Writer: Jay Boll
Topic:Why do so many intelligent people believe in tarot reading?
Link: QUORA / 19.03.2018
Note from XP: This is an interesting question as I have experienced great revelations from reading my own and interrupting the situations of others through Tarot. My interest is sexual – as I look for sin and corruption – but on the whole I think it is an individual journey … what do you think?
Why do so many intelligent people believe in tarot reading?
There is a widespread misconception that Tarot is a form of fortune telling used to predict the future. Some people may consult the cards in a naive belief that they can reveal the future to them. However, most intelligent devotees of Tarot do not use it in that way. For them, Tarot is an interpretive tool not a predictive one. It helps them gain understanding about themselves, the people around them, and the meaning of the events of their lives.
A good analogy for Tarot reading is dream interpretation. Some people believe their dreams have predictive ability. If they dream of finding money they believe they are due to receive a financial windfall. This is a very literal form of dream interpretation with no demonstrated basis in fact.
Intelligent people who engage in dream interpretation do if for a different reason. They are really performing a kind of self-analysis. Dreams can be a useful tool for self-analysis because they contain common symbols or archetypes of the collective unconscious. These are universal, archaic patterns of thought and feeling that represent basic themes of human existence.
In Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, he identified several universal archetypes, which can be found in every deck of Tarot.
In Tarot, Jung’s wise old man archetype most closely corresponds to this card, The Hermit…
While the innocent child archetype is represented by The Fool…
By shuffling these archetypal symbols and assembling them in different patterns – whether in a dream or in a Tarot reading – one can reflect on their meaning in relation to each other, and draw a larger meaning or understanding from the whole. In Tarot, this is a process that requires intelligence (i.e., knowledge of the deck and multiple individual meanings of its 78 cards), and a great deal of intuition. There is no single meaning of any card, just as there is no single meaning of a symbol in a dream. Every person has a unique personal spin on each of the universal archetypes, so there is no single way to interpret a Tarot reading or a dream. In addition, combinations of archetypes, dream elements, or Tarot cards bring added meaning to a reading. The whole is always larger than the parts.
These same archetypes or themes recur in all world religions, myths and literature. Another analogy for reading Tarot is reading fiction or understanding myth. All great stories contain archetypes and symbols. You can read them in a very literal way and perhaps even believe in the literal truth of them. But that is a rather stupid way to read. Those who give a deeper reading to great works of literature engage in the text with their imaginations (intuition) as well as their intellects, and often come away with increased understanding of themselves, others, and the world.
One of the best literary works for this purpose is James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. It begins like this…
“…riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”
and ends like this…
“A lone a last a loved a long the…”
When you join these two fragments together you come up with the opening and ending sentence of the novel (with about 700 pages in between)….
“A lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”
You can open virtually any page of Finnegan’s Wake and read it as you would a dream or a Tarot spread. Most of the sentences in the novel make about as much sense as the one above, which is to say a great deal, provided you have the intelligence, imagination, curiosity and patience to decipher it (see below).
Like a good Tarot reading.
Hail XP!
You commented: ‘My interest is sexual – as I look for sin and corruption – but on the whole I think it is an individual journey … what do you think?’ – that is definitely my lens as well, everything that will increase my sexual pleasures and gratification is worthy my pursuit, if not to say my only motivation and driving force is rooted purely in the sexual realm.
This journey is almost exclusively a solo ride, as the chances to share it full circle with others is nigh impossible. A good example are the genre of porn – as there are hundreds, and some are likely to overlap between individuals, but next to impossible to overlap completely between two individuals. Is that the reason why solosexuality and pornosexuality are in such steep ascent?
As for Jung and Tarot – while I consider it an interesting angle, I am not sure whether here somebody is trying to use Jung as a fig leaf to give Tarot reading a trajectory that Jung himself would not embrace – in my opinion the referenced archetype in the collective unconscious had the opposite roots from the individual – hence the ‘collective’. Maybe at some point these spheres will transcend, but if anything, the individual is absorbed and assimilated into the Borg and ceases to exist.
Cheers – APM (aka addicted Penis masturbator)
Hail APM
I think you are right about “journey is almost exclusively a solo ride” — the probability of finding the perfect “pervert” match is almost impossible — and even if you are matched in terms of your sexual depravities, what if you are NOT physically attracted to each other; or age appropriate; or have cultural, physical or language barriers? — I have a few “friends” that I would love to FUCK and SUCK … but there is also the issue of STDs … haha … the list never ends.
With the Tarot thing — it just occurs to me that some people think of it as “spiritual” while others think of it “intellectually” — I think of it as “sexual” — which probably combines the two …