The Loominal Take - Tarot

People often approach tarot like it’s a crystal ball. They sit down with a mix of curiosity and nerves, half-hoping and half-fearing that the cards will tell them what’s about to happen. Will I meet someone? Will I get the job? Is everything going to fall apart? Culturally, we’ve been trained to see tarot as fortune-telling, as if the power lives in the cardboard, as if the right shuffle can somehow spit out the future. That’s not how I see it. Tarot is not about channeling spirits or receiving secret instructions from hidden realms. I can’t prove or disprove those possibilities, but they’ve never been part of my experience as a reader. What tarot does, reliably and beautifully, is reveal what is already present. It reflects the patterns in motion, and it shows the potential trajectories of a current path. It doesn’t hand down inevitabilities, it lays out mirrors.

The first thing worth remembering is that tarot didn’t start as a mystical tool at all. The earliest known tarot decks in Europe were created in the 14th and 15th centuries as playing cards. The Tarot of Marseilles, one of the oldest surviving decks, wasn’t designed for divination; it was a game. Only later did the cards get layered with esoteric meaning. And even then, for hundreds of years, there wasn’t a huge variety of decks to choose from. If you wanted tarot in the early 20th century, you had one or two options. That changed in the 1970s, even though originally published in 1909, the now very familiar Rider-Waite-Smith deck exploded into popularity, accompanied by guidebooks that made tarot widely accessible. From there, the floodgates opened. Today there are thousands of decks, each with unique art and themes — cats, witches, pop culture icons, minimalist abstractions. We’ve multiplied the surface variety, but the essential structure of tarot has remained: seventy-eight cards, divided into the twenty-two Major Arcana and the fifty-six Minor Arcana.

For centuries, readers have tried to explain why the cards work. Some say psychic ability. Some say synchronicity. Some say fate, destiny, or the intervention of guides. What’s striking, though, is that none of these explanations are universal and yet the practice continues. It continues because even when we can’t explain it, it works. In my opinion, the secret isn’t in the cards. It’s in their application.

Human beings are symbolic creatures. We survive through meaning-making. That’s not an accessory to life; it’s fundamental to how we navigate reality. We don’t just see; we interpret. We don’t just live; we story. Hand us an image or a metaphor, and we will build connection around it. This is why tarot endures. The Fool is not just a picture of a youth stepping toward a cliff. It is the pulse of beginning, of risk, of openness and naiveté. The Tower is not just a lightning-struck building. It is rupture, collapse, and the recognition that what we thought was stable wasn’t. These images give shape to the unspeakable. They echo against the inner material we already carry. And when they land in the context of a question, they allow us to see ourselves and our situation differently.

This is where randomness matters. A tarot spread works because it interrupts our usual loops of thought. Left to ourselves, we circle the same grooves. The same worries, the same assumptions, the same stuck frames. Shuffling the deck and drawing cards introduces chaos into that loop. And chaos is not the enemy. It is the doorway to new perspective. The positions of a spread provide structure, a map of aspects to explore. Into those positions, we place random cards. The fixed and the random meet, and something sparks. Psychologists sometimes call this “conceptual blending”: the collision of two elements that forces the mind to create new meaning. In other words, the very mechanics of tarot mirror how creative problem-solving works.

That doesn’t mean tarot is just a brain trick. It means tarot is a system built on how our brains, bodies, and symbols already move. The spread is the architecture. The shuffle is the surrender. The cards are the stimulus. And what happens between them is alive.

To me, tarot is not prediction so much as participation. It isn’t a script for the future; it’s a dialogue with the present. When you sit with the cards, you’re not being told what will happen. You’re being invited to notice what’s already unfolding. Sometimes the cards clarify what you already sensed but hadn’t named. Sometimes they challenge you with something you didn’t want to admit. Sometimes they contradict your expectations in ways that make you pause. And in all of those moments, the real work isn’t in the paper images. It’s in your encounter with them.

Consider the spreads themselves. People often treat layouts like formulas: the Celtic Cross, the Horseshoe, the Three-Card Past-Present-Future. But a spread isn’t an oracle. It’s a map. It doesn’t decree what your life will become. It breaks a nebulous question into parts. Instead of drowning in “What am I doing with my life?”, a spread might offer angles like: What’s supporting me? What’s hidden from me? What am I resisting? Suddenly, you’re not lost in fog. You’re navigating terrain. And even if the map is symbolic, the act of mapping makes motion possible.

It’s worth noticing, too, that the impulse behind tarot — using image and chance to spark meaning — exists across traditions. From casting lots in the Bible to the I Ching in China, humans have always turned to random input as a way to access insight. Tarot is one expression of a much older human tendency: to ask better questions through symbol.

What makes tarot even more compelling is that it isn’t just a collection of individual images. It’s a journey. The Major Arcana as a whole sketch the archetypal path of a human life. The Fool begins open and unformed, stepping into the unknown. Along the way he encounters mastery and loss, love and heartbreak, joy and devastation, courage and wisdom. Each card is less about destiny and more about the kinds of thresholds every one of us crosses at some point. And when he reaches The World, it isn’t a final stop — it’s a return. Completion that circles back into beginning. The Fool steps out again, and the cycle repeats, always in motion. That circularity is part of why the cards feel familiar even if you’ve never studied them: they echo the arcs we live through, again and again, each time slightly different, each time our own.

In practice, tarot can be startlingly simple. One card pulled in the morning can change how you move through your day. Not because it predicts events, but because it primes perception. If you draw the Two of Swords, you might notice how often you’re avoiding a decision. If you draw the Sun, you might see joy in places you’d usually overlook. The card doesn’t cause the day. The card tunes you to pay attention. And attention reshapes reality.

Skeptics often dismiss tarot as nonsense. And if all you’ve seen are vague party tricks or “your crush will text you” readings, I understand why. Don’t get me wrong, I love YouTube pick-a-card readings and I have my favorites I follow. But to the critics, I want to be clear: that isn’t the whole picture. A real tarot reading isn’t about fear, certainty, or control. It’s about recognition. Sometimes that recognition feels like relief. Sometimes it feels destabilizing. Either way, it’s alive. And the work isn’t in predicting fate — it’s in deciding how to meet what’s already moving.

The tarot works not because it seals your fate, but because it refuses to. It works because it is a conversation, not a commandment. Because it holds chaos inside structure. Because it mirrors what is already alive. Whether you see that as psychology, synchronicity, or something else doesn’t matter. The result is the same: a deeper clarity about what is, and a wider field of possibility for what could be.