Accessing the Soul through the Tarot
By Vanessa Starr, M.A.
"Trying to fathom the eternal mysteries is like trying to empty
the ocean with a teaspoon." Saint Augustine
When I began teaching the Tarot, the first item on my agenda was to expound
on what the Tarot is. Inevitably, I would end up talking about its cloudy
origins, tracking its nomadic history through many disparate cultures
and countries. Or I would listen to myself intrapolate its relationship
to the Kabbalah, or use metaphors like "mirror", or Jungian
terms, like "synchronicity", falling back in desperation on
what the Tarot does. In short, I would discourse on anything but what
the Tarot is. My beginners always noticed, much to my chagrin, and I began
to feel increasingly like that teaspoon-dipper St. Augustine describes.
Suspending my Virgo Ascendant for a moment, maybe I could forego the
urgent necessity I and others feel to define, identify, and ultimately
pigeonhole the Tarot. That moment of suspension, after all, is very like
what I ask my clients to do: suspend investment in timebound matter for
the duration of a reading.
Seekers come to a reader with many 'matters' on their minds. With the
'matter' of their lives suspended, the soul speaks - volubly, through
the figural language of an oracle.
I would like to say that the Tarot's oracular function has been well-documented,
but it has not. Its fame as a fortune-telling tool, on the other hand,
has survived in folklore - that indelible marginalia that sits alongside
our history books. Even there, in its marginalized position, its divinatory
properties were altered from the original meaning of "divining"
-which implied parleying with the gods to see what's what - to mere forecasting.
The Tarot's function as an oracle, amanuensis of the soul, is much less
well-known.
So when I started reading professionally, the predominant question was:
What is going to happen to me? And, as any fool of a fortune-teller knows,
it's easy to foretell future events through the Tarot. Learn the keywords
and one or two popular spreads, practise on a few friends, and you're
on your way to the intoxicating thought that you, powerful you, can see
the future.
The average clientele, after all, come to a reading with most choices
already made, choices that determine their future in ways they could hardly
imagine. The responsibility of those choices is so burdensome that it
is easier to externalize their consequences as fate or destiny, or dare
I say it, a personality disorder. The Reader's responsibility is equally
fraught, what with trying to untie the synchronicitous jumble of soul
intent, choice, causation, and symptomatic manifestations - and then,
once s/he sees, having to find the words to describe effectually what
s/he sees. It makes you want to get a day job, for it's easier to fall
in line with the client's omnipresent question, which, by the way, is
more often expressed as a whispered demand "Tell me my future",
and always expels a plaintive fear of life - that amorphous, globulous
thing 'out there' that brings us obstacles and crises and just seems to
have a vendetta against us.
Well, this is how it feels sometimes. We experience life, the time-and-matter-bound
lane, phenomenologically within a subject-object dialectic, and periodically
feel like pusillanimous objects manipulated by a prodigious subject-perceptor
whose agenda is inscrutable. Anyone who has ever felt trapped between
a rock and a hard place - and who has not? - recognizes this feeling.
Even if you disdain the phenomenological premise, let's agree that incarnate
life is acausal, a condition possessing in and of itself no particular
vendetta or grace.
Thus, what the fortune-teller risks doing is pandering to people's fear
of life and its vicissitudes. By consenting to reveal future events without
placing them within the text (not to say supra-text) of the soul, s/he
tacitly agrees that life is indeed fearsome and can be controlled by foreknowledge.
Incarnate life may indeed be frightening, since ringed by mortality and
all kinds of personal and global holocausts, but the text of life is constituted
also in that which cannot be made carnate. Perceiving events without accessing
this other text is to be ineffectual in assisting the Tarot to transform
someone's perceptions of life and their life-choices. And deep, immediate
transformations do take place with those clients who have come to the
Tarot at a critical juncture in their lives. Oftentimes, as a reading
progresses, a 'client' transforms into a 'seeker' and the Tarot into a
neutral ground in which one's fate and free will may meet in a quivering
equipoise.
Perhaps an equally pernicious development in modern Tarot practice is
to 'psychoanalyse' the client, thereby becoming their (unqualified) therapist.
It's so easy in this age of psychobabble to borrow snippets, like 'projection',
'subconscious', 'ego', 'synchronicity' -words rent from their originary
contexts, distilled from their voluminous, explanatory texts. A bit of
Freud, a dash of Laing, a lot of Jung, and the communication which the
Tarot - that palimpsest of the soul - surrenders thereby and becomes wholly
derivative.
