Stuff You Should Know - How Tarot Works?

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

This is not a hit piece! Tarot helps plenty of people navigate their lives and reflect on their feelings – plus the art is unbelievable. We cover the backstory, real and imagined, and lure the innocent into tarot’s grip, er, offer basic tips for beginners.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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See terms and learn more at discover.com slash online privacy protection. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. So it's a good old-fashioned hooting and hollering hoedown of a Stuff You Should Know episode. Yeehaw!

This is your pick, the tarot. Yeah, I'm sorry. That's okay. You know who's ended this a little bit? Fortune tellers? Well, tarot specifically. Who? My wife.

Oh yeah? Yeah. Yeah, Emily has gotten into it a little bit and she's definitely of the state of mind of like, listen, this is something I do in the morning to sort of have a little quiet time. And I don't think she thinks that it like guides her life or has any sort of magic qualities.

I think it's a little more one of those things like, I'm going to see what my cards say and just sort of ruminate on that stuff. Right. And maybe it'll open up some new ideas and thoughts about life. I was reading a Vogue article that was pretty in-depth about it and that seems to be the general usage of tarot these days. And it's huge.

It's gotten really big lately. Apparently in 2021, a billion dollars worth of tarot cards were sold That's so many cards. around the world. Yeah, and they're expecting it to go up by another quarter billion in the next three years. So it's definitely a thing. For sure, it's having a moment.

But it is kind of reassuring that it's not like following like the crystals or essential oil healing tract. And instead people are like, I'm just using this to reflect on my life. Yeah. And I think she also just thinks the cards are beautiful and cool looking and appreciates the art and that kind of thing, which they are very,

and they can be expensive and super beautiful. Yeah. Do you know what deck she has? I'm sure it's probably just the standard shopping mall deck. The one from Spencer's Gifts. Yeah, I should ask. The Green Day tarot deck. Is it really a Green Day?

I know some bands have their own. I don't think so. It's possible. Who knows that Billy Joe Armstrong is, he's very innovative. He's a savvy little guy. He is. So we are talking about tarot cards today. I think we let the cat out of the bag already.

And they are not as old as you would think. And then their use of, for divination purposes, is even younger than that. And there is a really long standing myth that I thought was correct up until yesterday, the day before, that playing cards evolved out of tarot cards in an effort to conceal them at a time when people had to like watch out with their mysticism, their esoteric knowledge,

the occult, or else they might be persecuted. So they developed them into playing cards like we have today. That is absolutely false. And in fact, playing cards were around centuries before the tarot deck came along. Yeah, that's true. And people generally think, it seems like so many things go back to ancient China, but a lot of people agree

that they were invented in China in the 13th century and then sort of spread their roots from there. But like you said, the regular playing cards were around before this and the tarot were 22 different designs that were eventually added to a deck. And this was for playing games, like card games. And it became like a much larger deck and all of a sudden you could play, you know, with more cards that are different.

You can play more complex and interesting games. Right. So you had China inventing playing cards apparently. It's spreading to Egypt, which I had not heard of this group. Had you before the Mamluk Empire? I had not Mamluk without an A in the middle. It's not a Mamluk. Right.

No, it's not that. Just Mamluk. They were Muslims who controlled Egypt for about 300 years from like I think the 13th to the 16th centuries maybe. And they somehow got their hands on the playing cards that China had invented and they kind of made their own flourishes to it. The suits were kind of familiar. Like you might see today kind of, especially in the tarot deck.

But one of the big differences was polo sticks. That was one of the suits because apparently the people who were running the show really liked playing polo. I think polo was invented in Iran if I'm not mistaken. Is that correct? I didn't know that. It was a crossword clue the other day. Oh, very nice.

Which crossword? Chicago Tribune? No, New York Times. Is there any other? No, there really isn't. I'm sorry, a person who writes the Chicago Tribune crossword. You do a very good job. Sure. It's not fair.

So the Mamluk empire spread out from Egypt. They had conquests and I think maybe even trade with other places around the Mediterranean. One of the things they did was they went to Italy and they brought with them their cards. And it seems like in Italy, that's where tarot was first created. And it wasn't, again, not created for divination. It was created to make games much more interesting.

