Food Fortunes Tarot Cards,style A,tarot deck

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The goal is not to throw out facts, truth or science, says Dore – but to make room for magic, long “relegated to the edges”. Her preferred definition is from the anonymous Christian author of the Meditations on the Tarot: using the subtle to influence the dense. After nearly 100 years of work to ground psychology in evidence and empirical studies, we might see such idiosyncratic influences as outside the scientific scope. But all through human history, spirituality has factored into concepts of mental health and wellbeing – not necessarily reductively. The Extinction Rebellion co-founder Gail Bradbrook and feminist scholar Angela Davis have likewise spoken of something akin to Dore’s definition of magic in their activism: the possibility of achieving what seems impossible now. On TikTok, tarot cards are drawn by algorithms. Even the Sun newspaper recently published its own guide to major and minor arcana, a surefire sign of steady online search traffic for spiritual guidance. Tarot is among a range of mystic practices to have seen a mainstream resurgence in recent years. Most obvious is astrology, now almost adjacent to psychoanalysis in our shared lexicon – but there’s also psychics, reincarnation, supportive spiritual energies (such as with manifesting), and even witchcraft.

Even if magic is a leap too far, in “reclaiming the imagination from the grips of doubt and rationalism”, tarot may at least allow us to imagine a better world: the first step to creating it. As well as serving as a prompt for introspection, the cards’ storied past made Dore think of history repeating – circular narratives and mirror images through literature, folklore and legends. “It felt very nourishing for me, just to be like: ‘Someone drew this illustration; someone created these various interpretations – that means that I’m not alone.’”

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Jessica Dore holds tarot cards at her home in Pennsylvania. ‘You’re not predicting the future – you’re really just exploring.’ Photograph: Caroline Gutman/The Guardian Dore is clear about the limits to this: tarot is not therapy, just as she is not a therapist (though she received clinical training as part of her master’s degree). But that is not to say there is no therapeutic benefit to projecting our inner lives on to a card. For those people who don’t feel spoken to by some of the interventions that are evidenced-based, tarot makes a doorway for people to show up and say: ‘Here’s what I need’, instead of telling them: ‘Here’s what you need’,” she says. Dore, too, writes of the chariot card and the limits to willpower: “Capitalism isn’t built to teach pathfinding; it’s built to teach compliance within a preset path.” But she suggests that tarot could reveal another way – as stories and symbols have always done, separate from any question of whether they are rooted in fact.

As the German philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote in 1953, of the popularity of astrology: “the kind of retrogression highly characteristic of persons who do not any longer feel to be the self-determining subjects of their fate, is concomitant with a fetishistic attitude towards the very same conditions which tend to be dehumanizing them”. When she started her nightly ritual of drawing cards, Dore found that what emerged gave shape to her thoughts and feelings in the same way as a writing prompt might. The eight of swords – communicating a sense of feeling victimised, or trapped – for instance, might cause Dore to reflect on whether she was avoiding any difficult emotions. The tarot cards told Julie all sorts regarding the ongoing royal feud (Image: Youtube/Northumberland Witch Tarot)Considered in this light, tarot has more in common than one might think with therapy. As Dore points out, Carl Jung studied archetypes, symbols and synchronicity in seeking to understand the human psyche.