An Oneirological Style of Tarot "Divination"

This is something a little different than usual; it's not a story, but rather an explanation of a new process of non-divinatory Tarot interpretation modeled after dreams (hence 'oneirological'). This may be of interest to those with an interest in the history and process of divination through cards, though (as I explain) it is not really itself a form of divination. I offer it, then, as an illustration of the versatility of the Tarot and its completeness as a symbolic system. As a sidenote, I have adopted E.A. Waite's stylistic choice to generally refer to the diviner in masculine terms and the querent in feminine, as he does in the Key To The Tarot.

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AN ONEIROLOGICAL STYLE OF TAROT “DIVINATION”
Dominic E. Lacasse

The process of divination via Tarot cards dates to the sixteenth century, and possibly even earlier. Since this time there have been elucidated a great number of guides to the interpretation of the cards, and with each guide we see a different set of assumptions regarding precisely what is happening on the diviner’s board. These assumptions involve questions of the actual meaning of the cards (do we interpret them according to our own perceptions of their meaning, or according to the esoteric standards developed by our predecessors in the art?) the issue of which cards fall and in what sequence (is this totally random, or is it affected? If it is affected, is it affected by the diviner, or the querent, or some third party, perhaps spiritual?) the issue of interpretive priority (does the diviner tell the querent what the cards mean, or does the querent herself assign meaning?) and the place of the diviner (is he a spiritual medium, a psychologist, a scholar?) For each guide to Tarot interpretation we receive a different set of answers to these questions, and thus the act of Tarot interpretation is not a singular tradition but rather a pluralistic one; the Tarot is not a unified process maintained inviolate since time immemorial, but a common theme among a vast array of widely differing traditions.

It is in this spirit that I introduce what I understand to be a new approach to the nature and function of Tarot interpretation. This approach, as I will explain, will seem radically alien to many scholars of the ‘classical’ Tarot divinatory style as expressed most popularly by E.A. Waite. My approach offers different answers to the questions above, and indeed reevaluates the assumption that Tarot is necessarily a form of ‘divination’ (though of course, I am not the first to offer a non-divinatory approach to the Tarot.)

In short, I hope to illustrate an approach to Tarot interpretation which I am calling, for lack of a better term, “oneirological”, that is, essentially, ‘dream-oriented’. It is my understanding that the Tarot can in fact be interpreted in much the same way as a dream is analyzed by the dreamer. The process is similar; we are given a set of data (be it understood to be random or somehow affected) which we then interpret according to inner logic and apply to our lives. I will begin by discussing the nature of the dream in this sense, followed by my interpretation of the Tarot in this scheme, and will finally relate the major differences in assumption between this style of Tarot interpretation and the classical divinatory Tarot.

In this understanding, a dream is understood to have two major components; the ‘content’ of the dream, wherein are included the images, emotions, thoughts, and experiences which comprise the actual ‘events’ of the dream, and also the ‘analysis’ of the dream, which may occur during the dream or after waking, but is distinguished as being a ‘detached’, external examination of the dream content; in short, the attempt to apply some sort of cohesive personal logic to the (often illogical) dream content. All dreams which are remembered by the dreamer have these two aspects. Let us examine them in detail.

The ‘content’ of the dream, as everyone knows, is capable of an incredible, almost limitless range of images. The imagery and events of any particular dream may be either completely alien to us or completely mundane, or any combination thereof. Similarly the emotions we experience in dream appear to encompass the complete range of all our waking emotions, from pleasant relaxation to sublime joy, from vague apprehension to speechless terror. These emotions often spontaneously arise as a result of seemingly confusing or counterintuitive dream imagery; the face of a beloved friend can produce feelings of abject hatred, or any number of common objects or experiences may produce entirely unexpected emotional responses. The content of dreams is thus chaotic (in the sense that it is changeable and unpredictable, not in the sense that every dream is a dream of chaos or a chaotic experience.)