Yeah. I find it really interesting how many cultural things were spread through either war and the military or, you know, I guess, you know, oftentimes trade as well. But it seems like we talk a lot on the show about like someone went to war with something else and the people that they were fighting loved this food or this game or this whatever and took it home.

Yeah. That's how Lincoln logs came about. Really? No. I don't think so. This sounds like, I don't know about this Lincoln guy, but sure love these logs. Right.

People are crazy for them. So that's, they exported, I guess in that sense. Yes. That's how Lincoln logs got over there. So I think we're going to cut that last little lame addition to the joke out later. So when it arrived in Italy, Chuck, it was known as trinofi, which is another term for the Italian carnival festivals that

you see with the masks and everything. But then shortly after that, it changed the names to taroque, which apparently means foolish, stupid, simple, something like that. And they think that the name change happened when they introduced the fool. Right. And they, by introducing the fool card, which is a very

well-known taro card, as we'll talk about later, it signified like a huge change. They took regular playing cards, added 22 more to them, made them all trump cards. And now you had so much more complicated, complex games. And as a matter of fact, they think this is where trick taking games came from. Yeah.

I mean, you mentioned Trump taking cards. But I mean, if you've never played any trick taking games, do yourself a favor and learn spades or hearts or something. Gin rummy? Sure. Gin what? Gin rummy counts, I guess. Sure.

No, it totally counts. I guess I always think of spades, really. I went through a spades phase when I was kind of in college. It was kind of early on for some reason. And oh, and then what's the one in the Midwest that my wife's family always plays? Get us out of here. That's very funny.

Euker. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My parents played Euker too. No idea how it's played. No clue.

Well, I'm famous in our family for, for getting every single year how to play Euker. And then every Christmas they would then, you know, re-explain the game. But long way of saying these are all like trick taking games where you have, um, you're laying down hands and then we'll lay down like a Trump card and you can like take all those tricks that are on the board.

And there are all kinds of variations of trick taking games. But they're basically saying that, uh, I mean, was Toronto the original, the OG? I think so. Yeah. I think it originated in Italy in the north of Italy. Um, and then after that, uh, it spread to France and they

took the same name, a Terro, which, uh, in French is Terro with the A-U-X. Obviously we evolved into Terro, T-A-R-O-T from there. Right. So that's what they think the progression was. But this was just for making trick taking games, um, interesting or creating trick taking games. As a matter of fact, and the people are apparently

still play it in Europe. I think it's super hipster. I'll bet if you're a Euro hipster, you probably play the original Terroc or Terrocco, especially in northern Italy. Yeah. But, um, I think also if you're just kind of like a normal person too, you might, you might find it attractive. So it's still being played.

So there's two kinds of Terro out there in the world. And I say we kind of move on to the one that everybody knows over here, um, after an abbreak. Okay, that sounds like a great plan. 2023 is already well underway everybody. So don't wait any longer to level up your small business. And the way you can do that is by joining up with Stamps.com. That's right.

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So I think when people click on an episode called how terror works, they're not really interested in hearing about early origins of just another like spades like game. They want to talk about spreading cards on the table and having someone sit across from them and tell them how their day or week or life is going to go. Right. And that's the divination aspect.

Divination has been around a long, long time. People have been using cards for a long, long time. It's called Cartomancy. And I think the French basically invented this in like the 1700s or so, right? Yeah. And it was originally, they used playing cards. They didn't even use the tarot deck and people still do

Cartomancy using regular playing cards. Sure. Yeah. So I guess to kind of differentiate it, if you're doing tarot, that would be called tarotology and then Cartomancy is using, I guess, probably any other kind of cards. And so you think like, okay, tarot is kind of presented as ancient esoteric knowledge.

It's frequently connected to ancient Egypt or ancient Greece. Like there's oracles involved and that it's just kind of evidence of a longstanding tradition of mysticism and fortune telling. And that is 100% made up. It is. And you have a tone in your voice like you're about to yank the rug out for a month.

