OUR world; bright lights, high speed, noise. Aggression. Social media. Bad food. Toxic childhoods where pale children live indoor lives watching little screens. The steady, agonising death of the natural world. The old, slow culture of fairytales and legends, nursery rhymes and magic set in a robust nature is no longer mainstream. Kids are glued to their parents’ phones – or worse, their own – watching stupid mind-numbing stuff alien to the Irish culture; screechy achingly bright videos about nothing much.
Popular children’s videos today would be the Baby Shark song and video (a song and video produced by a South Korean kids’ entertainment company, the lyrics of which appear to be mostly made up of the phrase doo-doo), Peppa Pig, an irritating British cartoon series which, one Irish mother memorably complained had given her child an English accent, Starter Squad, created by an American Youtuber and the American animated series SpongeBob SquarePants. Yet we have forgotten the deep mystery and magic of traditional Celtic tales of goddesses, leprechauns, Pookas, banshees, the Fear Gorta, the shape-shifters, the Abhartach (a kind of vampire) and the Fomorians is no longer in common usage. The colourful mythology that was so much a part of Irish life in the days before electricity, before television and cars, before smart devices is disappearing.
Few children read for pleasure now, and yet books, of course, are where the best magic is to be found. You don’t believe me, ask the junior infant teachers – a worrying proportion of the children who now start school each September arrive without knowing how to turn the pages of a book.
So when I heard that an acquaintance of mine had set up a little shop to practise as a fortune teller in the middle of the city, I was fascinated.
Is there really that much interest, anymore, in the magic of tarot and the mystery of fortune-telling to warrant setting up a physical shop which people can actually visit at a time when more and more businesses are retreating online? Well, kiddoes believe it or not, last I heard, the business is flourishing. So just below the surface, below the noise of big, fast cars on the new ring roads and bypasses, beneath the noisy frenetic pace of modern life, the insularity, the bad food and the toxic obsession with devices, it seems there are many who still believe in magic.
Most of us have gone for a reading sometime or other. Sometimes the results prove to be unsettlingly spot-on, sometimes not, but the magic of fortune-telling it seems, still holds an attraction.
The main theme of Katy Hays’ hit fiction debut and Sunday Times bestseller, The Cloisters, is the power of tarot – and about academic jealousy, obsession and Renaissance magic and the search for a special pack of 15th century tarot cards. And it’s been one of the hottest books to be published in the last couple of years. Despite everything it seems there’s still a place for magic.
The earliest recorded history of tarot cards stretches back nearly 1,000 years to the 1300s, though that original pack was only half the size of the modern pack. That first tarot contained only the four suits that would later become known as the Minor Arcana (Cups, Swords, Wands and Pentacles, or as they were known in the mid-15th century, Cups, Swords, Batons and Coins.) The rest of the traditional pack, the Major Archana, which includes cards like the World, the Sun, the Moon, the Star, Temperance, Death, Wheel of Fortune, the Tower, the Chariot, Justice, the Emperor, and the Fool and so on was added on sometime back in the mid-1400s, though at that point it seems tarot was still only a game, the goal being that the winner was the person who earned the most points.
It was only from about the late 1700s that tarot cards began to be used for divination, or fortune telling.
It was the mid-1800s before tarot was developed as a specific fortune-telling tool in an attempt to integrate science and spirituality. Along came Carl Jung, one of the founders of modern psychology. He developed the idea of the collective unconscious. The modern interpretations of the tarot are believed to have their origins in this work. Viewed through the Jungian lens, many of the cards in tarot pack embody the many faces of the self that each of us carry within us. The Fool, for example, represents the infinite potential we have within us. The Fool is a blank slate that later changes as she embarks on the journey of self-knowledge that is life.
Yet it cannot be denied that tarot cards are no more than a series of cards printed with bright images. Research will hold that communicating with tarot is a conversation you basically have with yourself and your inner world. You use your conscious desire to find truth and meaning and develop an ability to interpret the voice of your own unconscious.
There’s a pattern and a structure to it. Is it therefore, that, in tarot, the magic is within us and the cards are just a way for us to connect with that magic?
They mirror life - we can have a lucky draw or a really bad hand - but the important thing is how we choose to react to what the cards tell us or to what life deals us. And that’s what any therapist will tell you. You cannot control what others do, in fact you cannot always control what happens to you, but you can control your reaction to the actions of others. Interesting isn’t, it how the messages in a pack of cards dating back some 1,000 years still have enough pulling power to warrant someone setting up a shop in the middle of a busy city to talk to people about what they have to tell us?
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The pulling power of a pack of cards that date back around 1,000
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03.04.2024
OUR world; bright lights, high speed, noise. Aggression. Social media. Bad food. Toxic childhoods where pale children live indoor lives watching little screens. The steady, agonising death of the natural world. The old, slow culture of fairytales and legends, nursery rhymes and magic set in a robust nature is no longer mainstream. Kids are glued to their parents’ phones – or worse, their own – watching stupid mind-numbing stuff alien to the Irish culture; screechy achingly bright videos about nothing much.
Popular children’s videos today would be the Baby Shark song and video (a song and video produced by a South Korean kids’ entertainment company, the lyrics of which appear to be mostly made up of the phrase doo-doo), Peppa Pig, an irritating British cartoon series which, one Irish mother memorably complained had given her child an English accent, Starter Squad, created by an American Youtuber and the American animated series SpongeBob SquarePants. Yet we have forgotten the deep mystery and magic of traditional Celtic tales of goddesses, leprechauns, Pookas, banshees, the Fear Gorta, the shape-shifters, the Abhartach (a kind of vampire) and the Fomorians is no longer in common usage. The colourful mythology that was so much a part of Irish life in the days before electricity, before television and cars, before smart devices is disappearing.
Few children read for pleasure now, and yet books, of course, are where the........
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