Is it in the cards?

I never had any interest in the metaphysical.

Every question worth asking either had a reasonable answer, or will eventually find its way to one. Every person claiming the opposite is either a charlatan preying on the gullible or a fool seeking comfort in lies.

That world view recently suffered some dents in its shield.

Turkey, hot summer night, and even hotter cup of tea in front of me. In many Easter countries, hot beverages are believed to send your system into hyperdrive and cool it better than cold ones. I don’t fully buy into that idea, but my disagreement isn’t profound enough to refuse a free cup of tea.

A friend I made the day before put her Tarot deck on the table and offered me a reading. I agreed. After all, Wikipedia stated that the cards originated as a parlour game, and that is the amount of faith I was willing to put into them. My lonely heaht asked for what I saw every movie character ask for - love. Hot, toxic (unless I learn some unspecified karmic lesson) and we will meet somewhere windy. You could tell that to any 19 year old and probably be right.

I got curious and asked about things that I already knew the answers to and she should not have been able to guess just by looking at me. About my frinds, job, past… the predictions were scarily accurate. Whether to believe (a concept I struggle with in general) or reduce it to a psychology trick was up to me.

Let’s start with the mystery before we get to the facts.

I deeply distrust the idea of anything controlling my fate, or that anything that powerful will be benevolent. She comforted me on both accounts: cards don’t care to control your fate or assume it is set in stone, they simply tell you what the road you have picked is most likely to bring. Don’t like it? Pick another one, you are still the one forging your path. Cards also don’t represent entities that might have interest in your fate, they are simply familiar archetypes used to tell the story and don’t have. Any magic extrinsic to the, which makes the vampire or kitty styled decks just as valid as the traditional Rider-Waite one.

The way these cards “know” what to show you is the most interesting part, as her explanation sounded more like a scientific theory yet to be proven than magic. They form the story from your cognitive field and bring the scattered thoughts to the surface. If I really think about it, I know what the path I am on is going to bring me, but being “told”what will happen by something else is easier for the same reason we ask our friends for advice we could have found within ourselves.

Tarot originated in 14 century northern Italy as a parlour game akin to bridge. 78 cards, 56 of the minor arcana (wands, cups, swords and coins) + 22 major, now representing the human journey. The symbols were simpler back then and gave more importance to the cards’s number and suit. In the 15th century, the cards travelled to Marseilles for a makeover due to a revival of Astrology, Egyptology (the kind that Egyptian people would have been appalled by) and most importantly the Kabbalah. This renewed interest in lost traditions awarded the cards their mystical interpretation.

British occultist Arthur Edward Wade put these symbols together using well-know archetypes that can be understood across cultures: the fool, the magician, the empress… as allegory for the roles different people make take in our lives or the one we ourselves might play. Him and Pamela Colman Smith (a member of the hermetic order early in her life) created the most widely used deck of today. Hermetics used the cards as a method of self-discovery, a method of bringing forward your own knowledge of the future rather than predicting it. Tarot won’t help you take a peek of the stock market but might help you realise that if you keep making the same choices your future will not look any different, yet it is not surprising that many people still need to be told this.

Can I say that the predictions that came true in a few months were my own knowledge? I don’t know, but maybe reasonable conclusions I could have come to with more reflection. All I know is by the time I finished my tea I felt like I left a therapy cession, I knew what I needed to do to make the future I wanted come true. Stripping the cards of their mystical allure helped break through my cynicism and didn’t make the worlds designed in them any less inviting. The magic of this world is created with our own minds and that it is as real as it is to us.