Tarot Evolves with Our Changing World

Although I am not a tarot animist, I will be the first to say that tarot has some magical properties. This post is about one of my favorites of those properties.

There are many different ways in which tarot can evolve to meet and describe new cultural situations and circumstances.

Here are three examples of what I mean. The last is a very recent one which many of us have discovered. Perhaps, though, we have not contemplated the magic therein as much as we could.

In my tarot practice, the Chariot, Major Arcana Seven, is very often a reference to a person’s car. Of course, when tarot divination was first beginning, no one had cars. Now, they are a very important part of society. They provide our ability to work, shop, and do the things we need to do. They are a status symbol, and very often a source of stress.

It is important that when we use divination to look at someone’s life, we have within the language of our divination tool the ability to look at all the important factors.

The car has definitely become an archetype in American culture. The archetype of the Chariot was easily able to expand to fit into that cultural need.

When I was living in Connecticut and the casinos were being built, the Wheel of Fortune, Major Arcana Ten, started to appear for clients much more often than it previously had. The Wheel of Fortune was suddenly signaling employment at the casino. Later, it began to show up for gambling addiction.

The casinos changed our local culture, and tarot found a way to reflect and communicate that change.

I recently acquired Modern Witch Tarot. The Five of Wands in this deck struck me as being an amazingly clear commentary for 2020 and beyond. Yet, the deck was published in 2019.

At first glance of the Modern Witch Five of Wands we see a very typical image; five people fighting each other with big sticks. What is interesting is that two of them are wearing masks which cover the nose and mouth.

The Modern Witch Five of Wands clearly describes the contentious social discourse regarding mask-wearing during the pandemic. Yet, the timeline tells us that there is no way this card could have been consciously designed to do so.

In the accompanying book, the fighters in this image are described as a “girl gang”. When we look at the image, we can see they have Asian features. Their stances suggest they are practice bojutsu, a martial art using Japanese staff technique.

We know that in some Asian cultures the covering of the nose and mouth to prevent the spread of disease is common, and, beyond that, is considered a simple common courtesy.

The designer of Modern Witch Tarot, Lisa Sterle, could not have possibly known that mask-wearing, mask-hating, and mask-making would be front-and-center activities worldwide in the years that followed her deck’s publication.

Had the masks appeared in a different card it might not be so noteworthy. The Five of Wands traditionally is about conflict. There has been a remarkable amount of loud and contentious conflict around mask-wearing in many places around the world.

That Sterle was inspired to illustrate this card in this way a year before the pandemic is the best example of how tarot expands and evolves to represent current culture and circumstance that I have ever seen.

There are many ways that tarot is magical. Sometimes it feels hard to show clear evidence of that, since so many of our tarot experiences are deeply personal and private.

I believe the clear relevance of the Modern Witch Five of Wands to our current culture and circumstances is evidence of tarot’s power to evolve to fit a changing world.