Understanding Yourself (Not The Future) Better With Tarot

A picture (card) is worth a thousand words

Photo by petr sidorov on Unsplash

With #Tarot having over 8 billion views on TikTok, tarot reading bookings being available over Instagram, and some Gen Zs even using tarot to make investment decisions, tarot is making a noticeable and undeniable mainstream resurgence.

Together with its revival, I picked up a pack of tarot cards during the pandemic (like many others) to see what tarot card reading could do for me.

Now, those of you who are non-believers of the ‘mystic arts’ and ‘magic’ might be tempted to stop reading here. But like you, I have never been a believer in the occult. To me, being able to divine the future based on depictions on some cards I drew seems improbable.

When I picked up the set of tarot cards, all I wanted to do was to understand what all the hype was about.

And as it turns out, there were lots I could learn from this deceptively simple deck of cards (again, nothing to do with predicting the future).

But First, What Are Tarot Cards?

Contrary to many people’s beliefs, the modern version of tarot we see today isn’t an extremely old technique people adopted to divine the future.

In fact, the modern version of tarot that we often see is really just around 100 years old. Tarot card-related games came after the Renaissance while most of the imagery only became standardized at the beginning of the eighteenth century before it spread into different versions bearing notable variations.

​If you are interested in understanding the history of tarot, James McConnachie’s “The Truth About Tarot” provides a rather comprehensive and interesting look into how the cards came to be.

In a tarot deck (unless the one you got is non-traditional), there will be a set of 78 cards that can be split into the 22 major arcana cards and the 56 minor arcana cards. For most people, the easiest way to learn the cards would be to get a Rider-Waite deck, the ubiquitous tarot set drawn by Pamela Colman Smith in 1909 often seen in many pop-culture references to tarot.