A Fresh Take on the Tarot

By Werner Nell

What if you could take your Tarot skills to the next level, and get far more from your cards than you ever imagined, with a little help from the social and behavioral sciences?

And what if you don’t need a psychic bone in your body to do so? If so, then you’ve picked up the right book! Inside these pages, you’ll be shown how to integrate some of the most powerful concepts, perspectives, and tools from psychology, sociology, and the educational sciences into your work with the Tarot. No matter whether you are a relative beginner or a more advanced practitioner, this book will provide you with a treasure trove of techniques that you’ll be able to apply right away to enrich and expand your work with the Tarot.

Werner Nell is an Associate Professor of Sociology at a South African university. As a social scientist, and the very first graduate of the Master’s degree program in Applied Positive Psychology in Africa, his research centers on understanding the dynamics of mindfulness, meaning in life, hope, and happiness. His interest in the Tarot started more than two decades ago, and ever since then, he has focused on integrating the best of what fields such as psychology, sociology, and life-coaching have to offer, with the Tarot.

In this book you’ll learn:

How to take your Tarot readings to the next level with the magic formula for understanding and predicting human behavior
How to use the Tarot to break out of limiting habits, comfort zones, and routines
How to supercharge your Tarot studies with powerful learning models and strategies
How to apply the principle of resonance to discover hidden corners of your own psyche with the Tarot
How to cultivate more hope, meaning, and purpose in your life with the Tarot
How to use modeling to convert your cards into your own success coaches
How to use the Tarot to help you see and step out of the matrix (if you want to know more about this you’ll just have to look inside)
And much more!

So, if you are ready to take your Tarot skills to the next level, then grab a copy of this book and let’s get started!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Werner Nell
• Release date: May 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005384425

Werner Nell

Werner Nell is an Associate Professor and social science researcher in sociology and psychology at a major South African university. His research focus centers on psycho-social well-being, and he is particularly interested in topics such as hope, meaning, mindfulness, and happiness, on which he has published a number of national and international peer reviewed articles and book chapters. Werner is also a qualified life coach and has a burning life-long interest in esoteric subjects such as astrology and the Tarot, which he has been extensively studying and researching for the past two decades. His passion is all about synergistically integrating the best of what the scientific and esoteric fields have to offer in support of self-development, personal empowerment, and flourishing, and sharing this through his writing and teaching.When he has a few free moments, you will likely find him traveling, scuba diving, enjoying himself on a wine farm, experimenting in the kitchen with new cuisines, or spending time in nature. Connect with Werner at Aquarianlight.com

Book preview

A Fresh Take on the Tarot

A Fresh Take on the Tarot

How to Take Your Tarot Skills to the next Level with Powerful Insights from the Social and Behavioral Sciences

Werner Nell, Ph.D.

A FRESH TAKE ON THE TAROT: How to Take Your Tarot Skills to the next Level with Powerful Insights from the Social and Behavioral Sciences

Published by Werner Nell Publishing at Smashwords

Copyright © 2022 by Werner Nell

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced or transmitted in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author or publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

‘All Tarot card images from the Rider-Waite Tarot deck copyright © 1971 by U.S. Games Systems, Inc.

Disclaimer notice: Please note that the content of this book is for educational purposes only, and is not in any way aimed at providing legal, financial, medical, or professional advice. Use of the information contained herein is at the reader’s own discretion and risk. Neither the author nor the publisher accepts any responsibility for any damage or losses, direct or indirect, that are incurred as a result of the use of the material contained in this book.

Contact Information: Aquarianlight.com

Author: Werner Nell

First Edition: February 2022

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

1 - The Fool

Breaking Free from Habits, Routines, and Cybernetic Loops

Cybernetic Secrets of Human Behavior

Stepping off the Cliff – How to use the Tarot to Transform Limiting or Lifeless Habits and Loops

An Example: Getting more Value from my Tarot Day Cards

How to use the Tarot to Enrich your Relationships

2 - The Magician

The Magic Formula for Understanding Human Behavior

The Magic Formula of Human Behavior

The Connection between the Magic Formula and the Law of Attraction

Harnessing the Power of the Magic Formula in your Work with the Tarot

Exercise to Examine your Beliefs about the Tarot

Special Technique: Using the Formula in Reverse

3 - The Empress

Savoring, Mindfulness and Gratitude

Savoring – the most Pleasurable Way to Increase our Well-being

Mindfulness – The Magic Key to Savoring

Gratitude

How to Become Happier with What you Have with a Tarot Gratitude and Savoring Journal

