Row, row, row Tarot, gently down the stream of consciousness

By Stephanie Mills
Sun contributor
Purpose and intention are all very well and good, if a bit over-esteemed. They’re the starting blocks we adults kick off from in the forward hurtle over the hurdles of life. Purpose and intention are critical and only a teeny constituent of destiny. Over 500 years old, the Tarot deck is continually modified by individuals who’ve extracted much essence from the human experience.

This kaleidoscope of accumulated insights can show us dimensions and possibilities of personal reality that purpose and intention may overlook. The cards tender narratives unavailable to waking consciousness. Now I’m not talking spooks or ether, but those mytho-poetic journeys we each make from sunrise to sunset, from one new moon to the next, and from one solstice to another.
Only a fraction of the saga is rational or literal. Like its kindred, purpose and intention, rationality is a fine and necessary thing. But the whole story — of my life, your life, the life of our community, our life as a species — is vast and rich, complex beyond reason or literal comprehension.
The Tarot deck can serve as a wonderful commentary on life’s glorious, unreasonable immensity because it shows, rather than telling, and its syntax is pure chance.
The pack, consisting of what are called the major and minor arcane, is made of elemental images and symbols, signs that are as eloquent as the inquirer is able to allow them to be. That Tarot’s minor arcane, which, remember, is ancestral to our 52-card playing deck, gets its potency from the four elements: from the earth, symbolized by pentacles (today’s diamonds); from air, by swords (spades); from fire, by wands (clubs); and water, cups. There is a further wealth of symbolic correspondence with each suit, and perhaps we’ll be able to explore them in coming installments.
The meaning of the suits ramifies through the silent symbolism of numbers: Concepts like singularity, duality, trinity, and quaternity loom large in mind and nature Add to the 40 combinations of number and suit (the “pip” cards) the 16 personalities of the court. The pages, knights, queens and kings embody the qualities of the suits as those might speak through gender, rank, or stage of life.
Part of what makes us human is our longing to discern patterns and to have them make sense. The four elements, the first 10 numbers and the ages of man have been seed syllables of our phrasing of the life of the world and its ceaseless changing balances for about as long as we have been human. And there they are, those old archaic patterns displayed on the cards to be shuffled, spread, and scrutinized for guidance and understanding. In readings the pip and court cards speak to situations, pieces of the current story.
Each of us may be unique, but no one, I suspect, wishes to live in total free fall or to feel that her or his experience is entirely new under the sun. The trumps — the 22 cards of the major aracana are big-time symbolizations of pivotal moments or momentous conditions in the soul’s journey — symbols of virtues and complexes. Jungian psychologists call such images universals of inner experience archetypes. Among the archetypal trumps are the Fool, the Magician, the High Priestess, the Empress, the Emperor, the Lovers, the Hermit and the Hanged Man. There are strength, Temperance, Death and the Wheel of Fortune: the Devil, the Star, the Moon and the Sun. These are roomy metaphors, but not so spacious or generalized as to dissipate into some common ground of nirvanic existence.
Trumps in a Tarot spread point to larger realities overarching everyday events, disclose strong forces presently at play within the psyche. Sometimes the major trumps speak to societal and cultural forces bearing on a situation. There is a trump called the Tower. It shows a slender stone citadel struck by lightning. Two crowned residents are blown loose and sent tumbling. This trump, I heard, showed up in a lot of readings following September 11, 2001.
Tarot cards are not opinionated. The only opinion, implicit in the existence of the cards, is that the reality alluded to by a trump or pip card is worth pondering and acknowledging. Something needful, some useful intelligence may be presented in the singular combination of suits, numbers and trumps arrayed in a spread. One can read warnings, realism, dreams and encouragement in the cards. The deck works to suggest and to startle. The cards are a graven invitation to the larger self to stir within everyday life.
The Tarot incites that larger self to issue the piece of wit, the unexpected strength, or the feral inspiration that leaves those worthies, purpose, intention, and reason, choking in the dust at the starting line. Animated, the heart, lungs, mind and limbs of the whole being are set coursing swift and fine as a dream of flight.
Glenn Wolff’s sketch this time came about this way. It’s one song sung by the suit of wands, what his mind’s eye beheld and what his skilled hand replied.
Stephanie Mills’ waking consciousness is at work on a biography of a Gandhian activist. Glenn Wolff has just completed public prairie sculptures in Madison and Baraboo, Wisconsin.