The Existential Game of Tarot
by Camille Gazoul
Guidance
We may be reluctant to trust our inner guide when it appears, because we are so used to taking cues from the outside.¹
Should I move? Should I go to therapy? Should I reach out to my parents? Should I tell my friend I am worried about her? Should I quit my job? Should I take this opportunity? What should I be paying attention to? What is the point of this story I am writing? Should I stop going to Quaker meetings? What is something I learned this month? Is my apartment haunted? Where did my faith go? Can I trust this person? What is my fucking problem? What is my relationship to my writing? Should I stop using these tarot cards?
From small to large, these are some of the questions I have had for my tarot deck. I know that every bitch does tarot. It’s not a unique skill or a special talent. But tarot, as a practice, is important to me, and it has been for about seven years.
The ritual is the same though the questions differ. I shuffle my deck, the cards thicker and longer than a standard deck of cards, less pliable, not prone to bending or buffing. As I shuffle, I consider my question. At a certain point there is a readiness, as if my questions and concerns had drained from my hand, and into the cards. And in that moment, I flip the first card face up and place it in front of me. I pull as many as ten cards and as few as three and I read each one, analyzing the art, the word, discovering connotations and denotations. I look at the category, the sequence, the placement, and of course at the whole. The collection of face up cards stare up at me, daring me perhaps to make meaning out of what was just moments ago utterly random.
I’ve used my deck to make every major decision in my life. If one were to look in my notebook one would discover drawings designing tarot spreads for specific problems, long scribbly passages of reflection to better craft appropriate questions for the cards to answer, and of course annotated paragraphs to assist me in divining the ultimate meaning the cards expose. Fundamentally tarot, for me, is a mindfulness practice, a writing exercise, and a spiritual guidance counselor.
And perhaps, as I am trying to determine with this spread, one that has run its course.
Comparison
The way to find out who you are is not by comparing yourself with others, but by looking to see whether you are fulfilling your own potential the best way you know how.¹
When I was around twenty my friend Sarah and I went to get our tarot cards read. There was a New Age bookstore called Crazy Wisdom in Ann Arbor. It had a peculiar smell that I would later recognize as patchouli and jasmine, but at the time I just figured it was the scent of Crazy Wisdom, and it would probably smell that way until the end of time.
On Thursday nights you could do walk-in tarot readings with this woman named Catherine. Catherine was beautiful, with creamy skin and long brown hair that she wore tangled with scarves and beads. Her face was young and fresh, her eyes bright. But her hands were red and gnarled arthritic. She clutched at her cards painfully, or at least it looked painful to me, with the twisted and bent shape of her fingers. She held in one hand a white crystal, and squeezed it while she shuffled her deck.
I had used tarot cards before, but mostly as a toy. Something to look at or draw while I was stoned. I had really only seen variations of the standard Rider Waite Tarot Deck, what most people picture when they think of tarot. Rebecca’s cards, I realized, the second she flipped them for my spread, were something entirely different.
The images were vibrant, colorful, and seemed effuse with every kind of symbology you could imagine. Where the Rider deck had a strict hierarchy; kings, queens, and pages, this deck had categories of clouds, rainbows, and fire. Cards with single words like Ice-olation, No Thingness, The Rebel, and Participation.
Before Rebecca started interpreting the cards for me, she seemed to look through me, “You have a spiritual ability,” she claimed.
I nodded solemnly, thinking it would be dumb not to accept that compliment, but I studied the cards, unsure where she could have gotten that from the disparate images before me.
Perhaps because she saw in me a “spiritual ability” or just authentic curiosity, Rebecca read my tarot cards while teaching me how to read tarot cards. I suddenly saw it as a game of metaphor, a skill of allusion and interpretation. A practice of listening, really listening to another person, and speaking from the heart.
Rebecca did not use the interpretations that I would later learn from the book that comes with the deck; she might have really been a psychic. But the experience unlocked something in me, and for the next year I went to every witch store I could until I finally found the same deck she used.
