Accepting that tarot isn’t something everyone respects

If you put yourself out there a tarot reader, people will have opinions. They aren't always going to be positive.

One thing that surprised me when I starting taking my tarot work seriously was learning that not everyone accepts, or respects, this line of work.

You see it a lot in Facebook groups and Reddit threads, where someone will make a post asking for recommendations for a local tarot reader. Immediately, the comment sections fill up with negative reactions:

“You’re just throwing your money away.”

“There’s no such thing as a good tarot reader – they’re all scammers.”

“Do you mean you’re looking for an actor?”

Sometimes I’ve had tarot students who are surprised to hear me talk about these things: “Tarot has helped me so much – how can people not respect it?” Or, “Tarot is so popular. I can’t imagine that people would be rude towards anyone who is into it.”

Unfortunately, it happens.

A lot of these comments, driven by skeptics, show a lack of understanding of what tarot is, and how people use it. The negativity around tarot reading, and related practices, often stems from the belief that it’s only about telling the future, and often doing so badly.

People see predictive readings as unreliable, if not impossible altogether.

They don’t realize that a lot of tarot readings don’t even touch on the future, and that clients seek out tarot for all kinds of reasons. It can help you sort out a scattered mind, gain a new perspective, or consider options you didn’t know you had.

Skepticism like this also operates on assumptions about what tarot readers believe of their own capabilities. Instead of considering that we all have different approaches, and philosophies, these types of beliefs operate under a blanket generalization that we all assume omniscience, or at least pretend to.

It happens even with tarot believers. Even though I don’t advertise my work as a predictive tool, it doesn’t stop clients from asking predictive questions. So many of us are introduced to tarot as a future-telling device that it’s hard to break that first impression.

Of course, there’s nothing with predictive readings. My point instead is that a lot of derisive comments toward tarot are looking at it from a superficial lens: That first impression is as deep as some are willing to go.

It can be a challenge sometimes when you’re meeting new people, or your work is being shared online in front of people who don’t know you, and might not be open-minded to tarot.

It’s easy to stay in a tarot bubble online, where your social media feed is curated to show you all your favourite tarot accounts. But once you step outside of that, you realize that a large portion of the population sees tarot as anti-intellectual, as well as purely deceptive.

Which is a difficult thing to accept, especially when you consider the deep history of tarot, and the many brilliant minds that have contributed to its development over time.

While I don’t go out of my way to convert anyone – I don’t have the time or energy to try to change people’s minds – I do, if given the chance, try to at least lead with tarot’s history. If skeptics can at least come to appreciate that tarot has specific origin stories and has gone through some very interesting evolutions to bring into what it is today, then it can at least be appreciated as a niche historical study.

I also continue to be mindful that while many of us who live and breathe tarot know that there are many diverse uses for it, there is still a lot of work to be done in communicating that at a broader level.

It might feel repetitive to constantly talk about different ways to use tarot, and to demonstrate different types of questions and prompts we can bring to the cards, but if someone is future-averse, it shouldn’t mean they need to feel shut out from tarot altogether.

All in all, I don’t let skepticism or negativity toward tarot get to me.

But I stay aware of it so that I’m not naïve about what I might be walking into when I meet someone new, or when my work crosses into someone’s world for the first time.

Until next time,

Liz

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Categories: : spiritual life