Before the birth of this Tarot blog, I had a clear intention and a clear direction of what I was going to write. But now I find myself in a catch-22 as to where to take Tarot Eon. All the paths open to me are uncertainties, and this leaves me with a feeling of uneasiness.
Uneasiness is a good word. It’s the word I want to focus on. Uneasiness describes how I’m feeling. Anxiety; because I can’t predict where it’s going to go. Confusion; because I’ll be discovering things along the way, and in the words of Osho, “a man should contradict himself many times”. The path I had in mind before I started this blog was to share my knowledge, but things have changed.
Essentially I’m looking to move away from saying what the tarot‘is’.
Rather than answer “what is the tarot?” How do you divine? Here are the techniques; these are the best techniques; I’d rather present the dominant trends within the Tarot, with the purpose of providing an ‘anatomy’ of Tarot as a means to answer my own question “why the tarot?”
When I think about the tarot, I think of the word interpretation. The cards themselves are foreign, unknown, and strange. Over a period of time, people can translate this foreignness into something familiar.
When I think about divination, I think of the word interpretation. We interpret the client and we interpret the cards, and we translate our interpretations into linguistics; language that hopefully the client will subsequently translate into something meaningful. In this sense it seems to me that it’s important to bring interpretation under close scrutiny.
The tarot claims universal validity (in the anatomy of tarot, this is simply one position) and seeks to provide an overall explanation of everything. The problem with this position, philosophically, is its reification of its presuppositions. Reification is a good word and one that I have been thinking about a lot. It’s this word that causes me my uneasiness. Reification means: to treat an abstract idea as if it had concrete or material existence. The presuppositions that are implied when we look at this position of the tarot are in effect reified ideas. Wolfgang Iser, a philosopher, calls this type of interpretation the ideology critique.
I feel very uneasy with any theory of the Tarot that elevates its presuppositions to the status of reality. In part, this is due to the transcendental nature of its frameworks. The tarot, in my view, is an act of interpretation. And as such, any attempts to explain the tarot by providing a framework only results in putting a distance between that which it seeks to explain. This in effect is a major criticism of any ideology critique. This is why I find myself at a crossroads, because I’m in danger of falling into this trap. It is impossible, certainly when a framework is provided for the tarot, such as the Qabalah, to avoid distancing oneself and creating a framework, this is because regardless of intention, a stance still has to be adopted.
A way to explain the meaningfulness of the Tarot, or the meaning to be grasped, is from inside itself; inside the interpretative act of Tarot.
Descartes was a philosopher who said “I think, therefore I am.” Wolfgang Iser changes that in a rather clever way. He says “I interpret, therefore I am.” Interpretation is an unfolding act, meaning is constantly unfolded as we interpret or in the process of interpretation, meaning reveals itself and that, interestingly, implies meaning also hides itself; so interpretation never stops from birth to death; we interpret. In the act of interpretation, that which was hidden becomes revealed; its meaning unfolds. For example, I want to read a book of poetry. Its meaningfulness, before I begin, is hidden. In the act of interpreting the poetry, meaningfulness unfolds; I may read that book again, and the meaning that was present to me before has now become hidden as new meanings unfold. In this sense, meaning is never fully present nor is it fully absent. It oscillates between the two. This, in many ways, describes the oscillation in a Tarot reading.
With regards to the above comments, I’m now uncertain as to what to do. I ask that you forgive the lack of structure to this blog that will no doubt arise as I try and answer my own questions. I will continue to provide information that personal experience has taught me works, in terms of divination and so on. However, I will present the information not as something true in itself, but rather I will look to understand the anatomy of these theories (interpretations) in such a way as to make them transparent. I have no idea where I am going with this, nor what will happen next, but I hope you enjoy the ride.
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