Why Tarot Feels So Accurate, And How to Actually Read a Card

If this podcast is something up in your psyche, moods is where you take it next. Moves is the private pre-social ritual technology that my team and I built for your inner world. It's not therapy or social media, but a place to work through what's coming up within you and then get back into your real life. Start your seven day free trial today at moods.world and use the code Founders F-O-U-N-D-R-S at checkout to lock in early pricing. That's moods.worldcodefounders. Welcome everyone to back from the borderline. I'm your host Molly. Now, this week, someone randomly tagged me in a video on Instagram and it was one of those Christian conversion testimony videos. It's the classic framework. Somebody saying that they escaped witchcraft or new age spirituality and found Jesus. And some random person tagged me in it and basically said, "Back from the borderline has gone demonic, tarot, witchcraft, the whole thing." And I'm paraphrasing here, but honestly, it made me laugh. And it's not because I think spiritual questions are stupid. Those of you who listened to this podcast more frequently, but hello to those of you who are new. I take these questions very seriously. But because the conversation around tarot in particular is so intellectually toddler-style most of the time, people only seem to really be able to imagine two positions. Either tarot is supernaturally evil or it's fake bullshit for delusional people. And I think both of these positions totally miss the point. And I think the more interesting question here is, what do symbolic or archetypal images actually do to the human mind and the human psyche? Because whether humans realize it or not, people experience reality from a symbolic and metaphorical perspective before we're even able to organize it rationally. Dreams and myth and film. They all do this. So does religious imagery. But so does tarot. A tarot card can feel emotionally true before we even know why, sometimes disturbingly so. And painfully so. And even people who claim that they don't quote-unquote believe in tarot often still react very strongly to that imagery. They feel something. And I think that we get lost in the sauce arguing about whether tarot is magic, fake, demonic, mystical, predictive, psychologically-projective, spiritually dangerous. We do all of this and we end up trapped in these modern hashtag, you know, modern, I say that derogatory arguments that don't really account for how these could be. Or how these type of symbolic and metaphorical systems actually function in human consciousness. Because tarot is so much more than a set of meanings that you would memorize. It's image and gesture and narrative tension, atmosphere. And one of the reasons the writer-weight Smith that became so culturally dominant is because Pamela Coleman Smith transformed tarot from abstraction into emotional scenes. So in today's episode, we're going to get into a lot. We're going to talk about why the writer-weight Smith deck changed tarot forever. Why human beings naturally read images in this way, why tarot readings can feel so strangely accurate. And then finally, why I think the most interesting territory exists somewhere between like a cynical debunking of tarot and then blind supernatural certainty. And then in the Patreon exclusive section, I will be teaching you how to actually start reading tarot cards without memorizing definitions. So we'll break down exactly how to read the way that each of these characters in the cards carry themselves, their posture, right, the gestures they're making, the movement, the environment, all of it. And I'll even give you a practical exercise that you can actually try yourself, because I think most people have been taught to approach tarot totally backwards. So with all that out of the way, let's get right into it. So I think one of the reasons that tarot just gets dismissed so easily is because people imagine that it operates through some kind of hidden code that's super rigid, like every card has one definition. And if you memorize all the meanings, then suddenly you can read tarot and maybe even predict reality. But that's not how most human beings experience tarot when they actually sit down with the cards, because what actually happens is much more strange. And I think it's way more psychologically interesting. You see an image and then something inside of you reacts before your intellect is able to catch up, you know. And I think that's fascinating. And humans do this all the time, right? Think about how like you'd walk into a room and immediately sense that just the vibe is off, right? There's been a fight that just happened before. Or maybe you can tell when someone starts to pull away from you emotionally, you can just sense it. You say the thing and then you can just feel that they're kind of they've gone away in their mind. Or you watch a movie and you become so emotionally affected by the scene before you can even really consciously organize all of that. It's one of the reasons why I've been avoiding like the plague watching hamnet. I'm terrified. I know it's going to fucking own my ass if I watch it. I get so impacted by shows and movies they can fuck me up for days to weeks. And dreams work like this too. A dream you can wake up from a dream and it can feel so emotionally devastating or so important, even if the logic is irrational, right? I woke up from a dream