The Infinite Tarot:

ABSTRACT

The Infinite Tarot is a tool intended to align with the objectives of psychotherapy, as a way of conducting inward analysis through symbolic association-forming. It expands on and combines various tarot decks into a single framework, as well as integrating several elements of symbolism used in cultural mythos and their many myths.

How seriously should I take the infinite tarot?

As seriously as you any other aspect of magic, and spirituality.

Meaning-making is a very central aspect of human psychological experience. Victor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, identifies that meaning or conceptualisation can make the difference between suffering through life or finding enjoyment in it. Meaning brings fascination, and curiosity, and drive.

Meaning is also an internal, subjective experience. Epistemology can be thought of as a set of principles by which we arrive at our beliefs, the things we take ‘seriously’. Ontology can be thought of as how we map our beliefs onto things which really exist in the concrete world. For example, we may believe in a particular recurring set of numbers in a mathematical pattern, derived from calculus and deduction. Then we can find an expression or near-expression of that pattern in the physical world. The mapping of the abstract to the concrete is what is meant by ‘meaning’.

This is the same sense in which we can think of magic, and spirituality. Both are forms of abstraction, a set of patterns which exist in the mind without 1-1 mapping to the concrete reality beyond it. When we make a metaphor, and say ‘the expression of this abstract thing is this concrete thing’, we are aggregating, or ‘meaning’, the idea with the reality to bridge the difference between them.

The power of magic, of divining, is in finding beliefs which aggregate well. This can be thought of the project of Tarot, of I Ching, of sympathetic connection. It’s up to you to decide if this is real magic, if it ‘works’. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. Magic is that which, when you stop believing in it, does go away. The main idea is that belief means ‘something’ is there.

A second caveat, though, is that ‘truth is what is there to be interacted with.’ A lot of magic is unreal, and untrue; enchantment, and illusion, and glamour. Self-deception, or to the magician, deception of others. But where meanings and complex systems of symbols and signs align with reality, where interaction with the interface of magic produces a true result, there is something special to be understood.

The weakness of divinatory systems, the inherent bottleneck on their creativity, is that to create a statement that is true whenever it is called to explain reality, the statement must be exceedingly vague and general, to the extent of creating a tautology.

As examples:

There is someone in your life that is having difficulties.

You have a mentor that you have trusted greatly, but you now find yourself questioning them.

There is a source of innocence that you have lost connection to in recent years.

Change is coming.

The I-Tarot is not wholly different, but because it is dealing with an uncapped number of cards, there is no negotiated tradeoff between generalisation and specialisation. Which is to say, it can attempt to say more things than the typical 78 card tarot deck can.

Combinatorically, even a simple tarot reading can get roughly ~600 000 different outcomes. But, because of sets and suits, those outcomes are often very similar.

Combinatorial uniquenessis not the same as interpretive uniqueness. Many distinct sets map to the same archetypal meaning.

e.g.
Suit of Cups → emotions;
Similar pip numbers → beginnings/ends;
Many different Minor cards can be read as conflict/loss.

A reader compresses thousands of raw combinations into a much smaller set of interpretive narratives.

The dominant axes compress information, cutting through noise for generalised, clear tautologies. The presence of Major Arcana, a dominant suit, and the presence of courts already partition the space into just a few dozen salient buckets.

e.g.
Splitting by (Majors count 0–3) × (court count 0–3) × (orientation pattern 8) gives at most 4 × 4 × 8 = 128 coarse buckets.

Fine distinctions become contextual, and are as much about reading the person as the cards. Two outcomes that differ only by swapping two low-pip cards of the same suit will often be read very similarly, and the same for swaps among related Major Arcana. Conversely, the difference between “No Majors” and “One Major” is usually large in its impact for interpretations.

The card orientation multiplies nuance, but not always meaning. Upright vs reversed can nudge interpretation, but reversed versions of many cards are read as variations on the upright theme (delay, blockage, internalized version), so the semantic distance is usually smaller than a card changing to a different suit or to a Major.

Because of this, and despite superficial complexities, there are unsurpassable drawbacks to finite Tarot.

The I-Tarot is not a claim to ultimate truth, or a hidden pattern guiding everyone’s lives. As a mythos it is not a monomyth, declaring the same set of stories for everyone. If the common fault of cartomancy is combinatoric completeness, or a finite number of plays, then there are a finite number of stories that can play themselves out within the scope of their meaning.

This matters little to the individual person, but like a lottery, readings do not occur on the scale of an individual person. It matters if 800 000 000 people share 600 000 divined fates (based on the idea that 10% of the world have annual tarot readings). The Law of Really Large Numbers, in this case, snips and aggregates awareness in a similar manner to the Rationalisation process outlined by Max Weber in Economy and Society. A deficiency of alternatives creates an iron cage in which different futures become hard to imagine.

I-Tarot aims to surpass this by replacing fixity with infinity. New sets will emerge, connections be mapped and drawn, as a continual, growing story plays out across the cards, mixed with meaning drawn from living, evolving cultures.

ORGANISATION

I-Tarot does still employ sets, suits, and arcs, though there in no insistance that they define the card, or are the ‘main’ feature of it applicable when called. It uses a basic framework of degrees on a Spread as a means of ‘uncovering’ hidden relationships or implications: