Tarot Cards and Subjectivity

 An important through line throughout Jeffrey J. Kripal's discussion of the paranormal in his text Authors of the Impossible is the idea that the paranormal experiences that the work explores, from seances to alien encounters, are concepts which bridge between an objective reality and a subjective one. Many of these experiences, alien encounters in particular can be fairly monumental or life altering experiences. I am curious how the phenomenon of the objective and subjective coming together can be found in more subtle ways.

Tarot, is I feel, a good example of this. (And other similar methods of divination but I will keep my focus on tarot here because I practice it myself so I can speak on it better.) On my personal experience with tarot, I've only been practicing it for a few months myself, but I grew up with tarot decks being a common sight, since both of my parents read tarot in college. It was so normal a sight for me in fact that it didn't occur to me until I was a teenager that most people probably didn't have several different tarot decks and manuals lying around their house. Now, I've been doing readings for myself for several months, and I'm definitely still just a learner but I think I'm developing a better understanding of why the practice, truly paranormal or not, has such an energy to it.

 

A photo of my deck in its box

When I first expressed interest in learning to read tarot my mom expressed it as being sort of like a Rorschach test. The cards work best on someone you know really well, or on yourself, and what matters is not so much some innate truth in them, but how you interpret them. Another similar explanation that I encountered recently was that a tarot reading was like a mirror, it can only show you things that already exist within yourself. They don't really tell the future.

You can be confident in these truths all you want, but nothing will change the feeling you get when you draw a card that is simply correct for the first time. For me that card was a reading for my roommate. We had left the common room of the house for the night, because our housemates were insisting on watching It, and neither of us were the kind to handle a horror movie. For the present in the reading (past, present, future) I drew the five of pentacles; three crows comfortable in the tree bathing in the glow of the pentacles and two in exile, wandering in the cold. I'm not sure my roommate quite understood the reaction I was having, but for me that seemed like a perfect mirror of what was happening in our lives at that moment, exiled from companionship because our housemates were insistent on plans we couldn't partake in.

The five of pentacles card

I've had other cards that just seemed to speak to me, or mirror my situation like this one, though never quite so closely (it was the numbers that honestly sold it), and I can't imagine that there's a reader out there who has never felt similar. I can't say this proves to me that tarot cards really do tell the future, it's easily just a coincidence, but it still really is quite the impactful moment. Considering it with lens through Kripal's writing, perhaps what ever it is that brings together the subjective and the objective in the case of a UFO sighting or other strange event makes a similar thing happen on a much smaller scale when it comes to divination. Perhaps while the objective reality of the card is governed by our linear perceptions of time, the subjective interpretation of it is not.

My personal interpretation is something a little more mundane. Humans are capable of predicting the future. We do it all the time. It's not magic. Usually it's just logic. I can say with reasonable certainty that tomorrow the sun will rise, I will work on my finals and talk to my classmates, I will read my daily card for the day. The information that one gleans from a tarot reading is just another potential piece in the puzzle that the brain puts together every time it considers the future. Sometimes it will be a helpful piece and sometimes it won't. Only time will tell.