Tarot Cards and Spirit Portals

MercyMe said:

But what is the "portal?" Not the cards, the tea leaves, the matchsticks, the bits of entrails, but the diviner herself. She sets herself as the one between the worlds, the journeywoman who both becomes the portal and who crosses through it.

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I see it slightly differently: the journeyer crosses a threshold by letting herself open to the messages the cards (or sticks, or signs in the sky, etc.) might bring - I see the act of divining (the interaction reader/cards/querent) as the portal. Most acts of divination (divination in the wider sense of "communing with the divine) require a "support" which inspires with symbols or signs - whether these be tarot cards, yarrow sticks, a bowl of water, a prayer book or a song, a routine to get into a trance or meditative state. When someone interacts with these intimately, without forming barriers in the mind, that is when she can cross a portal & experience a world of collapsed time and space, where everything is alive. It sounds dramatic - but every time we draw our card for the day and consider it openly, we are doing just that!

There are a few spontaneous acts of communion with the greater world: speaking in tongues, spontaneous prayer, spontaneous astral projection,...in which case the portal is formed by the sheer energy of the journeyer opening to spirit - or to use Western contemporary wording - opening to all the possibilities of the time-space continuum .

I do think it goes beyond communing with the unconscious. Whether one believes in the spirit world or not, I think when we divine we access something else out there in the world. We are not the centre of the universe, and our unconscious is not all-knowing. Let's say I read a spread for a querent I don't know and think - uh-oh, that looks like trouble at t' mill!
- "it looks like you have some difficulty in your job?"
- "yes, I do! My boss is an evil dwarf!"
- "Well, he's going to get worse, and he looks like he is trying to do the dirty on you behind your back. Watch yourself - I would suggest you start looking for a new job."
- "And what would be my chances?"
- "Let me see - 3 of Wands, it looks good, if you start prospecting now, you'll have some good business opportunities come your way. In fact it looks particularly good for self-employment."
- "Wow! I've been thinking of self-employment for some time, but I was going to give it a couple of years. What if I stay in my present job? I've only been there six months."
- "You'll end up carrying the can for your boss's mismanagement, it could be painful. "

Well, you get the picture - we do this kind of thing all the time. My unconscious can't know a stranger's boss, or how well this person would do if he looked for another job. It is not my unconscious coming up with the 3 of Wands - but beyond the portal, in the world that speaks, the 3 of Wand turns up and I can interpret it.

So if not spirits, what? Well, we come back to quantum physics, to chaos theory, to the gaia theory, of course - and the idea that by crossing the portal in our interaction with the cards, we enter a collapsed, teeming world where past-present-future is not linear (as indeed we know they are not), where what happens in Brazil affects me in Switzerland, where the earth is not an inanimate machine, but a living organism, where the observer actually determines if something is happening or not. It is the world we live in all the time, of course, but since the Scientific Revolution, in day-to-day life, people who do not practice a faith experience it as linear & logical. Cats are either dead or alive, they can't be both. Past comes before future. The future is ahead and unknown. What happens in Brazil has no effect on me now, as I sit typing with my (Brazilian) coffee at my side. And a flower is just a biological entity. Crossing the portal re-establishes the world as the strange-but-familiar non-linear, non-logical place we can experience in its fullness (of course, people of faith & traditional peoples in general have no trouble with the notion of spirit, as you pointed out, MercyMe).

BTW, MercyMe - I absolutely agree with what you say about personal responsibility. I don't think the above contradicts it - since in the interaction between card and reader (which, to my mind, opens the portal), the intention of the reader is, of course, paramount. Michael Dummett has spent half his life with tarot cards - he is one of a handful to know more about tarot cards & their uses than anyone else on this planet: but since he has no intention to cross a portal he doesn't believe in, and scoffs at the very notion of divination, he never interacts with his cards so as to create such a portal. His cards are just pleasing and fascinating artefacts - and good for him, as they bring him pleasure.

I do see the distinction you're making Helvetica, (I don't disagree, BTW, I'm processing...) I wonder if we're saying the same thing, in essence anyway.

I am saying the "portal" is the person. You are saying, if I understand you correctly, the "portal" is the act of divination. Where we converge, I think, is that I assume that people are actively seeking otherworldly experience which would lead them to do things that would facilitate that communication with "spirits."

When we say that divination = any act that facilitates that communication with the divine, how many of us have NOT done something at some point in time that reaches beyond our natural perceptions? A desperate prayer uttered in agony at a point of despair to a god one doesn't even know exists. A childhood sleepover that included a seance and levitating. Telling ghost stories around a campfire.

I know someone who senses spirit activity around her but who is fearful of them and so refuses to investigate further. She wishes she couldn't sense them, feel them, know they are there. She's had these "visitations" since she was a child. What act has she done, consciously, to open that portal? Or is she, by nature, more sensitive to the stirrings of the world(s) beyond our immediate senses? She has two daughters. One has reported sensing spirit activity and the other has not. Is this hereditary? If it is, then wouldn't such a person, even without the specific act of divining (at least not intentionally), serving as a portal?

Just thinking out loud here.

~Mercy

re

Wow, What an interesting thread. I never really thought of the tarot as opening myself up to portals and spirits. This concerns me. I always thought of it more as universal symbols and archetypes connecting with my subconscious mind. Alot to think about here!