People read Tarot for a variety of reasons. Some people use it predictively, some people use it introspectively, and so on. The uses range from the purely psychological, to decision-making, to bona fide divination. However, a common thread among all Tarot readers is that we read Tarot because it works. Whatever we’re trying to use […]
Read more "Sometimes You’re Wrong"I love divination. All kinds of it. On a cold, rainy weekend, my ideal way to pass the time is to learn a new and obscure method that people somewhere in the world have used to divine the future. Tarot is by far my favorite, and most-used, but I’ve dabbled in tasseomancy, geomancy, scrying, lithomancy, […]
Read more "Animating Principles of Divination"There’s a lot of confusion and misinformation out there regarding what Tarot is and is not. Can Tarot readers really tell the future? Are Tarot readers Satanists? Is it all just a load of malarkey? Here’s a short post to dispel some confusion and explain some of the things that Tarot absolutely can do. 1. Predict […]
Read more "Six Things Tarot Can Definitely Do"In my previous post on the metaphysical commitments required of (a certain kind of) Tarot reader, I hit two main points: the non-identity of mind and brain, and the non-linear nature of time.* One comment I got on that post was to the effect that both of those commitments seem uncontroversial; they’re the kind of […]
Read more "The Metaphysics of Tarot, Part 2"What do you have to believe in order to read Tarot? Well, technically, nothing. Tarot is a practice, not a dogma, and you can learn the interpretive skill without any prerequisite beliefs. But at the same time, the ways in which many readers use Tarot do entail certain metaphysical presuppositions. When I say “metaphysical” here, […]
Read more "The Metaphysics of Tarot"Is Tarot natural? Is it supernatural? Where does it fit in the Great Cosmic LEGO Set of our universe? I ask these questions largely out of an idle sense of curiosity and a childish desire to use a LEGO metaphor on my blog. But I think these questions are worth asking, because the Tarot community–and […]
Read more "On Nature and the Natural"I remember the day I learned the word “concatenation”. It was a Friday, and I was in my eighth-grade* Gothic literature class. We were talking about the numinous experience of the narrator in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. That day changed my life. The definition that I learned on that Friday turns out to […]
Read more "Emergence, Beauty, and Tarot"“The future isn’t set in stone. The cards provide a projection for the way you’re heading right now, but your actions can change the outcome.” I don’t think I’ve ever run across an experienced Tarot reader (in the real world or online) who didn’t agree with the above statement or some variation thereof. But personally, […]
Read more "And If the Future Is Set in Stone?"The early German sociologist Max Weber had a lot of really important ideas that shaped the way we think about the world. One of those ideas, which I find particularly useful in my day-to-day life, is the distinction between understanding and explanation. The German words for these concepts are verstehen and erklaren, respectively, and there’s a great Wikipedia article […]
Read more "Why I Use Tarot: Understanding vs. Explanation"Ladies and gentlemen, the results are finally in. This summer, I announced that I would be performing a statistical analysis on my daily draws, conducted over the course of a hundred consecutive days, to look for patterns in Tarot that deviate from a random distribution of the cards. And now, a hundred days later, my […]
Read more "Statistics! Tarot! Yay!"
Jack Chanek 