The chaotic nature of dream content is what necessitates analysis. Dream analysis is the question therefore of ‘what dreams mean’. Even seemingly mundane dreams necessitate analysis, and perhaps simply because of the fact that they are dreams, mundane dream experiences tend to be analyzed in a deeper sense than the same experience having occurred in waking life. Even more so do we analyze the bizarre or confusing dreams, dreams in which cryptic images and events take on massive emotional significance. Detailed analysis is a natural human response to unfamiliar content- thus dream content and dream analysis cannot truly be separated in the question of what dreams are. Indeed, we often analyze even while still dreaming.

Often is the argument made that the meanings drawn from dream content through analysis are secondary and irrelevant to the dream data, which is itself random. The argument goes on to suggest that the process of analysis is essentially a secondary layer of interpretation, with no real connection to the dream itself. This argument, as I see it, is correct in one respect (that is, that dream content truly is random, or close to random) but flawed in another sense, which is that it seeks to drive apart content and analysis of dreams, to such an extent as to suggest that the one is really only tangentially related to the other, that the content is the ‘dream itself’ while the analysis, which comes later, is a kind of story ‘about’ the dream.

This would be the case in the event of one person analyzing another’s dream, however the crucial distinction where a single person is concerned is that the same thing which creates the dream (that is, the mind) also analyzes the dream. The logic applied to dream content is not scientific logic but the internal symbolic thought processes of the individual; thus when a person analyzes his own dreams, the conclusions he reaches are not those that would necessarily be reached by any other person having heard about the dream, or having even experienced the dream.

The analysis, like the content itself, is a personal matter, and is thus not really a secondary explanation of the dream in logical terms, but rather a profoundly personal psychological explication of dream content. This is why decisions about what dreams ‘mean’ often only make sense to the person who has had the dream; dreams are explained to the self, not to others. Thus dream content and dream analysis are two parts of what is really a single process, this process being the mind’s evaluation of its own contents.

What we have then is a model wherein the following occurs in the process of having a dream: First, in the state of REM sleep, the subconscious is bombarded with a series of images and emotions. These are the regular contents of the waking mind (whether conscious or subconscious), arranged in what appear to be essentially random configurations. Most of this information has absolutely no relevance (or more correctly, is of absolutely no interest) and this perhaps explains why, as science has demonstrated, the vast majority of our dreams are never remembered. If we cared enough to remember our dreams we would have five or six per night; most people have only two or three per week.

However, certain configurations of the contents of our minds are new to us or perhaps inform us (purely by chance) about some previously unknown way of looking at some thing or another. It is these dreams which we remember; they are memorable because, as we say, they ‘tell us something’ (although really the content comes first and the analysis second, even if this happens during the dream itself). The degree of ‘normality’ that a dream has seems to correspond to the degree to which we think we understand the issue in question; thus we may have a completely mundane dream about, say, driving our car, and many aspects will be almost exactly like normal waking life, but it is the incongruous aspects (gearshift is a clown’s head) which indicate an attempt to gain understanding of something previously unknown or unconsidered. When we analyze our dreams, we draw in and correlate ideas in our minds which we believe to be related to these symbols, to explain to ourselves what it is the dream ‘means’. Thus the process of dream analysis is essentially reductive; we first subconsciously filter out and forget dream content which we consider irrelevant, and then we synthesize what remains with ideas we assign through our internal symbolic logic, and then we condense the result into what we call the ‘meaning’ of a dream.

Turning now to the Tarot, it is my understanding that Tarot interpretation can proceed in exactly the same fashion. In this case the Tarot deck (the full deck) stands in for the thoughts in our conscious and subconscious minds, the cards which are laid out during the reading represent specific dream content, and the pondering of the meaning and interrelationships of the cards represents dream analysis. In this way, a Tarot reading can be seen as essentially an ‘artificial dream.’