last week and I just sobbed it was so affecting to me right our psyche responds to image and movement and mood before it responds to any kind of explanations. And tarot works through this same kind of doorway. The cards are scenes. They're not just concepts. Okay, in a card you might see a figure that is carrying too much or the idea that something or someone is defending a territory somebody leaving under the cover of night, right? Someone staring at cups that are overflowing right so the image creates an emotional event inside the observer. And that's why tarot feels very participatory instead of something that you're just interpreting, you know, you don't just decode the card from an intellectual perspective. Part of you needs to enter the scene and so does your memory, your memory also has to enter the scene, your fears and your conflicts and your unresolved tensions start interacting with the stuff shown on the card. And I think that's where people misunderstood tarot and actively misunderstand it because a card isn't meant to tell you something it's placing you inside of a human situation. So once you start approaching tarot like this, then your experience changes and you stop treating the cards like definitions and then realize that they're meant to behave like little frozen moments inside of a bigger psychological drama of the hero's journey or the human's journey if you will or the the fools journey is a better metaphor for the tarot. And I think that's part of why certain cards linger in people's minds for years like I'll never forget that the first tarot card I ever drew for myself was temperance and from the classic writer wait Smith and it had a huge impact on me psychologically it's exactly the image I needed to see in that moment. And I think that those cards certain ones that linger in people's minds for so long is not because they received some kind of perfect prediction it's more so because that particular image captured a condition that they were feeling inside of them but they didn't have language for that and image cannot can honestly almost always do that a lot better than human language can. And that is a very different thing than just cheap fortune telling. Now if you call to mind an image of a tarot card it's likely that what will automatically come to mind is a card from what we call the writer wait Smith deck and I want you to help you understand why this deck became so dominant but to do that we have to understand the decks that came before the writer wait Smith. Now in older Marseille decks the minor arcana often looks much closer to playing cards right so you get arrangements of cups and swords and coins and batons and. the images are gorgeous, don't get me wrong, but they're not scenes in the way that modern tarot readers expect them to be scenes. So say if you pull the Seven of Coins in a Marseille deck, there's no people like in the writer-weight Smith, it's a person standing in a garden, pausing over the results of their labor, right? In the Marseille deck, the Seven of Coins is Seven Coins, arranged visually on the card. That's it. So the reading of the Marseille comes through the number, like the rhythm, the inherited meaning, and then the reader's symbolic imagination. And don't get me wrong, it's a very powerful way to read, but it just means that you have to have a different kind of literacy. So the reader has to animate the card from an internal perspective. So then Pamela Coleman-Smith enters our story here. And this is where tarot completely transforms. Pamela Coleman-Smith, often called Pixie, was not just some anonymous illustrator. She was an artist and a performer, and an incredible illustrator, don't get me wrong, I mean just look at the art she created for the writer-weight Smith deck, but her entire life was completely shaped by the theater. She worked in and around theater culture. So she understood staging and costumes, and how the way someone's body is positioned communicates something from the back of a theater. Right? And so that's a really good thing to keep in mind when you look at the writer-weight Smith deck, because when she created the images for this deck, she did something that seems obvious now, but it's only because we've inherited the world that she helped create. She gave the minor arcana human drama. So she turned these abstract pip cards, which is what the minor arcana are referred to as. She turned those into living scenes. So the 10 of wands, instead of just being 10 wands on a card, she turned it into a person bent under a bundle of staffs, moving but carrying more than the body should have to carry. Or the five of cups, she turned it into someone standing before spilled cups, absorbing, you know, what had been lost, but also seeing what remains still behind them, you know, or the nine of swords, a person upright and bad, pierced by thoughts, right? Awake in the private hour when the mind just becomes merciless. So these cards became readable, because the human body is readable. You don't need a degree in occultism to understand burden when you actually see the picture of a body just, you know, falling down under a huge amount of weight, right? You don't need to be initiated into a secret order to understand withdrawal when you, you know, see an image of that, right? This is the genius of Pamela Coleman-Smith. She made the invisible condition visible, and she did it theatrically. So in the writer weight, Smith Deck, the