How Tarot Cards Contribute to Big Picture Thinking (Hint: It Has Nothing to Do with Divination)

If you've been reading this blog, it's already pretty clear that I like deriving meaning from dreams, tarot, and astrological charting (haven't done much with the I Ching). Those of you who fear or loathe these tools or practices can leave now.

For the rest of you who are slightly more open, perhaps with a tinge of skepticism, here is how tarot cards contribute to Big Picture thinking.

A single tarot card has several layers of meaning. Available to bring into any interpretation are:

• symbols
• numbers
• colors
• assigned names
• traditional associations of positive/negative cast (e.g., death, devil, lovers)
• classes (major, minor, court)
• characters
• scene
• foreground/background perspectives
• upright or reversed nature of card

A set of tarot cards, organized into a "spread," also has several layers of meaning. Elements contributing to the overall interpretation include:

• the question posed by the querent/client
• cards within assigned card positions
• card incidence (e.g., concentration of reversals, majors, courts; no concentration of any one type of card)
• card sequence from right to left (e.g., do smaller-numbered cards tend to appear at the left?)
• card juxtapositions (e.g., card pairs)
• card characters in relationship across cards (facing toward or away)
• "flying" cards - those that fling themselves out or upright during a face-down card shuffle

My most favorite readings are those comprehensive, wholistic tarot readings that don't come from a brute force computation of all of these attributes. They evoke a big picture and then draw in the details.

It's that learning how to do this that is the challenge.

Let me illustrate by sharing an anecdote.

Truth be told, I started learning how to read tarot cards because I thought it would be good exercise in data analysis.

As a research analyst, I draw conclusions and derive recommendations from many datapoints. I put data into tables, look up and down and across data, synthesize, draw conclusions, and derive recommendations. I need to take into account other factors as well, such as who was invited to provide input, what was asked, how was it asked, what was said, who said what, and what happened within the organization, when, that could color the input.

Tarot cards have pictures and color, I thought, unlike means and standard deviations. They're sure prettier to look at. Should make it easier, no?

I read the books, took several classes, and learned many meanings. Armed with all this possibility, I discovered my brain, even with its experience in reading and processing data, couldn't compute all of the information the cards provided fast enough, and tuckered out before producing a fat, layered cohesive story. So I gave up.

I picked up the cards again several years later because I became interested in dreamwork as a self-discovery, self-growth kind of practice, and sometimes in dreamwork, we draw tarot cards to see what connects.

I got back to being curious instead of dejected - and was bound and determined not to go back to the exhaustive - and exhausting - computational tarot reading method.

Instead of working across a spread, card by card, I jot down first impressions of the what the whole spread means in the context of the question - without thinking! - then work from there to the next level, which for me is card concentrations. This is one of my exercises with the cards - the freeweights and fitness ball for that Big Picture muscle.