How to Use the Power of Gratitude to Deepen your Bond with your Cards

4 - The Emperor

How to Wake Up from the Matrix

Roles – The Cells of the Matrix

Norms – The Rules of the Matrix

Beliefs – The Truth Programs of the Matrix

Values – The Religion of the Matrix

Putting it All Together – Seeing the Matrix

The Matrix, the Tarot, and You

Waking up to Your own Tarot Matrix

Exercise: Waking up to your own Tarot Matrix

Using the Tarot as Window into the Matrix

Pimping up the Celtic Cross

The Matrix Spread

5 - The Hierophant

Taking your Tarot Studies to the Next Level with Secrets from the Science of Learning

Bloom’s model of learning

Why Throwing out the Tarot Books is like Shooting Yourself in the Foot

How to Combine Knowledge and Intuition to Build a Solid Tarot Foundation

Technique to Build your Tarot Knowledge Foundation

Powerful Strategies for Tuning into your Intuition

Proven Principles for Boosting your Tarot Studies

How to Convert your Knowledge into Understanding

The Big Secret for Converting Understanding into Skill

Creating a Plan to Take your Tarot Skills to the Next Level

6 - Strength

Increasing your Resilience with the Tarot

How to Use the Tarot to Boost Resilience

The Resilience Spread

7 - The Wheel of Fortune

How to Improve your Predictive Work with the Tarot

Why your Beliefs about Prediction are Contagious

Exercise to Clarify your Beliefs about Prediction

A Fresh Take on Effective Prediction – Valuable Lessons from Astrology

Precarious Predictions – Who is Responsible for your Client’s Life?

How to Use the Power of Language to Make better Predictions

How Values could Make your Predictions more Valuable

Good Predictive Work Requires Respecting your Client’s Views and Beliefs

How to Prevent Bias from Screwing up your Predictions

A Golden Ticket to Take your Prediction Skills to the next Level

8 - Temperance

Resonance, Projection, and the Tarot

Using Resonance as a Secret Weapon to Choose your Tarot Decks

Choosing your Tarot Deck the Resonant Way

Exercise to Use Resonance to Choose your Deck

Projection – The Secret Tunnel to your Inner Self

Using the Tarot as Projection Detector

Variation on the Exercise Using a Single Deck

Implications of Resonance and Projection for the Decks you Choose and Work with

Why Resonance is a key for Getting Good Answers from the Tarot

How to Use Rituals to Harness the Power of Resonance when Working with the Tarot

9 - The Star

Hope

Scientific Discoveries about Hope

How to Use the Tarot to Foster Hope

The Hope Spread

10 - The Five of Pentacles

The Importance of Meaning and Purpose

How to Use the Tarot to Foster a Sense of Meaning and Purpose

Basic Tarot Spread for Working with Meaning and Purpose

Using the Tarot to Tune in to Sources of Meaning

How to Find more Meaning and Purpose in your Work with the Tarot

How to Turn your Tarot Purpose into your own North Star

How to Turn the Tarot into an Ally to Achieve your Specific Life Goals and Purposes

11 - All the Tarot Cards Together Now

Modeling your Way to a Better Life

How to Model a Success Strategy

How to use Modeling to Improve your Tarot Skills

A Technique for Turning your Tarot Cards into Success Models

Using the Cards as Totems – a Shamanic Approach to Modeling

A Few Final Words

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Back to Table of Contents

Introduction

The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes – Marcel Proust

My aim in writing this book is to give you a whole bunch of useful and practical tools, techniques, and perspectives that you can start using right away to supercharge your Tarot practice (and yes, you can hold me to that promise). In short, I would like to show you ways to see the Tarot landscape you are familiar with, through new eyes and fresh perspectives, and support you in taking your Tarot practice and skills to the next level in a very short time. It doesn’t matter whether you are just starting out with the Tarot, or whether you are a more experienced practitioner – by approaching the Tarot from the perspective of social, behavioral, and other sciences and disciplines, you will be able to get a lot more from your work with the cards, no matter what level you’re at. (That said, having some familiarity with the Tarot will help a lot, as we won’t be going over the basic meanings of the cards in this book.) It also doesn’t matter at all if you believe that you don’t have a psychic bone in your body (of course if you do, that’s great too). I have a confession to make. While many Tarot readers have impressive psychic abilities, I’m not one of them. I have never seen dead people. (Well, except for a few actual dead people, that is....) I do not channel anyone. Even though I do have a modest amount of intuition, I have no psychic superpowers. I have always been unashamedly envious of those with well-developed intuitive and psychic talents, but lacking these myself, I devoted a lot of my time to finding alternative ways up the Tarot mountain. I wanted to uncover approaches that would help me get as much value as I could from the Tarot as a person who is just a regular Joe as far as psychic abilities are concerned. As a social scientist with a bit of a weirdo streak (social scientists are not generally expected to be interested in woo-woo things like the Tarot), my education in psychology, sociology, and other social sciences, as well as a lifetime fascination and study of astrology, dream analysis, and self-development approaches such as life-coaching and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), provided me with a useful set of perspectives and filters about human nature and behavior, and made me think about the Tarot in new and different ways. (This academic training also causes me to write overly long sentences, like that last one. I’m working on that, I promise.) Over the years, I have used these insights and perspectives as fresh lenses and tools with which to view and work with the Tarot. I experimented with various approaches to integrate these with the Tarot in ways that were practical, useful, and helpful. As time went by, I refined these techniques and approaches based on my experience with them, and my main purpose and focus in writing this book is to share these with you, and show you how you can immediately put them to use to take your Tarot practice to the next level. I offer them as suggestions, trusting that you will adjust them as you see fit so that they work for you. It is my hope that you will find them helpful and useful when using the Tarot not only for yourself, but also for your family, friends, and clients. (Just a quick aside: To avoid clunky repetition, I often refer to only one of these groups of people in the exercises in this book. Obviously, you could substitute any references to clients with that of friends and/or family, or vice versa).

