Continuing with the tarot theme, there’s another interesting issue that devides somewhat the tarot readers community – it’s the divinatory approach vs what can be called the secular approach. It really has to do with one’s own beliefs – whether the tarot are a tool or a gateway to some higher, supernatural or mystical knowledge, or whether they’re not more than just pieces of paper with pictures, on which the reader projects his or her own unconscious predispositions.

The seculars claim that tarot can’t be used for divination, while the mystics claim that that’s the way tarot has been used successfully for hundreds of years. Putting the success rate of predictions in the divinations aside, it’s kind of hard to ignore the synchronicity that occurs time and time again while using the cards for any kind of question. From my personal experience, and what it seems like also from experiences of many others, the cards in any kind of spread don’t just come up randomly.

First, there’s the repetitions of certain cards with certain meaning that keep popping up with the same people or the same subjects, something that can’t be ignored from being meaningful and carrying a certain message and not just random. Second, the frequent relevancy to the situation and accuracy of the specific cards that are drawn, at least from my experience and I’m sure of many others, is evidence to the obvious synchronicity that happens between the life situation that is focused on during the draw and the process itself of drawing the cards.

Third, the configurations of the cards in a draw with their meanings, be it traditional, intuitive or psychic, maybe lend themselves to unconscious projections, but because these are not blank pages or Rorschach test’s stain-like images, the tarot cards do have certain meanings to them, even if they have many variations. Therefore what can be projected from the reader’s unconscious is very limited and confined by those meanings and takes the reader in a create direction, where the chosen interpretation is influenced by the querent’s question and background together with the spectrum of meaning of each card.

It’s true that the readings of the tarot will not be identical between different readers for the same person with the same question and the same cards drawn, obviously. So there’s certainly a room for the reader’s own input that is based on his or her psychological make up, experience and even a certain mood during the reading. But on the other hand, given the confined meanings of the cards, this personal unconscious input is more limited than the seculars claim, IMHO, therefore given the identical circumstances of different readings (same querent, question, cards drawn) except the reader him/herself, there actually should be significant correlation between the different readings.

And this isn’t even a mystical claim at all, it’s a rational take on the nature of the tarot interpretation. The many testimonies of those whose tarot predictions did come true would be a mystical claim, or evidence, regardless of whether it was an obvious result of the existing circumstances during the reading, or beyond that. In any case, tarot is definitely not some kind of glorified Rorschach test.