01/04/2012
The material available on tarot cards is quantitatively significant, but much more rarely it is also significant in terms of quality. In first approximation, a good part of the web pages concerns the meaning of the tarot arcana; of what remains, a good part is trivial amenities. Of what we know about tarots, very little has been produced in recent years. Even looking to the Americas or India, countries in which the tarot lovers are growing, you do not see significant news.
One can distinguish between two approaches. A first approach considers the tarot cards like real magic items: the magic resides in the cards. Which are not generic cards, but only those cards sensitive to the particular person. Who takes them 'feels' that 'those' cards are the right ones for him. Hence it follows that even the reader, the interpreter of the cards, has its magical relevance, but only on the instrumental meaning of the term.
A second position completely transcends Tarots themselves: the interpretation is done through an intuition of the reader, the interpreter, which can also be completely distinct from the inner tarots meaning.
In both cases, however, everything stops here. Tarots are a divination tool, that carries or not some magic.
In this context, what sense takes the idea to offer an automated reading? Regardless of the gratuity, what is the meaning of an automated reading? This approach seems to violate both the idea of a magic inherent in the Tarot cards, and the idea that the magic is linked to the human medium. Yet, our approach is much closer to the original and oldest forms of divination: the magic intended as an act of will. In the case of an automated reading, the sense of the words (which are themselves symbols) is given by the reader, which in this case is the same postulant. And the response so obtained will be true to the extent that he does will, using the magical meaning of 'will'.
From the ideological point of view then Tarot Tree intends to stay on the 'traditional' line, despite the apparent modernity of the approach. Formerly, the only way to direct attention (the magical will) was to establish a physical location dedicated to it, like Delphi. Today this is no longer necessary. Tarot Tree has set up a virtual place where everybody is allowed to exercise and meet this atavistic need: divination. It will now be clear to those concerned about traditional magic that ours is also and above all an experiment.
A.C.