In this way, there need not be any aspect of ‘divination’ involved at all; the cards represent certain things (different things to different people, as will be discussed below) and they can be held to fall in a completely random manner, in any orientation, in any sequence, and at any place on the board in relation to the other cards drawn. Which cards come off the deck is also random (depending on the results of shuffling the cards) and which cards remain ‘unsaid’, i.e. never make it to the board, is therefore of course also determined purely by chance. In this way we have an event reminiscent of what happens when we dream; images and thoughts arrayed in completely random and totally unpredictable (unexpected) fashion, which are then interpreted as well as possible by the symbolic internal logic of the dreamer, or in the case of the Tarot, the querent. Thus we have a style of Tarot interpretation which is profoundly personal, which has absolutely no external guiding principles (esoteric, hermetic, or otherwise) and which allows for an incredible range in interpretation. Really, it is nothing more (and nothing less) than pulling a handful of thoughts out of a mind, shaking them like dice, throwing them on a table and observing the results. This approach is, to my mind, very exciting in that it shifts the focus of the Tarot from attaining information from spiritual entities / domains (divination) to a spontaneous, creative, and imaginative reappraisal of one’s cognitive state- essentially, self-psychology.

Needless to say, this approach changes the assumptions of classical Tarot interpretation in a number of ways. These changes involve the understanding of what is actually happening during a reading, the meanings of the individual cards, the roles of the diviner and the querent, and the expected result of the reading. These changes all involve the primary distinction of this style of Tarot reading, which is that at all times and in all cases the reading is immensely and completely personal (that is, subjective).

As discussed above, this type of interpretation need not (and to my mind probably should not) be considered divination. However, it does not necessarily have to be considered wholly psychological either; this is left up to the querent. Many people believe that spiritual beings or unknown realms are sometimes responsible for the content of dreams. This assumption need not be completely done away with in light of this new way of looking at the Tarot. Just as one might say that a dream comes from ‘beyond’, so one might say that the ‘artificial dream’ represented by the arrangement of the cards is also so affected. In this case, the cards that fall, their orientations, etc. may be read with an eye to the unseen in much the same way as a classical Tarot reading. However in order to properly maintain the personal emphasis of this ‘oneirological’ Tarot, one must of course remember that even if one holds that the message (the content, i.e. the cards) are swayed by this force, the content is inseparable from analysis, which must always be personal and human. Thus even if the cards are understood to be swayed by some spiritual force, the layout of cards is not a reflection of reality, but rather a message which only comes to its completion in the individual’s analysis. Personally, I prefer to keep divination wholly aside from this style of Tarot reading, as it largely misses the point, and also because classical Waite-style Tarot reading is a much better system for divinatory purposes.

A major distinction between what I am calling ‘classical’ and ‘oneirological’ Tarot is the assumptions implicit in the meanings of the cards. The cards of the Tarot are often considered to represent Jungian archetypes, and while I agree with this in principle, we must be careful here to maintain the crucial element of this approach to the process, which is the importance of subjective analysis. While the cards are certainly archetypal, it would be entirely against the nature of this kind of interpretation to suggest that they have concrete meanings which remain unchanged from person to person. In this case the numerous Tarot ‘guides’, such as the popular one by Waite, should really only be consulted when the meaning of a card is uncertain, and should be consulted not with an aim to ‘learning what the card means’, but rather as an attempt to open the mind to various interpretations, to start a person thinking about what a card could mean. For this reason it is also important that a person select a deck with imagery which appeals to him personally, and a guide which comments more on the imagery than on the received tradition of esoteric interpretation.

It should be clear by now, but let us state it boldly and without ambiguity: This style of Tarot is precisely not hermetic or kabbalistic or ‘traditional’ in any sense; it is improvisational and, beyond all else, personal, with no reference whatsoever to the authority of tradition (excepting of course that the individual accepts traditional meanings, having honestly decided that he agrees with this identification.) Similarly, the choice of card layout for this style is largely without consequence, although given the higher emphasis placed on the relationship of cards to one another, it may be wise to choose a layout which readily displays these connections, such as the Celtic Cross.

This is not to say that the values of the cards are arbitrary, but rather that each person must come to their own conclusions about what a card means. These conclusions can change over time, and certainly should, based on absolutely no criteria other than the opinions of the querent, but they should not be assigned arbitrary values from one reading to another, or else we will lose the important random aspect of the reading, and wind up simply fabricating the results we hope to attain. With this ‘oneirological’ approach, we have greater freedom, which can be easily abused to the detriment of the spontaneity of the reading. Let the querent set her own values for the cards, but let her keep them honestly, excepting that she honestly decides to alter them.