Yet, as civilisation slouches forward, so too does language, and the
nature and type of information language can convey. Why not exploit the
jargon of other helping disciplines to communicate with Tarot clients?
How else to articulate the wisdom encrypted in the Tarot except through
derivative language and metaphor? Or do I lack spiritual sophistication:
is there some other way to work with an ancient oracle?
Distinguishing between 'information' and 'wisdom' might be key here.
And the distinction goes far beyond semantics. In contemporary discourse,
information is pretty much all we get. It relies for its meaningfulness
on the extrinsic and the mundane, and it is explicated to the Tarot client
within the framework of linear time. Peeling an onion, I call it, that
first extrinsic layer of information or data that helps situate both reader
and client, i.e., your spouse left you three years ago; your son is dyslexic;
you just lost your job. The extrinsic is essential: neglecting it can
actually impoverish the fulsomeness of the spread. Information, as opposed
to wisdom, in a reading is one of the many buoys or markers that invite
further depth. In practical terms, it's a good, even necessary, place
to start, for where does the soul reside if not in the realm of choice
and will, projected into the world of matter? But it's not a good place
to end.
One of my students had the habit of describing a spread by saying 'this
spread is about...'. To her, the spread always had to be 'about' something
- business, illness, divorce, a lawsuit - really, whatever she felt was
uppermost in the client's mind, and to her, the spread only covered that
one area.
Reading in absentia a rich in-law dying of cancer whom she had described
as excessively materialistic and power-hungry, she declared the spread
to be entirely 'about' a recent business decision he had made from his
hospital bed. When I suggested that the spread revealed a soul immersed
in the world of matter unto sickness, she looked like she was about to
ask for her tuition back. So, of course, heartened, I persisted.
The spread is about both illness and 'business', and it is about neither
of these things, said I. Both and neither. Both, because the extrinsic
layer (illness, business, also a loveless marriage, disgruntled children,
among other things) expelled a lifelong, symptomatic disregard for, and
neglect of, the soul. Neither, because what the spread exuded about the
sickness of the soul could not be reduced to any of these things. The
spread unveiled one particular soul's journey through incarnation as a
gradual and comprehensive immersion in the world of matter. This exclusivity
was killing a man barely into his forties.
The soul-energy, so long forced to mirror human ability and energy as
exercised solely in the material realm, had fully saturated the first
ground of the incarnate, the body. The illness of the soul had not merely
manifested in the body; it had taken over the body as if there were no
other place for it to go. The man's body, like his world-view, lay dying
of a homeopathic, self-generated dis-ease. It was as if the soul were
demanding a victim to compensate for its neglect. Well, that is how it
feels sometimes. Yet the spirit has no iniquity but what we assign to
it. What was this reading 'about'?: a point in the journey of one man's
soul through matter embracing, nay careening towards its endpoint, and
a joyless, unaware one at that.
I felt exhausted and dispirited by this devoilement. The man's soul lay
sprawled, disquieted and unutterably eloquent in the stillness of the
spread. If he had sat before me eight years prior when his cancer was
seeded - or at any other critical juncture of his life - would I have
been able to effectually convey to him the wisdom encoded in his spread?
Or, as caught in a tractor beam, would he have remained pinioned by his
own intemperance? Was he a 'client' or a 'seeker', or now, neither: just
very tired and out of breath?
There are moments in some, not all, readings when, despite our enfeebled
forays into inadequate language, seekers confront their own souls and
undergo an indefinable self-authentication. You can see it in their faces
and their eyes, hear it through the phone wire. They go somewhere down
deep or up high, returning perhaps to a place before birth, before choice,
before being. And you are present at that moment, returning with them,
a witness, a hearer, an auditor, and you are humbled. You have assisted
the Tarot in making someone literate in the text of their own soul. This
moment, with this man's spread before me, was not one of those. And as
the class continued, the cards remained there, face up on the table, expelling
an energy, a wisdom that no one was there to receive.
I still don't know what the Tarot is. But I know what it does. I have
been there when 'it' happens, though words fail me ever. It straddles
the two contexts of humanness: the spiritual and the mundane. Neither
is privileged, though often the one suffers at the hand of the other.
Events, past, present, and future are indeed revealed. But the soul too
is made accessible. That's why its primordial routines became ritual,
raised to the level of sacred. Thus the Tarot is an oracle, a congenial
meeting-place for the exoteric and the esoteric, the extrinsic and the
intrinsic, the matter(s) of the body and the text of the soul. And even
these convenient dualities fail miserably to define it. The Tarot is the
name of the rose. When I stop lugging that teaspoon, I'll let you know.
Copyright © by Vanessa Starr
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