"so what if none of this was real?"
tomorrow, if a god came to earth and announced tarot was never true or real, what would it all have meant?
A few years ago I sat down at my childhood home with my great-aunt Kim during the holidays and laid down some cards.
Auntie Kim lives in a different state and seeing her around the holidays was not that frequent of an occurrence, even as a kid. Her mom (my great-grandmother) had started the tradition of card reading, from which my grandmother and mother (and now me) had continued out of personal interest.
Mostly, we chatted about our lives, caught up on life events, and I placed down cards fairly casually over our conversation. At the time, she had only one real question on her mind — despite a recent injury, she had been asked by her dance team to take a more central role in an upcoming hula event, and was concerned about her performance should she accept.
I assured her that it would be fine and (as cheesy as the advice may be), an optimistic outlook would secure a positive outcome. I encouraged her to accept.
It was a very small favor for me to offer a reading; the more meaningful offering ultimately was from her to me, as we closed out with her telling me that I reminded her of her mother.
Months later, she sent me a photo of her performing and smiling successfully in her hula competition.
first, the part that is absolutely real
Tarot’s origins are still dubious, but in crediting its 15th-century European popularization, Holly Adams Easley and Esther Joy Archer point out playing cards in the Tang Dynasty (9th century) and Romani people bringing the craft to Europe via North Africa and Spain as predecessors and influences.
We also know that “tarot” itself was first a game (tarocchi — this site has a pretty extensive list of tarot games and their rules if you’re interested in playing), with decks in Italy predominantly being commissioned by upper-class families, art including personal and cultural references of the time.
Humans have always found ways to play, divine, and resourcefully ask questions through the tools the earth provides us — oracle bone reading in China, divination with food in Ireland, cowrie shell divination in West Africa, divination with maize in Mexico, etc etc. Hell, look at the Wikipedia page for “methods of divination” and see for yourself. That thing is massive.
If nothing else is real, I believe the human instinct for connection (with ourselves, each other, and the earth itself) is real. Divination is the perfect outlet for all 3 of these things combined, and it has always existed, and will always continue to exist, even if tarot itself falls out of fashion in the far-out future. It is extraordinarily human to seek meaning, synchronicity, and understanding in things, to identify parts of ourselves in others and the earth that surrounds us, to ask intense questions about the unknown.
We can chalk this up to human folly and silliness (perhaps assigning meaning where it may not exist), but the same instincts have also prompted us to form cultures, make scientific advances, and create art.
is “real” what matters?
When someone questions the legitimacy of tarot, they are usually questioning the accuracy of the craft and its ability to produce authentic answers. I do, believe it or not, understand that they are not seeking a philosophical exploration of the human instinct to divine.
Personally, I think my line of thinking above is a bit more interesting! But if I must answer this line of questioning alone: I cannot make clear-cut claims about tarot’s accuracy, just as I would not be able to claim that all art is good, or that all relationships will work, or that any human pursuit is fully infallible — because humans are fallible. And that’s okay.
In my tarot practice, I aim for positive and/or productive outcomes. I ask myself what good my act of divination produced that day.
Let us say that readings are “false” and “correct answers” are only chalked up to coincidence. The reading I gave to my great-Auntie Kim was actually a work of fiction, and, hey, maybe anyone could have reasonably guessed that a positive attitude would align with a positive outcome.
Nonetheless, in this version of events it is still me who encouraged her to perform, it is still her who found her way to a successful performance, and it is still us who found a moment to bond over something supposedly fake. Even without concern for the “accuracy” of the reading, the reading still offered a unique space for human connection, a small betterment of both of our lives, and an opportunity for conversation.
At that point, who really cares that I was “right” anyway?
the appreciation for coincidence
I have one more anecdote.
When I was a teenager, I frequented a summer camp in the heart of some beautiful California redwoods and would bring my cards each session (one session being the length of a week) to get some rigorous practice in. I was still green, but getting a fresh set of strangers each week (in the middle of my favorite place on Earth) was the perfect space, in my mind, for exercising that intuitive muscle.
I would set up at an outdoor table and cycle through peers my age, the majority of whom I had never met or interacted with before, and answer a range of questions about their adolescent relationship dramas and concerns for the future and all of that usual stuff — and if anything, it was a great way to make friends.
There is one reading session that has always stood out in my memory, although its spectacularness is not even all that grand in hindsight, technically speaking at least.
I was practicing pulling significators for people before reading them more in-depth, so I first pulled only one card out to read the person in front of me. I remember pulling Justice and making some sort of attempt to interpret it traditionally — and I remember them listening attentively, waiting for me to finish speaking, and then informing me that actually, they have always wanted to go to law school, ever since they were very young.
We both laughed excitedly and I exclaimed, “Really?” and they said yes — they were shocked from the minute I pulled the card.
I was stunned by the deck’s accuracy (which really had nothing to do with my own personal correctness) and this person’s instinctive connection to the card, thrilled and ecstatic at the magic of the moment.
Given my profession and general disposition, you may probably guess that I don’t really believe in chalking tarot’s accuracy up to coincidence. But maybe it was a coincidence, a 1/78 (.01%) chance I’d pull the one card that meant something to them.
Can that coincidence not also be a little magical?
i love the way humans love and live and ask questions and
Diviners tend to be protective and defensive over the legitimacy of our craft, understandably so, as public perception is riddled with misconceptions about our intentions and what we actually claim to be doing.
However, I notice that many of us will attempt to legitimize ourselves with claims of accuracy, logic, and comparisons to other disciplines like science and psychology. I am neither a scientist nor a psychologist, so it’s not really my circus or my monkeys to be drawing that kind of comparison. Nonetheless, the most apt comparison for tarot, in my opinion, is not to compare divination with science or reasoning or anything of that sort, but with love.
Humans have spent their entire existence resorting to poetry, art, systemic commitments bound by law, different defining words, and beyond, just to try to explain what the experience of “love” is. And yet, we do not really land on a definition or experience that resonates with everyone, and yet somehow we also seem to understand what another person means when they say it, and also we cannot really prove its existence, and yet also we have faith that it exists in some way regardless.
How do I know tarot is “real”?
I know it is real in the same way I know anything else is real, which is to say that I don’t really know for sure and yet I do know in some other indescribable way, and I question it and love it just like I question and love every other human experience, and I will (hopefully) spend the rest of my life nourishing that curiosity and making connections with strangers and ideally saying something that fits somewhere in someone’s journey at some time and showing others that they can do the same and (and, and, and…).
For me, this is enough of a positive and/or productive outcome.