You know me too well. And yank we are because we actually know for sure where this all came from. It was invented by a couple of guys, a couple of French guys. A couple of dudes. One was just a couple of dudes or whatever dude in French might be.

One gentleman was named Antoine Court Day. How would you say that? Yeah, I think that's great. All right. He was born in 1725. He was a writer. He's a Freemason. He was super as was not a lot of people, but some people back

then interested in the occult and esoteric ideas and things like that. And when he was, I guess in his, what would that be like 40s or 50s? 50 I think. Terra was not super popular at the time. And as the story goes, he saw some woman that were playing it and he looked down and I'm paraphrasing here, but basically

he said he glanced down and recognized that the allegory of these pictures on the cards he found were relative to all of life and there were unlimited numbers of combinations to combine these cards. And that was sort of the inspiration of inventing this divination process. Yeah. Like he said, oh, I've discovered these cards and it's clear

that I've uncovered something here. So de Gebelin was a very annoying person. And he took that inspiration and then went back and reverse engineered everything to support the inspiration that he just had. Right. And he did so again by just making up a lot of stuff. He wrote this thing that was, it came out in multiple volumes.

I get the impression it was a little bit like maybe the Paris Quarterly or something like that or the Paris Review Quarterly. That legitimizes it more than I was thinking. But this, okay. How about the Hoboken Quarterly Review? Oh, okay. Ouch.

But it's true though, you know. So he called it the primeval world, comma, analyzed and compared to the modern world, which seems pretty straightforward. Yeah. That's fine with me. The thing is, is each volume, he just started talking about esoteric stuff. He wrote essays about whatever was on his mind and he was

trying to kind of build up this compendium of ancient knowledge that again, this guy was just pulling out of thin air. And it wasn't like he was the guy who pointed to ancient Egypt and said their mystery lies. There's an esoteric mystery tradition there. He wasn't even the original with that. He was just kind of playing off of some stuff that was popular at the time and really going to town with it.

Yeah. I mean, I think the French has did a lot of people, saw Egypt as this sort of mystical magical place with, you know, for a lot of reasons, but he's the one that sort of again, didn't invent it, but borrowed on that idea in one of these volumes. He wrote an essay on tarot connecting to Egypt. And then he had his friend, Louis Raphael Lucrasse de Fayol, Count of Melech.

That was beautiful. I'm not sure how much of that is right, but they got together as a team and he was also a dude that was interested in the occult and stuff like that. They tended to hang around together. And so they got together and sort of made up these description of the game and the tarot deck, or not the game, but I guess the practice and the tarot deck connecting it to Egypt.

Yeah. What was pretty cool was that they said, you know what the tarot deck is, these 78 cards. I don't know if we said, and if we didn't, sorry, when they added the tarot trump cards to the existing deck of cards, it made 78 cards. They had 56 cards in the playing cards deck before. Added 22 tarot cards as trump cards.

So you had a deck of 78. So what Digebelin and Defoyel said, I like you, said, was that these things were actually existing disguised pages from the book of Thoth. Right. And it's actually really cool if you stop and think about it. Like along the lines of like Ghostbuster, like Sumer kind of mysticism, cool.

And Thoth, I hope I'm pronouncing it correctly. He was a god of ancient Egypt, a real one. He was known for balance in the universe. He was credited with creating, if not all knowledge on earth, at the very least certain knowledge, like law, magic, philosophy, religion, science, writing. So he's a good guy. And he also was known as an infallible judge.

I saw it put somewhere. So he would be perfect to be the one who you could use the book of Thoth to kind of predetermine the future because you were basically tapping into Thoth to say, hey, buddy, can you help me out here? I need to know the future. Can I sidebar for a moment? Yes, please.

Or what do we call it? What do people call it when we talk about different? Tangents. Yeah, yeah. Can I tangent? Yeah. Approach. You mentioned Ghostbusters.

