14 February 2011

How does Tarot work... Yay Valentine's Day

Yay, it’s Valentine’s day! Time to spend money on chocolate, cards and perfume… all because if you don’t, you obviously do not love your spouse enough.

Did you know (one of the) Saint Valentine(s)* had little to do with love the way we think? Old Val was a prisoner and he became good friends with his captors daughter… oh and I believe he died kinda horribly, eyes poked out or something. A few centuries later the day of poor Val was scratched from the catholic calendar and clever merchants got their claws in it. They found out thousands of ways to make people spend their money on this day of love.

I do like the concept of letting someone know you secretly have a crush on them, but since I am happily married that specific part of valentine’s day has lost it’s merit for me.







Now about tarot, I wanted to give you my personal view on how spirituality enters into tarot. Oddly enough for a witchy type like me I hold little faith in higher powers guiding the cards. So, no spirits, divine beings or even faeries to pick the cards for me. I believe in the system behind the cards. How does that work, well put simply I feel the system as is cannot fail. When you use a certain pattern and know the possible explanations of the cards you always come to some sort of answer, add your querent as a catalyst and voila you get a storyline that makes sense, makes use of conscious and even subconscious themes in the querent’s mind and together you come to “fitting” answer to any question. In a sense it’s the interaction between the reader and the querent that makes up the answer.

However I do find that when I read, the cards always find a way to amaze me with their accuracy. In that sense it seems like any other card on the same place would not have worked. So who knows, maybe there is some higher power at work. For me however it is not important, the system works and the results so far have always been useful.

*There are several Saint Valentines in the running for being THE Saint Valentine, but it’s probably a combination of several martyred saints all rolled into one.

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