in relation between the cards and the brain. Moreover it assumes based on materialist premises that no third entity is present. But just as it is absurd to deny the objective, physical reality of the tree as “out there”, it is as much absurd, if not more so, to deny the occult metaphysical reality of tarot’s mechanism.
Descriptions may be interesting but are not useful. The mystery of tarot is precisely such because explanations of tarot reading are widely disputed. The purpose of such dispute is that if we can attain a good theory; we can determine how better to read the cards. Otherwise we are needlessly speculating and fulfilling the stereotype of philosophers who sit around babbling about abstraction all day simply because they have too much time on their hands and/or don’t want to get a real job. You think I stereotype but considering that I have witnessed such antics first-hand, I can only blush when calling myself an amateur philosopher.
Yet, in our considerations of how tarot works we must surely also consider the pertinent philosophical issue of hidden premises. To omit mention of one’s own axioms is dishonest and leads beginner readers into confusion when they are unable to form a consistent idea of the various issue that can arise in a reading (such as being energetically drained or getting psychic insights etc.).
My own premises are clearly stated in the goals of the Tarot Apprenticeship website; I am an Emanationist and a perennialist (in a loose and non-sectarian sense of the term). I believe that, in the main, divinatory tarot reading works through a particular mechanism that will be discussed later in the article. My lengthy experience appears to confirm the laws of this mechanism empirically; descriptions of this mechanism allow for deductions of how tarot works. Empirical testing based on the principles of this mechanism appears to verify these a priori claims. I have then at the least a pragmatic explanation based on this mechanism; I can explain to beginner readers, based on my chosen explanation of how tarot works, what they are doing wrong and how to fix it – with promising results.
Explanation 2: Tarot Cards Work Through The Quantum Quantum of the Quantum Quantum
Sticking with the issue of premises, this argument is, in practise, based upon materialist ideas as these are the axiomatic assumptions of most scientists. As materialism is reductionist when we take into account evidence (which allows for reasonable inference) for alternative metaphysical theories (like objective idealism) so are the theories which come under it’s heading reductionist and therefore inapplicable to a proper explanation of what happens when we are reading the tarot. For example, abuse of the principle of Ockham’s Razor (i.e. the law of parsimony).
Law of parsimony. The principle that the simplest explanation of an event or observation is the preferred explanation. Simplicity is understood in various ways, including the requirement that an explanation should (a) make the smallest number of unsupported assumptions, (b) postulate the existence of the fewest entities, and (c) invoke the fewest unobservable constructs. Also called economy principle; principle of economy; principle of parsimony.
The misuse of Ockham’z razor is, in practise, generally not the conflation between simplicity and parsimony but the flat out refutation of any good evidence which contradicts the materialist paradigm. It is ultimately an issue of epistemology, not metaphysics, because here the debate ends up being what constitutes good evidence when asking the question of how reality works, not how reality works par se. Such juvenile denial of evidence is called pseudo-skepticism and is characterized according to Marcello Truzzi (paraphrased from Morton Tolboll’s philosophical blog) by the following dogmas;
Outright denial rather than doubt
Double standards of criticism
Discrediting rather than inquiring
Insufficient presentation of proof including in counter-claims and misplacing the burden of proof
Winston Wu has included a rebuttal to the misuse of Occham’s Razor in a notorious treatise he wrote which debunks skeptics. As a whole, the purpose of Wu’s treatise was to make philosophical arguments against the pseudo-skeptical positions which are common amongst materialist scientists who call themselves skeptics [especially if they are public intellectuals – Ed.].
Pseudo-skeptics are discussed in the following Wikipedia article. Whilst Wikipedia is often prone to a heavy materialist (and even political) bias, this quote was published there notwithstanding.
There are some members of the skeptics groups who clearly believe they know the right answer prior to inquiry. They appear not to be interested in weighing alternatives, investigating strange claims, or trying out psychic experiences or altered states for themselves (heaven forbid!), but only in promoting their own particular belief structure and cohesion.
-Susan Blackmore
Hugo Anthony Meynell from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary, labels the “extreme position that all significant evidence supporting paranormal phenomena is a result of deception or lies” as pseudo-skepticism.
Explanation 3: Pseudo-Occult – Tarot cards work through the Higher Wisdom Vibrations Of The Unseen Quantum Atoms In The 4th and 7th Dimensions of the Cosmic Soup.
Consider the following quote.
It (the tarot) exists as a stabilized and tested representation through iteration and evolutionary processes. As a reasonably congruent, consistent and comprehensive map of experience, it functions to partially reflect our engagement with the Universe
No. It’s not a line from Seb Pearce’s New Age Bullshit Generator.
It’s a direct quote from page 2 of Tarosophy Squared, a 2021 book by Marcus Katz (a prolific tarot author).
Do you understand what it means? Be honest.
Me neither.
Actually, I lie. I understand what Katz is saying. But there are much better ways to discuss Hermetic cosmology…
There are other examples which I could have used but this one alone demonstrates the point clearly enough. You should know that this is not the full quote, however it is not much better in full context.
Let’s immediately put aside the excuse of “it’s supposed to be esoteric” as Katz in the start of that book to be writing for multiple audiences, including those who use tarot for psychological purposes. He is doing this to encourage mass membership of his Tarosophistry association.
Writing in myth and metaphor to convey mystical ideas is one thing, writing in overly abstract language is another. The problem with such language is that it causes confusion. If we wish to convey esoteric truths through abstract language, we should make this clear from the outset, if only to prime the reader to get them (the esoteric insights).