I just wanted to point out very fast that we showed my daughter the original Ghostbusters for the first time last week. Awesome. And it was surprisingly like, OK, for a seven-year-old, the jokes that weren't super appropriate as usual kind of go over her head. And she loved it. And so the next night we watched the recent sequel.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I saw that. And that movie, I think, is very unfairly piled upon. I don't get it. It's not good. And maybe it has something to do with watching it with my daughter and watching them two days in a row.

But I thought it was quite fun and super, super enjoyable. Yeah. I would say it's P.T. Anderson's deepest movie. At the very least, it's most entertaining. I didn't think it was perfect. I didn't know it was a big nostalgia play, but I bought in and we just had a great time watching it. So I thought it was a lot of fun.

It was a little weird that Egon at the end was like, I'm not going to say anything, but I'll give you some head nods kind of thing. I think that they really could have workshopped that a little more. Sorry for spoiling it for everybody. But other than that, I thought it was really engrossing, really cool. I liked all the characters. Paul Rudd, of course, is amazing.

So I said, go see it too. I think they kept him from talking a lot at the end because they didn't want to overdo a sort of dodgy, you know, resurrection. Totally. Like it could have gone off the rails if he was like, hey everybody. No, completely. For sure. They featured, they gave him too much screen time then.

Okay. So then cut back a little more even. Okay. Totally. I can see that. That's my take on it. Anyway, back to Tarot. I'm all about the new Ghostbusters though, and we're going to show

her the reboot with Kristen Wiig in the game too. What about two Ghostbusters 2? You can't skip over that. Yeah, sure you can. With Yano. Hello. Where's the baby? It had its moments, but I don't know.

Even Bill Murray and the whole cast were kind of like, that was a garbage movie. What? Yeah, Ghostbusters 2 was, they were not very proud of it. I'm going to have to go back and watch it because I liked it. All right. Well, maybe we will. Where were we? We were talking about how these guys, the Gebelin and his buddy Defoyel, had just basically

made all this stuff up. And I think we left off with how it was actually kind of cool that they linked it to lost pages from the book of Thoth. Sure. So they have now described this divination process, and it wasn't like it was a huge deal all of a sudden. And like the latest fad that caught like wildfire all over the world, it did catch on in a pretty big way, but that came a little bit later.

But what is clear is that all of these sort of stories that you hear about Tarot was of like the origins of it. And then there's some pretty fanciful stories written up about, you know, monks that created this game and these decks were found and ruined temples and stuff like that. Like all of that just seems to literally have been made up to create kind of a fun backstory. Yeah. And I mean, you can kind of get the idea. Like this is pretty cool stuff.

And like a bunch of people took a crack at it. Elias Levi, who created Baphomet, our buddy, he contributed to it. Said this is actually has to do with Kabbalah, the Jewish mysticism. Paul Christian, who I can't remember what his original name was. He added to it too, but he was a very famous mystic or occult person. And like that whole spiritualism, remember we did a whole episode on that? I do. Those same people interested in mediumship and the occult and all that just basically

added to this. They'd be like also this and also that. It was just a lot of people who are out of their minds contributing to this really neat, totally made up mythology surrounding Tarot cards. And then finally, Chuck, we arrive at Alistair Crowley. Yeah. All roads point to all AC, I guess. If you listen to that episode and got through my sort of sneering through the whole thing.

You will remember the Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which was in London. And this was a group that Crowley was, was he the leader of or just a big time member? He staged a coup, if I'm not mistaken, and they ended up breaking up rather than just let him lead. All right. That sounds familiar. So the breakup led to different factions and different groups sort of splintering off. And one of which was led by someone named A.E. Wait.

And this is where the story kind of takes Tarot to the forefront of popularity. In 1910, A.E. Wait published the pictorial key to the Tarot. And this is where the most famous deck, like the deck that you would probably buy today in the shopping mall comes from A.E. Wait getting together with Pamela Coleman Smith, who I believe was the artist. And this kind of changed the deck up and this is, this became sort of the most popular one, I believe in early 1900, 1909 or so. And it's still the most popular.