This brings us to perhaps the greatest distinction of all between oneirological and classical Tarot, that being the roles of the diviner and querent. It should be clear by now that with this form of the Tarot, the role of the diviner is greatly subordinated to that of the querent. The diviner no longer really does anything, merely lays out the cards according to blind chance (for the sake of emphasizing the personal approach of this style, the querent should still shuffle and cut the deck) and then helps to explain the possible meanings of the cards; however the querent herself is the ultimate authority on what the cards mean to her. The diviner really just becomes a more convenient flesh-and-blood version of the guidebooks to Tarot meaning that can be found in any bookstore. Even in divinatory interpretations of this Tarot style, it is the querent and not the diviner who performs the activity of divination, in that the divined message comes in two parts, the cards laid out and the querent’s (not the diviner’s) interpretation.

What this really comes down to is that in this style, the roles of querent and diviner really collapse into one person. In classical Tarot it is discouraged that a person should perform a reading on himself; in this style, this is precisely what should happen. Because the cards are no longer seen as a message from beyond, but rather a model of the reader’s own mind, it becomes a matter of great importance that the reader have an intimate familiarity with the cards; not just the cards of the Tarot in general, but the cards of his specific deck, and should always be refining an intricate system of personal meaning for each.

That is why this kind of Tarot is really not well suited to the traditional diviner / querent duality; a querent, unfamiliar with the Tarot or dealing with unfamiliar cards, will not possess the requisite depth of meaning required to analyze them on the incredibly personal level that this style demands, while the diviner, unfamiliar with the querent, can give only general hints, which may completely miss the mark. Much like a dream cannot be adequately explained to another person, the Tarot in this sense is a closed, personal message system, relying as it does on personal associations to its imagery, and thus for one person to explain another’s Tarot reading in this way is like the futile attempt of one person to explain another’s dream. This system is thus best suited to a scenario wherein the person of the diviner has been replaced by the querent’s own intricate, extensive, and subjective knowledge of the cards.

We must also learn to limit what we expect from the Tarot reading. In divinatory Tarot, where we take as a given that there is a message, which is trying to be understood, there is no such thing as a meaningless Tarot spread. Any spread which appears meaningless is understood to simply be unreadable because of intellectual limitations on the part of the diviner. Here, with no external guiding principle infusing our readings with insight and meaning, we do not have the luxury of assuming that a Tarot spread must be a message waiting to be read. We are taking dreams as our model for what happens when a person sits down with a deck of cards, and dreams are often (in fact, as discussed above, usually) completely nonsensical.

With the Tarot we have a kind of advantage over dreaming in this aspect, because we are not subjected to the apparently harsh edicts of our subconscious judge, who seems to censor about ninety percent of the information that passes through our minds during REM sleep, leaving only a small percentage as a remembered dream. We are allowed to make our own (conscious) decisions as to whether the ‘dream’ has value, and indeed any dream (or Tarot spread) which is open to analysis becomes a valuable insight in this scheme. As such, we can anticipate a much greater success rate in reading the ‘artificial dreams’ of the Tarot, as opposed to remembering our dreams. Even so, we must be open to the possibility that a certain Tarot spread may simply mean nothing to us (though it almost certainly would mean something to someone else.) Accordingly, we must learn to distinguish our own motivations, and be able to tell the difference between a configuration of cards that really means something to us and one we are simply trying to inject meaning into, by distorting our understanding of the meanings of the cards. We must be ready, and willing, sometimes even at a simple glance, to recognize when the cards are telling us nothing, and to pick them up and start again.

I see this style as something of a liberation from the somewhat constraining assumptions of classical Tarot, which generally requires extensive hermetic knowledge and limits the possible range of meaning of these incredibly intricate cards. I expect that I will gain little support among staunch proponents of the divinatory aspects of the Tarot, but I do not propose this system as an attack on divination. Rather, as I mentioned above, the cards themselves are only the common core of a huge range of traditions, some divinatory, some not; this one in particular is not (or, at least I think should not) be considered divinatory. This is not to say that there are no valid divinatory uses of the Tarot; rather, it is to affirm the incredible subtlety and versatility of these cards as symbols, and to demonstrate the astounding range of uses to which they can be put.