Because the universe is a bit random, divination methods have to be as well.
If you want that in more technical language, it is probably the embodiment of the principle of 'as above, so below'. The cards show the events of the invisble and material worlds, and because the unexpected can always happen, the cards have some surprises up their sleeves. What I specifically mean here, is that it would be very wrong to say, for example, that you have got at *the* meaning of a tarot card. Any divination method worth its salt will be able to jump up and surprise you with something completely unexpected. And this variance is found in the different ways of understanding tarot cards, which are all ultimately ways of assigning experiences or events to a particular card. It is also a common experience that particular understanding will come or go as the student is ready.
I was reminded of this when working a night shift recently. It was a very quiet night and my two colleagues and myself sat and I showed them some tarot cards on my phone. They had never even seen the cards before, and the only thing I told them was that they work by the reader projecting onto the card their own inner world so that the person's psychology is revealed by how they see the actual images. I was very interested to find that from a literally standing start both of them were absolute naturals, and in fact just by seeing how two people without preconceptions would see tarot cards, I actually learned a lot about what they can show. Of course it helped that the two people were intelligent and open to the idea of just describing a picture and making connections.
This little experiment reinforces the conviction I have had forever that it isn't really possible to be dogmatic about how to read the cards. In fact anyone can read them - as long as the deck is a pictorial one. In fact I have always suspected that the snobbery about the Marseille tarot is a way of keeping it in the hands of a clique of 'experts'. The major way of understanding the tarot cards for the past century has been looking at them and seeing what they show.
It is also very apparent to me that because so many people have had a go at creating maps of the universe over the centuries, different ones will come into play for an individual at different times. One I have previously tried to learn and actually did understand at one point, is the attribution of the tarot cards to the qabalistic Tree of Life. This is of course a venerable magical way of understanding the universe. My personal difficulty with it as it relates to tarot is that I always think the Majors should be on the sephiroth and the Minors on the paths, rather than the other way round, which always seems to me to imply that the Minors influence the Majors. The other major arguments about the Tree and the tarot (such as whether or not tsaddi is the Star - if you want to know about this one you really will have to look elsewhere on the internet) suggest to me that the Golden Dawn attempted to marry the tree and the tarot and there are a few problems.
They succeeded better with astrological correspondences - this is of course my personal opinion, and I think the reason they succeeeded better was that they actually moved the tarot round to fit the astrological signs. I don't have a problem with that, myself, since the point I started this post with was that divination systems have to be mutable to cope with the chaotic nature of the universe. I never got on well with this system, and in fact always found astrology rather implausible until two things happened. Don't get me wrong, the sort of free-form witch I am absorbs knowledge by conduction rather than anything else so that I am unlikely ever to internalise a complicated magical system, but astrology's worth was suddenly revealed to me. I have a friend who is a much more studious witch than me, and she commented to me that I don't seem at all like an Aries to her, much more like a Taurus. I swear I hadn't already told her this, but the fact is that I should have been a Taurus: I was born a month early. I simply couldn't wait to get out of my mother, and I wasn't receiving enough nourishment or developing properly so I was born at a bouncing 3lb 2oz and am a month older than I should be. My friend had correctly divined that actually I was functioning as if I was a different star sign, the one I should have been born under!
The other thing which brought home to me that there may be something about is a sudden conjunction between the astrological understanding of the tarot and my own understanding of the cards. I found among my notes on tarot, the cards attributed by the Golden Dawn to Leo, which is my mother's sign. Regular readers will know that my relationship with my mother is at best ambivalent and at worst totally conflictual, so it comes as no surprise to me what her birth sign's cards are (pictured). I can see my mother in those pictures clear as anything, in fact they look like a family album!
The astrological attributions of the cards have therefore become my current understanding of choice. Of course I may return to the qabala at some point and being me, reserve the right to understand the cards as I damn well please. Personally I find the Inappropriate Tarot tumblr very very revealing indeed, and am currently reading a book called Tarot for Grownups. The journey of tarot literally never ends, but the reader can find himself on different pathways as he goes along.
