#I don't know if magic exists or ESP or the supernatural or any number of deities

[cookinguptales]

Thank you so much for the tarot reading you did for me a little while back 💜 i'm sorry it's taken me so long to say that! i do rather think you have prophetic gifts, by the way- it was spookily accurate and helped me a lot 🔮

No problem! I'm glad it was helpful to you!

I do tend to get at least one message like this every time I do a tarot night for my followers, and like... you are totally entitled to that belief! What do I know about psychic phenomena and prophecy anyway? lmao. Maybe I am psychic.

But personally, I believe that tarot has a high likelihood of speaking to us no matter what, if just because the archetypal nature of the cards means that they're dealing with problems that we all struggle with. We all have self-doubt, we all have complicated relationships with money, we all crave love of some kind. We all have trauma in our past and we all want to believe that this time, things could be okay.

One of the reasons I like tarot cards is because they are inanimate objects that we imbue with meaning. They were just playing cards, y'know? We're the ones that gave them power over us, and we did that by filling them with our own stories. We placed a mirror in those cards, and while mirrors can be used for scrying, they can also just be used to take a good hard look at ourselves.

If I say "oh, you've had money troubles in the past," who doesn't that apply to? Maybe I'm thinking about me, when we were homeless for a while when I was a kid. Maybe someone else is thinking about the money they lost to gambling last week. Maybe someone else, someone wildly wealthy, is thinking about a stock market crash that brought their five mansions down to two. Maybe a final person has just never had quite enough to make ends meet. God knows that describes a lot of people.

I like tarot because we can all look at the same spread and see something different. I see a story to tell to the best of my ability, and that's how I do readings. But for the people getting those readings, they're often looking into little mirrors and seeing how they reflect their own personal experiences.

Because, you know, we all see different things in the same mirror! That's how tarot works, I think. Maybe some people are a little better at reading things in that mirror and interpreting what they see there, but we all see something new and different and deeply, deeply personal when we look at those cards.

Love that for us.

#that's what I eventually ended up studying in college btw #the way people construct personalized belief systems and vernacular religion #I got into religious studies to make sense of the world after I got out of an abusive religious background #and people always ask me what religion I am now #and I always say... y'know... I don't know what I believe #I don't know if magic exists or ESP or the supernatural or any number of deities #I don't know if I fully believe anything anymore #but I do believe in the power of stories #how we tell them and why we tell them and the parts of us that we mix into them to bolster their power #stories can ease a broken heart or they can be used to launch a war #they can create a belief system or tear one apart #we tell stories to make meaning out of the senselessness around us but we use them to CREATE meaning too #and sometimes the meaning that we create can last for centuries #they can make a little pack of playing cards into something that I was forbidden to touch when I was a child #that I was too scared to even be in the room with until I was in college #and the stories I tell myself instead can reframe those cards as something lovely I can collect #that help me make sense of the world in all kinds of ways #by helping me understand the emotions at the root of our experiences #and the stories we tell to give voice to them #and make them material; a thing we can finally touch #idk I'm rambling a bit but! those are my thoughts on the matter!! #replies #tarot #tarot shenanigans