As you might have figured out by now, this is not a book that is going to give you lots of nifty little keywords for each of the seventy-eight cards in the standard Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck. If that is what you’re after, there are plenty of great books out there that have done a brilliant job of that. This book is about something else altogether. Let me explain. In order to improve our Tarot skills and get the most from our decks, we can take a number of different approaches. The first, which is the subject of the majority of Tarot books (but not this one), involves direct study of the Tarot itself in one way or another. This entails coming to grips with the cards, the imagery, symbolism, the myths behind them, spreads, deck selection and cleansing, and so on. This is so critically important that I am going to have a little tantrum about this topic later in the book. Having said that, there is also another way in which we can improve our Tarot skills and maximize the value we get from our cards, which is what this book is all about. This approach involves studying human nature and the principles shaping human behavior and experience, via subjects such as psychology, sociology, and various esoteric disciplines, and bringing that to our work with the Tarot. In these fields, there are powerful insights and principles which hold the potential to greatly enliven, expand, and empower our understanding of the Tarot and the ways we work with it. If you think about it, this makes great sense. The Tarot fundamentally deals with human life and experience in all its dimensions. As such, although studying the Tarot could teach us much about human life and behavior, studying the major principles governing human psychology and behavior will conversely also help us greatly expand and deepen our understanding of the Tarot. I will go as far as to say that if we do not understand these things, we will get far less from our cards than might otherwise be the case. A study of these principles could unleash waves of new possibilities when working with the Tarot. Having a Tarot deck is like having your own psychologist, therapist, life coach, muse, consigliere, and spiritual advisor all in one. However, unless we know how to access the Tarot in these ways, we limit what we could get from our work with the cards. Fortunately, most of these principles are not complicated. That said, a major problem that anyone who starts delving into the social and behavioral science literature encounters, is the sheer volume of information that exists out there. And the way it is written is usually intolerably technical and anal, a little like having an overly cerebral engineer explain how sex works. Even as a seasoned academic, reading through this scientific literature still feels like wading through endless swamps of boring detail to me. You often have to suffer through many pages of jargon to glean a few nuggets of useful information. Not exactly the most fun way to spend your time. The good news is that by virtue of my position as social science lecturer, writer, and researcher, I have done this work for you. I have taken some of the most powerful and useful perspectives I could find in psychology, sociology, and a number of esoteric subjects, chucked out the boring jargon parts (I hope), and distilled them into their most useful core insights. I then went one step further and integrated them with the Tarot. (Just a quick disclaimer – there are of course many more principles in these disciplines than the ones covered in this book, but I tried to pick those that would be the most useful to your work with the Tarot, and which you could start using right away.) In the following chapters, I will share a whole bunch of useful insights about human nature with you, and show you how to use these straight away to add whole new dimensions to your work with the cards.

By integrating this richer and more expanded view of human nature and behavior with our understanding and practice of the Tarot, we will be able to gain more depth in our readings, make more of a difference doing them, and expand our understanding of the cards. In short, it will help you to take your Tarot practice to the next level.

During the course of the following chapters we will consider core constructs of Positive Psychology, such as hope, meaning, savoring, and resilience, and use them to enrich our understanding and work with the cards. We will also consider general psychological aspects of human behavior, such as habits and beliefs, and see how the Tarot could help us identify and move beyond ones that might be limiting. We’ll explore core insights from sociology about the way in which social forces constrain our lives, and use this knowledge to add an extra dimension to our work with the Tarot. Furthermore, we will consider findings from the educational sciences about effective learning and skills development to see how we can supercharge our study of the Tarot. In other chapters we will learn how to use the principles of resonance and modeling to take our Tarot practice up a few notches.

