Scientific Study of Tarot?

Thread originally posted on the Aeclectic Tarot Forum on 15 Sep 2003, and now archived in the Forum Library.

Frequency	15 Sep 2003
Has there ever been some kind of scientific study or investigation on why or why not tarot works? I'm just wondering. Do you think there should be one? Do you think it would be possible?

lunaperse	15 Sep 2003
i think it should be done right about the time we find scientific proof for why some people like haiku and others sonatas. this ties into my views on lwbs, divination/insight, etc. once we start applying scientific formulae to the tales the tarot have to tell us we lose something. it's like chaos theory, people know there's a unifying theory for it (well the Unified Theory of everything .. ooh i love hawking oh im definitely off topic) anyhow my point and i have one is that a scientific study would end in a reduction of the art. it would assign it limits. it would bound it. now i am not saying tarot doesn't have these thingsl. she does, but they seem to lie in different places not just from person to person but from moment to moment, we can say red is red because it is of a certain wavelength, now explain to me why i associate it (ok why our society) associates it with danger, passion, stop, anger, love, roses, strawberries, lush, debauchery, velvet, sex, romance... ad infinitum sometimes i look at the three of swords and see Sorrow other times i see the way the swords pierce right through the heart.. have gone through the pain and are on the side of healing sometimes the rain on this card looks like tears and other times it looks like a healing shower. find a way to predict to me when i will see the three as a card with a promise of healing or a card of deep pain with 100 oh well ill make it easy 99% accuracy and i'll rethink my views on the science of tarot. if we have a science of tarot we could just plug into a computer and get our readings back... *shrugs* i don't know if this really answers your q probly not... but... be well and travel in safety manda

Frequency	15 Sep 2003
I didn't think of that and now that you have mentioned it I think you are right. If there was a scientific study the tarot would lose something. It would lose it's mystery and I guess even it's appeal.

Minderwiz	15 Sep 2003
Science is an excellent approach to the material world - to that which is measurable and objective. Its method is a great way of extending human understanding. However the real world in which we live extends beyond the material. It has qualities that cannot be easily measured or can only be subjectively measured or possibly cannot be measured at all. Love, hate, desire, beauty or the meaning of life are such concepts which cannot be adequately represented by science, now or possibly ever. I believe the human mind is one of those areas - it is not simply a physiological entity - As Frequency says red can prompt different mental sensations at different times. There is very little that science can say about Tarot (other than physical description of the cards) - in scientific terms Tarot doesn't work because there are no explanatory mechanisms that are postulated which can be satisfactorily measured. In practical everyday terms, Tarot works.

firemaiden	15 Sep 2003
Although there may have been no precise study on how tarot works, we are continuously asking ourselves indeed, how does it work, and continuously applying differing degrees of scientific method to the query. I suppose, the passion to discover how things works however may be equally as strong as our appreciation for things of beauty. Picture the poor butterfly, skewered through with a needle... There are aspects of how Tarot works that may be studied -- I suppose, like what part of the brain lights up when we look at the cards, statistics on how often the same cards show up, that sort of thing.( I wouldn't be surprised if someone's done it. )

Minderwiz	15 Sep 2003
Well on the statistics side the cards tend to an average proportion of 1 in 78. though clearly over smaller runs the proportion will vary - most likely in a binomial distribution. Using this it's possible to see if card frequency is significantly different from normal in any sample (spread). However whether this would say anything significant in a qualitative way about the meaning of the cards is very doubtful. Similarly brain scans may yield a spread of values (though I am not convinced this is necessarily so) - However again what meaning this has is very doubtful, especially is we are talking about the subjective evaluation of the reader - what it means to them. I'm just not sure that such experiments would give any useful meaning to the use of cards for divination.

MattDouglas	15 Sep 2003
I've done hundreds, maybe over 1000, of readings amd only twice have people walked away saying I didn't know what I was doing. In one of those two circumstances I got the gut feeling that querent was in some real denial. I asked her if she'd like to reshuffle the cards and do another spread. She said ok. Of the new ten cards (I was using the CC both times), six of them were the same, 2 or 3 in the exact same positions. She kept her stance, and it was a rather negative reading. Also I'm taking a cognitive psych course currently, and have been having to participate in various online experiments. In one a small 9-letter grid (3 x 3) is flashed on the screen for 150 milliseconds. Of course, you can't take that in with such short exposure visually. However. you are asked to recall only one line of three letters. They don't tell you which line until after the grid has flashed, and the line you're asked to recall is "random". This instructions said I should score about 50%. I scored 71%. Not because I could see more than anyone else, but because I could anticipate which line would be asked for recall, and I was right 1/2 to 2/3 of the time; which I think is pretty good when random selection give me only a 1/3 shot. So yet another study is flawed because it doesn't make room for intuition. And it would probably be fairly simple to add a gues-which-one-we'll-select feature to the program. Overall, science has taken us far, but science without art is joyless and boring. Love, understanding, and compassion. Matt

The Scientific Study of Tarot? thread was originally posted on 15 Sep 2003 in the Talking Tarot board, and is now archived in the Forum Library. Read the active threads in Talking Tarot, or read more archived threads.