Can Tarot Card Reading Actually Work? | Vogue France

The world of wellness offers a seemingly endless conveyor belt of practices to heal, ground and guide us under the guise of self-care. In the anxiety-inducing grip of a global health pandemic alongside social and political unrest, our boundless appetite for emotional support shows no signs of waning. As meetings, workouts and cocktails flocked to Zoom, tarot readings are the latest trend to be digitized. But can it help?

Despite often inciting images of crystal-ball yielding fortune tellers, the often mystical world of tarot card reading is widely seen as a tool for self-reflection rather than divination. Giselle La Pompe-Moore, energy healer and founder of Project Ajna, describes tarot card reading as “a spiritual private investigator” offering us a new way of seeing ourselves, the situations we are in and how to navigate them.

During this collective period of unrest, it’s perhaps unsurprising that tarot is thriving. “When so much of our daily lives has changed or been taken away from us, we’ve had no choice but to confront what’s left behind — ourselves,” La Pompe-Moore notes. “It’s been an interesting moment to do some inner work and examine areas of our lives that we’re finding difficult to manoeuvre.” With sessions traditionally taking place face-to-face, recent events have created a surge in demand for online readings, primarily utilizing Zoom, WhatsApp or FaceTime. Data from consumer behavior platform Spate, reveals that US searches for “tarot cards” and “how to read tarot cards” are up 31.9% and 78.4% respectively from 2019.

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Spiritual guidance

“It makes sense that in uncertain times, we turn to spirituality for some form of guidance,” says Holly Friend, senior foresight writer at forecasting consultancy, The Future Laboratory, who have been tracking the evolution of Alternative Spirituality. “With many people finding themselves out of a job, anxious for the health of loved ones, and generally disillusioned about the future, spiritual practices such as tarot readings take on a new significance.”

US-based tarot reader and licensed social worker, Jessica Dore, attributes the rise in interest due to those seeking tools to grapple with the current instability. “In mythic terms, we’re in a collective ‘belly of the whale’ moment. We're all inside, doing whatever we're choosing to do, waiting to be tossed back out into the sea. Tarot is particularly powerful in an initiatory time like this because it utilises archetypes and symbols which can help us acclimate to the broader storyline of what we might be going through and why.”

The pictorial language of a deck of tarot cards is the fundamental catalyst which encourages us to dissect and discuss matters that our conscious minds aren’t able to comprehend. Although Dore believes the cards have specific meaning and aren’t merely ambiguous images open to interpretation, she says there is a tangible benefit in letting an image from a card land where it needs to in your awareness. “When I work with clients, I'll often ask them to just tell me what comes up when they look at a certain image, without prior knowledge of what it's traditionally "about." What comes up is profound, tailored to their needs, and nine times out of ten more useful than whatever I would have said.”

Accessing the subconscious

With blind spots in our consciousness, utilising visual prompts allows us to access different parts of our brain and reveal things we didn’t know about ourselves, according to Dr. Charlynn Ruan, Ph.D, clinical psychologist and founder of Thrive Psychology Group, Inc a female focused group practice. “Our verbal abilities can be limiting, with much of our understanding and experience challenging to verbalise without other visual or physical sensation cues. It’s why we say, ‘I just have a gut feeling’ to express something we know, but can't verbalise.”