Yeah. I mean, far and away, especially in the United States, it's called the Wait Smith deck or the Ritter Wait, because I think Ritter published it. And it's, it's, if you saw it, you'd be like, oh yeah, that's, that's a Tarot deck. That's what I think of it as. It's this beautiful art deco illustrations that like if you, if you, again, if you just think of a Tarot card, like they're probably imagining a Wait Smith Tarot card because Pamela Coleman Smith just nailed it.

I mean, this is 1909 and there's a lot of different decks that have the same thing, but they're just drawn differently or whatever. They're still publishing this 100 years plus later. It was just that well done. Yeah. And I think they also, I don't know if it was to make it more popular or not, but there was a lot of Christian imagery on previous decks and they kind of toned those down a little bit for this deck.

Like they said, hey, why don't we get the Pope off of there and include some cool, like ancient Grecian priest instead. Right. Maybe it was just to make it a little more sort of mysterious. I think so for sure. But also not, they didn't want to scare off the occultists, you know. Right. They didn't want it too poppy.

Right. They also, there was a papis too, papis. Sure. She became the high priestess. But it also followed a lot of tradition too. I think the moon card has been generally unchanged for like 500 years. It's cool. It still contains the same baffling imagery that it always did.

The moon card means illusion and deception and that things are not as they appear. And so of course to demonstrate that and get it across, the moon card has a moon. It also has a path that leads off into the distance, an animal on either side of the card to represent two sides of human nature. I guess good and evil kind of thing. Yeah. I got that part. Here's where it really takes a weird turn.

There's towers in the background, odd, and then there's a crawfish crawling out of the water. Yeah. I mean, that's got to symbolize some sort of evolution, right? I don't know. I have no idea what the crawfish means. And I don't really want to know. It's just so odd that I would rather that be some sort of hermetic mystery for me forever.

All right. Well, don't write in about that then. Yeah. Please don't tell me. Dear listener. Let's take a break. Yeah. Let's take a break and we'll talk a little bit about the deck itself because like what's

even on these cards, right? Yeah. Yeah. 2023 is already well underway, everybody. So don't wait any longer to level up your small business. And the way you can do that is by joining up with stamps.com. That's right. Because with stamps.com, you're going to be able to print your own postage and shipping

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Let Gate One handle the planning for you with affordable escorted tours in European River Cruises. And right now, through January 30th, use promo code HEART20 to receive 20% off your tour. That's promo code HEART20 through January 30th. Visit gateonetravel.com for more information or to book your tour. Once again, use promo code HEART20 through January 30th to receive 20% off your 2023 trip. Hey everybody, it's a new year and it's a good time to take a look at your website. And if you take a look and you decide it looks kind of black, then it's time to head on over to Squarespace to create a new one. That's right, especially if you have, oh, I don't know, some kind of audience like we do.

Squarespace member areas connect with your audience and generate revenue through gated members only content. You can manage your members, send email communications and leverage audience insights all on one easy to use platform. Yeah, and if you have a big social media presence, you can display posts from your social profiles on your website. You can automatically push website content to your favorite social media channels. It's like the circle of life. So head on over to squarespace.com slash SYSK for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use offer code SYSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Okay, Chuck, where we left off basically a man discovered a deck of cards and decided that they were mystical in much the same way that if somebody discovered a World of Warcraft deck 200 years from now and decided that you could use them to tell the future exact same thing. But he made such a cool mythology around it that it just caught on.

Yeah, so we're going to talk a little bit about the deck. They're not the most in depth thing. We can't get into every card, but just sort of an overview. We mentioned that there are 78 cards, 56 of these are what's known as the minor arcana. And they are the number cards and they're divided into four different suits, which are wands, swords, pentacles and cups, which sort of explains the Terence Malick film Night of Cups was in reference to the tarot. Oh, yeah, I saw there's a compilation of tarot and films on Vimeo that somebody just made of just imagery from the tarot that shows up in films without making a big deal out of it kind of subtly. But was that one of those like, look, it's everywhere kind of things? A little bit, but I mean, they didn't hammer at home. They really just showed you like, yeah, there's some pretty cool stuff. And at the end it said, see, it's everywhere. See, told you.

