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Dec. 16, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
57:24
Edition 775 - Simon Kenny

Simon Kenny has investigated the history and background of Tarot - what the cards have meant to people through the generations. His book "A Critical Introduction to Tarot" is just out.

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, I hope everything is good with you.
My weather report from London I'm going to keep short and reasonably sweet.
It is milder than it should be for the time of year at the moment, having had a real cold spell about a week or so ago.
It's wet and windy today.
Very wet and very windy, about 13 degrees Celsius, 55 Fahrenheit.
That's the way things are with me.
I know that in other parts of the world, it is very changeable and very hot.
My friend and listener, Shane, in Sydney, hello Shane, tells me it's 42 degrees Celsius.
I think in Fahrenheit, that's 100-ish.
Thereabouts.
That's real hot.
We had a little bit of that in London a year or two back, and it is unbearable if you don't have air conditioning and things to protect you.
So the weather is variable around the world.
I hope that life is good wherever you are.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
Please keep those coming in.
I see them all as they come in, sometimes waking up at 3 o'clock in the morning, as I've said before, and opening up my phone because I'm addicted, like everybody else, to check my email inbox just to see what people are saying.
When you get in touch with me through my website, theunexplained.tv, click on the email section there and it'll take you straight through to me.
Please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
It's always good to know those things.
And if your email requires a reply, please give me some time, but please put that in the subject line.
Require, reply, or response required.
Sorry, I'll just put these teeth back in.
It's been an interesting time.
As to the unexplained over-the-holiday period, I've decided that after this year, I'm going to have to take a little bit of a break across the holiday.
That doesn't mean that the podcasts and radio shows stop now.
There will be radio shows over Christmas, and I will make sure that there are podcasts up to Christmas, and then I will come back in the first week of the new year, probably towards the back end of that week.
I just want to stop.
I want to do a bit of planning, and I also want to do a little bit of thinking about what I'm doing and where I'm going, generally.
A few people have said to me, and it's an interesting thought, that they would like to hear me express my views on life, the world, and everything.
Well, look, I have views.
I'm not necessarily, as you will know, a political person, although I do note with interest some of the actions of our government here in the United Kingdom, as somebody who observes politics and used to do so professionally.
But I do get very concerned, is the answer to the question those people have been asking me, about the fact that prices are rising ridiculously.
There was a report in our newspapers this last week or so about supermarkets charging staggering increases for food, and I notice this every time I go in.
Everything that you want or need seems to be more difficult to obtain and seems to be more expensive to obtain.
And I'm just going to pose this question, and then we'll get on with what we're doing here.
You know, as a bunch of people, as I know that you are good people listening to the unexplained.
You are a good person and you're a thinking person.
Otherwise, you wouldn't be here.
And I'm grateful for your support.
But you must have thought, what is going on and how are we going to cope with all of this?
I think these are big questions that people are simply not addressing as much as they should.
I mean, a tiny little example.
Car insurance.
I was, and I know everybody in the UK has been hit by this, but I had to renew mine.
And the quotation, and all the details are the same.
I have an old car.
I live in the same place.
I am me.
My quotation went up very nearly 200%.
I don't know how that kind of thing can be justified.
And then you look at services, utilities, and things like that.
We have all kinds of problems.
So maybe separately at some point, and this is not the place for any of that because you come here in many cases to get away from that.
And, you know, I might start to speak about those things because at my advanced age, I'm getting worried.
And, you know, I'm worried, I've got enough things to worry about without all of those.
So that's just a thought and in reply to those people who say, why do we never hear your views on anything?
Well, there they are.
That's it.
Thank you very much to Adam, my webmaster.
Thank you to you for being part of my show.
Remember, my Facebook page is the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
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And if you have, thank you very much indeed for doing that.
Guest on this edition of the show, something very different.
Irishman Simon Kenney, author, technologist, educator, does probing questions with technical thinking.
He began writing at university where he graduated top of the class and continued to blog about technology and political philosophy.
Simon has taught as a lecturer at the University of Limerick in Ireland.
He works as a software developer, reading and writing to better understand the contemporary world.
That's when he's not writing code.
As a writer on the topics of spirituality and belief, Simon brings a keen awareness, his biography says, of philosophy and contemporary politics to his experience of spiritual and religious life.
Now, a non-believer, we'll get into that.
It's his life's mission to understand the colorful forms that personal convictions often take.
Interesting.