I didn’t think to read the introduction, or the two page advertisement in the back about the Meditation Retreat that should have tipped me off to at least a cursory Google search of who the hell made the cards. I was too excited! I had found a tarot deck that aligned with my shiny new life philosophy. It acted as a form of verification for my ideas and a confidence boost for my decisions, something I felt I badly needed in my early twenties.
Morality
Rigid ideas of good and bad, sinful and virtuous, acceptable and unacceptable. It is important to remember that these judgments of the mind are just products of our conditioning.¹
From ages 16 to 20 I had chronic strep throat. Obviously in terms of chronic illnesses or really any health issue I was lucky. As the surgeon who finally took out my moldy, rotted tonsils that had been infecting my body for years said, “It’s not like you have cancer!”
It did however take a toll. I was physically weak for those years. I was dizzy and fell down a lot. I had a hard time remembering things and keeping track of ideas. I didn’t have a normal energy level, and I was just generally ill. I got a reputation among my friends as being a clumsy ditz who always has something wrong with her. That, I never quite shook.
When I finally got better it was like a gray veil had been lifted from my eyes. I could suddenly go on long walks. I could run without falling. I could stay up late without being sick the next day. I could retain memories! And most surprisingly, my mind was firing like crazy, every new thing I learned felt like a superpower.
It was at this time that I first read Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, Douglass, Buber. I got into Hermann Hesse, David Foster Wallace and Patti Smith.
Suddenly I was cobbling together a life philosophy, something you need when you have a life to live. A combination of New Age Spiritualism, New Sincerity, and Transcendentalism. I put it into practice in my growing social life, as I was at last accepted into friend groups, participating in clubs, and invited to parties, but my life philosophy is a misshapen blob of contradictions, stealing from different cultures, religions, and superstitions. From Emerson I stole his conviction that life is only as we perceive and animate it. “Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.” ² From Thoreau I snagged the idea of the sublime, of the ultimate form of intelligence was contact with the Other. From David Foster Wallace I chose to be present, to seek authenticity. I worry all the time that I have no right to claim these ideals, let alone regurgitate them in the many drunken conversations I’ve had about intentions.
And yet, they are my beliefs. Even though my brain is supposedly fully developed now, this time period was formative, the ideals have filtered in through actions, become watered down by life, and are now just part of me, like the scars on my knees.
But when I was young, when I was first discovering the edges of my mind and the bounds of my personality, I found my ideals difficult to articulate. That is, until I found my tarot deck.
Control
There is a time and place for control, but if we put it in charge of our lives we end up rigid. Controlled persons are always nervous because turmoil is hidden.¹
I think I am exactly the type of person that would not only join a cult, but join a cult accidentally.
It’s not that I am stupid or easily convinced. I just really love believing in things. Perhaps it was an overdose of fantasy in my childhood, or maybe my mind is just wired to wish for something other than reality.
There are of course drawbacks to this kind of inclination. When I was ten the librarian at my elementary school told us that the world was going to end, according to the Mayans, in 2012. The Mayans? My ten-year-old brain reeled. I had just read a book about the Mayans and those guys were super smart!
I remember doing the math, painfully, on the margin of our worksheet. I would be fifteen. I wouldn’t even get to drive yet? And the whole world would end! This seed of bad knowledge rooted in my brain like an invasive plant and never went away. I spent the next five years of my life engaging in magical thinking, something I still do to this day, perhaps foolishly.
It started with praying. I was raised Catholic, this was a natural choice. Then when I started to think the whole Jesus thing wasn’t as watertight as Mom claimed it to be, I started wishing on angel numbers. 11:11, 3:33, and so on. The mental olympics I participated in to keep the world from exploding, my god. I’m still waiting for my thank you.
