Lotta weirdos dunking on @sadydoyle for mentioning that she's into tarot cards, so I guess it's story time. Pull up a chair, if you're so inclined.
Ages and ages ago, I was working with a friend on a biography of the notorious magician and skeptic James Randi. The project, sadly, never came to completion, but working on it was a hell of a ride while it lasted.
Among other things, I got to interview a bunch of amazing people in the worlds of magic, skepticism, and the paranormal—three endlessly fascinating interlocking subcultures.
One day I found myself in an English garden, talking to a woman who had risen to prominence as scholarly believer in the supernatural, but who had years before become reluctantly convinced that it was all bunk and wishful thinking and switched to the other team.
At one point we were going through a discussion of different kinds of paranormal belief—dowsing, crystal healing, precognition, whatever—and I mentioned tarot. "Oh, I still do tarot readings," she said.
Some day I'll find the tape or the transcript and share the whole conversation that followed, but the gist of it was this: A tarot reading doesn't require a belief in the supernatural. It can proceed even if neither party believes anything paranormal is involved.
I'm an atheist. I think faith healing is bunk and nobody can talk to the dead and out-of-body experiences aren't real and ghosts don't exist. But I still regret that I didn't have time to get my tarot cards read that day.
Tarot, like the I Ching, can be understood as a matter of pattern-seeking—of using random prompts to provoke a productive contemplation of stuff that's already rattling around in your brain.
Done with a partner, it can also be an opportunity for directed, empathetic dialogue—for two people to produce insights that neither would be able to come up with on their own, or without the structure of the ritual.
To dismiss tarot as spurious, or as woo-woo garbage, isn't skepticism or rational thinking. It's shallow, uncritical cultural snobbery. And again, I say this as a full-bore skeptic and atheist.
And yeah, dismissal of tarot is absolutely a gendered position to take.
Anyway. A healthy and rigorous skepticism requires, in my view, an open and empathetic approach to the role of ritual and intuition in human life, as both are essential elements of the human experience.
(I should really get myself a tarot deck, now that I think of it. And I should also eventually try to finagle a reading out of Sady.)
