Would you play with tarot cards?

When I was a kid I used to play with tarot cards I bought at the swap meet but my mom found them and took them away, saying they were "ways to talk to the devil". I don't believe that tarot cards actually do anything so I really would not care if people did anything with them. I just don't have an interest in them anymore.
 

RLynn

Active Member
Like the ouija board, tarot cards are just patterns of ink on cardboard. They are inanimate and cannot possibly do anything. They were originally just playing cards and only relatively recently have become associated with divination. Some people think that they can predict the future, but that's a delusion; nor are they a channel for talking to the devil, whatever the devil that means :) (pun intended). However, they can be used to stimulate the imagination and thereby provide insight into one's own thought processes. Thomas Pynchon apparently used the tarot to suggest the sequence of chapters in Gravity's Rainbow, and it is sometimes used to help with plot development in creative writing. Tarot actually is one of my hobbies, and I think I have a fairly nice collection of decks which are of historical interest. Besides Christian culture and mythology, some of the standard decks borrow from classical mythology, such as the 1JJ Swiss, which contains cards depicting Juno and Jupiter. I have no interest in the idiotic modern tarot decks, which generally are good for little except starting a fire.
 
Like the ouija board, tarot cards are just patterns of ink on cardboard. They are inanimate and cannot possibly do anything. They were originally just playing cards and only relatively recently have become associated with divination. Some people think that they can predict the future, but that's a delusion; nor are they a channel for talking to the devil, whatever the devil that means :) (pun intended). However, they can be used to stimulate the imagination and thereby provide insight into one's own thought processes.
Thanks for sharing! I agree that they are inanimate and cannot actually do anything. I didn't know that it was just recently that they were associated with divination though. I am really interested in hearing more about how they inspire creative writing too.

I do think the artwork on the cards is pretty and I have seen some beautiful decks.
 

RLynn

Active Member
Tarot has a long history. The Visconti-Sforza was designed in the mid-fifteenthth century. While playing cards have been used occasionally for divination for several centuries, the first deck which popularized tarot for such use was the Rider-Waite, which was published in the early twentieth century. Arthur Edward Waite designed the deck primarily to illustrate certain philosophical ideas, but it was received by the public as a divinatory deck. Waite was a devout Christian, who would have been horrified at the thought that his deck of picture cards could ever be associated with the devil.
There is no set way to use the cards in creative writing. Just pull a few cards at random, look at the pictures, and see if they suggest anything to the imagination which could be used in a story. If one is in the middle of writing a story and gets a block, looking at some cards might suggest fresh plot ideas which could enable the block to be overcome. How the cards may be used to stimulate the imagination is entirely up to the individual. Sometimes just looking at a single card and thinking about it for awhile can open up a whole new world of ideas, provided one is so inclined.
 

LegendofJoe

Active Member
You know quite a bit about Tarot RLynn and I agree with you completely.
I taught myself how to work with them years ago. It was only a matter of time before I learned that much
of what i did was cold reading technique. But still, many of my friends and family were amazed by what i told them ( I never took money).
I also became an avid collector; I have a copy of the Rocca deck, as well as a facsimile of the Visconti-Sforza.
People at work still periodically ask me to do a reading for them. I try and tell them not to take it too seriously; that
I am only trying to be intuitive with the help of some imagery, but they usually react with what I say as if I'm the reincarnation of
freakin' Merlin! It makes me a bit nervous: people will grasp at anything to have a peek into the unknown when they are going
through rough times.
 

RLynn

Active Member
The best professional Tarot readers use cold reading too, some consciously, some not realizing what they're doing. It gets results, and clients keep coming back, who don't realize what is happening. They want so badly to believe, that they are often very cooperative with the reader. In a way, it's sort of sad.
 

Myrddin

Well-Known Member
People at work still periodically ask me to do a reading for them. I try and tell them not to take it too seriously; that
I am only trying to be intuitive with the help of some imagery, but they usually react with what I say as if I'm the reincarnation of
freakin' Merlin!
Well, I'll be taking that as a compliment!!;)
 
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