Tarot reader to priest

Hi Jeff, thanks for the link. You will have to wait for my posthumously published autobiography to get the really juicy stuff! 🙂

Fr. Philip, OP

I used to read Tarot cards too and, believe it or not, I found them accurate. At the time, my explanation for why they worked was that they expressed a lot of possible meanings in symbols, and the reader used his or her intuition (not psychic powers) to figure out which symbols applied to the person being read. I was in college at the time and the last reading I did scared me — it said that a friend of mine was headed for something terrible. She had had several strange and bad relationships, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise, but I am not a card counter and I don’t think I could unconsciously make a card reading come out any particular way, especially because I was never good enough to remember what the cards meant, I had to look them up. Within a few weeks she had a very bad breakup and a nervous breakdown, went home for the rest of the semester, and had to do a fifth year to graduate. I didn’t read cards after that.

I would never have considered Tarot cards to be occult. I knew some occult folks and Tarot cards were pretty mainstream compared to their little meetings and “spells.” The set I had was very beautiful, kind of art nouveau. I held onto them and the book about how to read them for years, stuffed in one closet or another, and finally threw them away long after I returned to the Church. I’m naturally a packrat, so I don’t know whether I had an unhealthy attraction to them or just that they were pretty and had cost me money. But I was never easy about them, so maybe it was the former.

Is it occult? Depends on who you ask. Many people consider Tarot cards and similar things to be harmless entertainment. Personally, I don’t think reading Tarot cards is healthy, because it tempts you to believe in things that (depending on your theology) are either evil or just plain lies. I used to keep a journal of readings I did for myself, and when they said things I didn’t like (true things, BTW) I would wait a day or two and see if I could get them to come out better. They never did. One could easily become obsessed with trying to make things turn out differently. I threw the journal away, but now I wish I could get it out and see what it said.

Tarot cards and all that New Age stuff goes back to the same group of people in the 1800s, the Golden Dawn and their ilk, who were by all definitions into the “occult.” They were not nice people.

To be nitpickily precise, divination (with tarot cards, or regular playing cards, or anything else) is what’s forbidden.

Playing tarocchi card games is perfectly okey-dokey with the Church, however. 🙂 (Though honestly, the kind of tarot cards sold in this country aren’t much use for playing cardgames.)

(Insert comment which blames turn of the century English twits for this.)