Why I Wrote ‘A Critical Introduction to Tarot’
When I was growing up, Tarot was taboo in my family home, just like any other occult or ‘New Age’ object. My formative years were the 90s, an era influenced by the so-called ‘Satanic Panic’ that gripped America, starting in the 80s. This culture war trickled through to the Christian Evangelicals in Ireland that were influential to my family. I remember watching American Christian singer Carmen’s music video on VHS for his song ‘A Witches Invitation’, which I found disturbing (though when I see it now, it is overwhelmingly comic). In the house of a male witch, he saw it “filled with every occultic symbol you could fathom; Hanging pentagrams and horoscope signs, a Ouija board and dungeons and dragons game set on the table, a crystal ball with an incandescent shine.”[1] In the video, beside the crystal ball, we see Tarot cards, with The Devil card prominently (and predictably) in shot. In the end, the witch is dragged to hell by puppet demons.
Later in my life, I became intrigued with Tarot cards through the practice of someone I knew who gave me my first Tarot reading using a three-card spread, if memory serves. I recall being resistant to the experience, by now having left Christianity and embraced scientific materialist atheism. I felt I had a ready explanation for what transpired: chance probabilities played out, with a futile search for meaning in the random patterns. How insufferable this attitude! Years later, I was again reminded of this practice when I purchased The Modern Witch Tarot by Lisa Steele as a birthday gift. The comic-book style and diverse representations of the figures attracted my attention, and I became curious.
In the intervening years, I had softened my brash materialist certainty by reading philosophy and anthropology. How could I be so confident of their inefficacy as I had once been? More importantly, I had come to realise the poverty of dismissing the beliefs of others out of hand. What, then, would it mean to take Tarot seriously as a subject while remaining sceptical? And so, I stumbled upon the driving question for A Critical Introduction to Tarot.
However, I didn’t immediately think of writing a book. Instead, I read Tarot books, looking for the book that would explain it to me. In all my reading, I couldn’t really find a book that took Tarot seriously but that wasn’t written by a practitioner advocating their usage. I read many guides and how-to books and was struck by how much they glossed over how Tarot might be assumed to work at all. An exception was Benebell Wen’s Holistic Tarot and, to a lesser extent, Cynthia Giles’ The Tarot: History, Mystery and Lore, but though they addressed this ‘how’ in some depth, it was not by any means the subject of their books. I had the privilege of interviewing Wen for my book and was grateful for the additional insights she was able to offer.
It occurred to me that other people might be interested in an answer to this question too, so I continued researching and making notes. I was able to find some online articles that discussed why Tarot might work, and the almost unanimous explanation of these modern takes focused on psychological projection — the idea that the mind’s search for meaning is so desperate that any random collection of symbols is compelling, yet the read meaning is confined by pre-existing unconscious knowledge. I saw a tension here between this view and the views of Tarot practitioners as they wrote about it in their books. Many authors retained the mystical, spiritual, and supernatural aspects, including fortune-telling practice, even those who embraced an ostensibly psychological framework. As I read about Jung, I saw a much fuller figure than the ‘father of archetypes and individuation’ I had previously known him as, and his work is one of the central pieces of the puzzle in understanding contemporary Tarot. Indeed, his concepts are frequently referenced by Tarot authors.
I had not been very well acquainted with Jung, but his work had featured prominently in the lectures of Jordan Peterson, a now famous anti-woke, anti-communist Canadian firebrand. I had enjoyed some of his earlier lectures on symbolic and archetypal ways of looking at the world and his focus on Jungian individuation as a self-help strategy. I was part of his target demographic — educated, non-religious, spiritually disaffected young and middle-aged men — so it is perhaps not surprising his messages resonated with someone like me. I attended his debate with ‘New Atheist’ Sam Harris in Dublin in 2018, moderated by right-wing provocateur Douglas Murray. I included some quotes from this debate in the book because, as chance would have it, the subject of Tarot came up, with Harris predictably pouring scorn on the practice as that of a “charlatan” and Peterson pausing to at least consider what might be behind it. I engaged with Peterson’s ideas towards the end of the book when discussing ‘ways of knowing’ and ‘kinds of truth’, two ideas that owe a lot to the very postmodern theorists he so often ridicules, with senseless attacks on those he considers “Postmodern neomarxists.” In recent times Peterson has focused less on psychology and the human condition than on his contrarian political hot-takes, producing very little of interest and much to criticise.
Reading Jung is famously difficult, though very rewarding. I found Gary Lachman’s Jung the Mystic indispensable in furthering my understanding the context of Jung in the creation of the twentieth-century occult. Lachman was kind enough to read A Critical Introduction to Tarot and offer his endorsement, and I can likewise endorse his many excellent books, which are brimming with insight and wit. With Jung, we have one pillar of modern Tarot. The other, I discovered, is quantum mysticism — a term attributed to Deepak Chopra, who has advocated a quasi-scientific view of New Thought, or ‘mind over matter’, in the context of personal healing. There were hints of this in small comments in Tarot books when some kind of materialist credibility was sought that didn’t resort to psychological projection. The idea that it’s “all in your mind” is, of course, very unsatisfying and is not coherent with the interconnectedness of a Tarot reading with actual, personal events.
