On Tarot:

What is Tarot?

Tarot cards are itemized numerical cards that follow human story lines. The central hypotheses of Tarot are 1) human personality is not continuous, but rather discrete – i.e., humans, occupy certain set personalities (or playable roles) that can be categorically binned. The bin categories are the 12 zodiacs; and 2) That human experience is not unique – the story of your life is similar to – and has been experienced by many other humans in the past – though the specific details are different.

Is human personality discrete/categorical?

I think it is. There are definitive measurable characteristics of personality that can be quantified. These attributes are things like openness, disagreeableness, conscientiousness, etc. Your categorical bin, or player, or role, or character, is essentially a vector space of these quantified attributes – where you group with others in your cluster. This vector space can roughly be binned into ~12 different roles or zodiacs, plus or minus a few. Your bin is probably genetically determined at conception. So you end up a character that responds to environmental stimuli in a sort of pre-programmed way because of your defined character personality. “All the world is a stage” and you play your role.

Human experience is not unique.

If the above is true, that human personality falls into categorical bins, that means that your personality has existed many times on earth before. Other people, who behave and respond to stimuli in a way very close to or exactly the same as you have existed many many times before in evolutionary history. We see how some people with certain personalities repeat the same mistakes and behavioral patterns over and over in their life. Why is it hard to believe that many more people like that coexist simultaneously and have existed in those same behavioral cycles in the past and will again in the future? These conjectures seem obviously true to me. So there are predetermined character types, and characters encounter the same situational opportunities/problems/game events, because those very events are often induced by their own behaviors. These assumptions form the basis of Tarot. Tarot assumes you make your reality based on who you are.

Philosophy of Tarot.

So what precisely is Tarot? Imagine someone wrote down all the basic plot elements that can happen to a man or women. They can fall in love or out of love, they can become rich or poor, they can be betrayed, they can take a risk and find a reward or a failure, etc. These are events and actions that can occur in the game of life. Now reduce the subset of things that can happen to a character to the smallest, broadest list and subdivide it into suits that follow a given story – that is Tarot. Interestingly, Isaac Asimov wrote in Foundation that eventually humans would discover that human behavior en masse is predictable by computer simulation, because humans are creatures that follow and respond to stimuli in consistent predictable ways. So predictable in fact, that the entire fate of the universe could be statistically predicted by running the simulation forward. THAT is Tarot. Tarot is that same argument. Nothing new under the sun, repeating behavioral patterns that keep coming true…

Does Tarot work?

Tarot cards are tools of manipulation (benevolent or malevolent). Because behavioral patterns are statistically predictable and people play certain character roles, you can push people towards their behavioral destiny or statistically predict what will happen to them, via Tarot. It also helps to understand their character and their environment. It can be outright manipulative, which is why the Catholic church bans it – but it’s not Satanic. Nothing in the cards is Satanic and people who fear the pentagram imagery are not understanding that pentagram symbolism preceded Satanism and Satanism only adopted it. If you actually read the Tarot cards and what they are – there is nothing Satanic about them whatsoever. But they can be used as tools of manipulation, and have been used by self-proclaimed witches to manipulate dumb people. Tarot readers undoubtedly use them for that purpose when it suits their needs or interest to manipulate or influence. Tarot also works because the stories told in the suits are recurrent life patterns. For example 2 of wands (strategic risk) leads to the next card, 3 of wands (expansion) – taking smart risks leads to expansions. So Tarot is filled with little aphorisms and proverbs that really work in life. Imagine if a wise old man wrote down all the lessons he had learned in short aphorisms and turned them into a deck of cards which had been distilled over time – that is Tarot.

…working on re-organizing this deck…