All right, so the pentacles, the cups, the wands and the swords are the four suits. And there are also face cards in these suits, the page, the knight, the queen, the king and the ace, right? Yeah, and I mean, just like a regular deck of playing cards, there's one through 10 cards and then the face cards. And then on top of that, there's the 22 tarot cards that you think of, like the fool that we mentioned or the hero font we mentioned earlier. And there, I think the minor arcana, those are like the one through 10 Jack, Queen, King kind of thing. And then the major arcana or arcana, the 22, those are the ones that are like the money divination cards. But you can also divine the future based on some of the lesser cards too. And I think people have kind of added to that over time.

And that was one of the reasons I think that the wait Smith deck was so interesting is that they really took some of the formerly just kind of disused cards and really dressed them up with new imagery. And I think that was one of the reasons it became so popular. Should we talk about some of the big daddy cards? Yeah, let's do that. All right, there's the tower card. And this is not a card that you want. And we'll talk about readings and how those go in a minute. But generally, you know, you sit across from someone or you do it yourself and you spread a certain number of cards out depending on what kind of spread you're going to use.

If you get that tower card, it's not a great card. It's probably the worst card you can get. Yeah. It indicates all sorts of bad things. Something that might happen to you that really has a negative impact on your life. Destruction, chaos. Sort of like the rug getting pulled out from under your feet. It's just no good.

So you don't want to, you don't want to get that tower card. No, you definitely don't. And then just kind of as a nod to what I was just saying about some of the minor arcana cards also being fairly potent. I've seen and also thanks to the tarot guide and eye publishing for some of this info that the 10 of swords, again, that'd be like the 10 of spades and like a regular deck. That it is actually one of the worst cards that it's a runner up to like the worst card you can get. And it's more about like being badmouth behind your back or betrayed. The end of a relationship or a situation hitting rock bottom. Nobody likes that.

But we should say at this point that when the card is pulled, it can be pulled upside down. And there's a couple of interpretations with that. One is that it means the opposite of what it normally means right side up or basically bizarro tarot. Or it also means that the effect that it means right side up is just going to have like, it's going to be weaker than it would have been had the card been right side up. Yeah. I mean, the direction certainly matters with how the card is drawn and laid and spread. And it seems to matter even more maybe when they're, if you're not just doing sort of a standard one card thing or like the three card spread, which is very common is past present future. But it seems like the more cards, what's the Celtic cross?

That's the sort of the most common complex one. And that one really, it really matters which way these cards are pointing in relation to one another. Yeah. And also each spot on the Celtic cross spread represents a specific thing. So the card, the card you draw for that spot is how that, whatever that card says, like say chaos or something like that, how it relates to that part of your life, like work, like say. And then you've got not just the interplay between the card and its position, but also that card and its position and the other cards in their position. So it's really complicated and complex very quickly. But I mean, it's kind of like a really, like a full astrology reading. Like you can, you can really go to town and come up with some really in depth readings for people starting with the Celtic cross for sure.

Yeah, absolutely. You've also got the full card, which we mentioned earlier. Just to follow up on that, that is the first card of the major Arcana. And that is, that's a good card, generally speaking, it's a positive thing. A lot of times it can indicate like a fresh start, a new beginning. If you're going to go on some exciting new adventure, you might draw the full card, if you believe in that kind of thing. It's a cute card. There's, especially in the weight Smith deck, it's like a youth who's got like a little bindle over his shoulder.

Yeah. A cute little white dog jumping up, barking at him like, hey, you're about to step off of a cliff. I think he's got a flower that he's smelling and just kind of like a happy, transfixed look, you know. The fool is usually a pretty happy person. And that's a, that's like a good example though. Like you would not necessarily think the fool is a good card. Same with the death card. Obviously, anytime somebody gets the death card, they are a little flipped out until the reader tells them, actually, don't worry.

The death card doesn't actually mean death. You'd be way closer to being worried about dying with the tower card. The death card is much more associated with change, transition, new beginnings, ends of old things. It doesn't, it doesn't mean you're going to die. No. Unless it does. In that case. It does not help though that when they draw that card, they say, and the kind of death is upon your head.

