STORY TAROT

Two of Swords,  a Tarot Image                                          © by Ruth Zachary

I sometimes take on a Fortune Teller Persona around Halloween, and because it is that time of year, I was reading about the Tarot cards, to be more familiar with card meanings.

When reading the cards, people often lay the cards out in various spreads or arrangements. The spread suggested for use with the Waite deck (1910) was named the Celtic Spread, that started with a Celtic cross, used for answering a specific question. A variation on this ten-card  spread was a layout suggested by Dorothy Riddle, a clinical psychologist from Arizona, which was arranged in a clockwise spiral from the center outward.

Different spreads often use different numbers of cards, which are interpreted according to the way the spreads are arranged. In most variations each position in the lay-out has a particular meaning, such as one position represents the person asking the question,  and other positions represent the past, present and future influences affecting the question. Some spreads use all of the cards, but other spreads use only a small number of cards.

Essentially the order of the cards, which vary according to the order of the shuffling of the deck and the associated meanings, including position in the spread, seem to tell a story. Different authors ascribe different interpretations to each of the cards, and art imagery of different tarot decks suggest multiple associations by readers of these decks. The story or interpretations told are likely to be highly individual and different in the final picture than any other person’s “reading.”

Using cards to reveal a plot of a story, would not be much different than a “reading,” for the purpose of fortune telling.

This suggested actually using tarot cards to work as a framework for storytelling. The number of cards used could be arbitrary. Major Arcana cards (22) could represent main character archetypes, and (16) court cards could represent minor characters. The story telling “spread” would determine plot elements, such as introduction of antagonists, or allies, miscellaneous characters, describing a character, the backstory of a character, the situation at the beginning, the order of events through time. The (40) Minor Arcana suite cards could represent plot elements, situational occurrences, facilitating the development of the story and its outcome.

To try it out, I started a spread  of  40 or so cards, arbitrarily to end when the World card appeared.

There were many ups and downs of fortune for the main character, a woman, and periods implying struggle, and a period of prosperity, which could make an interesting plot. Near the end, a number of cards with negative connotations appeared, such as the Tower card, the Devil card and the Death card. This would imply the story would be a tragedy, or perhaps a murder. The story could  be divided into sections, according to periods of good fortune and periods of struggle. The main character or Narrator could foreshadow the outcome in the beginning, and develop the story to its tragic end.

I invite other writers to try some form of this method of story plotting. I might consider other aspects of Tarot readings that would create a feasible fictional story plot. Such a story would certainly be more unique than some plotting formulas promoted for screen plays and short novels in how- to books. If I find one that works better than my first attempt, I might actually try to develop such a story, and share the method in this blog in the future.

This Writing and the Image above are the Copyright © of Ruth Zachary. The Two of Swords illustration was Published in the author's book of Poetry, Spirit Walks Among Us - Xlibris, 2012.