FOOLS, HERMITS, AND DEVILS: TAROT AS A SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE

Photo courtesy of author.

In the spring of 2015, I bought a tarot deck because I was lonely and bored. I was 25 years old, mothering two sons under the age of two, and struggling with the particular invisibility that often accompanies that kind of caretaking. I also bought a tarot deck because I missed the intentionality of prayer. I had left the Catholicism of my childhood in my late teens because of a forbidden-to-me longing for priesthood, and then I had stayed away from church for a long time because I was tired of being told I wasn’t good enough. I quickly fell in love with how tarot scratched my itch for the ritual of religion, and how it made me feel seen. I never used it for divination, because I’ve never believed in divination. But I loved creating a quiet space to pull cards and sit with them. I loved getting to know characters like the Fool and the Empress, the Knights and Queens. I loved registering my ever-changing reactions to these images and seeing myself, good and bad, reflected in them. Tarot helped me to know myself again. It was also a fine substitute for prayer, until it slowly became no longer the substitute but the substance.

A few years ago my family and I moved to New York City and rented an apartment on the Upper East Side. The apartment was tiny, but it was also four blocks from the Met. I dropped my sons off with their grandparents every chance I could get so I could spend hours wandering around the galleries by myself. I would sit in front of the torso of Apollo, or Rothko’s No. 3, or Margareta Haverman’s A Vase of Flowers, finally understanding what it felt like to be truly riveted by a work of art. I didn’t want to admit it, but it felt like church. I found myself preoccupied by this feeling, wanting to return to certain works of art over and over because I felt like they were changing me, but I didn’t know quite how. I didn’t know how to explain that kind of beauty to myself, until I realized that there was no way I could reconcile it outside of a theistic worldview. Turns out, I simply couldn’t look at a Van Gogh and not believe in God. 

Visio divina is a Latin term that means “divine seeing.” At its most simple, it is a prayer practice that involves praying with images. Put another way, it brings together the practice of contemplative prayer and the experience of God’s presence in works of art. To practice visio divina is to look at an image with an open heart, inviting God in through it. It can be a sort of affective mysticism, focusing on an experience of God that can be felt with the senses. Traditionally, visio divina is used only in relation to religious art. But I believe that visio divina is what I experienced in the galleries at the Met, with both religious and secular art. Though at the time I didn’t have a name for what was happening, I do think God used that beauty to draw me back to faith. 

To use tarot as a tool for visio divina, or any kind of prayer, might seem strange at first glance. In pop culture, tarot is usually cast as an occult tool, the domain of witches attempting to divine the future. But it’s my view that a deck of tarot cards is nothing more and nothing less than a set of seventy-eight little works of art. It’s also my view that any art has the ability to lead a person to God, and that’s what tarot did for me. I had kept up a regular tarot practice for several years, using the cards mostly as journaling prompts. But as I spent more time inviting God into my heart through art, I started to experience tarot in the same way I experienced the paintings and sculptures at the Met. I began to interact with tarot through the lens of art and prayer, and I found that it also started orienting me towards some kind of faith. Tarot, which had always helped me to see myself more clearly, showed me the God-shaped hole in my life.  

This ability of tarot to aid in self-reflection is one of its greatest strengths, and there’s a place for this in Christian practice. The pursuit of self-knowledge has a rich history in the Christian tradition and it’s often treated with a depth that isn’t always found in secular ideas about the self. John Calvin, in the opening pages of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, writes that it is not possible to know God until we know ourselves. Every one of us has to live with our own particular self; knowing our own particularities is important—they teach us about our specific gifts and how we can best relate to God. Calvin keeps going, though. He flips this idea, going on to write that we also cannot fully know ourselves until we know God, because it is God’s goodness that reveals to us our need for God. Every one of us has a deep, instinctive yearning for God, and it isn’t until we acknowledge God that we are able to pinpoint that yearning. When I experienced that yearning firsthand, tarot was one of the things that helped me to name and interact with it.

Tarot marries well with this kind of work, self-examination through the lens of one’s relationship with God. I liken it to the Ignatian Examen—a daily spiritual self-review that allows a person to reflect on God’s presence in their life. It is possible, for example, to pull cards at the beginning of each day as a way to reflect on where God would like my attention to be, or to draw and meditate on cards at the end of each day as a way to reflect on where God felt present in the gifts or struggles of a particular day. Tarot has a way of making space for me to commune with God, to offer God my successes and my failures, my struggles and my eases. If I pull the Devil, I can reflect on the things in my life that distance me from God. If I pull the Six of Cups, I can reflect on my hope for my children and how to facilitate an example of Christian kindness for them. The Sun, joyful and triumphant, often prompts thoughts on the Incarnation. The Moon, thoughts on the ways in which Mary reflects the Incarnation. To use tarot every day is to create a space where, every day, I am turning my heart to God.

This is how I use tarot these days. Every morning, I wake up and make coffee and pray Morning Prayer from the Book of Common Prayer. I also pull a tarot card (or two, or three). And then I sit and reflect on how the cards I pull and the readings from the Daily Office play off each other and play off me. I might read the passage from First Corinthians about how “if any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise,” and then pull the Fool, a card that, for me, symbolizes a letting go of worldly attachments to fall into the abyss of God’s love. Or I might pray through the readings for Joan of Arc’s feast day, and connect her visionary courage to the young and fiery Knight of Wands. Doing this every day, interpreting the tarot through the lens of Christian theology, has brought a welcomed contemplative intentionality into my life. 

The point of any spiritual discipline is to move us past the distraction of daily life, into a place of stillness where it is possible to hear the voice of God. For me, tarot did exactly this. Tarot created a space where I could look at myself closely enough to notice that something was missing in my life; it helped me name what it was. It gave me images for my feelings when I didn’t yet have the words for them. Slowly and carefully and almost unconsciously, it led me back to a life of faith. And it does this still, day after day, as I pull cards and pray.