Neuroscience + Metaphor = a Rational Explanation for How Tarot Works?
It turns out that tarot and logic aren’t mutually exclusive.
Some people need a rational permission slip before diving in to explore the tarot. I get that because a decade ago when I picked up my first tarot deck, I had to overcome a lot of my own resistance to the idea of tarot being a practical tool for self-exploration. I had previously thought of tarot cards as an instrument for fortune-tellers and tricksters, and I’ve had lots of conversations with others who feel similarly over the years.
For a long time, the way I understood the mechanism of the tarot, at least the explainable part of it, was that the imagery and ideas presented by a deck offer us a new perspective. This wasn’t a science-backed explanation, but it did — and still does — make sense to me.
Sometimes journalling on an issue, speaking with a friend or just sleeping on it can free up something that enables us to find a way through or make sense of things differently. Similarly, a card from the tarot, when we reflect on it in relation to a situation, can prompt insights that might not otherwise have arisen.
This felt logical and sane if a little woolly. It didn’t capture the strength of ah-ha moment that I routinely experience when reading for myself or witness when reading for others. Not only that, I still couldn't explain how reading the cards creates this effect. In conversations with the tarot uninitiated, passingly curious or sceptical, it just didn’t feel substantial enough.
Recently, when I watched a presentation by a friend on her counselling diploma research project (thank you, TG), she discussed some neuroscience findings that have helped me bridge that gap. My friend talked about how the human brain responds to storytelling by releasing cortisol, increasing attention and memory. As soon as I heard that, my ears began to prick up about how this might apply to the tarot.
My reading style for clients has often been described as a kind of storytelling, where I create a coherent narrative from the cards and seemingly disparate elements of the client’s life. In most cases, I work by co-creating with the client, unless their preference is otherwise, which it sometimes is.
My friend went on to talk about neuroscience research cited by Amanda Seyderhelm, a play therapist who trains professionals and organisations to work with children on issues around grief and loss. This research shows that more brain centres light up in response to metaphor than any other kind of human communication. At this, a lightbulb went on in my own brain because here was an explanation that made sense to me: a tarot deck is 78 visual metaphors!
For those of us who use the tarot to explore our feelings and circumstances, I now think that metaphor is the scientific explanation for why and how that works. Each card is a metaphor for a range of human experiences, often in an immediately obvious way. When considered for a little longer, we can find more subtle metaphors within the image, which we might have missed at first glance.
If you know nothing or very little about tarot, this may not immediately make sense, so I’ll walk you through an example. Here is a picture of the 8 of Swords from the Anna K Tarot:
I’ll look at this from the perspective of a tarot novice, coming across this card for the first time. Looking up the 8 of Swords in Joan Bunning’s Learning the Tarot for Beginners, she offers us three keywords: restriction, confusion and powerlessness.
This card depicts a woman looking at a reflection of herself in a mirror, where her reflected image is much younger than she is now. Her younger self is blindfolded and bound with white fabric, one end of which trails from behind her, along the ground and out of the mirror, where it becomes part of the fabric of the woman’s dress. There are eight swords in the picture, one tied to the girl in the mirror, five standing vertically in the ground around her, one laying on the ground in front of her and one in the woman’s right hand, pointing downwards.
It’s easy to see how this image is a metaphor for the three keywords Joan Bunning has given us: the girl in the mirror is restricted by her bindings, her blindfold is symbolic of confusion, and she is powerless, even though she has a sword herself, as well as being surrounded by them.
Let’s assume that our tarot novice knows that the suit of swords tend to relate to matters of the mind and how we use it. We can then see the bindings connecting the two selves of this woman as being mental constructs — her situation today being informed by, or experienced through, the lens of her past powerlessness. She has the power to cut that tie, but until she does, her thinking is likely to come from that trapped, unclear, powerless place, when her sword was inaccessible to her.
In a reading, this card can encourage us to consider the possibility that we might be experiencing — and responding to — aspects of the present as though they were things that happened in the past. There could be elements of previous trauma — big or small T — affecting our thinking.
It might simply be that we’ve never re-visited a parental injunction to do, or not do, something, since it was issued. “Strawberries are too expensive for anything other than special occasions” was a ridiculous one of mine, until a conversation with a friend made me realise that it wasn’t something I believed, but something I’d been told and taken on trust ever since. My strawberry loving children have reason to feel grateful for that realisation!
The power of this card lies in the questions it suggests — ‘how am I tied to the past?’, ‘what is in my power and what isn’t?’, ‘what do I have permission to do, and who from?’. These are questions that speak to the human condition, and can be useful in all sorts of situations. We’ve only looked at the 8 of Swords, but the metaphors in each of the 78 cards of the tarot invite us to consider these kinds of questions.
Learning that metaphor connects up many different parts of the brain simultaneously, in a way that just talking about a thing doesn’t, was a breakthrough for me. It has helped me understand what’s going on in mine and my clients’ brains when a reading has the effect of joining up dots we hadn’t previously connected. I now have a clear and scientific explanation for how the tarot enables us to make sense of things.
This idea of visual metaphor also helps explain why different iterations of the same card — in this case, looking at the 8 of Swords from other decks — can offer such a variety of nuance, even when they contain elements we can relate to the same set of keywords. Take a look at the picture at the top of this piece, and hopefully you’ll see what I mean — and keep an eye out for more on that, in my next post.
If you’ve been looking for a logical reason to explore the tarot for yourself or a rational explanation to offer friends, I hope this helps!
