Writing Prompt 2: There's really no need to be vague about it. Demonstrate why a particular interest is interesting.
I am OBSESSED with how people interpret signs. Tarot cards, Astrology, personality tests, BuzzFeed quizzes, and Spotify-wrapped, to name a few, showcase not what the universe wants to show us, but instead what we want to see. Asking questions about your future? Tarot cards help you streamline and clarify what you truly want out of your future just by simply asking. Needing support for a particularly difficult time of your life? Astrology allows you to look inward, reflect on your own traits and habits that led you to where you are.
Have you ever done the coin flip trick if you’re stuck between two choices and can’t choose? You put one option on Heads, the other on Tails, and flip the coin. How you react to what the coin reveals tells you what you need to know. Tarot and Astrology, among others, perform a similar service: They help us trust our gut and make sense of a world that’s constantly bombarding us with marketing-driven content and demanding more productivity.
When friends of mine ask for a Tarot card pull, I get giddy not because I’m excited to see their futures or help my buddy’s connect with their ancestors (my apologies for how non spiritual my approaches are, here). I’m excited to hear what my friends think; how they interpret what they’ve been through and where they’re going. Tarot cards help me to deepen those relationships.
But there’s a whole different history to the cards than just being tools for self-reflection. Tarot cards are a thriving industry within occult and spiritual practices, however, were initially utilized for complex card games. They have Italian roots dating back to the mid-15th century, in which the complicated game of Tarocchini, played by 4 players, utilized a point system for each of the figured cards. The Northern Italian game symbolizes the early stirrings of the Italian Renaissance, a cultural movement poised to flourish across the entire country. Italy in the 1400s was politically divided, recently ravaged by the plague, the focus of European power, and participating in multiple Italian Wars. The 1400s in Italy was also a hotbed for humanist theory and artistic achievement, mainly due to the end of feudalism. So it makes sense that this time also resulted in Italian traditions, games, and products expanding into Germany and France. For Tarot, this marked a pivotal shift in the way cards were played and perceived. 18th-century French occultists began to claim that the cards had purposes for divination. And we know what happened in 1700s France… between the French Revolution, colonization, and a population boom amongst the poorest class, it makes sense that the country sought spirituality and spiritual practices.
I wonder if there are some parallels we can draw between the use of spiritual Tarot then, and the use of spiritual Tarot now?
Spirituality also plays a unique role in Astrology. I have these 2 monster books, the Secret Language of Birthdays and the Secret Language of Relationships by Joost Elffers and Gary Goldschneider, that I’ve loved bringing to new workplaces, sharing with new friends, and returning to myself because of their abilities to spark strong reactions. I absolutely love hearing people read their birthday page and exclaim, “that’s interesting but not me at all.” Or even, “that’s so me, how’d they know?” The conversations that follow are beautiful. We learn so much about one another together.
I delved into the backgrounds of the authors of these books and discovered something fascinating: Gary Goldschneider was a marathon pianist. In 1984, he performed all 32 of Beethoven’s sonatas in a single sitting before an audience of 10,000 people—earning him headlines seen from across the world. Joost Elffers, on the other hand, is a publisher, known for being a “packager”. He specializes in culturally relevant texts that inspire the imagination of readers. Both of these authors have the same goal; to sell a book that reaches the widest swath of “truth-seeking” readers as possible.
To dig a bit deeper, Goldschneider describes himself as a “personologist”, a term coined by Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler who straddled the late 1800s and early 1900s. His theory presented an interesting conversation with Sigmund Freud’s, who was actively researching at the same time; while Freud presented a theory identifying motivations universally driven by aggression and sexual urges, Adler sought to demonstrate that feelings of childhood inferiority drive people to gain superiority later in life. These theories were all cultivated during turbulent times in our global history. In the early 1900s, the United States became a world economic leader and heavily expanded its industrialization throughout the country. Globally, especially for our Austrian theorists Frued and Adler, the early 1900s were fraught with war. Austria, itself, went through huge changes from the establishment of a dual-monarchy with Hungary in 1867 to the creation of the First Austrian Republic in 1919. After Germany’s defeat in World War II, the country went through its own identity crisis and in 1955 became the Second Austrian Republic.
The context for which these theories arise helps us to identify the reasons these questions were asked in the first place. Adler sought to identify universal markers for understanding “self” among “many” in the research of his birth order theory, and Goldschneider clearly sought the same. During the time of his publications, which ranged from his first in 1989, published in Dutch in the Hague, to his last in 2002, global events such as the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, the Gulf War, the debut of the World Wide Web, the end of the Cold War, and September 11th brought forth new cultural and social norms placing importance on the establishment of national identities. The world seemed to collectively ask, “Who am I, and what is my relationship to you?” Adler’s “birth order” theory has since been debunked.
