Growing up conservative Christian, divination carried an illicit edge.
But a Tarot deck is just a normal deck of cards with a fifth all-trump suit. Still spooky?
A while back, my daughter and I messed around with a tarot deck to create a variant on War that improves upon the original (the big change was that we evened out the players’ decks after each round; whoever won more cards banked the extras).
With the Tarot deck in hand, I also played around with a card reading after the kids went to sleep.
The booklet that came with this deck was very specific. The cups = love, coins = money, etc. Each card had specific effects in its orientation and place within the tableaux.
Now, this is where the religious folks have it right. This is not good entertainment. Such a practice with specific prompts will put things in the head that don’t need to be there.
However, that’s not an issue with divination in general.
I also played with the Decktet, a modern deck designed in 2008. The creator has published suggestions for using his cards for readings with an open interpretive system. Instead of relying upon concrete predictive functions for each card, a Decktet reading creates a network of relationships between the cards. This method is much more suggestive and might be a great way to unearth the unconscious.
A few months later, I started messing around with the I Ching. Maybe I’ll revisit the Tarot one day, but it’s hard to beat several thousand years of Chinese divination.