Tarot Pages
Tarot For Fiction and Introspection * Why Tarot Speaks To Us * Grab A Deck * The Fool’s Journey * Elements And Alchemy * Numerology: The Story of Creation * Court Cards * Seeds For Stories * My Tarot Stories
When you’re stuck in your writing or journaling and writing prompts don’t seem to help, not even freewriting is getting you anywhere, I suggest you pull a card. Many tarot loving writers have used this method to develop characters, their background, or plot lines.
This is possible because tarot is not just about fortune telling. Its history is spotty and debated, but it has been around a long time, and refined over the ages to reflect nearly every aspect of the human experience through symbols. Symbols conveyed through art. Art can move us, inspire us, and this art has been refined to communicate the same things that we wish to communicate as writers; the lessons we learn as we live our lives.
To keep it brief, it’s a collection of archetypes, recurring symbols or themes in our lives, and roles we play such as mother, teacher, rebel, or thief. Archetypes like these help us tell ourselves the story of our own life. Carl Jung, frienemy of Freud, knew all about it. There’s even a tarot deck based on his theories aimed at using them for psychological growth.
The history of the tarot, including the fortune telling aspect, is part of why we can also use it either for psychological introspection or for story telling. In order to be used to predict events, the cards need to express a great deal of information. A system was designed to help the reader explore a rich variety of meaning to pull out what “feels” right.
This symbolism has a visual language that many writers or other creative people have already studied. Let’s start with an apple. You know how to explore the sensual experience of eating an apple, the way it makes you feel, and how to combine that with our mental associations of apple pie (or Eve’s temptation) for artistic communication. As such, the apple conveys both innocence and temptation through its succulence.
Every tarot card does that, offering symbols that have layers of meaning to explore limitless possibilities within a focused context. You might make a collection of poems about rage and include poems about family, work, murder, and healing from anger. Each individual card has the same range of potential; a world of meaning, designed to move you on a deep level.
On top of the archetypal aspects, you have 78 pocket-sized works of art in a wide variety of styles to inspire you. Only one deck is needed, but you might end up with more. Collecting decks can be fun, is relatively affordable, and each deck has its own voice.
Now, because I want to encourage others to play, and would love it if you gave this a try and then shared your results with me, I’m going to give you a quick tour of how to use the tarot in your writing. We’ll start with why they can feel so spot-on sometimes.
A note about gender in the tarot: the genders represented aren’t necessarily related to biological sex – a queen may refer to someone who identifies as male, but contain more receptive energy than projective, while still being perceived as strong). While the symbolism is often cishet, the tarot is intended to be gender fluid in interpretation, letting our intuition fill in the blanks. This allows us to explore everyone in our lives. Many decks have alternate or genderless imagery. When I mention gender, I speak of the traditional symbolism when it pertains to meaning.
First, let’s address whether or not there are messages hidden in the cards.
Tarot Pages
Tarot For Fiction and Introspection * Why Tarot Speaks To Us * Grab A Deck * The Fool’s Journey * Elements And Alchemy * Numerology: The Story of Creation * Court Cards * Seeds For Stories * My Tarot Stories
Tippitiwichet 