Best I can tell, the people who use tarot cards are those who want to believe in the idea of pre-destiny, or that there is some mystical “if I do this, then that will occur” order to the universe — beyond simple cause and effect. It’s kind of sad, really, to imagine someone thinking that by spending time with a deck of decorated cards, they’d be able to figure out what makes them or their loved ones tick. Even sadder is that in most cases people will pay someone else good money in order to have these “insights” given to them. Now that you know where I am coming from on the subject, I’ll get to the point.
I had a press release for Random House’s ‘Wisdom of the House of Night Oracle Cards‘ app show up in my inbox, and my first instinct was to simply delete it. But there were a couple of things in the email that made me give it a second look. For instance, did you know that there is evidently a “World Tarot Week“? It doesn’t show up on any of my calendars, but because the press release says there is one, I am assuming that there must be those who celebrate it, or who will celebrate it, now that they know there is a reason to celebrate. In that spirit of celebration, Random House is dropping the price of their tarot app from $6.99 to $3.99 from May 22nd to May 24th; if you decide that you can wait until May 25th, it will only cost 99¢. If you are interested, you can find the app in the App Store, Google Play, and the Barnes & Noble NOOK Store.
The thing is that these cards are ugly; rather than looking like the traditional Tarot cards that any self-respecting Madame Zelda at a carnival might use, these app-based cards look like this …
Not very inspiring if you are trying to hoodwink someone into thinking that you can tell them about their past, present, or future, right? Maybe it’s just as well.
With that said, I have heard of one intriguing use for tarot cards that has nothing to do with trying to bilk people out of their money or prey upon those with a low skeptic threshold: there are fiction writers who use tarot cards to devise plots for their novels! Have you ever heard of this? Evidently it’s a mind exercise that some authors will do; they draw cards and use whatever the back of the tarot card says to help them figure out what might happen next in their plot. The gist is that you’d pick three to five cards to flesh out a character and to figure out places where the plot might go next; it’s a sort of mind exercise for writers who are stumped. That seems like the best use for tarot cards that I’ve heard of.
What about you? Will you be celebrating World Tarot Week? Do you put any stock in what a tarot card reading might reveal? Do tell. =)