I don’t really do astrology, tarot, and other such woo-woo stuff. But I know a bit about it via osmosis because I follow a bunch of queer people on Tumblr and watch a lot of content on YouTube about mindfulness.

I used to find it annoying how things like astrology fly in the face of science and don’t even both attempting to offer a justification for why they should work or why we should find the theory credible. I know a bunch of smart and thinking people who love to give tarot readings and it has always seemed a bit cringe—like, you can’t possibly believe in that, right?

However, I just watched a video where someone talked about how she had gotten super deeply into new-age spirituality and taken a conscious step back when she realized that all the rituals were preventing her from staring the problem in the face. Her story made me realize that these practices have a sort of meta-value that is difficult to appreciate if all you are trying to do is gauge whether the theory is real or not (it obviously isn’t).

This woman had an experience doing tarot where she found herself “resisting” the cards as they came up—she really wanted to see card A but instead was shown card B, again and again. Through this experience, she was able to work through a blocker in how she perceived herself: She thought she was the sort of person implied by card A, but the deck laid out an alternate narrative. And then she did the hard work of thinking about which narrative she actually wanted to accept.

This wasn’t a story about replacing narrative A with narrative B because the tarot deck knew something new about physics or the human soul. The point was rather that tarot can offer narratological challenges to how we see ourselves, or get us unstuck when we are invested too deeply in the wrong narrative, not unlike lateral thinking.

I’m still not really interested in tarot and I honestly am not sure that all practitioners do so with the amount of self-awareness needed to unlock the benefit described above. But I am open to the fact that human nature is complex and sometimes you need to use a back door to get inside of your head and see what’s really going on in there.