The Mirror in the Cards

I do not read tarot the way some people read tarot. I am not waiting for the cards to tell me what will happen next week, or whether a person will call, or whether a deal will close. I have never been particularly curious about the future, perhaps because the future is the one thing that, given a little time, always arrives on its own.

What I am interested in is the mirror. The slow, strange, surprisingly accurate mirror that appears when you shuffle a deck, lay the cards in some arrangement, and then sit with what you see. The cards are not telling me anything I do not already know. They are telling me what I have been refusing to say to myself. That is a different service entirely, and it is the one I have come to value.

It was Alejandro Jodorowsky, more than anyone, who taught me to think about the deck this way. He spent decades treating tarot not as fortune-telling but as a kind of psychological instrument — a tool for what he called psychomagic, by which he mostly meant the art of becoming honest with oneself through symbol. For Jodorowsky, the deck was a portrait of the human being laid out in seventy-eight panels. The Fool was the part of us that leaps. The Emperor was the part that builds. The Devil was the part that consents, quietly, to its own chains. To turn over a card was simply to be reminded that one of these figures was alive inside you at that moment, asking for attention.

I find this approach far more useful than prediction, because it does not depend on the cards being magic. It only depends on the reader being honest. The symbols on the cards are old, and human beings, for all our novelty, are not. Whatever the cards point to, you have already lived. The reading just gives the thing a name and a shape, so you can stop walking past it.

I also believe — and I will not try to argue anyone into this — that the configuration in which the cards arrive is not accidental. Not in a mystical sense, necessarily. In a quieter sense. The hand that shuffled them was attached to a body, and the body has been carrying something all week, all month, all year, and the cards that surface tend, with uncanny frequency, to be the cards that match what is being carried. Call it fortune. Call it the subconscious arranging the deck through the fingertips. Call it whatever you like. I have stopped needing the mechanism to be explained. I have only noticed, over many years and many readings, that the cards almost always say something true.