A Brief Guide to the Tarot

While every Tarot deck includes a little booklet explaining the cards and their meanings and interpretations, I have also included one here, for the sake of completeness.

A passing familiarity with some of this stuff may enhance the thematic resonance of various elements of the game.

A Note on Cartomancy

It is, of course, possible to predict the future with startling specificity and accuracy. Astronomers do it all the time: with access to a telescope the size of a building and a brain-melting amount of calculus, it's possible to do things like predict the precise location of stars in the sky years in advance, determine the time and location of future eclipses, and predict exactly when the sun will rise and set.

After thousands of years we've finally found a priesthood who, when they read the tea leaves, actually come out with the correct answer. Absolutely bananas. The prognostication olympics have been cancelled because ballistics team took home every medal for 4 centuries straight. Astrology didn't even have a chance.

Technically, ballistics should be able to tell you which pip on a numbered die will come up when you roll the bones, or what the weather will be like tomorrow, but when it comes down to complex systems like fluid, or even the bounces of a handful of small rocks, chaos intervenes to make predictions essentially impossible: most things exist in systems so complex that ballistics calculations work, but microscopic changes in initial position and velocity produce wildly different outcomes, so models can't reliably produce exact predictions.

Probability theory and statistics then stepped up to bat and firmly delivered a line drive for our ability to predict the unpredictable. Despite being unable to predict the outcome of an individual die roll, probability can accurately bound and predict the outcome of thousands of dice rolled together. Roll a six-sided die 1,000,000 times and I guarantee the sum of those dice will be more than 3,000,000, less than 4,000,000, and a stone's throw away from 3,500,000. Probably.

We are, in fact, prediction engines, constantly engaged in the task of measuring, modelling and predicting our surroundings. It would be impossible to participate in traffic, or to play a game of pool or poker, if we weren't.

I say this in order to establish that predicting the future is, in fact, possible. We do it all the time.

Cartomancy, however, depends on the well-understood practice of cold reading. It's a carefully managed illusion whereby a clever huckster can attempt to predict the past, which, generally, is much easier to predict than the future, on account of it's having already happened.

By presenting cards that offer seemingly-specific interpretations, but that can also be re-interpreted and re-combined in various and sundry ways by exploiting their rich details and broad archetypes, cartomancy offers an extremely powerful engine for cold reading. "The Lovers" and "The Emperor" together can mean "you will fall in love with a tall, dark, handsome man within the week" (whoa, chills), but it can also mean "you will have or have had a positive interaction with any man, at some point in the future or at any point in your past", a prediction that, if you were simply to make it without the aid of fun occult-themed cards, would be so non-specific and broadly applicable as to be laughable.

Cold readers watch their clients closely as they draw cards. If they gravitate towards specific cards, it's likely that those are the ones that have meaningful connotations for them.

Cold reading works by giving the target a lot of very broad patterns and then watching and refining, taking their reaction to the patterns presented and using them to zero in on specific details. This is easier with a willing audience: most people are happy to reinterpret vague statements into their own frame of reference and volunteer a lot of information about themselves.

It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to see a Patagonia vest and a ten thousand dollar watch and say "Your connection to the financial world brings you a lot of pain, but also provides welcome structure to your life".

It's also much easier to remember a spookily accurate prediction as a wild and unlikely coincidence, while dismissing and quickly forgetting an inaccurate prediction... Ashley. Honestly, with enough customers and enough predictions, you're bound to find someone who you've always been right about, just by accident.

This produces no shortage of "whoa" moments for people experiencing cartomancy for their first time. Whoa: Death came up, and my grandfather just died last week. Or: if there wasn't a prominent death recently? Maybe there will be one in the future. Or maybe there won't, and Death just meant "any significant change, at all". Because the cards have specific connotations but general outs, they're able to produce a high velocity of interpretations that feel laser-precise even if they're... not, really.

As a bonus, most of the cards are optimized to be easily interpreted as answers for some of the most common questions. The four suits are carefully organized around things people want to know about: love (cups), money (pentacles), power (swords), and adventure (wands).

This doesn't mean all fortunetellers are necessarily hucksters, although many of them are: many fortunetellers are simply intuitive, empathetic people who are as invested in manufacturing the accuracy of their card readings as their customers are. They've had many of their own "whoa" moments, and with a little effort they, too, can tune their inner eye.

Ultimately, it's my impression that fortunetellers are mostly harmless: talking over your life and experiences with an empathetic stranger who's doing their best to listen so well that they seem prescient can be pleasant and even thereapeutic for many, although it's no substitute for real therapy.

This also leads to some fun life advice: toss out wild predictions now and then. People will forget the misses, but remember the hits, and you'll seem like an oracle.