figures are staged. Bodies are facing certain directions, hands actually reveal more than faces. The backgrounds of the cards matter. The distance between figures, it all carries meaning, you know, the weather and the colors and the path, the wall, the bridge, the window, the mountain. All of it is participating and all of it has meaning. And this is why the writer weight, Smith Deck, became so game-changing, because it speaks in a language that human beings already speak, right? We read rooms and faces and distance, and things like this matter to us, like what somebody's holding, where they're looking, you know, whether they're turned away from us or toward us. And so the writer weight, Smith Deck, became so powerful, because humans instinctively read scenes. And this is also why people who almost, they know nothing really about tarot. They can feel something when they see the cards. They may not know the traditional meaning of the five of pentacles, but they understand what it means to feel excluded. You know, they might not know the deeper occult associations of the high priestess, but they understand a veil, you know, and a woman seated before something that they can't immediately enter, right? So they may not know the correspondences of the moon from an esoteric perspective, but what they can understand is the feeling of walking at night, you know, and that line between instinct and fear. So Pamela Coleman-Smith gave tarot a more human face. And because of that, the cards started to feel more like a theater of the inner life, instead of a secret code. And that really is the revolutionary aspect of what she did. So I think another reason tarot creates such intense reactions in people is because it exposes something very uncomfortable about how human consciousness actually works. Most people imagine that they move through the world rationally. You know, they've convinced themselves that they arrive at conclusions through logic, first, and then emotion. But that's not actually what happens psychologically. As human beings, we're always reading emotional and environmental information beneath our conscious awareness. I already said this, right? We're looking at how somebody's holding themselves, or even little facial tensions. Who's withdrawn? Who's dominating? Who feels unsafe to us? And maybe emotionally unavailable? Who appears, you know, guarded? And most of this stuff happens instantly and pre-verbally. Right? I said, you walk into a room. You can tell if two people were like arguing, or when somebody is grieving, or when a situation feels like really emotionally tense, even if the facts still appear like fine on the surface, or people are telling you, it's fine, right? They're words. Yeah, it's fine. You can be like, yeah, you're not fine. The psyche is already interpreting reality through image, an association, and mood, and memory, and narrative before conscious explanation catches up. And that's the layer that tarot interacts with very directly. A card externalizes conditions that often already exists internally, but they're just partially unarticulated. So the image gives language to something vague or contradictory or difficult to consciously articulate. And that's why readings can sometimes feel like uncannily accurate. And that's because human beings are meaning-making creatures constantly organizing experience through association and emotional pattern recognition. It's not because, you know, every card descends from heaven carrying objective certainty about your future. It's not it. It's just that tarot gives this process something to interact with. It's a tool, right? And the most grounded esoteric practitioners think of tarot like a shovel that you would use in the garden. It's just a tool, right? And this is where people often bring up projection, right? So projection often is getting treated like a dirty word now because it doesn't automatically mean delusion or irrationality. Projection is actually one of the primary ways the unconscious gives us material to like make it visible to us first, right? So we project all the time onto movies or shows or relationships or authority figures or strangers or religion or politics, whatever. Projection isn't bad. It's just part of how hidden emotional material becomes perceptible to us. It ain't that deep folks. It can be good, bad or somewhere in the messy middle and usually it's in the messy middle. And obviously projection can distort reality. People can force meaning, where meaning doesn't exist. People can become super fucking paranoid and grandiose and and obsessive and spiritually inflated through these types of practices. Human beings are very capable of manufacturing false patterns. We actually love doing it. And did you know that there's actually a word for this? And it's apophemia. And apophemia is the human tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. So that's like seeing a face in a cloud or imagining, you know, your destiny and a coincidence. But the conversation gets more interesting here. Because just because the psyche creates patterns doesn't mean that those patterns are meaningless. Because sometimes false patterns emerge, sometimes emotionally revealing once emerged, sometimes a person pulls a card suddenly and realizes that they've been avoiding their grief. And it makes them dive deep into that. Or maybe they recognize a relational dynamic that they have been unconscious of or maybe just