How does a pragmatic engineer reconcile a largely mechanistic world-view with a deep respect for the Tarot as a tool for personal growth and exploration? I know a great many "fortune tellers", and a few "psychics" ... and have complex opinions about both of those paths, but I deeply believe in "Oracles".
What is an Oracle? It comes from an ancient Greek word for "mouth". The "Oracle of Apollo" was a mouth, through which the voice of Apollo could be heard. I don't, personally, put too many questions to Apollo ... but I do believe that there are very important voices that are desperately in need of mouths. Let me offer two examples: one a parable told me by my father, and another from a woman I met in an airport.
A child has had a high fever all day, and the family asks the Shaman for help. He comes, and he examines the child, feeling her skin, looking at her eyes, etc. He talks to the child, and asks the parents about how and when the fever came on. Then the Shaman lights a bundle of herbs and smudges the hut, and moves into a 5-10 minute chant and dance, which grow increasingly frenetic, and he suddenly drops to the ground and stares silently into the smoke for another 5-10 minutes. After being very quiet and still for a while, he reaches for a pouch and dumps out a pile of several dozen feathers, stones, bones, teeth, carvings, and unidentifiable objects. He stares intently at them; he moves them around into different geometrical patterns ... adding, removing, rearranging, singing an ever-changing sequence of chants, and occasionally sweeping them away and starting all over again ... occasionally reaching over to chant to or somehow manipulate the child.
Suddenly he leaps up, and excitedly sings a chant ... which becomes faster, louder, and more emphatic each time he repeats it ... and then runs out of the hut, and comes back twenty minutes later with a couple of roots, some pitch, and a few insects which he proceeds to grind up and brew into an infusion (singing the same chant over and over again) which he gives the child to drink. Thirty minutes later the fever breaks, and the family is profoundly grateful. They give him a glass bead, which he drops into his bag and takes away with him.
The casual observer might think that they had just watched a witch-doctor with a good knowledge of local herbs ... but that would be a shallow reading, and there was no witch-craft involved. This was modern medicine at its best:
Sometimes knowledge sounds like superstitious chanting, and a research library looks like a bag of bones and stones. Not everything we don't understand is foolish superstition.
I was sitting in an airport (SJC) waiting for a flight, and watching a young woman drawing a comic. She was very good. Her style was sophisticated, and she drew with a speed, ease, and confidence that I found amazing ... she was drawing (in ink) the reflection of her face in a cup of gently swirling coffee and foam! After ten minutes of watching, I told her that I collected San Francisco underground comics, that she was very good, and I was pretty sure I had never seen her work ... and asked her if she had ever been published. She gave a strange smile and said "There is a story about that!"
She had always drawn, but a few years ago she had moved in with a boy friend who regularly criticized her "draftsmanship" ... and encouraged her to study mechanical drawing. She gradually stopped drawing, and over the next two years she stopped doing a great many other things. She was talking to an old friend one day who told her that "she had pretty clearly died" and demanded to know what had happened to her. But she didn't have words for her depression, and could not explain. Her friend (who knew her very well) then told her to draw the story of what had happened to her.
A few weeks later, she visited her friend again, and showed him the comic she had drawn. He read the story (about a woman who was denied everything she loved, squashed in even the most trivial expressions of herself, and desperately depressed), and asked "Did these things actually happen?". She answered "Yes, exactly as I drew them ... and this relationship is so over!".
She showed me the comic she had drawn about her life (drawn in the same wonderful hand) ... but what astonished me was that she could have those experiences inside her and not understand what they had done to her. There were voices within her, screaming for help, but she could not understand them. But her pen could easily tell a story that she had never consciously told herself. It was only after she saw what she had drawn that she recognized its truth.
Drawing was her oracle: the only mouth through which her injured soul could speak. That she had access to such an oracle was, in this case, a literal life-saver. I believe that we all have, within us, important truths to which we have not yet given a voice. To focus on the medium through which the voice speaks is to miss the point entirely. What matters is:
The cards are a bag of tokens in which we can invest all of the experiences of our own (and others') life-times. What may look like "memorizing meanings" is actually coming to understand how to use a filing system. What Papus, Waite, Crowley, Case, Pollack, Wanless, or anyone else say cards mean are mere historical footnotes. What is invaluable is the meanings they carry for us.
Cards should not be understood as rote meanings, but rather as situations full of possibilities and alternatives. The interpretation of such broad symbols in the context of real-life situations is not entirely unlike the interpretation of Rorschach Blots, in that what we read has at least as much to do with what is inside of us as with what is in front of our eyes. The process of exploring and interpreting a spread requires intuition and creates opportunities for us to say and see things that we have not yet consciously said or seen.
That is why I believe in oracles. That is why (and how) I use the cards.