What Is Tarot?

This is a guest post by one of my awesome Tarot Apprentice contestants, Iseke. I’ll be featuring some more guest posts by these talented young tarot readers in the near future. Be sure to watch for them!

Divination tools are languages we use to communicate with our sub or higher consciousness. In this way, we can use any divination tool to string together letters, words, and sentences into full ideas. A certain pattern of coffee grounds means one thing. A certain direction of movement from a pendulum means another thing. Whatever system of divination one uses (and really, you can use ANYTHING for this purpose) becomes a language.

Tarot, with its complex levels of historical and cultural meaning, art, symbolism, and connection to other esoteric systems, creates a very deep language with a lot of study put behind it. That means that when choosing Tarot as your language of communication, you have a whole lot of depth to explore your circumstances. Tarot is great for really looking at the subtlety of an issue, as anyone who has had a reading or done one can attest to!

A lot of people may assume that Tarot cards (or any other divination tool) have a magical property of their own. Really, they have no more magical properties then a pen or a paintbrush do! They possess only the magic you put into them. Just like how you won’t get a novel out of an alphabet itself, you won’t get magic without a practitioner. A Tarot deck sits in potential, waiting for you to come along and make something of it. What you make out of it is entirely up to you, because while there is a well established system for reading the cards in place, they are YOUR tool of communication when you read!

So what does that mean? It means that when you sit down with a deck of cards, you have a rich grammar and vocabulary present for you to work with. This is commonly referred to as the “Little White Book” definitions but it goes far beyond that, because it draws on a pool of everyone’s practice and experience. Like spoken languages, divination languages grow and evolve over time. However, as you work with the cards (or the tool of your choice) you will find that the cards take on special meanings for you, and this is when you can see for yourself that it is truly a language of your own!

For instance, in my own practice, I’d notice a card keep turning up in certain contexts. It wasn’t in the standard context you’d expect to find, but it connected with me and my experiences and so I began to notice when that card would come up in that context. That was when I began to see the Tarot operating less in the “refer to the LWB” fashion that overwhelms us all at the beginning and more like my own personal system.

The most important thing about understanding the Tarot as a language is that it frees up flexibility in the way we understand the Tarot itself, as well as how we use it. Those of us who read Tarot cards all know what one means when they mention the six of cups, because we all share the umbrella language developed by centuries of cultural thought, study, and practice. But, like a dialect, we all have our own flavor of the meanings. Allowing this and encouraging it will help those who are beginning their Tarot journey from feeling completely swamped staring at a book of meanings they feel they need to memorize! Instead, it’s all there as a support network so that the reader can develop the most intuitive way for them to reach their sub or higher consciousness during readings.

So if a client who knows a thing or two about the meaning of the cards sits down for a reading, and a while into it disputes that your interpretation, you can explain to them why this may be: in your practice and development you have come to learn what the cards mean personally to you. So long as you are consistent throughout the reading! Also, if you are teaching someone the Tarot, you can encourage them into further developing their intuitive interpretations by reminding them that ultimately, the goal is the conversation between the reader and their higher selves (or the reader, the client, and their collective higher selves). Tarot is what makes that conversation tangible!

~ Iseke