Christianity and Tarot Cards

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Hi, so I'm in a bit of a conundrum. I went to a con this weekend for...something I'm a closet fan of, and picked up some tarot cards based on that thing. It was mostly as a novelty and they look kind of lit. However, this is my first "functional" tarot deck as it has both the major and minor arcana. I own a full set of the official Persona major arcana cards that I had to get by pre-ordering two separate games, but they aren't a functional tarot deck without the minor arcana. In any case, I've always had a bit of interest in tarot cards, at least as a concept.

However, I also happen to be a Christian. One of my pastors told me that tarot card reading is sorcery, which is something I should avoid. I suppose she's right. I really shouldn't do tarot card readings. The cards I just picked up are kind of neat though. I talked to a couple of my friends, both of whom say that it's not really sorcery if I don't actually believe in it. I...also think they have a point. I believe in the power of arbitrary drawing of mass-produced cards about as much as I believe the Death Clock algorithm, which is not really.

Actually, that's not entirely true. I believe God has the power to speak through almost anything, even if it's pagan nonsense. So...card reading could reveal something but not because of any power I have, and certainly not because of any power a consumer product has. I'm also pretty sure God has better things to do right now, such as helping the people in Australia. So anything revealed by a card "reading" is likely pure nonsense.

It may seem like I've found a good loophole, but out of the friends I've talked to, one is a non-Christian and the other is one of those believe what's convenient to her kind of Christians, so perhaps I should talk to a pastor before I do anything. I obviously don't want to engage in sorcery. I'm not entirely sure if not believing in something means it isn't actually sorcery, but who knows? So, I thought I would maybe do the logical thing and ask some complete strangers on the internet what they think.

Something that I read when I was going through a conundrum like this, I think back in August 2013 or so:

Went through similar things, was fascinated. I think we are spiritual beings having a human experience. I messed around with it all. I will say that when God had something to convey to me, He never did it through one of those outlets. I do believe that other beings can and do communicate through these conduits, just don't confuse them for God.

If I had it to do all over again, I would take a pass. But, people must do what they must do. Be very careful...

You can make a modest living performing Tarot readings, as long as you keep in mind that perform is the key word. I know this because I used to do it.

It's all about how well you can weave a fantasy based on the seekers' needs and the basic meaning of each card.

There's a seeker born every minute, too.

Uh-oh, it just got worse. I brought my tarot set to game night with my friends, mostly so I could have a discussion about it, and long story short, six of my friends requested readings, four of whom are Christians. All of them did the New Year's Spread and they all said that at least parts of their reading seemed to speak into something going on in their life. Now we're all in the same boat thanks to me. I did make it clear, especially to the Christians, that both the reader and person having their fortune read are complicit in whatever goes down, so now it's not just my sin...it's ours. Only the friends who weren't present escaped having a reading.

While Christianity has been pretty consistently opposed to the use of divination and other sorcery there are also Christian mystical traditions and Christianity has been the main influence on occult beliefs in the 'Christian world', so there's always been Christians who do engage in those practices.

Personally, I can't advise one in any meaningful way about religious faith or magical practices since:



Ironically these days Dave is quite the superstitious cultist.

I can share what happened to my parents when they went down the tarrot card and spirit of the glass route.
Firstly, my parents had both grown up in Christian backgrounds. They thought that they were Christians. My Dads background was that his Dad was well known and respected as his Dads Dad was mayer of the town. There was a mix of Christianity and freeasonry through that line (Not a good mix as the two ton't mix together).
On my Mums side they had mostly been strong Christians though from one angle there had been one person who was a freemason (Shriner), but it was the exception.
So coming from that background, both my parents were said to be Christians. But in truth neither knew the Lord. They were searching for answers.
My Mum had been into Dennis Weekly magazines while growing up. (Spiritializm/occult etc). So when some college friends came to visit ad they got into tarrot cards and spirit of the glass in their late teens to early 20's it seemed a reasonable thing to do. They knew there was something behind it. They wanted to find out what it was.
They mostly did spirit of the glass. My Mum said the glass was moving on its own. Her finger was hardly touching it. The cards were spelling out messages.
Now the house they were in they had bought from their parents when they got married in their early 20's. I was born when my Mum was 22 (She was married at 20). The house became so haunted through these demonic openings, that when I was 4 years old we moved, and when my parents were putting pictures off the walls and packing them in boxes, they would turn arouns and the pictures were back on the walls. As a kid I used to talk to the demonic ghosts, one being an old decrepid lady... . The dog which was a ferrocious little dog who knew how to defend itself (A Sealyham terrier who tore apart two gernam shepheards who set upon her one day) backed backwards up the stairs in that house due to the goings on in there. My Mum had to eave me and my brother in there and waited outside the front door for my Dad to get back before she would go in....
So when I was 4 and we moved further up the street to a lovely pair of cottages (One being habitable...Just!) it was a welcome relief and it was the end of the ghostly goings on.
I was the first to become a Christian in my family at about the age of 13. My Mum was second about ten years after and then my youngest brother (18 years younger then me) and then later my Dad, and later again my other brother who has his own family and is 3 years younger then I am.
These conversions to Christianity were true miracles and true conversions. We all thought we were Christians before that.