That was so good. That was such a great degebeling. Or maybe we should get Miegel to do a tarot deal. I can't, I can't. Miegel's in his dressing room right now. Well, I think, yeah, I need to, I need to sort of parse that out. I can't over Miegel you. I can't.

I just miss him so much. He'll be back. Don't worry. I know. His taffet is sweaty right now though. So those are, you know, some of the major arcana that are sort of the money cards that you might see if you go to a tarot reading and get told by some, you know, little old lady what's going to happen in your life. Yeah. Or a young lady or a young man or an old man.

Or all kinds of people do it. You know, binary, non-binary person, all sorts of different people. And that's the point. Any single person can be a tarot card reader. And one of the things that I saw suggested Chuck was to do what Emily does, like every morning, take a card and just think about it for the rest of the day. What does that card mean to you? How does it tie into your life right now? And by doing that, you know, over and over again on a daily basis, you're just kind of wading into the world of tarot cards.

And you're also just absorbing what each card means and how it can possibly relate to somebody's life. So I saw that infogue as a really great way to kind of start and get into tarot. And that's, again, it's evidence that anybody who's interested can become a tarot reader. Again, I just want to stress, there's nothing magic about tarot. There's nothing magic about tarot readers. But that doesn't mean that they're not accomplished. Some of the tarot readers out there are really, really talented at what they do. But they're just not performing anything magical and any reasonable tarot reader will tell you the exact same thing.

Right. And for listeners, I was desperately trying to think of an invoked joke. And all I can think of is something about, you're never going to get it. Never going to get it, never going to get it. The time came and went, but I know we were all thinking the same thing. Yeah, but I mean, I'm with you. It's conky, but sometimes you just have to go back and like cite a joke, even if you don't pull it off right then. I do that too, I'm with you.

So I guess, you know, we said that there's a spread that happens. And, you know, there's different ways of doing it and obviously different ways of reading and interpreting the cards. But generally, you will have someone or yourself will do whatever spread you've decided upon. And if you're giving someone else a reading, there are some people that think that that person being read should like, as the cards are being shuffled and such, should talk out loud sort of about the questions that they might have. Some people think that they should actually cut the deck. So they physically interacted with it while others say, no, they shouldn't touch the deck, hands off. So there are sort of different ways of going about it, depending on your methods, I guess.

Yeah. And I also saw that your tarot deck is supposed to have been gifted to you. You're not supposed to buy your own tarot deck, but again, there's no hard and fast rules in tarot. And anybody who's like stressing you to adhere to hard and fast rules does not get tarot. So they just need to be quiet. That's your mouth. So one of the ways that this pops up is that tarot is actually sometimes used by psychotherapists. And it actually has a kind of a lengthy tradition in psychotherapy dating back to Carl Jung,

who, starting in the 20s or 30s, became interested in tarot among some other divination tools like the Yijing astrology, was trying to find these archetypes that are universal to human consciousness, that he believed tarot kind of reflected, whether on purpose or not, and that you could use that as a way to kind of unlock that part of yourself, or that part of the universal consciousness that was in yourself. Carl Jung was maybe a little off the mark with that, but there's this idea that you can use this tarot reading to really stop and reflect and think about your life. And that's a really great tool when you're in psychotherapy or counseling or any kind of therapy.

Anything that can kind of get you to stop and think about chaos at work or your love life or whatever in a certain way that's kind of guided by the card that you draw, that's helpful. That's useful and there's nothing wrong with that at all. Yeah, I agree. And I don't think there are a lot of psychotherapists out there that are saying like, let this be the guide to your life or anything like that. No, run if you're psychotherapist. I think it's more along the lines of like if it helps the patient

and if they get something out of it as far as delving deeper into their own psyche. And as long as the psychotherapist gets money too, then it's all good. Sure, I mean, that 50 minute clock is going to run. That's right. Ooh, you get 50 lucky at 43. 43, is that real? Yeah. No.