That brings us to the book we're going to be discussing that he's written.
The book is called A Critical Introduction to Tarot.
Now, I haven't talked much about Tarot on this show over the years.
Not much at all.
And yet Tarot has played, as you will hear in the conversation, I think, a pretty sizable part in my life.
And I sway, and I say this in spite of myself, towards being a believer, because the interactions I've had with Tarot readings have been positive.
In other words, they have been extremely relevant to me.
Now, I don't know how that is.
I might be deluded, let's put it that way, but I know that in my life, that is the impression that I get.
So that's all I have to say.
I think we can cross now to Simon Kenny.
We're going to talk about the Tarot for the next hour, a very different kind of conversation.
Hope you enjoy it.
And I hope your preparations for the holidays are going well.
All right, let's get to Simon Kenney now.
We're going to talk about the tarot, a critical introduction to it.
Simon, thank you very much for coming on my show.
Hi, how are you?
Thank you for having me.
So, Simon, I know that your background is Ireland, and I know that you're in Berlin at the moment.
Are you working in Berlin?
Yes, I'm working here at the moment.
Right, okay.
There seems to be a thriving tech sector there.
A lot of Brits seem to be going there to work in technology, in what I would call, because I don't know any better, IT.
Absolutely.
Yes, there's a really great scene here, and yeah, there's plenty of opportunities.
Okay, talk to me about you then, because your background would suggest that you would be writing about technology, I think, you know, because you seem to be a very practical person from what I read in your own biography.
I would have thought you'd be more interested these days in the ingress and growth of artificial intelligence and what it's going to do to our lives.
Well, I have actually written quite a bit about it with my brother-in-law, Adam Stoneman.
But we haven't found, it's been difficult to actually get a look in on different publishers on that topic.
There's just so much being written right now about AI.
But it's been something that I've been following a lot, especially related to image-generating AI.
But I suppose, yeah, it would be something that people might expect, that that would be more what I've written about.
I think image-generating AI is something that's very much in the news at the moment.
And look, as you might have read and know, we're going to be going into a general election here in the United Kingdom, and they're going to go into a presidential one in the States.
I think that's going to be a big topic.
It is.
And there's calls for regulation everywhere, and people are worried about jobs, but also about what does it mean for what we might call maybe image hygiene or that we can trust what we see, I suppose, in the media.
Former evangelical Christian, that interested me straight away.
You gave that up.
You're now looking at things from another perspective.
Why pick on tarot?
Why do tarot?
Well, I was interested in understanding why people were drawn to it.
And, you know, when I was younger, whenever I left Christianity, I became a sort of staunch materialist and the typical blowhard, thinking that I had the answer to everything.
I was younger then, and I think that that's also typical of that age.
But whenever I grew up a little bit, I suppose, I just wanted to understand what attracted people to tarot.
And I suppose by reading philosophy and anthropology in particular, it gave me a little bit of a broader mind.
And I thought, well, it's quite an impoverished attitude just to dismiss the beliefs of others out of hand.
So I tried to open my mind and read widely on the tarot to try to answer that question.
Are you a believer now?
I don't class myself as a believer, but I do have a range of different answers that ultimately, I think, come down to how we look at metaphysics.
What do we think that the structure of reality is?
Because my research indicates that that's really where I think that we, where intelligent people disagree ultimately on questions like, does the tarot work and what kind of practice can we do with it?
I would be very inclined to be skeptical about it.
Look, my background is journalism.
Journalists are skeptical about everything.
Maybe that's one of the reasons that I'm doing this.
But I have to say, and I'm saying this almost against myself, in spite of myself, that through my lifetime, the most accurate, if you can call anything accurate, predictor of my particular state at any one time or my future as it may look, have been things like the tarot and to some extent numerology, which you also talk about in your book.
But the tarot particularly has been astonishingly accurate.
And even to today, I interviewed a woman in America about a system of card reading that she developed.
So the illustrations were hers, and the system was similar but different from tarot.
And I kept the cards here, and periodically, just for a laugh, I will pick one out just at random and see if it relates to my current situation.
And every time I do, it is absolutely spot on.
Something is happening.
I don't know what it is.
But from my perspective, I suppose I need to literally lay my cards on the table here.
I think there's something in tarot.
I don't know what it is.
What do you say?
I think that that feeling is certainly what motivates a lot of people's interest in it.
And that's the sort of looking at it from a practical point of view.
