AUTHOR’S NOTE: Sorry about the clumsy malapropism, it was the best I could come up with as a riff on the “separation of Church and State” in tarot terms.

As everyone knows if they have even a smattering of knowledge about tarot history (or just the eyes to see), the traditional cards have a strong religious (primarily Christian) bias running through them. This is a relic of an earlier era and doesn’t have much to do with the modern art of divination or even with psychological self-improvement, making it necessary for secular readers (as well as those who are more spiritual) to work their way around its presence in the images. It may be an historical fact but it doesn’t have to be the centerpiece of interpretation, and I rarely give it a thought as I pursue more utilitarian concepts in my “action-and-event-oriented” approach to prognostication.

Spirituality, on the other hand, is alive and well in current usage. A large percentage (in fact nearly 40%) of the US population considers itself “spiritual but non-religious.” A slightly smaller headcount (I believe I saw 23% of one demographic sub-group) acknowledges having either consulted a professional diviner or conducted a self-reading in the last year. For a practice that has been categorically dismissed by both religion and science, these numbers tell a different story, not one of rampant gullibility but of searching for knowledge of a less-regimented kind. Some seekers reject patriarchal paradigms and dualistic thinking entirely, but for the most part it’s a quest for individual meaning.

I’ve mentioned before that the Enlightenment was the worst thing that ever happened to mystical inquiry since there was no room in its empirical worldview for mysterious phenomena. If a curious occurrence appeared to be unexplainable, it was crowded into a corner by logic, ruthlessly dissected and forced to surrender or, failing that, banished to the dustbin of irrational conjecture, not to be heard from again for several centuries. I think Aleister Crowley was onto something when he chose the magical motto “The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion” for his work, although neither discipline would admit to having anything to do with his irreverent and often perverse outlook. He may have come up with it just to irritate both camps; today we would call it “trolling.”

Crowley’s harsh sectarian upbringing apparently blighted any incipient tolerance he might have felt toward Christianity as a young boy, but in my own case it was due more to skepticism about anything that had the fingerprints of pious theologians all over it, no matter what religion they espoused. The mystics who wrote the Bible were certain that their reveries faithfully rendered what God might have said to them had he stooped to private conversation in ways that were patently inscrutable to anyone else, but it sounds like delusional self-flattery to me. Call it “ecclesiastical narcissism,” and in the 21^st Century we have psychotherapy for such deviant behavior.

An even less-charitable assessment would be that it was “all in their head” to begin with but – human insecurity being what it is – their implausible yet hopeful assertions spawned a far-flung empire based entirely on a priori fabrication that led a dubious Omar Khayyam to “come out the same door where in he went.” As a local dermatologist (who obviously didn’t believe in homeopathic remedies) one told me with disarming subtlety when advised of a self-treatment that had completely suppressed an incurable skin condition, “The mind is a wonderful thing.”

If they were messing around on the as-yet-unnamed Astral Plane, the progenitors of Christianity and their like-minded descendants may have been conned by some cosmic practical joker and didn’t realize it. They were clearly convinced that they knew what they were talking about but that doesn’t mean they had a more defensible position on the origin of the species than the Humanist philosophers who came later or any other academic faction for that matter (though if pushed to it I would put my money on Spinoza).

Even before the putative divine wisdom was massaged by fallible human minds to turn it into authoritarian scripture, the faint glimmer of illumination that announced it may have been nothing more than a manifestation of the “Universal Joke” that Crowley was always on about. In other words, it was just too pat to be swallowed by any modern thinker; my own opinion is that it fails the “giggle test.” Whereas their Greek counterparts diced with the gods, maybe these guys were reduced to playing “epistemological mumbletypeg” with dull knives.

If I were serious about taking the religion out of tarot I would have to create my own deck, and – although I have both the artistic ability and the metaphysical background – at my age I don’t have the energy for that level of effort. Most of the decks I’ve seen that “sanitize” the imagery to eliminate conventional symbolism have been devoid of character and weren’t worthy of being called “tarot,” so I wouldn’t go that route anyway. Thus I will continue to just wink at it and go on ignoring its existence except where I can turn it into useful storytelling tropes of some kind. Although it carries Crowley’s own brand of theological grandstanding, the Thoth deck will always be my choice when seeking a reading that is equal parts practical and mystical while not trying to force its spiritual agenda down my throat (after all, as a faith-based product of his fertile imagination, Thelema is just a religion like any other).