Jung’s contribution is his ‘collective unconscious’, a difficult concept to pin down but which undergirds the ineffable experience of connectedness and uncanny synchronicity (another of Jung’s terms) sometimes experienced in coincidence. For those wishing to marry this with the materialist science of the day and appear credible, quantum mysticism offers, if not concrete evidence, at least enough to question the certainty of the atomised, ‘dead’ universe so often repudiated by Tarot readers and occultists of all stripes. I discovered that quantum mysticism is widely discussed in the related works of contemporary practical magic, both of the everyday kind and that of high ritual magic. Tarot must be understood in the context of magical practices, not only due to its history — the most famous Tarot deck was produced by a magical order of high magic, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn — but also because an overlapping worldview is shared by witches and other magic-users, many of whom use Tarot as an integral part of their practice.
To get to the bottom of this, I resorted to ‘first philosophy’ — to metaphysics. After considering the above, it is evident that various explanations for how Tarot works (and their opponents) rely on differing metaphysical claims. I was already familiar with materialism and Western dualist spiritual ontologies, but I furnished this with another branch that is more in line with the ‘true sceptics’ of quantum mysticism and parapsychology: idealism. A compelling case is made by fellow Iff Books published author Bernardo Kastrup in his books, especially Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe and Everything. A particular metaphysics will support or constrain one’s view of chance, predestination, time, theory of mind, and a host of other relevant areas. As I read and followed the leads, I knew that a book exploring these linkages would be interesting to write and of use to the general reader.
Today, Tarot is much more visible than it was when I was growing up. I explore this in the book, but it is partly due to the proliferation of lifestyle media on the internet and Tarot’s association with self-help and personalised guidance. This was another reason to take Tarot seriously as a topic. As we are confronted with Tarot more often on social media, for example, it is all the more tempting for sceptics to uncharitably dismiss the ‘astrology girls’ promoting it. There is not a little confluence here with how gender operates within Tarot — most Tarot authors and practitioners, in my survey of the literature and culture, are women or femme-presenting. To bolster my engagement with this aspect, particularly writing as a man, I delved into some feminist literature on Tarot, epistemology, and witchcraft. The link is available on the surface, as many witches write from an explicitly feminist vantage. Sceptics (especially men) cannot afford to be glib towards these practices, and they are popular for a reason, having a history and context that extends beyond the present moment.
For me, this book is both a rectification of my previous knee-jerk dismissal of Tarot and a coming to terms with the Christian prohibition I grew up with, as an open-minded exploration of a fascinating and widespread practice. The Christian fear of diabolic influence is often expressed as a fear of occult symbols (as was the case for Carman), and this superstition is adjacent to conspiracy thinking. In a culture of unseen ‘spiritual warfare’ over the souls of humanity, these are the sleeper cells, spies, and spiritual cyber-attacks of Satan. I examine this in the book, especially in the context of that larger-than-life organisation, the Freemasons. For those perturbed by such things, it is another reason to be wary of the Tarot.
Hermetic and occult symbols, those from alchemy and astrology, Kabbalah and the myths of antiquity, are all present in the Tarot. I try to show why this is and what the impact is, and especially that a disavowal of a number of these symbols by modern Christianity is less widespread than often imagined and is, in any case, a recent phenomenon. However, these ill-conceived fears are based on genuine theological disputes that are not often highlighted. Gnosticism, or the gnostic heresy, is a frequent touchstone in the book, and a rejection of the theology of Paul is relevant to some Freemasons. Since Christianity (and later Islam) came to be manifest as religions of conquest, the gnostic ideas of integrating good with evil are antithetical to the victory of the righteous good. This tension is embodied in Freemasonry, an ecumenical and self-consciously gnostic tradition.
Many ‘New Age’ authors and thinkers revitalised this earlier gnostic tradition with the similar Eastern religious and spiritual ideas of balance, wholeness, and so on, for example, in the teachings of the Tao. Behind the black-and-white morality and polemics of divisive preachers and the appeals to fear and suspicions that accompany them, we find a history of tension. In this discussion, I think there will also be much of genuine interest to the Christian reader. The Tarot has existed, for its entire history, within a Christian social framework and contains many explicit Christian references. The Rider-Waite-Smith deck, in particular, depicts angels, the garden of Eden, the day of judgement and the devil, to name just a few. It is left to the reader to decide whether this is ‘cultural appropriation’ or if Tarot can constitute some kind of Christian practice.
Ultimately, I did satisfy myself with an answer to why Tarot cards work or don’t work — or rather, a collection of answers drawn from the rich literature. I discovered that the logically contradictory nature of intuition and subjectivity explains why people talk about Tarot and other spiritual practices as they do. Tarot reading is shown to work — as practitioners have always claimed — given the qualifications and assumptions not often explicitly expressed in the literature. This should be unsurprising if one does not assume one’s fellow humans are, on the whole, delusional. Not everyone, of course, seeks answers to these questions. Indeed, many practitioners are openly ambivalent about it. I may have succeeded, however, in enticing some to look a little closer, be they a Tarot reader, a committed Christian, or a sceptic. To those that follow their curiosity, this book is for you.
Agatha Christy apparently said she wrote so she didn’t have to talk to people. I think non-fiction writers embody the opposite: we write to talk to people. It is the continuation of a conversation already going on in the culture. That, certainly, is my aim. I have decided to leave the telling of much of the context you have read in this essay out of the book as written, as I wanted to focus on literature review rather than my story as the author. I maintain this was the right decision, but I hope you may have found this informal appendix nonetheless interesting. My approach has been to write to understand, to follow my curiosity, and to look for underappreciated connections.
Any thoughts? Discuss with me on Twitter.
A Critical Introduction to Tarot is now available for pre-order on Amazon.
[1] Carman, “A Witches Invitation”. The Benson Company, Inc, 1993.