Most tarot authors will say that they're not actually usually certain or maybe have no idea of how it works, but they just know that it does work so that they have this practice.
It's more of a tool in that sense.
For example, lots of the tools that we use on a daily basis, we don't really understand and we don't maybe need to understand, such as the computers that we're using to talk right now.
Do we really understand, you and I, exactly how they work?
Not really.
But actually, in a critical introduction to tarot, I do try to get beyond that and ask the question of how can it work?
So I use philosophical tools, philosophical inquiry, to really grapple with that.
And there's a number of answers.
Rather than proposing a definite one, I think it's more interesting to kind of look at the landscape of belief.
Because I guess this is one of those things that even if you do inquire, which you do in the book extensively, you're not going to come up with a definitive, well, after all these years, here is the answer.
Let's talk then, first of all, because I don't know anything about its history, about the history of tarot.
I understand that people have been using this probably for thousands of years.
Not thousands, no.
But people have been doing different kinds of divination and Other practices like it for thousands of years.
But the tarot deck itself was created in the 15th century in Italy, probably in Milan.
The scholarship is still a little unclear on that exactly.
But it was created for a game.
It's a 78-card deck.
It has two sections in it.
The minor arcana, which are like the poker card deck, the playing cards that we'd be used to with four suits, although there are four court cards instead of three that we might usually find.
And then the major arcana, which are the bigger themes in life, they're originally called the trumps because the original tarot game, which is still played actually in Europe, but not so much in the English-speaking world, the trumps are used in a game like Bridge, and that is what the game of Tarot is.
So it was originally created that way, but like many other items that become used for divination, especially that have a random component or that have a component like tea leaves and so on that is interpretable, tarot became a mystical practice, a fortune-telling or divination practice in later centuries.
And how did that process occur?
Did it occur because people formed groups and they started doing it in a social way?
Did it occur because people were writing about it?
How did that happen?
It's again another question that there's still ongoing scholarship in, and there's a few different camps with different ideas.
One popular among tarot scholars who are more partial to the tarot as in that they're usually practitioners themselves and advocates for its divinatory usage, one thing that's proposed by them is that cards have been used as long as there have been cards for some kind of divination.
Sortlage is the name for that kind of divination practice.
So that people use anything that's really available to them to contact the divine or to interpret the will of God or to connect with spirits, whatever the kind of belief system that is within is quite common.
So that it would be natural that tarot would be one of the methods for doing divination.
But there's another camp that think that it was sort of an accident.
So there's a character called Court de Gelvin who is purported to have seen the tarot being played by ladies in high society in France in the 18th century and just had a sort of flash of inspiration that this was the fabled book of Thoth, the Egyptian lost book of knowledge, hermetic knowledge.
And that then it became a feature in the French occult revival of the 18th and 19th century.
And so it was more of happenstance.
I think that those are maybe two of the main theories of why.
So it represents whatever you want to represent, whatever the spirit of the times allows it and permits it to represent, yeah?
I think so.
You know, Tara was always being made and remade.
You know, in that time, it was heavily focused on Christian symbolism and themes, because, of course, from the 15th century to modern times, Christianity has been the overwhelming cultural background for Europe.
But in modern times, in the last, let's say, since the 60s and 70s, especially in America, it's been more associated with neo-paganism.
And lots of the decks that are created today are more in that area.
And I suppose that it gives it an even more uncomfortable relationship for people who are of a Christian faith and so on, even though that it ultimately has roots in, if not in Christianity, being made by Christians and Christian mystics.
That's interesting, isn't it, that it has a connection with Christianity where some forms of Christianity down the years tend to poo-poo such things or even worse, actively go against them.
Absolutely.
I mean, I think that's just how that kind of orthodoxy works.
I mean, you know, since the Reformation, there's been a family quarrel within Christianity, and it's been extremely serious and bloody and so on.
So it's not, I think, unusual, although extremely regrettable, that sort of ostracized family members are, you know, denounced as heretical.
I think that's just unfortunately the way it goes with that.
Well, I know that I was brought up in Liverpool and my grandfather was a Catholic on my mother's side, and it was the reverse on my father's side.
So I have experienced both sides of Liverpool and that situation.
But I know that the priest who would periodically call at my grandmother's house in Waterloo looking for my granddad and wondering why he hadn't turned up for Mass, I think if you talked with him about the tarot cards, he would have said it's the devil's work.