Of course, it wasn’t always so dire. In the height of my Emerson days I determined that perhaps the ultimate form of enlightenment was to be one’s own God, instead of believing in these designed structures with ulterior motives. This was also, coincidentally, when I became really insufferable. I determined that everything was a cult, everything was manipulating my emotions and sapping my very human desire to belong and believe, and using it for evil. Boo capitalism! As solipsistic as it sounds now, it sparked my relationship with manifestation.
Manifestation. Now that was something I could get behind. Attempting, through strong intentionality in action and thought, to craft the outcomes for your life? This I can do; I have been training for this.
The problem with these New Age spiritual practices is that it’s on you. If I was my own God, that meant when things went wrong it was my own fault. At a certain point, I could only claim a string of bad luck, unemployment, and isolation as the results of my powers of manifestation. And I only clung harder to the idea that I was in control. Maybe I just didn’t have the right crystals? Maybe I wasn’t writing my spells in the active voice? What on earth could the problem be?
I wish I could say that my desire to believe in things has become more discerning, but it hasn’t. It’s just become harder to summon the faith. I don’t buy everything people tell me anymore, but I crave, deeply, the feeling of relinquishing the burden of this existence. Making it some other, more powerful thing’s problem. I don’t want to feel like I am in complete control over my spiritual practices, I want to be moved, god damn it, by something other than myself.
Turning In
Develop the knack of turning in, take distance from the mind, indulge in the freedom of no longer running after desires, turn in and away from outward journeys.¹
The last year I lived in Austin before moving for my MFA program, I was dedicated to a quest. I wanted to see as many genres of music as I possibly could. I love live music, unabashedly, uncritically. When I lived there I went to see music almost every night. I learned two-step at Sam’s Town Point, went dancing at Sagebrush, watched punk bands fight at Mohawk, cried over an opera singer at a cafe open mic. I was to move to West Virginia in a few weeks and decided I wanted to see some Appalachian folk music. That was how I first stumbled into a Quaker meeting house.
When I arrived a bunch of old Austin hippies were gathered in the center of a beautiful, golden washed octagonal room. The ceiling arched with tan wooden beams that gathered into a skylight. I had burst into a jam session without an instrument, but they let me listen. I’d never heard old-time Appalachian folk music, never so intimately sat with musicians and watched them find a song.
Perhaps it was the acoustics, perhaps it was God. I still don’t know, but that evening, while the music swelled and communed, I heard something between the notes, and part of me felt like standing up and singing.
When I moved to West Virginia I found a local Quaker meeting.
I’m ashamed to say I know very little about the Quaker faith, but I do understand the practice. Weekly, Quakers will meet in a quiet room. They will sit in silence together for about an hour. Sometimes a person is moved by the Spirit, or Creative Director, to speak, and they will. No one responds, the words just fall on ears, everyone maintaining their silent meditation.
My first meeting someone was moved to speak; she told a story about her sister who was recently hospitalized because she collapsed beneath a pile of boxes in her home. The sister was a hoarder, and this woman in the Quaker meeting began to talk about her faith, about not being sure where it was, if it was hidden somewhere, on a golden window sill obscured by piles of trash in her sister’s home. She made a metaphor out of the mess.
I went to Quaker meetings for a few months. I fell in love with the creeping notion of a quiet room, with the idea that I could sit and do nothing, and with practice my mind would free itself from itself. Sometimes I heard nothing, sometimes I saw nothing, and I think that was the point.
That was the first time in my life I ever really considered the value of faith. Not believing in something, not buying into an idea or a life philosophy, not even really having faith in a particular entity or idea.
I had never let myself do that before, just sit with this blind inexplicable feeling. Even though I thought I believed everything that passed in front of me, bought into whatever trendy new craft I could scribble about in my notebook, I had never really believed in any of it. Because if I did, I probably wouldn’t have had to work so hard.
