Tarot Elitist...

I’ve always felt that Tarot is the best form of divination…and I’ve tried a lot.

From scrying using mirrors and polished slate (catoptromancy) which almost always left me feeling like my brain was being sucked out of my skull; to crystal ball and marble gazing (gastromancy – not to be confused with that bloated feeling you get after a particularly large, carb-heavy meal where you wonder if you’re going to burst); from cleromancy with Ogham and runes (spending half the time trying to stop a stray runestone or ogham stick from shooting off and disappearing under the couch); cartomancy (with the Lenormand and other card oracles); capnomancy (smoke); ceromancy (wax in water – not fun when you leave the candle burning for 20 minutes and discover that it’s one of those no-melting-pool-of-wax candles); tasseomancy (tea leaves, coffee grounds and even hot chocolate residue, but let’s face it who wants grounds in their coffee or leaves in their tea – they invented teastrainers and french presses for a reason); nephomancy (clouds); haruspicy (in theory only, this one is guaranteed to get you some seriously strange looks at your local butchers or at the deli counter, but does give you the perfect opportunity to use the line “if I wanted your opinion, I’d read your entrails”) and stichomancy (books or lines of verse – not to be done with a marker pen with the lid off if you want to be able to read the book again!)…but they’ve all been passing whimsies by comparison to my love of the Tarot.

But I’m a bit of an elitist.

I can’t help it. I’ve tried breathing through it, but I do tend to get a bit vexed whenever there’s tinkering going on with the cards…

There’s no card in the deck called “the mystic washing machine”, and there doesn’t need to be…we’ve got 22 cards in the Major Arcana, nicely arranged into the ‘Fools Journey’, so why do people insist on buggering about with them?! When I see a deck released that is “a lovingly reimagined modern version of the Tarot, with 26 Major Arcana cards, and 64 Minor Arcana cards”, I immediately think “you can’t strap a beak to a cat and call it a goose…it just won’t fly” because what this author has lovingly created is an oracle deck, not a Tarot deck.

I’m fine with the standard shared names, like Coins/Pentacles or Wands/Rods for the suits, or Knaves/Pages for the courts – that’s all a matter of translation and personal taste, because it doesn’t seek to take anything away or attempt to add anything to the system; and I can just about swallow a thematic renaming of a card or two, such as calling The World card The Universe card instead**, or Princesses and Princes for Pages and Knights, but when I see half the deck renamed I genuinely don’t understand what the author is trying to achieve: Renaming Justice as Karma, The Devil as The Lower World, or The Fool as The Innocent is that author putting their personal perceptions onto a tool used by other people, and restricting the ‘translation’ of that cards meaning to what is written in the border.

[** The exception to this rule, is of course the Thoth Tarot which is an entire law and system unto itself, but it isn’t a deck I really use for clients unless they request it, as it’s very introspective and very prone to prising the lid off of cans of worms left, right, and centre!]

Yes, the Fool can talk to us about innocence, but it doesn’t always convey that meaning, and we can find ourselves wandering off down a metaphysical or metaphorical blind alley, with our intuition being left at the door before it has even got a chance to get its boots on, because we’ve pounced on the displayed meaning immediately. If that’s how you’ve learned something, great – if that’s how the card speaks to you, great – but what you call things at home, or in your head, isn’t necessarily what everyone else is calling it…and to emphasise that point, click here…

(Now I’m not sure what goes into a DAMN!, and an iced DAMN!, but I’m suspecting it’s vodka…and I’m not sure what they’re putting into the watercooler at some publishing houses, but I don’t want to drink it, thank you very much indeed).

When it comes to artistic expression, I’m all for it – from pipped minors, to full deck illustration; from decographic computer aided design, to trippy psychedelic imagery; from mixed media overlay interpretations, to watercolour classics; from RWS-trad imagery to modern-day stained-glass style reimaginings – this is where the story comes in, and by understanding the artist and their influences, we can gain immeasurable insight into both the artist and also the tool that they’re illustrating.

You can paint a beautiful Monet piece onto a hammer, but the tool itself is still intended to knock a nail into a wall – the artwork embellishes the piece, rather than stifling its use…of course if you then go and call it a chopstick (“a lovingly re-imagined take on the familiar hammer, beautifully illustrated, and now called ‘the chopstick’”), we’re going to have words…words that I usually reserve for people who kick animals or push pensioners over in the street.

See, told you, elitist.

Now when it comes to Oracle decks, I was always a Tarot purist – it was comparatively either Tarot or ‘some other system that I wouldn’t wipe my feet on’…but recently, I’ve softened (a little!) and have actually embraced a couple of different Oracles, using them alongside my Tarot cards to blend in with the meanings, to emphasise a particular situation, to provide practical advice and input on what the Tarot identified as a major, psychological or internalised issue, to provide ‘small steps’ to improvement, and to ground a reading into relatable concepts for a client uncomfortable with the Tarot archetypes, and have enjoyed considerable success with these alternative card systems…

I still rankle a little, and find myself apologising to my Tarot deck a lot, as if it might somehow share my disdain for these wayward pretenders to the crown, but with innovations such as the Magpie Oracle – shiny metal charms that match traditional Lenormand card symbols – I’m learning to accept the wisdom and insight that these oracles can bring to a reading, and while I rarely read solely with an oracle, without my Tarot deck to hand, they are actually adding to my appreciation of the flexibility and scope of Tarot while adding an additional string to my bow, and giving my love of art and card imagery, and its ability to inspire intuition, an alternative outlet.

What's tools do you use to help your intuitive connection? Are you a Tarot elitist too, or do you employ different methods of divination? I'd love to hear what works for you!

[The Magpie Oracle is available from the very talented and exceptionally lovely Carrie Paris, and is available here]