Absolutely.
And I think that's the common view.
Pope Francis denounced the tarot in, I think it was 2018 in a sermon.
And you'll find evangelical Christians as well lumping it in with New Age practices and so on, even with Harry Potter and things like that as forbidden practices that should be gotten rid of.
But the truth is that it has a Christian background.
So the writer-Waite tarot card deck, the most famous one, the one that your listeners are probably thinking of in their mind now whenever they think of what the tarot is, was created at the start of the 20th century by A.E. Waite and Pamela Coleman-Smith.
And Waite was a actually, he trained for the priesthood.
And he left, but he retained a God-centered and God-focused practice throughout his life.
And he saw his work as essentially Christian mysticism.
And he was very much in favor of the kind of Catholic way of doing things.
In his earlier years, he really disliked Protestantism, and he was attracted more to the sort of pomp and ceremony that go along with the Catholic rite and the Catholic practice.
And even in the 19th century, one of the most famous Tarot scholars, Levi Eliphas, if I'm saying that right, was also trained in the priesthood and left to become a sort of independent Christian mystic.
And both of those figures are maybe the most, if not, in the top five most influential people in Tarot history.
So it just goes to show, I think people really don't know this history.
And it's one of the things that I hope that a critical introduction to Tarot can also contribute to people's understanding is the Christian background.
And I think that maybe some Christians might find it maybe less of a knee-jerk reaction to see it as evil.
But there is the card in it, the devil, for example, and that does cause people to be a little bit freaked out.
Well, I was going to get into the symbology.
Let's do that.
The current version, you say, arose in the 20th century, so it's comparatively recent, and I know the images have changed down the centuries, down the years.
The current images are very strange.
They seem to be very contrived in the literal sense of that word.
And I always used to get freaked out if the person doing a tarot reading, and I've had a few in my life for me, dealt up the death card because I'd always think, well, that's it then, you know, time to start getting my affairs in order.
But in fact, you know, they'd always say, no, no, no, that means the reverse.
It's a rebirth.
So how did the imagery emerge?
The imagery was there from the beginning, a lot of it, but it's been developed over the centuries.
So in the early tarot decks, we do see some cards like Death and most of the cards in the major arcana are there.
The minor arcana weren't really fleshed out except in one historic deck, and then that was developed in the Riderweight Smith Tarot deck.
So death at the time that the tarot was created was not, there would have been images of death and skulls and so on.
The Memento Mori art tradition where people have reminders of death as a way to be humble about their place in the cosmos, let's say.
And that is, again, a Christian impulse.
But at the time, it was the time of the Black Death, so we're talking the 1400s in Italy.
So if you look at it from a psychological point of view, I suppose you could see it as these are using this kind of imagery as a way to approach these themes, to get used to them, to process as well traumas and difficulties and just the reality of life.
And I suppose that that's what I would maybe encourage is the way to see the variety of the cards in the tarot is that one tarot author that I interviewed said that hopefully behind all of the doors, so to speak, of the tarot cards, there's really everything in life.
And that is definitely, I think, undoubtedly the approach that, and that's why we would see death, because the deck is trying to show all of the various possibilities.
And it's one of the reasons why it's such a compelling tool as well for people that there's something relatable in the cards, you know, in all of the cards, really.
And I suppose the fundamental question for those like me who've been for tarot readings and I wouldn't rule out going for another one at some point, you know, quite soon, because life is uncertain and you just like to get a handle on things.
And actually, I found it pretty accurate in my life.
You know, whether I'm a fool and I just believe that, you know, whether there really is something in it, I don't know.
One of the reasons I guess we're having this conversation, I want to learn.
But it seems to me that tarot is then, for any era, whatever people want it to be, whatever void they require it to fill.
And we know the void that people want it to fill today.
They want answers to questions in their lives.
They want to try and demystify things and make things that are uncertain certain.
So the tarot reading process, I don't know how much you went into this, but how much of it do you think is down to the sitter and how much of it is down to the interpretation of the reader?
It's an open question, I suppose.
We could look at it from a few different angles.
I think that one of the most common ways that people look at what's going on in a tarot reading is that the cards are really a tool and that there's nothing inherently within the cards.
You know, at the end of the day, it's difficult to get past the fact that they're just pieces of card and they're made, these days they're made in a factory, but they're made by people.
How does it work?
Are they imbued with magic?
Are they connected to another realm?
