littlesai

I was introduced to the Tarot through a particularly bad young adult mystery novel. Thankfully, I've forgotten its name and author so it can't sneak up on me in bookstores and expose my completely innocent, but highly embarrassing, bad taste. I can't be too disparaging, because it did open up a new language to me.

When I began, young and starry eyed, I was ecstatic to find their was a way to see the future. The very thing every young, awkward teenage girl wants...and should never be given. I purchased the Renaissance Tarot Deck and a copy of Sylvia Abraham's 'How To Read the Tarot'. You see, my bad taste does not confine itself to fiction, I'm afraid to admit.

My apologies if you are a fan of Ms. Abraham I don't so much mean to critique her, as to impart that her book presented one, and only one, argument and understanding of Tarot. Unfortunately, I took that to be the end all and merrily paved the way to my own destruction.

Armed with my deck I began doing readings often (and probably inaccurately) for myself and anyone who asked. It was exciting and a whole world to discover in each card. And while that statement is true I believe, my understanding of Tarot was flawed. When my daily readings finally turned incomprehensible, or just wrong, I dismissed the entire endeavor as an antiquated superstitious practice with no merit. I never even did a reading with my recently acquired Scapini deck.

I lost ten years before I even began to understand what the Tarot really is, or at least, what it has become for me. I'll let the impeccable Joseph Campbell speak though, he opened my eyes first and can probably summarize it best:

How, in the contemporary period, can we evoke the imagery that communicates the most profound and most richly developed sense of experiencing life? These images must point past themselves to the ultimate truth which must be told: that life does not have any one absolutely fixed meaning. These images must point past all meanings given, beyond all definitions and relationships, to that really ineffable mystery that is just the existence, the being of ourselves and of our world. If we give that mystery an exact meaning we diminish the experience of its real depth. but when a poet carries the mind into a context of meanings and then pitches it past those, one knows that marvelous rapture that comes from going past all categories of definition. Here we sense the function of metaphor that allows us to make a journey we could not otherwise make, past all categories of definition.

For myself, I use the Tarot to make that leap past my own preconceptions and see relationships or barriers with some semblance of depth and meaning that would escape me otherwise. The past is gone; the future is not yet here. Before me is the tool of understanding myself in the present. It took me a decade to see what a treasure that really is.