To structure the content, I assigned a specific Tarot card (that embodies the concept in question) to each chapter, and used the sequence of the Major Arcana to order the chapters. (I fully realize and accept that you might view the cards quite differently. That is perfectly fine, of course, and there is no need for death threats, pitchforks, or anthrax-laced hate mail if you feel I should have used a different card somewhere.). Because the concepts we will be covering are so varied, each chapter has a slightly different structure (as an Aquarian I struggle with keeping everything all the same...). However, we will generally start by first exploring the concept in question in some depth. The idea is to provide you with a firm base of knowledge and understanding that you could bring to your work with the cards. Once the theory is covered, we’ll move on to applying it in the context of the Tarot. Some of these applications will emphasize your own inner relationship with the Tarot. Others will focus on using the Tarot for yourself, and yet others will center on your use of the Tarot to read for others.

Each chapter is designed to stand on its own, so you could dip in anywhere you like if you’re not the kind of person who enjoys reading a book from cover to cover. (The one exception to this is chapter two, which introduces a formula that makes its appearance in several later chapters, so you might want to read it early on.) So feel free to approach this book in the way that works best for you. That said, here is a suggestion for getting the most from this book. Start by reading through a chapter from start to finish, as this will give you a good understanding of the concept covered in that chapter. Then put it all into practice by doing at least a few of the exercises. Once you have done that, read the chapter again. This time it will be a different read, as doing the exercises would have sensitized you in ways that will enable you to pick up things that you might have missed the first time around, or to see them in a different light. And please, don’t turn any of this into a chore – bring an inquisitive sense of lightness and play to the exercises and have fun with them! None of them are cast in stone. Treat the instructions as suggestions – feel free to modify them and make them work for you.

One more thing, before we dig in. I realize that in today’s world there are literally thousands of books on every subject under the sun, including the Tarot. I am honored and grateful that you chose this one, and it is my wish that you will get even more from it than you might have hoped at first.

Let’s get started!

Back to Table of Contents

1 - The Fool

Breaking Free from Habits, Routines, and Cybernetic Loops

The Fool would never have met any of the characters and experiences signified by the Major Arcana if he didn’t venture beyond his familiar world and step off that cliff

What if I told you that you very likely live in a self-constructed prison? Of course, you might disagree. But let me ask you – how free are you really? As much as we might like to believe that we use our free will to lead our lives, the truth is that we exercise our will far less than we might care to admit to ourselves. In reality, large parts of our lives run on autopilot. I am referring to the ways in which habits and routines slowly ossify parts of our lives that were once fresh and new, turning them into stale, predictable behavioral loops and limiting comfort zones. Over time, they become the invisible prison bars within which most of our day-to-day existence plays out. Take a moment and think about your typical day. Make a list of all the actions you engage in. Then compare this list to what you usually do on the next typical day. And the next. See what I mean? You almost certainly have a usual morning routine (which might vary between working and non-working days, but this still means it is a weekly routine), that involves doing the same actions, in the same way, and in the same order, day after day. You shower (or have a bath) in the same way, dry yourself off with your towel in the same sequence that you have been following for years, dress yourself in the same place in the same order every day, have pretty much the same staples for breakfast, take the same familiar route to work, and on and on the list goes. This also extends to our relationships, which tend to fall into ruts far more quickly than we would like. Interactions become ever-more scripted and routinized, with certain topics dominating the conversation, and others gradually receding into the background.

Now don’t get me wrong, there is nothing intrinsically bad about habits and routines. In fact, they can be very beneficial. They enable us to do complex tasks such as driving without the need for much thought, and provide supportive structuring to many aspects of our lives. Good habits can be building blocks towards success and achievement, such as a habit of meditation or exercise. But unfortunately, they can also stifle, limit, and constrict our lives and relationships in many ways. Either way, the impact that habits have in our lives would be very difficult to overestimate. As James Clear points out:

Our habits put us on a trajectory of accumulating gains and losses that eventually determine much of the outcomes we will experience in our lives. This means that in the long run, the quality of our lives depends greatly on the quality of our habits.

Habits make things more familiar, automatic, and predictable. When it comes to brushing your teeth or doing the dishes, this is great, but in areas such as relationships, leisure, spiritual and creative expression, habits and comfort zones can easily rob us of much of the richness, freshness, and novelty that life has to offer. As the Tarot’s Fool reminds us, these qualities are essential to a full life. Unless we take a new road from time to time, life becomes stale. In fact, when we view the Tarot through the lens of the Fool’s journey, none of the experiences of the Major Arcana can come into play until the Fool has stepped off that cliff and gone beyond the bounds of the familiar and comfortable, but limiting Shire.