So it's difficult to pin down.
I think that one majority of you maybe is that it tunes already existing psychic abilities or that it in other ways connects to something greater, but that the actual method itself is not as important.
But it's one of the reasons Why tarot is so popular for divination is because of that imagery that people can bounce off and that it in some way unlocks faculties of the mind or the spirit.
And one popular way to look at it is through Jungian psychology.
So, Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychologist and mentee of Sigmund Freud, he was quite mystical, actually, as well as contributing to the very sort of rational science of psychology.
He had a much more irrational, and I don't mean that pejoratively, I mean promoting the place for irrationality and subjectivity in relation to how our minds work.
And he proposed that there was something that connected all of our subconscious together, the collective unconscious.
And a lot of people use that framework to understand what's going on with the Tara, or at least to suggest the kind of realm that it's going on in.
So that would, of course, mean that it's through our minds and through the aspect of our minds that we don't understand.
I suppose it's one of the things that really makes it very compelling, is that we don't understand our own minds fully.
There are things that happen.
For example, you have a compelling dream or you feel like you want to do something, but you're conflicted about it.
How does all that work?
And so that's what the theory of the unconscious is supposed to try to address.
And then if there are two people sitting at a reading, how can it work between them?
It could work through the collective unconscious.
So you said it could work through the collective unconscious, this idea that there is something floating up there that links all of us, and that's the driving force between how your future, your fate is determined or read out from the cards.
That's certainly one view, and it's a very popular one.
Jung is mentioned very widely in the literature, not only because of that, but also because of his theory of archetypes, which is how many people look at the imagery in the major arcana or the Trump section, which are archetypical images.
You know, for example, the Empress, who embodies sort of motherly, maternal aspects, as well as fecundity and planty nature and so on.
You know, each card has these different levels, but a lot of those themes are archetypical.
And of course, as you mentioned, death, that's a very huge archetypical concept in our lives and culture.
Through the years, has science, and you mentioned the Jungian interpretation, there have been others, has science bothered much with tarot?
Has science interfaced with it?
Not really, not to my knowledge.
There has been a lot of interest in psychic abilities and trying to show whether or not they work or not.
And I've read a little around that, and there does seem to be still some unclarity about it.
But the tarot specifically, I don't think has been widely investigated in that way.
Have you ever had a tarot reading?
Yes, of course.
I've had several.
In fact, it was one of the things that prompted me to research and then to write about what I discovered was trying to understand, trying to square, I suppose, the feeling that you mentioned about the accuracy of it and that kind of,
what's going on internally in the experience of having a reading with understanding, well, does this conflict with how I see the world, of how I understand what's possible and so on.
So yes, I've certainly had readings.
And I've even given a few readings, although I don't tend to do that because I think that's maybe ethically not that good to do readings if you're not.
Interesting experiment.
No, no, exactly.
And I did do it with an experimental approach in that sense.
Are you accurate?
It was accurate.
In fact, the person that I read for ended up in tears because it really triggered something quite deep and personal in their life.
So it was, yes, it was, you know, it can be quite serious in that way, I suppose.
So that brings you, personally, and that person you read for, to the fundamental question in your book, and that is this dichotomy, this, you know, buffering up against each other of the rational and the irrational.
How can this be?
Exactly.
You know, it's, I suppose there's been a kind of tug of war between rationality and irrationality in certainly in Western culture and philosophy in the last 100 or 200 years.
You know, people, with the increase in technology and a kind of mechanistic understanding of the universe, for a lot of people that suggests a kind of dead universe, like mechanistic is almost synonymous with dead in that sense.
And it takes, for many, it's a worrying kind of concept because it seems to take away the meaning of the meaning of their lives and what's the point of everything and so on.
So there's a kind of counter-rational movement that's more romantic, and I mean that in the capital R romantic sense, that wants to re-enchant the world, to not see us as automatons or sort of biological robots just walking around without any purpose.
And yeah, it's a really big area of debate.
And I suppose, yeah, I think one of the better ways to understand it is through philosophy.
Yes, but how?
I mean, look, I didn't enjoy it.
It's not my thing.
But I did have to study philosophy as part of a politics degree many, many years ago.
And, you know, I found very interesting some of the works of the big philosophers, Plato's and Aristotle's and Humes and Locke's and all in Thomas Hobbes and all of those people who I had to get into because I had to pass my exams.
But it wasn't my thing.
It did introduce me to some interesting concepts.
