On Revelation & Tarot

For a long time, tarot wasn’t something to which I found myself particularly drawn; now I use it almost daily as a journaling tool. How did this transition happen? What do I get out of the exercise? How do I use it to its best advantage? If you’re curious, let’s dive deeper and explore revelation and tarot.

As a physics undergraduate at a prestigious program, I firmly (read: naively) believed that the scientific method could be applied to solve any problem and regrettably dismissed many things that I considered too “woo-woo”—tarot among them. It seemed like a contemporary anachronism, an artefact from a mystic bygone era. The idea of a divination tool promising an impossible level of certainty disagreed with my imperfect but flourishing understanding of free choice and statistics. Any budding curiosity was quickly nipped by the unfortunate pressure to seem lofty and intelligent.

Once I left university, I had some learning and growing to do, and I did.

I realized I didn’t feel like a “normal” person for most of my life and began exploring this more closely in my early twenties. I also rediscovered a love of writing. These interests eventually drew me to Lauren Sapala—a book coach who now hosts online workshops teaching life skills to INFJ and INFP people. My heart lit up. She used words like “empath,” “spirit,” and “intuition” with a straight face. I was curious and found myself dipping my toes into “manifestation” despite myself.

I found myself spending more and more time in the folklore section of my local independent bookstore. One day, my partner gifted me a beautiful tarot deck that paired each card with a story from around the world. I gushed over the acquisition and then naturally it sat on my shelf unused for some time while I got curious about other things (mermaids, mostly). I would proudly bring the deck out on occasion and do a reading “cold”—without any real preparation—using the instructions provided but it seldom seemed relevant to anyone’s actual life and struggles.

I took a writing course this past year by Brooke Adams Law, a writing coach I followed and liked on Instagram for a few years. She emphasizes the importance of writing rituals that engage all of our senses and performing them regularly to prepare ourselves to write. An exercise she engages in as part of her own writing ritual is to draw a single tarot card and meditate on its meaning and relevance as a way to incorporate the subconscious in her writing. Ah!

I pulled out my gorgeous deck and began to use it with my morning journaling, finding that I got much more out of the experience than by doing a reading “cold”. It felt more like therapy than divination; it forced me to see problem areas in my life through a new perspective.

And now?

I use tarot daily and have found many ways to integrate it into my routines. I found an unusual RPG tabletop game that uses tarot instead of dice as a game mechanic (how cool is that?). I recently finished a fantastic fiction book by Sarah Henstra called The Lost Tarot.

For fun one evening, I pulled out the deck with my partner and we did some journaling followed by a tarot reading; the context-driven tarot technique was born (described below).

The shift from dismissal to curiosity to finding a useful way to engage with this tool has taken many years, and I’ve learned many things about myself along the way. Meditating on this journey gives me pause—what new things will I learn in the future that I even now dismiss? I suspect that if a human lives long enough, every idea and opinion they hold close will be challenged in this way. Life has a way of smoothing out our rough edges, if we choose to listen.

The Context-Driven Tarot

Gather some supplies:

• Tarot deck

• Notecards

• Pens or pencils

• Timer

Set a timer for 5-7 minutes and briefly journal about what’s going on in 3 or 4 different facets of your life, one on each notecard. For example: I picked Creativity, Business, Relationships, and Energy-levels as my facets and wrote a sentence or two about each on the notecards.

Times up! Time to start the tarot reading. I usually shuffle the tarot deck and draw three cards off the top and lay them out in order, side by side—this is known as a three-card spread.

Each card, direction, and placement has special meaning in this type of reading. The card itself represents some aspect of human life. The direction (whether the card is upright or reversed) can add nuance to its meaning. Decks often come with guidebooks that can help with understanding the meaning of each card (Wikipedia is also a good resource). The card’s placement can mean different things from person to person—I like the three placements to represent where you are, where you’re going, and how you’re going to get there.

An example spread might be: Five of Wands (reversed), Six of Swords (upright), and King of Coins (reversed).

An example interpretation might start by examining each card:

• The first card, representing where I am, is linked to compromise, peace, harmony, resolution, and conflict avoidance.

• The second card, representing where I’m going, is linked to healing, moving forward, stability, escape, and journeys.

• The third card, representing how I’m getting there, is linked to corruption, materialism, ruthlessness, authority, and indulgence.

Now, we apply the spread’s interpretation to each notecard to see how they might be applied.

At first, I felt squeamish about seeing the reversed King of Coins, but the more I thought about its meaning, the more I came to embrace it.

When learning a new creative practice, doesn’t it help to accept that it’s never possible to make something that matches the idea in your head, that the idea is always “corrupted” in execution? That’s always the way with art, sometimes for the better! Perfection isn’t what I’m after, just consistent practice.

When starting a new business, isn’t it important to act as the authority figure in my life and indulge by betting on my eventual success?

When there’s a relationship in my life that isn’t serving me or when struggling with my health, it becomes vitally important to be ruthless with how I spend my valuable energy, right?

Because I journaled about the things in the back of my mind beforehand, I was able to much more easily make sense of how each card might symbolically offer advice.

Do you find this technique intriguing? Have you given it a try?