refuse to admit to themselves. Or maybe they become aware that they're emotionally depleted in a way that their intellect keeps overrun. for them. So often with tarot and image and the symbol within that image, bypasses our defensive mind just long enough for a little bit of emotional and spiritual honesty to enter the picture. And so that doesn't require us to reduce tarot to either it's fake or it's like a god-given tool that's predicting our future. Those are very uninteresting positions because it's all fake. That position explains basically almost nothing about why human beings have used image systems and mythic structures and dreams and ritual objects and religious art and narrative divination practices across cultures for thousands of years. But on the other side, every card is literal cosmic destiny becomes equally uninteresting. So the interesting part is the charred middle, not the messy middle this time. This is that place where image and psyche and intuition and memory and association and perception and emotion, all those cool things interact with each other in real time. Because whether people want to admit it or not, human beings we're not purely rational creatures, observing reality objectively from the outside, we're interpretive creatures, we're always reading the world. Tarot just makes that process visible. And once you understand that the cards are operating more like staged psychological scenes, then your reading process can change. And you don't obsess over memorizing these fixed definitions, even though lots of different books will try to sell you that. And you also just don't want to treat the cards like in a cult multiple choice exam. Every image has a correct answer inside. That's not the vibe. The idea is to approach cards almost like a director or an actor or a novelist or a dream analyst might approach them. And asking things like, "What's happening here? What emotional condition is dominating this image? What's the tension that hasn't resolved here? What feels hidden or overexposed? Who has power in this scene? What's being defended or abandoned here? Who's withdrawing? What happened immediately before this moment? Or what would happen five minutes after this scene ends?" That's when the scene of the card becomes active. And it turns into this psychological landscape that you can enter instead of a definition that you're supposed to memorize. So that's why I think people start to learn tarot in the wrong way because they're taught to memorize things before they actually learn how to intuitively look. But once you really begin seeing the cards, tarot becomes much more alive once you stop reading it like a dictionary. All right, my lovely listener, that is where I'm going to leave the free portion of this episode. But in the Patreon exclusive section, we're going to go much deeper into how to actually read tarot in a way that doesn't depend on memorizing definitions or forcing you to remember like a giant-ass list of meanings. I'll walk you through how to approach a card from a visual and psychological perspective first. And then, I'll give you several card examples so that you can start seeing exactly how this works in practice. So we'll also be talking more about why readings can feel so weirdly accurate, psychologically, as well. And by the end, I will also offer you a very practical exercise that you can immediately try yourself so you can walk away feeling like you actually understand how to start reading tarot from an intuitive perspective. So if that sounds interesting to you, you can join me over on Patreon at patreon.com/backfromtheborderline. And honestly, if you're not quite ready to become a paid member yet, you can still join my Patreon for free right now. I'm restarting my weekly newsletters over there that I used to do on Substack. So every Wednesday, you'll receive my weekly writings along with previews of Patreon exclusive episodes and content. So you can totally enter the ecosystem for free now and decide later whether you want to go deeper. And also, please know that my inner work platform Moods is also live now. And you can go there at Moods.world. One of the most exciting things about Moods is how it allows you to build an actual daily tarot practice. You can pull cards, journal with them, and even have Moods help tutor you through interpreting the readings in the same style that we've been talking about in this episode. Through reflective interpretation and image analysis. And I really think the combination of Patreon and Moods together is so powerful because Patreon members also get discounted access to Moods. So you can get my highest Patreon tier plus full Moods access for under $30 a month, which gives you a huge amount of material and reflection tools and exclusive episodes. All of it is ongoing practice for you to work with. So every Patreon episode I've been releasing since the launch of Moods is meant to become another doorway into using it more intentionally and deeply. So if you want all of that, the links are in the episode description. And with that, I will love you and leave you and remind you as I always do that anyone, including you, can come back from the borderline. I'll see you next time. If this episode brought something up with you, don't just leave it here. Take it into Moods. Start your seven day free trial at Moods.world and use code founders at checkout to lock in early pricing. That's code founders at Moods.world.