⮜ An atheist/non-spiritual approach to tarot

I am not a spiritual person. While I recognize these are important to many people, spirituality, magic, “magick”, and “metaphysics” are not practices I follow or believe in. When people talk about crystals, reiki, astrology, things like that, the best they’ll get from me is a polite nod and a tight smile while I hold back opinions that I know they won’t like.

However. I will go to bat for tarot (and oracle decks et al). I find them incredibly useful tools, and not because of card spirits or any divinatory power within a deck. I regularly read tarot as a meditative and reflective practice, and I know other atheist tarot-readers as well.

Why am I making this exception when other magick makes me roll my eyes? Well, I think tarot works in a way the others don’t. If you’re an atheist and looking for a rational explanation for tarot as opposed to a “magickal” one, the one-word answer is: semiotics.

Semiotics is the study of the communication of meaning via signs. A sign is anything that represents some other concept. A crown is not just an object one wears on their head: it’s a sign of royalty, authority, and power. A rose is not just a plant: it’s a sign of passion and love. Semiosis is the act of understanding and creating signs, i.e. interpreting meaning within a certain context. I’m no expert on semiotics as a field, so I won’t go too far into its nuances, but for this purpose, signs are symbols.

That means when you think of a crown, or a sword, or a cup, it’s not just the object, but also the semiotics and symbols you associate with the object. These connotation come from stories (fictional or nonfictional), cultural customs, linguistic quirks, education, the news, and, crucially, personal experiences. And tarot is chock-full of these semiotic signs. I’d guess a single tarot card probably has like 5 pieces of symbolism on it at minimum. It could be an object, an action being taken in the card, the colors, the composition of the illustration, the words written on it. Even if you know literally nothing about tarot or the deck I’m using, if I pull out a card that looks like this* and say “this is you”, you might have some guesses as to what it means:

This is even more nuanced due to the connotations and semiotics that tarot itself has constructed for itself over the decades. In tarot, the suit, rank, and arcana also contain their own meanings. While “the devil”, “the lovers” or “death” are signs with very obvious meanings for a lay person, the cards’ usual meanings aren’t quite what you’d expect if you’re not familiar with tarot.

Still, if you ignore literally all the tarot-specific symbolism and semiotics, and go with what you see in front of you, then it becomes very clear that tarot, in the end, is all about telling a story for yourself, about yourself and your experiences. Like i alluded to before, it’s not just the common understandings of symbols that are important for tarot. What is probably more important, in my opinion, is what you personally have as associations with a certain symbol. This is where the card art and symbols of the deck you’ve chosen become REALLY important.

For example, the Ten of Cups generally means family, celebration, and harmony. It traditionally looks like this:

In the card, you can see several signs: a countryside, a happy couple, children playing, a rainbow, and plentiful cups floating in the air because symbolism.

However, in my favorite deck, the Chromatic Fates tarot, the Ten of Cups looks like this:

I don’t associate that card, in my deck, to be a good thing. I’ve had terrible experiences with family and alcoholism, so whenever I pull a reading with the Ten of Cups, I go “uh-oh”. That “uh-oh”, or any other emotion I might have that is elicited by the signs of the card, is what makes tarot specific and personal.

The lens by which you read the cards is a microcosm of the lens you’re using to look at life in the context you exist in. If you are seeing life from a biased lens–which we usually are at all times–then that bias will reflect back at you based on what you notice in the cards vs what you don’t, out of the several symbols present. For example, of I were to look at the traditional Ten of Cups card and see the children playing, and I’ve desperately wanted to have kids with my partner but couldn’t, I might see it as a melancholy or mocking card–focusing on the children and dismissing the rainbow entirely. If I were coming out as queer, I might see the rainbow as a sign that my family will be accepting, and not really care about whatever the ten floating cups are supposed to mean right now. And so on.

Tarot, like all stories we tell ourselves, is a mirror held up to our own life, personality, and experiences. You see what you expect to see, what you think you should see. And here is the secret sauce to tarot: unlike in other cases where that may be seen as lying to yourself or self-perpetuating some thought pattern or being blind to the truth…in tarot, the expectation for what you want/hope/dread/expect to see is the truth. Because the truth is not divination–it never was. It’s “What am I feeling right now? What am I seeing?”