But how does philosophy then and your study of it apply to this?
Well, what I would say is that it matters how we understand what we can know and how we can know it.
And that's the area of philosophy known as epistemology.
And I think that really matters here because a lot of people that are tarot practitioners are ambivalent about how the tarot works.
They believe that it does work, but there's a kind of almost appreciation of the sort of limits of knowledge in that sense.
And I think that that's a very interesting aspect to look into.
It's like, well, what can we know?
How can we know it?
What are the limits?
And does that matter?
And then another aspect is teleology, which is the study of meaning, I suppose, in the world.
How do we make meaning?
And is there inherent meaning in the world?
Or do we impose meaning on the world?
And as I mentioned earlier on, I think that metaphysics and disagreements in metaphysics is a really interesting way to look at why people believe in tarot or not.
For example, the scientific materialist, well, materialism is a metaphysical position.
So that's the position that there's nothing in the world, there's nothing in, the only thing that the universe is, is material.
Another way to say it might be physicalist.
So only the physical world exists.
And that our consciousness isn't its own thing.
It doesn't exist in any other plane or any other way.
There's no spirit.
There's all of that stuff.
And that's not the majority view.
It certainly hasn't been the majority view for history.
And I think if you were to do a survey of every person on the planet now, it wouldn't be the view there.
But it's a very popular view, and it's a very promoted view, especially in our kind of scientific age.
So it gets a lot of airtime, I suppose, for want of a better way to say it, in our culture.
But there's a kind of tension there with how people really think the world works and how they understand their lives and so on.
So that's something that I'm always interested in is, okay, we have our high ideas and culture, but how do people actually think, how do people actually interact with the big questions in life?
And those who go to tarot believe that tarot may help them to find an answer.
So I suppose we come back to that question of trying to give clarity to an unclear world.
Yes, exactly.
And I don't think that's really an optional thing either.
You know, it's not something that we do only to pass the time.
It's an essential drive within people.
And anyone who feels very comfortable in that, I think, thinks that they have an answer.
But it just takes a personal crisis or an accident or a disaster to really make people think again about these things.
So in life, we do grapple with this from time to time.
And certainly a tarot practice is one of many ways, I would say, that people do try to make sense of the bigger questions in life, for sure.
You're concerned, and from this conversation, it's very clear, you're concerned with the why for many people this works.
But there's the question of the how this works.
And that's the one that people have struggled with and has baffled me all of my lifetime.
Have you any thoughts on the how?
Have you ever, in your moments of silence and contemplation, ever contemplated thought on the question of how can this work?
Yes, I mean, it's discussed in a critical introduction to tarot.
For me, you know, I do have my own sort of provisional answer, I suppose.
You know, I do think that there's a certain limit to knowledge, especially in terms of metaphysics.
For example, I'm not convinced that we'll ever really know how the universe, quote unquote, started or those kinds of questions are, I think, probably outside of our ability to understand.
So there's an appreciation with me, I think, that there are limits.
But I would be quite convinced by the psychological aspect of it.
And it's really quite a popular way to look at it these days.
So that tarot is a way, one of many ways, to kind of have a dialogue, a self-dialogue with things that aren't immediately aware in our conscious awareness.
So as a psychological mirror, I suppose you could say.
One of the reasons why that's popular among others as well is that, as I mentioned, it kind of leaves the door open to this kind of collective unconscious.
For me, I think the collective unconscious is a really good metaphorical way to understand how we know things that we don't know that we know, you know, things that we pick up through our culture.
But there's really a lot of things that are quite difficult to explain.
You know, Jung himself had a kind of period of madness where he would walk up and down the garden speaking with people that he imagined were there.
And he was thoughtful enough to, extremely thoughtful, I should say, to appreciate that they were in his mind.
But it was very difficult for him to explain that they really felt like different personalities.
And I suppose if anyone has had a dream where someone said something to them or they seem to know something that they couldn't have known, or that they feel like they couldn't have known anyway.
And it certainly happened to me.
I'm sure it's happened to most people.
Like those things really do, you know, are difficult to explain.
But I suppose I would have my own provisional answer in that we come to this knowledge outside of our awareness.
And I think that tarot can be used in that way to kind of reveal what we know, but we don't know.
So it's a gateway.
Absolutely.
Yes.
And my interest in it was sparked by wanting to actually produce a documentary aged, I think, 23.
