Using tarot to unlock the power of story

It is hard to partake of any story-based research without coming across the name Joseph Campbell — for good reason. The man knew stories. He dedicated his life to them. In his book, A Hero with a Thousand Faces, he claims that “deep-seated archetypes lurk in stories created by all kinds of cultures.” Anyone who’s picked up a tarot deck knows they exist there too. That is why tarot is such a powerful story-telling tool. But why is that important?

Importance of story

I’ll let Jessica Macbeth, author of the Faeries Oracle guidebook start the conversation. She wrote:

First and foremost, for many of us, we learn, grow, and lead more satisfying lives if we have ways of expressing our inner world. Such expressions can be a way of helping ourselves better understand our feelings and experiences. Or they can be a way of getting pain out where we can look at it and begin to heal. Creative expression is a method of exploring our own truth, bringing it into light so we can see it more clearly, and maintaining our sanity.

Stories are a powerful form of creative expression that people readily understand because they follow a logical pattern. In their simplest form they begin with an introduction, followed by a conflict of some sort, and finish with a resolution, hopefully a positive one. In other words they explore where we’re at and what we want, what’s preventing us from getting it and what we can do about it, followed by an outcome.

New technologies that analyse the brain go so far as to suggest that we are hardwired for stories. But we don’t need technology to tell us what we know instinctively. It’s simple. We live multiple stories every day. Everything we want, every action we take, every thought we have is part of a story.

Literary critic Barbara Hardy puts it this way:

We dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticise, construct, gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative.

Put simply, stories are how we navigate the world. Unfortunately though, not everyone is a reliable narrator — including ourselves. But, often times we don’t consider that.

The Power of Stories

Nevertheless, the stories we tell ourselves, regardless of whether they are true or not, shape how we see ourselves and the world around us. In turn these stories shape how we behave. And, its our day to day actions that define our identities. That’s why stories matter.

Furthermore, research suggests we remember facts better if we’re exposed to them in a story. So we need to make sure we are listening to, and telling, the right stories. But how often do we truly consider, review, or edit the stories we tell ourselves to ensure they are accurate?

We should do so regularly for many reasons, but one that should never be underestimated is the fact that, as Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author of Women Who Run With the Wolves writes,

Stories are medicine.

They are “the simplest and most accessible ingredient for healing.” Why, because they help us to get to know ourselves.

But we need a way to explore our stories consciously. This is where tarot comes in.

Tarot is a story telling medium that helps us to extricate the stories we need to explore and in turn stories help us work with tarot more effectively. They support each other.

Tarot and Story Combined

1. Tarot helps us to organise the information
   • A spread provides a formal way to structure and organise information
     • When you lay out a spread with the intention of exploring your inner world you have a structure to follow. For example you could use my simple Hidden Stories Spread to explore What’s hidden? Why it’s hidden? What impact it’s having? What you need to understand about it? and most importantly What you can do with the information.
2. In turn stories help us to bring our tarot cards to life
   • Stories encourage us to turn cards into characters
     • It is easy to fall into the trap of seeing the people appearing on a tarot card as two dimensional, but they aren’t. They are characters sharing their stories with you so that you can better understand your own narratives and their impact.
3. In this way, tarot helps us to uncover memories and beliefs we may not have questioned
   • Tarot can show us the story
     • It can help us tap into our own long held, yet often unquestioned, beliefs. I am constantly surprised by how many things I have believed without considering their origins let alone their validity.
4. Then tarot can help us see which stories need to be rewritten
   • Knowing what stories need editing allows us to rewrite them.
5. Step five isn’t something tarot can do. This is down to story.
   • We live and breathe the revised stories and in so doing we move towards living as the truest, most authentic version of ourselves.

The End

And that’s it, until it isn’t. The Fool moves through the Major Arcana from Magician to The World, although not necessarily in that order since there are many ways to structure a story. Nevertheless their story doesn’t end there. It begins again, but this time with more knowledge, hopefully more wisdom, and with greater understanding about who they are, what they want, and what they are capable of. The stories themselves never end and that is as it should be.

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References

Hero With a Thousand Faces (3rd edition) written by Joseph Campbell and published by New World Library in 2008.

Story Craft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction written by Jack Craft and published by The University of Chicago Press in 2011.

The Faeries’ Oracle created by Brian Froud with the guidebook written by Jessica Macbeth and published by Atria Books in 2000.

Women Who Run With the Wolves written by Clarissa Pinkola Estes and published by Rider in 2008.

The Enchanted Map created by Collette Baron-Reid, published by Hay House in 2011.