The Master
The Master of Zen is not a master over others, but a master of himself. Learn from the teachers, and would-be masters and move on. There is no blissfulness more precious than freedom, than being a master of your own destiny.¹
A few weeks ago my boyfriend Oliver and I sat down to watch a documentary called Wild Wild Country. My sister had told me to watch this documentary at least five years ago and I never got around to it. It was tacked on to a list of shows and movies that she recommends to me that I never watch, a sore subject between us.
Oliver had mentioned Wild Wild Country earlier that week and seeking to satisfy them both I settled in to watch it. The documentary follows the story of the Rajneesh Movement, a religious cult led by Indian mystic Bagwan Shree Rajneesh. The documentary begins with the early years of the cult and goes through the period of time in which they purchased an enormous swath of land in Wasco County, Oregon, and after a series of escalating and outrageous events, including two attempted assassinations, were essentially shut down by the federal government.
As the first episode developed, one of the interviewees referred to the charismatic leader as something other than Bagwan, which everyone else seemed to call him.
“Wait,” I said, popcorn halfway to my mouth. “What did that guy say?”
“Osho,” Oliver said.
My mouth hung open.
“What?”
I lunged for the remote and paused the documentary. “This Bagwan guy went by the name Osho?”
He laughed, confused by my reaction. I turned the lamp on beside us and leaned over the coffee table to retrieve something that is never more than five feet from my person whenever I’m at home. Something that I take with me on trips, that I spend hours contemplating at least once a week.
My tarot deck. I had long lost the original box that it came in, but I still had the booklet that includes descriptions and explanations for each card, as well as directions for reading. I pulled the booklet from beneath a pile of junk on my coffee table and held it up to him.
“Osho Zen Tarot,” he read from the front. “You’re kidding me.”
“My tarot deck was written by a cult leader?” I said in disbelief.
“You didn’t know that Osho was a cult leader?” he said back, cackling at my stricken expression. He hit play, the very next image in the documentary was a video of the Bagwan, or Osho, speaking to a crowd at his ashram in Pune.
“Wait!” I shouted out again. “Is that him?”
I shuffled through my deck looking for The Master. That was the name of the card that held an image of Osho. I thought it was just a drawing of a wise looking man, I never thought it was a real person.
“He’s literally in your deck?” Oliver crowed with laughter. “You realize you’re in the cult, basically.”
I hit play again, hardly paying attention and sinking into the couch. Over the next six hours of the documentary I experienced the rise and fall of the Rajneeshi lifestyle. From the cults’ early years, where the teachings and ideas present in my tarot deck were groundbreaking, attractive philosophies to highly educated Westerners seeking spiritual refuge. To the later years, when corruption, in-fighting and greed nailed the coffin shut on the idealism of the 1960s.
I watched as the philosophy that clicked with me at such a formative time in my life and continued to be an influence on my choices became nothing more than buzzwords carrying the same spiritual weight as a corporate professional development slideshow.
The next day, on impulse I picked up my deck and started shuffling, something I do whenever I have extended alone time, boredom, or writer’s block. But when I pulled my first card, instead of making the connections I’d been making for the past six years of owning the deck; a connection based on experience, research, and thoughtful meditation, all I thought about was the artwork, designed to be attractive to someone like me, someone who would end up in the Rajneeshi cult in the first place. A privileged, over-educated, white woman, with a lack of purpose being the primary component of her personality.
Trust
Don’t waste your life for that which is going to be taken away. If you trust, only then can you drop your knowledge, only then can you put your mind aside. And something immense opens up. ¹
Lately, I’ve felt faithless. The things that usually buoy my spirit simply haven’t been working. As a fiction writer, the unfortunate fact of my life is that I connect nearly all of my self-worth to my ability to effectively play pretend and communicate it to strangers. In dry seasons of inspiration I would often turn toward my tarot cards, using them to work out an idea, theme, or story I was trying to crack. But my cards had been tainted. Now when I look at the Master I don’t see a wise old man, I see the leader of a capitalist cult, a man who was known for having a Rolls Royce habit, which was actually a front for a tax exempt trust to exist within the profit making arm of the Rajneesh Foundation International.
