Tarot

siLLy puPPy wrote: NOM is hilarious! I've been on a former USSR exploration in the last year or so. Love Scald (doom metal), Regnat Horrendum (symphonic black metal), Grazhdanskaya Oborona (punk rock), Yegor i Opizdenvshie (psychedelic rock), Sergey Kuryokhin (avant-prog, avant-garde-jazz) and many more from Ukraine, Kazakhstan and other former republics. Shocking how much quality material came from that part of the world and still does!

 

Edited by Woon Deadn - May 25 2020 at 09:52

Returning to the topic.

See, all I see tarot card reading as doing is generating narratives through controlled chance. It gives meaning to subsequent experiences by offering a framework of interpretation. But I don't see tarot's archetypes as a conceptual scheme that has any privileged access to reality and their application through chance makes them even less connected to reality. On the subjective side, I certainly think it's possible that one might derive self-knowledge from the act somehow, but on the other hand, it might not be pre-existing self-knowledge but a created one. Just like it has no privileged access to reality, I don't think it has any privileged access to your unconscious. Whatever you interpret as a result would have to be put in conversation with what you already know, in order for it to be a gain in knowledge and not just jumping from one state of self-knowledge to another, attaining new knowledge from entertaining a novel narrative perspective, but losing old knowledge. I guess what I'm saying is that I can see it having a useful place, but not an epistemologically exalted one. Jeff Tweedy recently recommended a book called What It Is, which contains surreal drawings and collages and seemingly nonsensical questions about the pictures as prompts for creative work. I feel this has a similar structure. It subjects you to chance generated experiences that can serve as a new narrative perspective from which to analyze your life. But what if it were more entropic? What if there were more archetypes and variables? What if you just used a random word generator? It may lose the mystique and its intelligibility to traditional occult interpretations, but would likely be far more useful in the way I describe, though lacking the badass art nouveau style. 

Edited by Polymorphia - May 25 2020 at 20:29

Polymorphia wrote: See, all I see tarot card reading as doing is generating narratives through controlled chance. It gives meaning to subsequent experiences by offering a framework of interpretation. But I don't see tarot's archetypes as a conceptual scheme that has any privileged access to reality and their application through chance makes them even less connected to reality. On the subjective side, I certainly think it's possible that one might derive self-knowledge from the act somehow, but on the other hand, it might not be pre-existing self-knowledge but a created one. Just like it has no privileged access to reality, I don't think it has any privileged access to your unconscious. Whatever you interpret as a result would have to be put in conversation with what you already know, in order for it to be a gain in knowledge and not just jumping from one state of self-knowledge to another, attaining new knowledge from entertaining a novel narrative perspective, but losing old knowledge. I guess what I'm saying is that I can see it having a useful place, but not an epistemologically exalted one. Jeff Tweedy recently recommended a book called What It Is, which contains surreal drawings and collages and seemingly nonsensical questions about the pictures as prompts for creative work. I feel this has a similar structure. It subjects you to chance generated experiences that can serve as a new narrative perspective from which to analyze your life. But what if it were more entropic? What if there were more archetypes and variables? What if you just used a random word generator? It may lose the mystique and its intelligibility to traditional occult interpretations, but would likely be far more useful in the way I describe, though lacking the badass art nouveau style.