What I am saying here is that yes, there is more to tarrot cards and spirit of thw glss etc. They are designed as openings or gateways into the spiritual rwalms. But they let in demons into your home. Yes they work. It is these demonic spirits which operate them.

But do you want to know demonic spirits, or do you want to really get to know Jesus?

It is your choice.

If you want to say "Enough of thinking I am a Christian. Lets get to know the real Lord and be a Christian" then chuck the cards and start to pray :-
"LORD JESUS. I KNOW I AM A SINNER AND THAT YOU DIED FOR ME.
I ACCEPT YOU AS MY LORD AND SAVIOUR.
PLEASE COME INTO MY LIFE LORD. COME INTO MY HEART. RESCUE ME AND BE MY SAVIOUR. AMEN.

Of course. This is a decision not to be taken likely. But if you are serious then the prayer is real and you will get to know the LORD.

I’ve known lots of people who believed that they have had demonic experiences but almost always there was a logical, non supernatural reason for whatever they experienced.

I sort of believed in demons for awhile when I was younger because I was taught that even bad dreams can be due to demonic influence. I don’t believe that now, and I’ve found that my dreams and anxiety around sleep are less troubling than they used to be. I still have PTSD-related nightmares, but they’ve bothered me less than dreams I had when I was younger when I believed they could be due to a demonic attack.

On the cusp of not believing, I was comically scared when I engaged in practices that could supposedly bring demons, especially at nighttime but nothing ever happened apart from creaky stairs, flickering lights, and branches rattling against windows when it was windy outside (all of which could be attributed to a rational explanation even though I wasn’t feeling very rational at the time).

I've actually spent a fairly good chunk of time in the last three to five years teasing out the difference between what kinds of 'other' experiences are genuinely a brush with something else that's sentient and which are just something suggestion-oriented.

My conclusions so far are something like this - the overwhelming percentage of the time nothing directly 'spooky' is happening, but I will make the distinction that there will be some times that something clearly does happen and it won't be at the beck and call of your imagination, similarly it's quite likely that some of the thoughts you're getting - without anything spooky happening per say - may not directly be your own or at least picked up in ways that aren't related to five-sensory input. In a way you yourself might be spookier than you realize because you can do certain kinds of things, like focusing the heck out of your attention, and then watch it ripple out a few days later as a raft of synchronicities and a lot of those synchronicities can be active and outward enough that it gets quite difficult to write them off as chance. That said though - most of what you'll be seeing in life is mundane and boring, and it's really close to something like atheist materialism with maybe a 1% twist. That and - if a bunch of kids are scrying together or playing with an ouija board and reacting to what they perceive to be subtle weird things happening, most of it is probably them and at the worst outlying cases they might be doing something akin to inviting someone at random off the street, not a desirable outcome but not exactly the start of the next The Exorcist movie either.

Where I think the Abrahamic faiths get things twisted as well is the schema in which they see other forms of sentience existing. They don't simply have flora and fauna out there, they have two kingdoms competing for the eternal fate of human souls and in that worldview everything is either on team white or team black and thus things like tarot cards have some special marked power that simple fantasy doesn't, a bit like the idea that God and Satan some how worked out a rule book of 'Hey Satan, these will be the tools you use to test my believers and they'll be highway fast-tracks to being under the control of your minions or being harassed by them'. That last part hardly makes sense and if it did then what was a tool for the damnation of souls would have to change in its reach, effect, and possibly whether it's even a tool of perdition with cultural context. What we have is cultural leverage on divination and things of that sort that we don't have on fantasy and imagination quite as much albeit from the Puritan era onward imagination was seen as the devil's workshop and all of your attention was supposed to be outward (which helped put the last nail in the coffin for about 300 or so years of history where there was quite a popular fusion of Hermeticism, Christianity, and Platonist/Neoplatonist philosophy where nature was all part of God).

I still don't really know what to make of groups like the better known Solomonic magicians on Facebook these days working with the angelic and demonic hierarchies. Something clearly happens for them, a lot of these interactions do seem to qualitatively break the bounds of what you might expect if it were all merely psychological, but the social structures that get conveyed seem somewhat confusing.

I kinda have to go back to the sort of thing Donald Hoffman was saying though - ie. that the world, really the universe as a whole and beyond, is a vast social network of conscious agents and that from something that's more fundamental than space-time we spin up very selected and contextually arranged pieces of information for Darwinian fitness payouts. That explains well enough how you could have races of beings around that we can't see or communicate with all that easily for the most part. At the same time, that being a real world, it's not in perfect tandem with your imagination nor can it be, and also to that point having a deck of tarot cards is probably far less interesting than you'd expect.