I didn’t trust my cards anymore. I also understood them in a different way. The wisdom and art I found so moving in my early twenties were now the watered-down notions of an ideology invented by a grifter.
It’s embarrassing how depressed I was. Unable to write, uninspired by everything I read, feeling that the very ideals that gave my life meaning were dumb. I couldn’t seem to get a grip. That old listless, helpless refrain that had been the backing track of my life when I was sick had returned with a vengeance.
The other day I googled Bagwan, just to see if his Wikipedia would be more redeeming than the documentary. I learned that he had experienced a spiritual awakening at 21 years old, that he studied philosophy and his initial ideas were drawn from thinkers and religions from around the world, never quite settling on one school of thought. His early lectures were about rejecting institutionalized religions, and seeking one’s own spiritual path. ³
The guy was one of the most notorious cult leaders of the 1980’s and his early 20s didn’t look that different from mine. Perhaps it wasn’t the end of the world that my spiritual beliefs were a patchwork quilt. And maybe it wasn’t so terrible to use my tarot cards. Even the originator, the Bagwan himself, was running the show based on his version of the same notions of transcendentalism and Buddhism that I had read about all those years ago.
I sat with this knowledge for a while, then turned to my tarot cards. Clearing books and papers and dirty mugs from my coffee table I shuffled them carefully, wondering to myself all the while, What the fuck is wrong with me? Why can’t I seem to find that spark of faith that guided me in my writing, in my life? And just like they have been for six years, the cards helped me.
It’s not like tarot cards give you direct answers. There’s no magic element to them. What tarot cards do, what all these spiritual practices do, is force you to open your mind, to craft connections out of seemingly disconnected ideas or problems, hammer them into something smaller, something digestible, and make the mess into a metaphor.
This skill, of turning life into metaphor, of meaning making, is the whole point of writing itself. It’s what I spent my hours in the Quaker meeting house doing, it’s what I think about at every concert, when I write in my journal. It’s our most human endeavor, to take this messy life and attempt to find the meaning, to make that meaning beautiful.
Maybe I am an easy mark. Maybe I believe things too readily. Maybe I believe in all the wrong things. But at least I can take my life, as uninteresting or unsatisfying as it is, and turn it into stories.
After the Osho incident, I checked out a book at the library about intentional communities, or cults. The writer, this woman named Rosabeth Moss Kanter, was a popular sociologist in the early seventies, and gained some fame writing about the wave of communes and cults during that time period. Now, she is primarily known for her work about corporate leadership and management techniques, but in her first book she attempts to analyze the ongoing fascination with utopias and communal living. She claims that people yearn for “…a social order that is self-created and self-chosen rather than externally imposed, yet one that also operates according to a higher order of natural and spiritual laws.” ⁴ And who among us doesn’t wish for the same?
While I was reading the chapters about some early American communes during The Great Awakening I came across one called Oneida. They believed that heaven was an earthly achievement, not a goal for the afterlife. They believed in “complex marriage” and had strange matchmaking and social practices. I told Oliver about it.
“Another one. It’s always some weird freaky cult with you,” he said.
“I don’t know,” I replied, shrugging and turning back to the pages. “You never know, maybe it works.”
References
1.Osho. 1995. Osho Zen Tarot: The Transcendental Game Of Zen. New York: St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
2. Baym, Nina, ed. 2003. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Sixth ed. Vol. B. New York: W.W Norton & Company.
3. “Rajneesh.” Wikipedia, September 16, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajneesh. 4. Kanter, Rosabeth M. 1972. Commitment and Community Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Camille Gazoul is a fiction writer finishing her second year in West Virginia University’s MFA program. She still uses her tarot cards but now takes her readings with a grain of salt (well, sometimes…) Camille’s fiction has been featured in JAKE and Bending Genres. More at camillegazoul.com.
COLD SIGNAL 