Whether we admit or not, most of us have quaint notions of what tarot cards are.
On the surface, they are merely a deck of illustrated cards used in predictions, while the tarot card reader is an eccentric person dressed in robes seated behind the fortune-telling booth in the town fair. This image of tarot cards is, of course, clichéd, and yet we'd rather feel comfortable with its familiarity than dig deeper. We resort to the more convenient explanation rather than actually investigate the sometimes unpleasant yet gratifying truth of tarot cards.
Perhaps, the most famous among the tarot cards is the Death Card, a card quite unfairly invested with too much negative meanings and energies behind it, so much so that we usually think of tarot cards as tools of the occult, vehicles of evil even. While we can't deny the fact that indeed tarot can be used for such purposes, tarot cards can also be perfectly well-intentioned and can be actually used for good causes.
As a matter of fact, the earliest use of tarot cards in fifteenth century Italy was as a game, much like a deck of regular playing cards but with the addition of trump cards. It wasn't until late 17th or 18th century that tarot cards began to take on a more serious role in divination.
Over the years, the pictures in the tarot cards, their rich symbolisms, procedures, purposes, and meanings evolved in such a way that the characters portrayed in them have come to mirror all our follies, fears, strengths, and hopes. By stringing them together into a tale, we are able to retell and uncover the past as we would have liked it unfold, as well as get a sense of a manageable future we can feel safe with.
A radical and inevitable shift indeed for tarot cards from a simple game to life-changing therapy.
Carl Jung, a world renowned psychologist has always considered tarot as an alternative psychotherapy. By utilising the rich imagery encapsulated in every tarot card, we are able to voice out our concerns, look into our past, and prepare for the future. In some cases, children who don't yet know how to speak can use the images and characters in the tarot deck to piece together their thoughts and tell their story. Tarot cards then offer an alternative language system through which we can bring our Unconscious up to the light.
Jung explains that tarot cards represent different archetypes of human personality and situations. The Death Card then is not just simplistically a dreary card foretelling iretractable death to the querent (person who asks questions in a tarot card reading). Rather, the death card can be seen as the death, an end of something inside us: a vice, long standing pain, bad habits, sorrow, signaling rebirth.
We do not just blindly pick out cards from the tarot deck. Every moment of our lives we are armed with choices, choices that spell out and define our fate. It's not just what you keep out from your life that matters; it's also what you allow to make a difference. Even if they're just a deck of tarot cards.
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