Tarot is among a range of mystic practices to have seen a mainstream resurgence in recent years. Most obvious is astrology, now almost adjacent to psychoanalysis in our shared lexicon – but there’s also psychics, reincarnation, supportive spiritual energies (such as with manifesting), and even witchcraft. Certainly, the care and palpable sense of responsibility with which Dore approaches her work might surprise those who see tarot as essentially exploitative, the pastime of the cretinous and the credulous. The dismissal of tarot – and likewise astrology, another interest popular among young women – is often suggestive of whose suffering is taken seriously. The Extinction Rebellion co-founder Gail Bradbrook and feminist scholar Angela Davis have likewise spoken of something akin to Dore’s definition of magic in their activism: the possibility of achieving what seems impossible now. Considered in this light, tarot has more in common than one might think with therapy. As Dore points out, Carl Jung studied archetypes, symbols and synchronicity in seeking to understand the human psyche.

When she started her nightly ritual of drawing cards, Dore found that what emerged gave shape to her thoughts and feelings in the same way as a writing prompt might. The eight of swords – communicating a sense of feeling victimised, or trapped – for instance, might cause Dore to reflect on whether she was avoiding any difficult emotions.In psychological terms, that could simply mean greater awareness of how our thoughts and emotions (the subtle) shape our actions and behaviours (the dense).

I would challenge you to consider that this set of images – that are derived straight from mythology and folktales and fairytales in many cases, and even religion and spirituality – might also have meaning too, if you can step out of the rigid mindset.”The tarot cards told Julie all sorts regarding the ongoing royal feud (Image: Youtube/Northumberland Witch Tarot) Dore is clear about the limits to this: tarot is not therapy, just as she is not a therapist (though she received clinical training as part of her master’s degree). But that is not to say there is no therapeutic benefit to projecting our inner lives on to a card.

Dore, too, writes of the chariot card and the limits to willpower: “Capitalism isn’t built to teach pathfinding; it’s built to teach compliance within a preset path.” But she suggests that tarot could reveal another way – as stories and symbols have always done, separate from any question of whether they are rooted in fact. Now Dore has expanded on her cerebral writing on “the human experience through tarot” in a book, Tarot For Change: Using the Cards for Self-Care, Acceptance and Growth. With this practical, carefully referenced guide, Dore brings together the scientific and the arcane, two spheres long believed to be antithetical – but increasingly less so. Above all, this new dawn of the new age has been framed as a response to widespread anxiety and sociopolitical instability; as an attempt to find meaning in an impervious, chaotic world. Tarot, she thought, could be a similar conduit to awareness and introspection. These two strands – barriers to self-help, and tarot as a path to it – travelled together in Dore’s mind, culminating in a “strange and unlikely marriage”: she became a licensed social worker and full-time tarot reader. In 2018, the Pew Research Centre found that six in 10 Americans (both with religious affiliations and not) held at least one new age belief. Among the explanations given have been the internet connecting subcultures and people with alternative views, fashion houses bringing their imagery to the fore, and the decline in Christianity and community in the west.One upshot of the 21st-century embrace of “wellness” is mounting awareness and acceptance of the real benefits of non-clinical practices such as meditation, yoga, spending time in nature, journalling and mind-altering drugs. The goal is not to throw out facts, truth or science, says Dore – but to make room for magic, long “relegated to the edges”. Her preferred definition is from the anonymous Christian author of the Meditations on the Tarot: using the subtle to influence the dense. For more incredible stories from the Daily Star, make sure you sign up to one of our newsletters here

Jessica Dore holds tarot cards at her home in Pennsylvania. ‘You’re not predicting the future – you’re really just exploring.’ Photograph: Caroline Gutman/The Guardian Various pieces of artwork and old glass bottles at Jessica Dore’s home. Photograph: Caroline Gutman/The Guardian Tarot simply asks that we hold ourselves open to it, says Dore. “The beautiful thing about tarot is that you will meet the card where you’re ready to go.” As the German philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote in 1953, of the popularity of astrology: “the kind of retrogression highly characteristic of persons who do not any longer feel to be the self-determining subjects of their fate, is concomitant with a fetishistic attitude towards the very same conditions which tend to be dehumanizing them”. Even if magic is a leap too far, in “reclaiming the imagination from the grips of doubt and rationalism”, tarot may at least allow us to imagine a better world: the first step to creating it.

Free Celtic Cross Tarot Card Reading

On TikTok, tarot cards are drawn by algorithms. Even the Sun newspaper recently published its own guide to major and minor arcana, a surefire sign of steady online search traffic for spiritual guidance. For those people who don’t feel spoken to by some of the interventions that are evidenced-based, tarot makes a doorway for people to show up and say: ‘Here’s what I need’, instead of telling them: ‘Here’s what you need’,” she says.