Mystic Ways Books

Tarot for Chris­tians: Lessons from Christ’s Fool

“I WANT TO do a book about tarot,” I told my agent.

Silence.

“Hello?” I said into the phone. “You still there?”

She hung up on me.

“You hung up on me,” I said to her when I called back.

“No,” she said. “I hung up on a crazy per­son who needs supervision.”

“You don’t want the book?”

“I don’t know what to do with a book for Chris­tians about tarot.”

That’s the reac­tion so many of us have. Tarot is a set of 78 pieces of rec­tan­gle card­stock and ink. You have 78 cartoon-like draw­ings, and we fear them like each one is done with some kind of mate­r­ial that is cor­ro­sive to the soul. If you’re a proper Chris­t­ian, you don’t like the images or what they rep­re­sent (regard­less of what that might be).

The most pop­u­lar deck in use today was drawn by a woman who spe­cial­ized in illus­tra­tions for children’s books. But we pack all kinds of over­tones and innu­en­dos and power and angst into these 78 sketches.

There was a time when I hated tarot. I was afraid of it because my fam­ily told me that hat­ing the cards is what all good lit­tle Chris­tians would do.

I was a good lit­tle Chris­t­ian. Being a good boy is what made me want to live. It made me a solid mem­ber of the Chris­t­ian com­mu­nity because I bound myself to the same rules and atti­tudes of every­one else.

When I ques­tioned the order of things, my par­ents reminded me that I was just a kid. They said there were experts who denounced things like tarot. When I asked why, they told me it was obvi­ous. They said that I was try­ing to “know bet­ter” than the really smart peo­ple who went to great schools and uni­ver­si­ties and had their names fes­tooned with let­ters of honor: Rev­erend and Doc­tor and PhD and ThD and MA.

Nobody can know every­thing about every­thing. We had too many top­ics to mas­ter, and I should leave “for­tune telling” alone because the experts said it was the devil’s work. When I asked them were tarot was men­tioned in the Bible, they got angry. They said I was invit­ing Satan into my soul.

They’d start quot­ing the Old Tes­ta­ment: “If a per­son turns to medi­ums and necro­mancers, whor­ing after them, I will set my face against that per­son and will cut him off from among his peo­ple.” Leviti­cus is always the Go To Book for big­ots and scalawags.

They warned me not to give tarot and astrol­ogy the time of day.

Now after Jesus was born in Beth­le­hem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, say­ing, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to wor­ship him.
[Matthew 2:1–2]

Wait. What? The stars told the three wise men to come visit Jesus in the manger. They came to visit from the East. Holy men from the East. If I add up those num­bers, carry the one, scrunch my eyes just so… the three wise men were actu­ally astrologers, and they were com­ing from Per­sia (now Iran).

Mommy slapped me when I sug­gested that, of course. You can’t “un-think” some­thing like that. I knew the Magi were into astrol­ogy. Those sly Iran­ian geezers on camels were plot­ting the stars.

Mommy said it was bet­ter to accept their teach­ing on satanic things like tarot. They didn’t want me to stir the pot.

“The best way to turn muddy water into clear water,” she said, “is to leave it alone.”

My ears always turn that kind of admo­ni­tion into a dare.

—– 

Jesus founded two churches. Most peo­ple today know about the sec­ond one, but the orig­i­nal group is more fun.

Our Mas­ter hung out with all the wrong kinds of peo­ple dur­ing His earthly ministry.

He was a party guy. The first mir­a­cle passed down to us in the gospels was chang­ing water into wine at a wed­ding celebration.

“Dude!” I imag­ine myself say­ing at that wed­ding party in Cana.[1]

Jesus hung with scoundrels and the sick and the scum of soci­ety. He cared about pris­on­ers and kept crowds of bul­lies away from the disenfranchised.

Soci­ety hated them because they weren’t up to society’s stan­dards. Fol­low­ers of Jesus weren’t proper peo­ple. They were riffraff, une­d­u­cated herds of ruf­fi­ans. The hoi polloi.

I love rab­ble rousers. Jesus appar­ently fit in nicely. He was such an out­sider that his own peo­ple had him mur­dered, killed by the upstand­ing cit­i­zens. They said he was such a crim­i­nal that he didn’t deserve to live.

[1] Cana doesn’t exist today. It was prob­a­bly a vil­lage in what is North­ern Israel. A few think it was in the south­ern part of mod­ern Lebanon.

—– 

Con­stan­tine (272–337) started the sec­ond Chris­t­ian church. He was the Roman emperor who first said Chris­tian­ity was proper. He did it for polit­i­cal rea­sons more than anything.

Con­stan­tine told Roman soci­ety that it was okay to be a Chris­t­ian. Cit­i­zens who wanted to suck up to the emperor left their non-Christian reli­gions as fast as their brown-nosing char­i­ots could race.

After politi­cians and middle-managers got their hands on the dogma, every­thing changed. The cross — Christianity’s cen­tral sym­bol — went from a crude depic­tion of a dying man to a styl­ized fig­ure in vest­ments and jewels.

