So, moving on to chapter one of one of the best Tarot Books ever written (in my humble and biased opinion), Tarot for Yourself by Mary K Greer. If you want to follow along, please take a look at Part 1, The Introduction, posted last week.
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“Deciding to work with Tarot is like embarking on a long journey, an inward journey that cannot be taken lightly.”
Mary K Greer, Tarot for Yourself
In Chapter 1, Greer gives a brief background information to the history of tarot, and though I find this interesting, I think I’ll hold off on a discussion of Tarot history until a future post. For now, I’d like to focus on the next exercise, in which Greer asks the reader to reflect on what Tarot means. She asks specifically What is Tarot? and What do you feel is the purpose of Tarot cards?
I think these two questions are incredibly important, so much so that I’m going to devote this whole post to them. What you think Tarot is will determine your relationship to tarot. If you think that tarot is a fortune telling or divination method primarily, then you will use tarot differently than a person who thinks of tarot as a system of occult information or as a representation of the Hero’s Journey or any other esoteric or spiritual interpretation of tarot. Obviously, many people combine many different methods of understanding Tarot, but the essential thing here is being able to boil down your beliefs about Tarot to the simplest terms: What, in a few sentences, does Tarot mean to you, and what it is for?
To me, Tarot is a system of culturally significant and intuitively evocative images that show us possible levels of human development (the Major Arcana) and all possible ways of interacting with the world (Minor Arcana). Tarot images tap into the collective unconscious and draw on archetypal images to give us higher insight.
The purpose of tarot is to use this intuitive and collective imagery to sharpen our own personal intuition and problem-solve. When the reader and the querent are both focused on the cards and the questions, Tarot can unfold unforeseen possibilities (or, maybe possibilities we aren’t willing to see, but know about already) and give insight.
So, that’s my simplest, boiling-down-tarot answer. What do you think? What is Tarot, and what is it for? I’d love to hear your thoughts! Stay tuned for part two of a very interesting chapter one next week (sooner than later, I’m hoping).
Tags: learning tarot, mary k greer, tarot, tarot for yourself