A couple of Spo-fans want to know how I got interested in the Tarot.

 

I didn’t consciously seek out the Tarot. One of my roommates in college had a deck; he was took some sort of one credit course on the subject. He didn’t have much skill for them; he couldn’t remember what the cards meant or how to read them in a spread. In contrast I had a ‘knack’ for them. I gave him continual assistance as he ‘practiced’ readings for me. When the course was done he pushed the deck towards me and said “Here, you take them. You have the knack.” I have been reading them ever since.

 

When I was in Jungian analysis, my teacher had an interest in the Tarot as a means of examining the archetypes and the unconscious. He used them with his clients to do active imagination and self examination.

 

People often ask me do the cards predict the future? Mr. Tom Robbins sums up the Tarot in his book ‘Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas”:

 

“Now you listen, honey, and listen good. Do you really believe that I could pick stocks that are gonna double – or winning lottery numbers or racehorses? Come on! I’d be styling and smiling in a nice little villa in the Himalayan foothills. You get the picture. And another thing; I cannot accurately predict your future. We need to get that straight, too. I can’t, no psychic can, and any that claim they can are swindlers.

A crystal ball, this is not, and you damn well ought to be glad about it. It isn’t tea leaves or goat entrails, neither. What it is is a highly refined, highly efficient system of symbolic knowledge. The symbols that were carefully chosen over the centuries speak directly to the deeper levels of the mind. The Western mind. In the East, the I Ching cuts the very same mustard, but with more, shall we say, intricate turn of the knife. Never mind that. The images here in the tarot will serve to open up and free certain aspects of your subconscious. I can read what the hell’s going on in the recesses of your pumpkin. I read your subconscious thoughts – they’re damn near as legible to me as The Seattle Times – but I don’t read the future. Comprende?

Now for one reason or another, your subconscious knows things your conscious mind doesn’t. Oftentimes it’s ahead of your conscious mind in regards to the direction you’re leaning regarding a particular situation or decision. So in that respect, the information I glean for you tonight may, at a later date, seem to you to be a prediction coming true. Anything I reveal to you tonight can be changed. You, of your own free will, can change it. Reverse it, redirect it, whatever. You can remove the blindfold and slow the hell down. Remember that.”

 

That is my approach to the Tarot. It is like looking into the mirror, not into the future.

I collect decks not unlike others collect baseball cards or prayer cards.

Perhaps some day I will write about my dozen decks.