—– 

I have lots of non-Christian friend. Many of them don’t like “the church.” It’s like two camps, and they can’t stand each other. What my non-Christian friends don’t like is the sec­ond church of Con­stan­tine. I think lots of them would find our Mas­ter an absolute hoot. They’d like the lib­eral / paci­fist / activist who par­tied with society’s riffraff.

—– 

My cousins fit into the sec­ond incar­na­tion of the Chris­t­ian church. I don’t and never did.

I can see my cousins wince at the idea that their cousin would write a book sug­gest­ing that such a devil’s tool as tarot could be use­ful, a set of mer­i­to­ri­ous flash cards with use­ful lessons to help us grow and flourish.

My cousins will be call­ing me a sor­cerer over this book. If that’s what they think, I will just turn the other cheek (or turn the other adverb, or what­ever one turns in this sit­u­a­tion). It isn’t true. If I were a sor­cerer, my cousins would be cov­ered in warts by now. I won’t cor­rect them because I think it’s cute. Also, it’s a dis­tinc­tion that gives me the edge at fam­ily pic­nics and the invari­able “dis­cus­sions” at those outings.

Those of us who fit into the Master’s orig­i­nal church group don’t fit neatly into the sec­ond group.

“Don’t talk to that hea­then, Johnny,” I can hear my cousins say. “He’s evil.”

—– 

The truth is far less dra­matic. I use tarot as flash cards. They chal­lenge my nog­gin with­out drag­ging words into the dis­cus­sion. They are so jam-packed with imagery and sym­bols that there’s an almost inex­haustible sup­ply of novel facets that attack my pre­con­ceived assump­tions about the spir­i­tual world.

They’re great, and they annoy my cousins, which makes them even more valuable.

Tarot speaks to the right side of my brain.

My left-brain gets assaulted with words and ideas from all kinds of places, but my artis­tic right-brain is ignored in my mod­ern, internet-savvy daily life.

The left-brain is where engi­neers live. It’s ana­lyt­i­cal and pre­cise. It’s so busy being accu­rate with the botany that it for­gets to notice that a red rose is one of God’s cre­ations that deserves a stand­ing ovation.

Tarot presents images — arche­types — to my right brain. It com­mu­ni­cates with images instead of words. I see and rec­og­nize, with­out hav­ing to parse and translate.

The rose is just the rose.

The peo­ple who design tarot decks add titles at the bot­tom of each card: magi­cian, devil, moon, and tem­per­ance. It sends those of us with left-brain afflic­tions into tail­spins. Words on so many of the cards are just a ruse. We can get a hint about the mean­ings, but the minute we start tak­ing those let­ters too seri­ously, the whole thing goes south.

I’ve more insights by star­ing at the images and let­ting my brain wan­der. When I see some­thing that is in con­tradis­tinc­tion to some expert’s real­ity, the expert loses. Sorry, experts.

—– 

I’ve used tarot cards as flash cards since I was a lit­tle kid.

For years, I’d cut my tarot deck to select one card in the morn­ing. It was my card of the day. I’d carry that card with me and stare at it when I had some downtime.

Some days I’d look at the card. Some days the card would look back at me. It was a dance.

When I’m writ­ing one of my fic­tional nov­els, I get into a rut from time to time. My secret for writer’s block: cut the tarot deck and select a card. It isn’t that there is some kind of cos­mic something-or-other going on. Maybe there is; maybe not. The point is that the image on the ran­dom card mounts an assault on my writer’s block. The sym­bol­ism, the arche­type, in the image shakes what­ever was caus­ing my men­tal con­sti­pa­tion. It has worked over and over.

—– 

I did an actual tarot read­ing one time too. Once. It was sort of a read­ing. I laid out the cards and con­sulted a big book to see what each posi­tion was sup­posed to tell me. It was awful. I am the most inept prog­nos­ti­ca­tor in the his­tory of tarot. Every time I tried to take that read­ing seri­ously, I burst into laughter.

My guardian angel was laugh­ing at me. Hosts of cheru­bim and seraphim were laugh­ing so hard that they started pass­ing gas, and that isn’t a pretty thing to happen.

As a result of that read­ing, I swore off the practice.

If you want to learn how to “read” the cards and tell the future, I’m not the one to come to. I haven’t any advice.

What’s more, I don’t think the future is any of my business.

The past is the past. It doesn’t even exist. The only way we can inter­act with the past is to think about it, and that think­ing is hap­pen­ing NOW. Bad thoughts about the past include shame and regret. Those are just thoughts, and they can ruin the present.

Same thing for the future. It doesn’t exist. We can only think about it, and our think­ing hap­pens NOW. Bad thoughts of the future can be dread and fear, but they’re just thought pat­ters. The future doesn’t exist, and our bad thought only muck up the present.

If you want to get your head off into the future, that’s all up to you. I have enough trou­ble with NOW. Adding time-shifts to my NOW com­pli­cates things beyond pleasure.