Un-Learning the Tarot: A Fool’s Quest

Recently, I made a radical decision: I decided that I would spend the next two-and-a-half months un-learning the Tarot.

Like most people, I learned Tarot with books and how-to videos, cribbing notes in my personal grimoire in the desperate hope that I would become a master diviner. I wrote pages about numerology, and pages about the court cards, and recorded more meanings for uprights and reversals than anyone could imagine. In the early days, I even sketched the cards into my astrological notebooks, spending several hours unpacking the symbols on each card, while trying to decipher the deeper meaning of their decanic correspondences. Although the snail on a crude drawing of the Nine of Pentacles remains a cherished doodle, I recently realized that all the meanings that I had learned were not my own, but someone else’s. For that reason, no matter how hard I studied, I would never fully grasp the meaning of the cards.

I suppose the person that is most to blame for all this radical re-visioning is A.E. Waite. His interpretation of the moon card struck me as irreconcilable with the knowledge I have gathered about the moon and its cycles, its meaning in traditional astrology, and its archetypal representations in various mythologies. Danger, deception, terror, hidden enemies, and occult forces hardly resonate for someone with a committed practice to following the lunation cycle for the purposes of magic and manifestation. To me, the card more aptly describes the potency of co-creation with the moon and the gifts of…