Why no Tarot card is good or bad

When you first work with any Tarot deck and learn the meanings behind the cards, you might notice that certain cards can seem more negative when compared to another. You only have to look at the ‘swords’ cards to see that many of them come with words of warnings and despair. This also extends to the Major Arcana cards in the deck.  As any experienced reader will know, the face of a client will normally drop when they turn over the ‘Devil’ or the ‘Tower’ card. I have been guilty myself in my younger years of pulling out a card on a situation, seeing the grim face of ‘Death’ and falling into despair. It was only with the benefit of hindsight and time I saw there was a vast amount of ‘good’ buried under my projections of ‘bad’ in the situation I asked upon. The ‘Death’ card was always teaching me a valuable lesson had I looked upon it as a teacher and not gone running off with my ego-based thoughts of what I wanted to happen.

We spoke before of the problem with using the cards for prediction of future events as certain cards that have more negative connotations attached to them could devastate the person interpreting them. However, the cold hard truth of it is that no card in the Tarot is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Each card that comes with a positive meaning always has a shadow side, and likewise those that might have a more negative meaning also have a lighter side.

However, it also goes deeper than this. The cards themselves are symbols and archetypes for our collective unconscious. They reach out further than our egoic mind. It is the reason that no matter how hard you try, you can never pull out the ‘wrong’ cards for any reading. No matter how much shuffling you may do or how many times you move your hand across the deck. It is your unconscious and the Spirit within that is in control of what card you select, and that decision has already been made most likely before you even asked your question….

Therefore, if the cards themselves are a symbol of aspects within us that go beyond our egoic mind, how can they represent either ‘good’ or ‘bad’? Let me explain.

Our egoic minds love to label, categorise and judge. Therefore, an important part of their job is to label events that occur in our lives as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. I am sure you have met people or are familiar with those that see the world as very black and white, right and wrong, etc. Nothing is wrong with this but ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are only perceptions according to that individual.

You only have to look at conflicts that occur in the world to understand that what one perceives as good, another can see the same thing as bad. Just as you investigate events of your past you may see things that appeared ‘bad’ at the time, but later transformed you as a person and made you happier because of it. Or at least it became a learning experience so you would not make those same mistakes again.

It is with this approach you should look at any card in the Tarot deck. That each card represents more the colour grey than any black or white. That it carries a meaning that may yet be unseen from your egoic mind but one that will move you ever more towards your true nature.