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Divination is not mere fortune-telling or superstition. Rather, it is an exceedingly subtle psychological technique whereby the secrets of the unconscious can be discovered, its powers (extrasensory and others) can be made accessible, and guidance for our confused and disordered lives can be obtained. The most important fact to fix in one’s mind is that there is nothing haphazard or accidental in the universe, and that external events—no matter how seemingly trivial—are intimately related to happenings within the human psyche. Thus, if we learn the art of discovering and interpreting the external signs, we may thereby gain access to the world of inward realities in our own souls and in the soul of the cosmos. The magic of Tarot divination is not in the cards but in ourselves. The cards can and do act as instrumentalities whereby the subjective reality within the unconscious becomes able to project a portion of itself into objective existence. Through this projection, a meaningful and useful relationship or a creative dialogue between the subjective and objective sides of our lives may be established, which is a great accomplishment. Thus divination by means of the Tarot may be defined as a practical way in which a bridge is built between the temporal world of physical events, on the one hand, and the timeless world of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, on the other. It may be useful to recall that divination was considered an important part of the curriculum of certain mystery schools, not primarily in order to teach how to foretell the future, but in order to construct a psychic mechanism within the initiate whereby a source of guidance and insight might be made accessible to his conscious self.
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Stephan A. Hoeller (The Fool's Pilgrimage: Kabbalistic Meditations on the Tarot)