Oh, okay. I'm kidding. I can see 45, but this is like, what do they break for commercials? Right. Okay, what if you go to a tarot reader and they just nail it, especially if it's presented to you as like, you can kind of see a little bit of the future with these cards. I'm not supposed to say that, but it's true.

And they nail the reading. Like it just speaks to you. And there are plenty of people out there who have that, have had that experience, but luckily science can swoop in and say, calm down, calm down. There's actually a really good explanation to this. And there are two sides of the same coin. One is cold readings.

The other is what's called the forer effect. Yeah. We, you know, we talked about cold readings and she's, I feel like we've done a few episodes where we kind of touched on that. But that's the idea that when you sit down in front of a reader, or it could be whatever, if they have the crystal ball or the tarot or they're reading lines on your hand and stuff like that, that they are really, if they're good and they stay in business,

then they're probably really good at cold reading, which is sort of just picking up on either obvious clues that you may not realize that you've even set out loud, or even sort of subconscious clues that they pick up on and how you carry your life or maybe how you walked in the room or what kind of car you arrived in, and just sort of picking up on all these blatant or non-blatant clues that a person might unconsciously or consciously give.

Right. So that's where the reader is doing the work. Right. There's also another way where the readee, the person getting the reading, actually does the work. And that is that forer effect I mentioned, which is it's named after a psychologist who coined it. It's also called the Barnum effect based on PT Barnum's famous saying

there's a sucker born every minute. It's people's willingness to accept very generic, very generalized information as tailored exclusively to them, which is something that can happen in tarot reading. And in that case, it's not the reader doing the work. It's you, the readee, who's like, oh, that makes 100% sense. I totally see how that jibes with my life. Obviously, these tarot cards are perfect in showing me the future.

Yeah. I mean, it's kind of a confirmation bias in a way because you'll remember the things that were confirmed and you kind of don't really think about the other like six or seven things that didn't come true. Right, exactly. Interesting stuff. Yeah, for sure.

One other thing that they could read are strangers in a cup of tea or beverage. That can be read as well. Coldread, too. Thank you. You got anything more about tarot? Nah. Me either. I think that that's the end of this episode then.

And since Chuck said nah, I said me either. Obviously, everyone, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this a correction and we heard from a few people on this. This email was a little bit of a spanking about the condition of John Denver upon his death. Oh, yeah. Sorry, John Denver's family and the ghost of John Denver. I was very disappointed to hear Josh make the false claim

that John Denver had cocaine in his system at the time of his plane crash. Toxicology tests were negative for all drugs, including ethanol. The following pertinent paragraph was taken from the NTSB investigation. I'm not going to bother reading it, but it basically says what this guy says, which was tests were negative for all screen drugs. If you'd like to review the whole report, you can find it here. While Mr. Denver was no altar boy, drugs played no role in the crash that killed him.

And it's a sad disservice to say otherwise to his memory and his family. Very disappointing, you guys. And that's from John. Maybe it's the ghost of John Denver. It could be. He and George Burns are hanging out. That's right. So yeah, I'm sorry, John Denver and John Denver's family.

I don't know how I felt for that, but I totally did. I knew that like years and years and years ago, and I guess I just never bothered to look it up. So my apologies for that one. And I take it back. We should do a short stuff one day on the West Virginia controversy in Country Roads. Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's two sides that have long been fighting.

And I think they each think it's settled of whether or not almost heaven was the state of West Virginia or the western part of the state of Virginia. Oh, that is a, that's a feud. I don't know if we should wade into that hornet's nest, Chuck. You're probably right. And also, I think John, I like John, John Denver, by the way. I've said it before.

I think he wrote one of the best songs about Toledo ever made. Saturday night in Toledo, Ohio, where he talks about how you can go to the park and watch the grass die. Because it's so boring. I love Toledo. Good stuff. Yeah. So hats off to John, hats off to John Denver,

and hats off to us for being big people, especially me, and admitting our mistake. If you want to get in touch with us and let us know about another mistake we made, doors wide open. You can send it in an email to stuffpodcastsatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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