Tarot: 'But I Don't Know What Any of the Cards Mean'

I have discovered that there is a book called The Upside-Down Bible by a chap called Symon Hill. I haven't read it but he has my instant attention by beginning an article about the book,

THREE YEARS AGO I was in a fetish club in the Midlands, leading a workshop on the Bible.

We were surrounded by a variety of interesting equipment, along with notices emphasising the importance of consent. In a small circle, I shared biblical passages with people attending a fetish-related conference in the venue.

We looked at Luke 7, in which a woman kisses Jesus’ feet. “It’s pretty kinky, isn’t it?” responded one participant. Source

What he has done is find a way of enabling people to see how people see the bible completely afresh, without any of the conditioning and assumptions created by repeated reading, commentaries, church interpretations, etc. He says he found this an absolute revelation.

I am of course familiar with how this happens and how this external clutter hides what is actually happening in the bible. The classic example of course is the sin of Sodom, which let me tell you is NOTHING to do with taking it up the bum.

I feel a similar thing happens with tarot. There are of course some major differences, the main one being that nobody will say that a particular interpretation of the tarot is divinely inspired, and the other being that a tarot reading is the classic magical act of divination so is intended to open up something in the reader or querent to enable them to see what is happening, rather than simply telling them. 

Let me be very clear that there is nothing wrong with looking up meanings in the little white book that comes with the deck, because that in itself gives you a number of possibilities that you will consciously or subconsciously choose from. But I think the frameworks we learn tarot in function exactly like the learned interpretations of the bible: they stop us seeing helpful stuff.

The closest I've got to reading tarot with people who have no knowledge of it in recent years is when Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust (set of cunts) punished me by moving me to Urgent Care. Suddenly I found i was reading tarot for all my new colleagues in the Section 136 suite and it was a real eye-opener.

One guy I'd already known for years told me he'd wondered if I was a witch but was still surprised to find I read tarot (which is just as bizarre written down as it was when he said it). To my surprise I literally threw down some cards and despite having next to no knowledge, he was off doing his own reading. He could see himself and other people and brought this straight to a conclusion which was so obviously accurate for him. Yet it was also completely divorced from anything you'll read in the books that it was obvious he was a natural.

The way he did it was literally just that he recognized himself and others in the cards by the way they behaved and related. It took minutes, if that. If you want a formal name for a similar technique the Tarot School of New York teaches a technique called the Voice in the Card, where you literally just let your eye wander over a card and let some detail grab your attention. The thing was this guy had done it with the whole thing and taken it up a notch because he recognized himself and someone else.

Another difference between tarot and bible reading is that in tarot reading it is acceptable to project your own shit into the cards, because that's the point. Of course people do that with the bible as well, but that's a whole other thing. One of the theories about how tarot works is literally just that you project in a classic psychodynamic sense, onto the reading and engage with it that way. You either ignore or weigh up aspects you don't recognize.

So what I mean is if you abandon the textbook 'meanings', you're in more of a position to project your own stuff without finding your mother in there. That's a joke. If you're looking at the Empress it's a bit difficult not to see a mother of some sort.

A very good way to get to this is to describe the card without setting out to interpret it. You may think you're describing it objectively but this is actually what brings out what's happening for you.

A perfect example was another of my then colleagues who got Judgement in a quite important place in her reading. Textbook meanings can be, a judgement, an accounting, rebirth, and it can have some fairly heavy meanings around what might happen after death. None of them made any sense and she wasn't running with it so in desperation I asked her to describe the card to me. 

It was the nudity. All she could say was 'All those nude people', and this did in fact have a great meaning for her in the reading which she was then able to tell me. It was about people being exposed for who they were!

So to summarize, I wouldn't necessarily advocate never having any formal meanings because the world the tarot describes is pretty freaky, but sometimes an 'untutored' view is helpful and reveals the querent's own disposition. Ways to unlock this are to get them to describe the card or even tell a story with them. 

Because it's possible the Moon only references the anus if you know it does. 🤔