A non-esoteric view of tarot

Debra said:

I do agree that often in the reading threads people are twisting themselves into knots to explain how and why a particular card fits as a description of their situation or an answer to their question, when it seems manifestly obvious that the card simply isn't right. Let's face it, when you pull a card, there's always going to be something on it. I don't see any reason to think the cards are 'always right' or that we should always 'just trust the cards.'

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Just so. There will often be a card in the spread that just isn't "saying much" about the question or the querent in its position in the sequence. When that happens, I won't spend a lot of time trying to make it cough up more sense than it readily yields (unless it's a Major, which in my experience is always saying something and I need to sort it out before I'm done). In either case, I will most likely circle back around to it later in the reading after the rest of the "story" has been explored to see if any new light has been shed on it. I have no problem with a "low spot" in the reading; it just means there isn't a whole lot going on in that particular area that needs emphasis.

Novbert, your post is interesting, but for myself, I don't care why tarot works, it just does. Or rather, I don't feel I need to know how or why it works in order to use it. Like I don't need to understand the mechanics of how my eyeballs work in order to see (or how any of my other senses work for that matter). I just use them. To me, and possibly to a lot of us here, tarot works like that. Some people call it sixth sense. ?? Whatever, I'm just glad I discovered that for me tarot is a great way to access it. Maybe sort of like my glasses fine tune my vision.

Oh, I don't know! I have stopped worrying about it. I just know it works. The more I worry myself about it, the less accurate my readings are. You said somewhere above not to talk to you about universal energies or chakras, etc. So I won't mention it. The more I relax into my tarot readings and flow with it, the better they are. That's all I know.

You might be interested in this guy's website:

http://www.weirdshitnotbullshit.com/articles/how-does-the-tarot-work/

Woot! So many things to read and reply to. Unfortunately I don't see how I could react to all the comments here, but I'll definitely try when I get home from work.

The comment of Amanda_04 kept bugging me all last night:

Amanda_04 said:

I'm curious to know your psychological reasoning on why, in a group of tarot readers who did not consult with each other but were reading for the same anonymous person, 2 of the same cards appeared 2 times between at least 2 of them in a 6 card spread?

http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=156340&page=5

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I confess I couldn't stand and I did the math for it (I know, I know, it's definitely not the right place to talk about math, but I find it rather interesting to see what are the chances for that aforementioned coincidence). Actually the probability of that is not too complex to calculate. I wouldn't bother you with the details - of course I can if someone is interested - but the result was this:

If three person draws six cards randomly from a deck of 78 cards, the probability of having
- no matching cards is 21,5%
- at least one pair is 78,5%
- at least two pairs is 40,4% <= and this was the mentioned case

Having a 40% chace for something doesn't really qualify that thing as outstanding, exceptional or the deed of higher powers beyond human understanding. An event of 40% probability is very very likely - its almost as likely as getting heads when flipping a coin. Maybe you'd expect all the cards to be different but as the numbers show that event has actually smaller chance than having at least two pairs of cards. Not to mention when it comes to larger spreads. The chances of repeating cards must be even higher in that case.

Just something to think about

Oh crud. I've forgotten how to do this--is it joint probability? As long as you're showing us, would you show us the formula?

Where is The crowned one when you need him? He's good at this stuff. Joint probability sounds about right.

Math

Just because you've asked for it

Okay, so the first step is declaring the possibility of n card pairs when two readers draw 6 cards. As I see what the first person drew is irrelevant - it's just a random set of 6 different cards so we shouldn't calculate with that. We can declare it fixed.

The next step is to declare the possibilities of the next person drawing 'n' of the cards the first person has already drawn. We'll use combination for that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combination) I'll abbreviate "n choose k" as (n,k) for simplicity's sake from now on.

So all the possible six card combination is (78,6)=256851595
Now the chance that the second person will have n cards the same as the first one was is: (6,n)*(72,6-n) as we need to choose n cards from those six of the first person and 6-n from the remaining cards. The result is the amount of cases when the second person has exactly n pairs with the first person. It's

pairs cases
0 156238908
1 83949264
2 15431850
3 1192800
4 38340
5 432
6 1

By dividing the number of possible cases with the number of all cases we get the probabilities, for having exactly that amount of pairs:

0 60,83%
1 32,68%
2 6,01%
3 0,46%
4 0,01%
5 0,00%
6 0,00%

Now it becomes tricky. Cause at this point comes the third person, but the amount of 'free' cards (those which don't pair with the first two's cards) depends on how many pairs did the first two have. So we have two variables here:

k: the number of pairs in the first two hands
l: the number of repeating cards in the third hand

The way to calculate the amount of cases is: (12-k,l)*(78-(12-k),6-l)

Explanation: 12-k is the amount of cards with which the third person's card can make pairs, 6-l is the amount of non-paired cards in his hand.