How Tarot Works
Here we shall answer the Mystery of how the tarot cards work. The answer to this particular tarot question has been an open secret for around 150 years.
The Astral Light
Tarot divination is a magical art which works through the incarnating soul’s (i.e. the higher self’s) interaction with the astral light.
The astral light is a concept talked about most extensively by the Theosophists. Let us first get an idea of why it makes sense to regard the astral light as connected to tarot reading (and other divinatory arts).
Tarot, if not about telling fixed fortunes, is about reading the energies – hidden information which may include potential futures (and what happened in the past) as well as (reading/discerning) much other knowledge. Now read the following quote by W.Q Judge.
In the Astral Light are pictures of all things whatsoever that happened to any person, and as well also pictures of those events to come the causes for which are sufficiently well marked and made. If the causes are yet indefinite, so will be the images of the future. But for the mass of events for several years to come all the producing and efficient causes are always laid down with enough definiteness to permit the seer to see them in advance as if present.
W.Q Judge, Ocean of Theosophy, https://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/ocean/oce-16.html
This explanation is promising as it is congruent with the common motivations for tarot divination; reading likely outcomes. Although you wouldn’t know from this quote, a further look into the astral light will show you that using it as an explanation would also fit with the various ancillary reasons for divining such as gaining divine wisdom.
Deception and the astral light
The usual clairvoyant deals only with the ordinary aspects and strata of the Astral matter. Spiritual sight comes only to those who are pure, devoted, and firm. It may be attained by special development of the particular organ in the body through which alone such sight is possible, and only after discipline, long training, and the highest altruism. All other clairvoyance is transitory, inadequate, and fragmentary, dealing, as it does, only with matter and illusion. Its fragmentary and inadequate character results from the fact that hardly any clairvoyant has the power to see into more than one of the lower grades of Astral substance at any one time.
W.Q Judge, Ocean of Theosophy, https://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/ocean/oce-16.htm
How to read the astral light accurately
Theosophists such as W.Q Judge discouraged deliberate interactions with the astral light. Other esoteric groups (such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn) were more open about it’s practicalities. One modern Golden Dawn adept is Peregrin Wildoak, who wrote By Names and Images (2012).
In this book, Wildoak first described the influences of the astral light as something which beginner magicians should be vigilantly aware of.
Discussing divination, Wildoak first distinguished between “intuition” and “inspired intuition”. He then attributed these methods of gaining knowledge to Yesod and Tiphareth respectively on the qabalistic tree of life, with Yesod, he said, corresponding to the astral light. Thus, it was imbued with the mysterious qualities of the Moon as well as with the depths of the “subconscious” mind.
When discussing it in relation to divination, he quoted from Gareth Knight’s commentary to Dion Fortune’s Circuit of Force (a book on the aura).
To avoid unbalanced conditions of the astral light it is not sufficient simply to perform particular banishing formulae; what is required is the tranquillity of mind and heart that comes from stable outer life relationships and a selfless dedication.
Gareth Knight (Circuits of Force)
A quick exegesis.
Firstly, rituals alone do nothing to impact “unbalanced conditions of” the astral light. Rather, it is our overall life that matters.
Secondly, there must be “tranquility of mind and heart” or in other words, a good amount of Inner Peace, present in the practitioner for it to be read properly. The astral light flowing against us, we must make ourselves immune to it’s currents.
Thirdly, the tarot reader or occultist cannot be selfish in terms of either their general character or their motivation in a particular instance before attempting to read it (if they are concerned with accuracy). The astral light is a small although significant part) of an Emanationist cosmogony so selflessness. If we add in the Hermetic idea that whatever is on the positive pole can control the negative pole and that we get more “positive” as we get closer to the source, then it becomes clear, understanding the implications of the Emanationist cosmogony, that selflessness is a way of helping us to control, and thus accurately read, the currents of the astral light.
In addition to selflessness, I would add that peacefulness, imagination, concentration and willpower are necessary. These five trait making magic. As mentioned, tarot divination is a magical art.
Implications of How The Tarot Works
Now that we have seen that the tarot works through the astral light and that controlling (in order that we may read) the astral light is a magical art, what can we take from this to use in our tarot reading practise?
Here is a brief list of implications of the astral light as related to tarot reading. These implications will not make sense until you have studied the properties of the astral light in more detail (something beyond the scope of this article).
It is advisable for tarot readers to learn how to read for themselves before they learn to read for others. This is counter to the still prevalent idea amongst divinatory tarot readers that reading for oneself is unreliable and is therefore to be avoided. It is also advisable for tarot readers to be practising mystics or occultists.
Like any magical art, tarot reading can be dangerous when used for divinatory purposes (unless we know what we are doing).
Various strange phenomena are explained by the astral light and it’s “inhabitants”. For example, having cold chills for no rationally explainable reason when reading is explained in part by the occult idea of elementaries – the “husks” of human desires which drift around, so to speak, for some time after death.
Words and attitudes matter for both the querent and the reader.
Conclusion
In conclusion, earnest exploration of how tarot works can lead to profound questions and then revelations about how to give safe and effective (divinatory) tarot readings. Whilst various solutions have been posited, the idea of the astral light provides a sensible answer to various mysteries surrounding the tarot, allowing the tarot reader to solve common tarot reader issues such as how to effectively interpret tarot cards for themselves.
Reading List
W.Q Judge – Ocean of Theosophy
Dion Fortune (commentary by Gareth Knight) – Circuits of Force
Peregrin Wildoak – By Names and Images: Bringing the Golden Dawn to Life
United Lodge of Theosophists – Elementals and the Astral Light
In Light and Truth.
