Tarot and the Search for Meaning: Why Philosophers Who Never Met Keep Agreeing

Sometime in the fourth century BCE, in Athens, Aristotle defined moral virtue as “a kind of mean, since it aims at what is intermediate” (Nicomachean Ethics II.6, 1106b, after Ross) — courage poised between cowardice and recklessness, generosity between stinginess and waste. A century or two earlier and four thousand kilometres east, the Buddha had opened his first sermon at Sarnath by announcing “a middle path… avoiding these two extremes” (Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, after Rhys Davids) — a life poised between indulgence and self-mortification. There was no correspondence between these men. No shared library, no common teacher, no translated texts drifting along the caravan routes in time to matter. Two thinkers, given entirely separate civilisations to work with, walked into the same room by different doors.

It happens again, and more precisely, five hundred years later. Epictetus — born enslaved in Phrygia, teaching in exile — opens his handbook with the observation that some things are in our power and others are not, and that misery is mostly the business of confusing the two (Enchiridion 1, after Carter). The Bhagavad Gita, a Sanskrit dialogue set on a battlefield, gives Arjuna the same medicine in almost the same dosage: “Let right deeds be thy motive, not the fruit which comes from them” (Gita 2.47, after Arnold). Act well; release the outcome. A Greek slave and an Indian charioteer-god, essentially shaking hands across a distance neither could have crossed.

Any honest reader eventually asks: what exactly is going on here?

The convergence problem

There are two live explanations, and it is worth being upfront that scholars genuinely disagree about which is right — the debate between perennialists (who think the traditions are describing one underlying truth) and contextualists (who think we flatten the traditions by merging them) is real and unresolved. But notice that both explanations are remarkable.

The first possibility: the convergences are discoveries. On this reading there is something real about the structure of a good human life — a shape to it, the way there is a shape to a catenary curve — and any sufficiently careful thinker eventually trips over it, the way any sufficiently careful geometer trips over π. Aristotle and the Buddha agree about the mean for the same reason Newton and Leibniz agree about the calculus: they were both looking at the same thing.

The second possibility: the convergences are portraits. Human beings everywhere are issued the same equipment — appetite, luck, other people, mortality — and so, given a few centuries, every tradition builds the same handful of load-bearing answers, not because the answers are written into the universe but because they are written into us. This is sometimes offered as the deflationary option, the polite way of saying the agreement means nothing. It is not deflationary at all. If independent civilisations keep converging on the same diagnoses of the same predicaments, that is extraordinary evidence about what kind of creature we are. The portrait is as interesting as the landscape.

Either the cosmos has a moral geometry, or humanity does. Pick whichever you like on a given evening; the practical consequence is the same. Where traditions that never met agree, the agreement has been independently tested — and independently tested ideas are precisely the ones worth carrying around.

Which brings us, sooner than you might expect, to a deck of cards.

The oldest need in the deck

“All men by nature desire to know,” runs the first sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (I.1, 980a, after Ross). He meant it as an observation so obvious it could open a book about everything. But the desire has a cruel design flaw: it outruns the supply. The things we most urgently want to know — what should I do, who am I becoming, what happens next — sit exactly in the region where knowledge is hardest to come by. The search for meaning is not a hobby some people have; it is an intrinsic part of the human condition, and the unknown is where it lives.

Every civilisation builds instruments for this. Oracles, augurs, the I Ching’s yarrow stalks, the liver of the sacrificial ox — and, from the fifteenth century onward, a deck of seventy-eight cards. This is what tarot offers, and it is worth stating without embarrassment: the possibility of grasping onto something — a sense of knowing about the inherently unknown. That is the appeal. That is the whole reason a Renaissance card game survived five centuries while the games around it died. Anyone who tells you they are drawn to tarot for purely aesthetic reasons is describing a poster, not a practice.

The question a philosopher must ask next is the uncomfortable one: is the sense of knowing actual knowing? And here the honest answer is no — the cards do not know your future, and this site will never pretend otherwise. But watch what remains once the fortune-telling is subtracted, because it is more than you might think. What a tarot deck actually contains is a compression algorithm for human predicaments. Seventy-eight images, refined by centuries of use, each one a recurring situation: the leap not yet taken (the fool), the withdrawal to think (the hermit), the ratio that must be poured rather than measured (temperance), the turning of luck that no one controls (the wheel of fortune). The deck is not a window onto next month. It is an index of the situations humans keep finding themselves in — a catalogue of the very predicaments that made Athens and Sarnath converge.

Neither debunking nor peddling

Tarot usually meets one of two receptions, and both are lazy.

The debunker observes, correctly, that no mechanism connects a shuffle to a destiny, and concludes that the cards are therefore empty. This is like burning a library because the card catalogue was arranged by astrology. The refutation of the sorting method says nothing about the contents — and the contents of the tarot, at its best, are the convergence points themselves. When temperance asks Aristotle’s question about the mean, it asks a question that survived independent verification on two continents. That is not superstition. That is the most rigorously peer-reviewed material in the human archive.

The peddler makes the opposite error: sensing that people ache for the unknown to be knowable, the peddler sells the sense of knowing as knowing — timelines, soulmates, guarantees. This is worse than the debunker’s mistake, because it takes the genuine article of the human condition and returns counterfeit goods.

There is a third position, older than both: treat the cards as instruments of inquiry. Socrates spent his life demonstrating that the right question, arriving at the right moment, does more work than most answers. A tarot card, on this reading, is a question that has been waiting centuries for its moment. The shuffle’s randomness is not magic — it is a defence against your own agenda. Left to choose, you would never select the card that interrogates the thing you are avoiding; the deck’s indifference is what lets it interrupt you. (Our essays on the hermit and Plato’s cave, temperance and the golden mean, and the wheel of fortune between the Stoics and the Gita each walk one card’s convergence point in detail.)

Reading it in practice

Read this way, a draw changes character. Three cards on the table are not a forecast; they are a structured prompt — one tested question about where you stand, one about what you are holding too tightly, one about what you have declined to look at. The reading ends not with a verdict but with better questions than you brought to it, each meaning cited to the philosophers who earned it. The sense of grasping the unknown remains — but relocated, honestly, from the future (where the cards have no authority) to the present (where, it turns out, most of the unknown was hiding all along).

Our question, this time for the whole deck rather than one card: if a card could tell you one true thing tonight, would you rather it be about what will happen to you — or about what you actually want?

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Sources. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II.6 (1106b) and Metaphysics I.1 (980a), after W.D. Ross (public domain). Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (SN 56.11), after T.W. Rhys Davids (1881, public domain). Epictetus, Enchiridion 1, after Elizabeth Carter (public domain). Bhagavad Gita 2.47, after Edwin Arnold, The Song Celestial (1885, public domain). On the perennialism–contextualism debate: Steven T. Katz (ed.), Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (1978); Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (1945). On tarot’s history: Helen Farley, A Cultural History of Tarot (2009).

Try the reading tool: draw three cards and see which questions have been waiting for you — every interpretation cited to its source.