For this reason, we could take our work with the Tarot to the next level through a fuller understanding of habits, routines, and comfort zones, and how we can change them. As our understanding of how life works increases, so will our ability to read the cards in more expanded ways. As we see more of life, we are correspondingly able to see more in the cards. As a result, our work with the Tarot will become more helpful and empowering. So, let’s start by having a closer look at habits and cybernetic loops.

Cybernetic Secrets of Human Behavior

A theory that had a major influence on many different disciplines, including many of the social sciences, is Cybernetics. It gives us a framework for making sense of how and why so many things in our lives evolve into stable, but often stifling habits and routines. As we’ll soon see, this understanding has the potential to greatly enrich our Tarot practice. But first, let’s whip out a definition: Cybernetics is concerned with self-regulatory purposive systems, and its core concept is circular causality or feedback, where the observed outcomes of actions are taken as inputs for further action in ways that support the pursuit and maintenance of particular conditions. Applied to people, these self-regulatory systems refer to the human mind and thinking, which directs our behavior towards certain goals based on the feedback we are getting. Sounds a bit boring when you say it like this in Wikipedese, but actually it’s a really useful theory, as we’ll see in a moment. While there is far more to the theory than what we can cover here, we will dig into one important concept, that of cybernetic loops. No, it has nothing to do with the Terminator or with SkyNet, but with human behavior. See, this theory posits that our behaviors tend to crystallize into repetitive feedback loops. Not just our own behavior, mind you, but also our interactions and relationships with others. If you think this is an exaggeration, just have a look at your current or most recent romantic relationship. Have you ever found yourself having basically the same argument in the same general way more than once? Perhaps way more than once? If you think about it, was there a consistent pattern to the way things unfolded? (Think Groundhog Day.) For example, you said something that the other person considered to be a problem, so he or she confronted you with it, causing you to withdraw into silence, which led to the other person starting a fight with you, which then seemed to subside for a while, only for the whole cycle to be repeated a few days or weeks later? See the loop? To explain what cybernetic loops are and how they work, let’s run this example through the steps shown in Figure 1. It went something like this:

You acted by saying something that had a certain content or tone → this had an effect on the environment in the sense that the other person considered this a problem → which triggered your partner to engage in a habitual response of nagging → which gave you information from your environment (your partner is unhappy with you) → which you evaluated mentally based on your goals of being left in peace and avoiding negative feelings, and you then made a decision about how to respond → which caused you to act by withdrawing from the fighting (which didn’t make you feel good or peaceful) → which had the effect on the environment of triggering the other person’s anger and rejection issues → which caused him or her to pick a verbal fight with you → which was more feedback from the environment (that your partner was seriously pissed off with you), which you again evaluated mentally as a bad thing, given your goal to feel good and at peace, causing you to act by withdrawing even more. With each fight, the underlying problem becomes more and more entrenched, and round and round it goes. Now, if you were a masochist and enjoyed suffering, this would all be fine, but I am going to hazard a wild guess that most people would generally prefer loving, harmonious relationships over conflict-ridden ones.

This kind of loop happens everywhere. In fact, very few aspects of our lives fully escape the influence of habits and cybernetic loops. The way we practice our religion, our hygiene habits, and the kinds of food we eat, our spending habits, our weekly phone calls to a certain relative, the way we celebrate holidays, how we have sex, and how we work with the Tarot, all eventually succumb to the gravity of habit.

Here’s one more example to illustrate: Based on your goal to present a great appearance to others and to be accepted and approved of by them, you decide to engage in the action of spending money on expensive designer-brand clothes and fashion accessories. This has the effect on the environment of causing you to be noticed more, which provides you with positive feedback from the environment in the form of attention and compliments. Based on your desires, you evaluate this positively, as a strategy that gets you closer to your goal, so you act by forking out even more cash on fashion bling. Within a few months you look fabulous but feel like crap as you have maxed out all three your credit cards and don’t know how you are going to repay the interest...

Figure 1: Cybernetic Loop

Loops such as these entrap us and limit our life experience. They keep us stuck in unsatisfying life situations, and may even cause us to go into destructive downward spirals. Of course, not all habits and cybernetic loops are bad. Quite the contrary. When cybernetic loops function well, they can serve to increase our chances for reaching our goals (which is why self-guided missiles, which have an amazing talent for reaching their goals, work on the exact same principle). As such, you will very