This card pretty much sums me up.

At least a friend surprised me recently by saying this when they noticed I had a deck of them. I didn’t know anything about this friend’s spiritual beliefs, so I was even more surprised when they described themselves as a “rational minded agnostic”. I asked them why they thought they were evil, and they said something to the effect of “silly fortune telling tools like that impede rationality“. Which underscored the fact that they had NO IDEA what Tarot cards are about, which is not surprising; the cards have a very murky history. Although the first documented mention of them is in 1367, The earliest documented use of them for divination wasn’t until 1781. Although many still use them in a predictive fashion, perhaps more people (like myself) use them as a reflective tool, to simply open up thoughts on a topic, much like Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies or Marshall McLuhan’s obscure Distant Early Warning Deck. Although the evidence is anecdotal, I think it’s safe to say that the more “occult” impression that modern people have of Tarot cards is a result of the same crazy British aristocratic types that would hold seances, go to India to get their personal gurus, and allow weirdos like Aleister Crowley to hang out with them. All of which I believe was driven at least in part by a sort of quiet Anglo rebellion against the stifling rules of the more repressive forms of Christianianity of the era. A more modern use of the Tarot is probably descended from the influence of C.G. Jung, who suggested that the images on the cards were “distantly descended from the archetypes of transformation“. Over the years I’ve personally used a few “conventional” decks. I started with the Rider-Waite as a teen, which ultimately felt too 19th century and crusty. I moved to Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot in my morbid later teens. This deck ultimately comes across like a heavy metal band: it ends up being almost comical in its desperate attempts at being sinister and mysterious. I later used the Aquarian Tarot, which I still kind of like, but more recently I’ve used the Pomo Tarot, which cleverly integrates some rather dramatic changes in the design with some extremely hip and useful changes in the language of the interpretations. There’s a decent overview of the deck here. If you’re intrigued with Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies”, you can try an on line version here.

The Pomo Tarot uses familiar images from art to rethink the symbology of Tarot. Although some of the images are almost comical at first glance, they end up working surprisingly well when pondering more modern life issues.