ARTICLE
Are Tarot images relevant in fortune-telling? Meditate on extrasensory perception and oracular right guessing by using psychic magnetism on symbolic systems.
What tool do you use?
Do images make any sense? Why do we choose decks if cards and suits have specific meanings? By using arcana, water and other natural elements, coins, rods and any other substance making you focus your attention... is about flowing by moving your body.
Where is your body at? It's at the place you're moving to, in the time you're going to. One of the vital principles is the etheric interdependence of beings and things, by which barriers are no more, definitions lose functionality, separation disappears.
All of the sensorial goes against this type of extrasensory and psychic experience. Even the cards you choose may push you away from it because they're expressing shapes, some of them more concrete, some others more abstract, but in the end all of them evoke some sensation or specific thought.
Somehow, the best oracular practice dismisses any tool since we get it such as it is and without taking away or changing qualities, attributes or tendencies due to our perceptual conditionings.
Meanings and practices
Like with any other oracle, spreading cards and guessing right is about practising with the own attention and magnetism. During your first practices, you surely were sticked to traditional meanings of each card. But if you're interested in the oracular side of Tarot, then you should have checked if your reading was right or not.
Cards are tools for concentrating and focusing the attention, and for nothing else. If we need meanings to do so, we have them. But the most important thing for a right forecast is experience, practice and observation taking us back to each spread: did we effectively read what happened?, was our description accurate?, has the prediction become a fact?
In this very personal approach of each Tarot reader to cards, we may be close to or far from traditional meanings. It doesn't matter! Whatever meaning is assigned to a card, we have to see if it takes us to oracular facts or not. The easiest way to exercise it is by spreading cards to inquire about what we don't know and have no direct contact with either, about what is physically far away, and also telling nobody about the reading (so we'll dismiss any possible interference). Look what happens throughout time, and then tell me!
Orderings and systems
Divinatory practices are always appealing to some type of symbolic ordering to understand cards. Orderings of all kinds, from worldviews about life and death to orderings structuring daily relationships of situations, people and things.
Our particular way to feel, think and sense is included in them: what is expected in each situation? We may easily project our point of view into a reading but, again, if you're interested in the oracular value of mancias, observation and practice will make you leave aside what interferes with extrasensory perception.
An arcane is a tendency, situation, thinking, sensation. From the past, present, future. Behind it, the rest of 77 cards show up.
This is about personal preferences too! If practices and observations of facts have made us choose a particular deck and not other ones, then we'll be closer to understand the meanings certain specific deck holds inside. The understanding may be traditional or modern, very simple or complex, classical or innovating... So mancias provide their own meanings and particular logics, which we incorporate to ours: our particular ways join those of arcana like an oracular whole expressing the skill and singular style of each Tarot reader.
Some decks
The Golden Tarot by A. Atanassov is inspired by Gustav Klimt's paintings. It's a dreamlike deck, great to focus on images and get lost. Human figures are usually naked or dressed in clothes merging with backgrounds or the rest of elements on cards. Informality and allegories take us to meditate on different subjects too, especially on parameters about what is normal and proper, sensuality and beauty, so the deck is great to expand perception and reach any type of situation being inquired, becoming one with it.
Fortune (10)
The Outsider Tarot by Bobby Abate brings a more delimited although eclectic deck. It comes from a particular time, the current one, the visual one, an age about calling the attention, the personalistic among the crowd. With special astrological references, it brings radical innovations by adding roses (coins, Earth) and eyes (swords, Air). Using this deck is a whole challenge for divinatory practices because we need to know traditional meanings and also change our perception in several ways: about how situations are considered to grow and be developed, and about modern life perceptions (the way people look at and see each other). This is the world Bobby displays in his artwork.
Sefirot by Causa Creations is part of a game inspired by the jewish cabbala, so we have to know the sephirot and the worldview coming along with it. However, the sephirot on the two-players board are not always associated to the planets such as they are inside of the traditional Tree of Life. As you can appreciate, some Tarot decks include more complex systems to guide readings, and also with deeper meanings...
Symbolon by Peter Orban & Ingrid Zinnel is a contemporary deck too, because was designed according to the archetypical psychological inheritance from Europe. You can easily appreciate it in the designs, wiht cards providing a frame to perceive roles, activities and situations in human imagination and daily life during the last centuries. As it happens with the decks mentioned above, this one focuses our readings on planets and signs of the Western Zodiac too, and the authors don't consider it as an oracular mean.
Tarot with astrological correspondences by Xul Solar is one of the more complex decks I know. It has been designed by taking into account some basic astrological concepts as well as different types of languages!: polarities, positional and light/dark games, relativity, relations of signs, aspects patterns, numbers, planets... Being its author an Argentinian esotericist, cards are associated to the Spanish alphabet in a complicated system with a highly structured logic to guide perception. If you're particularly interested in esoterism, then you may use the deck to focus on subjects not easily noticed in daily life...
I hope this article is interesting to you! Want to share your readings? Would you like to comment on a particular deck? What do you think about Tarot as an oracular tool? Leave a comment!
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