Calculating it for all the l-s and k-s gives us 36 numbers - the number of possible cases for each ... case (the number of possible amount of pairing cards in the third person's hand considering the amount of pairs in the first two person's hand)
These numbers should be divided by the amount of all cases to get probabilities, but beware! These are only conditional probabilities for each setup of the first two persons (so the numbers show what is the probability of the third person has 2 pairing cards with the first two SUPPOSING they had only 1 pair).

To get the whole probability field, you have to multiply the conditional probabilities with the actual probabilities of each case of the first two persons(listed above), and then sum up all those cases which contain the same amount of pairs. The result looks like this:

0 21,52% 100,00%
1 38,10% 78,48%
2 27,34% 40,38%
3 10,40% 13,04%
4 2,30% 2,64%
5 0,31% 0,33%
6 0,02% 0,02%

Where the first column shows the amount of pairs/matches in the three hands, the second column contains the probability of having EXACTLY that amount of matches and the third shows the probability of having at least that amount of matches.

Of course it could be continued to 12 - as the maximum amount of matches is 12, 6 cards in the second person's hands and 6 in the thrid one's hands, but the probability of anything above six matches is so close to zero that it doesn't even worth mentioning.

I hope I could make it clear - writing math text in english is not easy at all

This thread is getting interesting! We've heard from - or will hear from - the rationalists, the scholastics, the psychologists, the fundamentalists, the apologists, the gnostics, the mystics, the humanists, the pragmatists, the fatalists and the optimists, whom I'll call the "Pangloss faction" (but Leibniz was a renowned mathematician as well as a proponent of Optimism). As for me, I'm with Candide; we each must "cultivate our garden."

And I'm more convinced than ever that Hamlet was right!

Novbert said:

If three person draws six cards randomly from a deck of 78 cards, the probability of having
- no matching cards is 21,5%
- at least one pair is 78,5%
- at least two pairs is 40,4% <= and this was the mentioned case

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I could be wrong, but that doesn't seem right to me. You did take into consideration that each person had their own 78 cards they were working with, and one of them was using reversals, yes? Trying to configure that really isn't going to matter much, because we would have to know exactly how the reversal deck was oriented to configure some other percentage of likelihood a card would be turned upright... etc. etc.

I'm not going to argue what you think tarot is and is not- I'm more curious to know when you think the projection stops and something else begins... because I find it very limiting to believe that I just projected on to a person that 7 years from now, she would want to have a water-birth with her first child, but would have complications and receive a C-section to still give birth to a baby boy between May 11th and June 10th - when none of that is relevant to my life (my first-born was a girl, both my children were naturally born in the hospital no where near a water tub, and neither of them were born in that time-frame). Please tell me what it is you believe I was seeing/feeling then (by the use of tarot cards), and if you must call me crazy go ahead and do so, and we'll end the conversation right here with irreconcilable differences. Otherwise, I'd like to know your explanation on what you adamantly believe to be "stupid" in what I've done, your personal experiences with "stupid", and how you came to the conclusion that it was in fact, "stupid"... because I have a lot more "successes" than "failures" by reading the cards and giving accurate predictions, and I'd be interested in hearing a more solid standpoint... Have you ever tried to predict something with the cards? How did that turn out for you?

Barleywine said:

This thread is getting interesting! We've heard from - or will hear from - the rationalists, the scholastics, the psychologists, the fundamentalists, the apologists, the gnostics, the mystics, the humanists, the pragmatists, the fatalists and the optimists...

Click to expand...

And the most interesting of all is that it was started by an alleged engineer/ nouveau intuitive Tarot card reader / mathematician -enthusiast / psychology- enthusiast/presumed firm non-believer in anything esoteric who, albeit the claimed skepticism , joins an, among else, esoteric online community, under pretex of pursuing new information, while trying to prove mathematically that the given community is plain wrong in its very basic postulations...

A Detour into (Another) Absurdity

While there is a wealth of mathematical esotericism buried in the tarot (just try to fathom one of Crowley's rarified equations or unravel the meaning of some of the qabalistic permutations!), mathematical probability as a foundation for its effectiveness isn't likely to be one of them. There is a mountain of anecdotal evidence to the contrary; it looks like a non-starter to me.

Maybe its time for a new paradigm <satire alert!!!>

Since Adam Smith's "invisible hand" has been so rudely amputated in the bloodbath that is modern economics, perhaps we could graft it onto the Frankensteinian construct that this debate seems to be intent on making of the tarot (or maybe it already is?).

The three forces could be represented by the querent's self-interest (demand), the reader's talent in serving that self-interest (supply), and the cards' habit of offering competing or contradictory insights that the reader must judiciously assemble and deliver as a way to successfully negotiate the "marketplace of ideas" (the reading). It's not a perfect fit since competition for clients among readers would not really be a factor at this level of interpretation, but you get the idea.

There, I knew I could take your mind off mathematics