Making our own path
How I’m transforming the tarot card from dubious fortune-telling device into a practical tool for self-discovery
In The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino, a group of strangers are brought together one dark night, at a remote woodland castle. Their power of speech is mysteriously taken from them, and using nothing but the images on a shared deck of tarot cards they are forced to silently recount their life stories to one another. The tarot cards — a deck of arcane, abstract symbols like ‘Death’, ‘The Fool’ or ‘The Tower’ are drawn one by one, and the book’s narrator relates the stories as he interprets them. The ‘Star’ card transports a knight to the surface of the moon. The ‘10 of Coins’ becomes a birds-eye view of a cemetery, through which a wanton grave-robber stumbles.
As more stories are told, and more cards are laid in a pattern on the table, the cards of each storyteller begin to overlap with one another. Cards are borrowed, re-used, and gain new meaning in different tales, until at the end a symmetrical pattern of 72 cards has been laid down, each one connected as a part of multiple stories. Using these abstract cards as starting points, Calvino draws fantastic tales that span the history of human triumph and suffering. An alchemist makes a pact with the devil, maidens are saved from lusty barbarians…
Calvino and I share an obsession. I am (according to friends, the Myers Briggs test and anyone who has ever sat through more than two drinks with me) obsessed with systems. I’m intrigued by the hierarchies of order, meaning and value that govern how we think; systems like language, government, the rules to Settlers of Catan or Liar’s Dice. Systems can be oppressive — they restrict and define — but they are what we use to understand the world, and how we create order out of chaos. Without a discrete 64 tile square board there could be no chess game. Without complex legislation, and majority trust and belief in that legislation, we couldn’t have the nations we live in today.
For Calvino the system of the tarot cards — with their complex meanings and elaborate arrangements — became a maddening puzzle. In reading them he was wrestling with a system so abstract that it could mean anything. The Major Arcana (the trump cards) contain death, love, deception, power, fortune; the fundamental forces of the human condition. Bound up in them is the potential for every human story, past and future. Night after night whilst he was writing the book Calvino would re-sort, re-position and re-deal the cards looking for the perfect combination of stories - his own divine meaning.
Reading The Castle of Crossed Destinies led me to the mystic history of cards and divination — pervasive in history and popular culture. In the early 20th century larger than life occultists like Aleister Crowley captured the public imagination with a vision of tarot as a window to a more holistic universe, where every atom and creature was interconnected, and these connections could be discerned in our readings. Later on TV and the cinema picked up their compelling power: The James Bond film Live and Let Die, for one, is steeped in the occult, and features Solitaire, a seer who reads the tarot cards to divine fate and see the future.
To be truly powerful, though, a system has to balance freedom with definition. Creativity loves restraint, and the infinite untapped cosmic power Crowley saw in the tarot became too abstract for rational men. In the cards modern humanity saw ambiguity that was exploited by con-artists and shams. Instead of being formed by echoes of the music of the spheres, their future was mechanized — machines ran to the hum of predictable, clockwork rhythms — rather than febrile soothsaying.
The universal truth that seems to lie in these cards — just beyond our reach - is seductive. Symbols like the Empress, the Hanged Man and the Fool are at once archaic, powerful and deeply human. A quantified, scientific world has scattered them into disuse, but what if we could repurpose them; use their abstraction to reveal a different kind of truth? Instead of looking to them for our futures, what if we could use to help us tell our own, unconscious stories, and in doing so tease out the subjective, personal truths we hide even from ourselves.
The human is a system; the human mind a vast and complex network of rules, hierarchies and logic gates. Today, in the Age of Machines, what better use could we have for the artifacts of arcane mysticism, than to have them help the human brain expose its own systems and processes through response to primal truths (the Arcana) that predate our layers of rational thinking. Tarot cards as a science: a psychological, rather than astrological tool.
Over the next few months I’ll be working with some of my closest friends mentors to help them ‘read themselves’ using the tarot deck. Rather than the deeply individual maze Calvino constructed for himself and his characters, or the sprawling, infinitely abstracted divination of the mystics, these people will tell me their story as they see it in the cards, and in doing so decode and expose the hierarchies in their own brains. It’s going to be a fascinating journey, and I’m confident each person will come out of it with a deeper understanding of what makes them tick.
If you’re interested in getting involved or ‘reading’ with me, just leave a comment. Otherwise let the experiment begin, and let the cards fall where they may.