I went up to Blackpool on a stormy day from my parents' home not very far from Southport.
I'm telling this story for a reason, Simon.
So I promise not to take too long telling it.
But I went to interview somebody I'd heard on a local radio station.
And at the time, I was going through one of my periodic phases of having had a bad time with the BBC.
At times in my life, that organization has not treated me particularly well, but I don't think I'm alone in that.
But it was one of those cathartic periods when I was looking for answers, but I was also looking for good people to interview.
So I suppose I had an ulterior motive when I went to interview a guy called Christian Dion, who later became a very famous psychic.
He's very good with the tarot.
You know, I thought he was an amazing operative with the tarot, if that's the right word to use.
And I sat there, pretending, acting the here I am, you know, mature radio reporter.
There was no sign of the insecurities and difficulties within at that time.
No sign of the questions unanswered in my life.
You know, what am I going to do next after, you know, the situation that I'd found myself in?
You know, all he knew about me was that here I was, supremely confident, I thought, with my tape recorder in those days, my microphone, and I wanted him to demonstrate to me the thing that he could do, and then we'd have a conversation like the one that you and I are having about how that works if it does.
And I have to say, it became apparent many years later that not just a few of the things that he said then, and you know, experiences may differ, this is just my experience and my interpretation of it, everything he said later came true.
I did go to work in London, which was not on my horizon then.
I did have a big contact with America.
And I did, very much later, have an experience with television.
Now, all of those things happened.
Some things in my personal life that he couldn't possibly have known.
You know, the fact that I'm a bit of a loner, I think, one way or another, and people have let me down and stuff like that.
Now, you may say that that could be a cold reading technique, but it was so specific.
And as the years went by, it meant more to me.
I think that's what I'm saying.
And the point of the story is, seven years after that, I'm sitting in a radio studio in London, about to go national with the news, reading the news into a show that is being done in London that has a guest, the 9 a.m. news, and there was a guest for the next hour with a broadcaster called Pete Murray here.
And I was thinking about reading my first national news bulletin at 9 o'clock in the morning, and I was a little terrified, you know, a little nervous.
Nerves, good for you, I suppose.
I looked across the desk just as I was about to go on air to the nation from there.
And this person looked at me, pointed at me, and said, I told you so.
That person was Christian Dion.
I did not know he was going to be a guest on that show.
And that was almost the fulfillment of all the things that that tarot reading all those years before in Blackpool had said.
It was the single, or certainly one of the single strangest and most impactful moments of my life.
And it was all about a tarot reading, Simon.
I don't know whether you hear many stories like that, but that's my experience of it.
Yes, there are many stories like that.
I think that what's really interesting about it, apart from it being a very interesting story itself, is that the way that people come to these practices, as well as all kinds of other practices and beliefs that some people might find strange, is often through that kind of personal experience.
I think that's a really important component.
What I've found myself is that I have had, you know, I haven't had that many sort of mystical experiences or experiences that really challenged my understanding of reality in those ways.
But in my research, you know, I found that to be a really common way for people to look into these things or to get more interested in them.
So having those kinds of experiences, you know, is really key.
And I think, you know, it's one of the reasons why I wanted to research it myself was to give a little bit more credence, a little bit more respect, actually, to people's, how people express their own experience, to try to understand it in a genuine way.
And you do address the subject of why, in this era particularly, people are coming to this more and more, it seems.
How would you sum that up?
It does seem that way.
So when I was writing Critical Introduction to Tarot, it was just after the kind of COVID lockdown, and there was many, many articles, especially in the lifestyle magazines, about how tarot was on the rise and how people were looking for, you know, in those especially uncertain times, for kind of answers, but also kind of comfort and to make sense of the world.
However, like some of the tarot scholars that I talked to said, well, it's not that it's become more popular, but it's become more visible.
You know, I suppose we have now, you know, okay, what did we have in the 80s and 90s, the explosion of TV, and then we have the internet now, and it's only gotten more and more sort of busy with social media and so on.
So it's really, in that scholar's view, it's really just that it's kind of come out of the sort of kitchen and onto these essentially international broadcast media where we see it.
But I suppose as well, tarot cards are cards and there's a commercial aspect to that too.
And I think that that's definitely a component where people have, artists and as well, many different companies have seen it as a way to make money, but also for artists themselves to engage with a kind of very large work.
I've talked to many artists who are attracted by the idea of, well, here's a template I have for 78 images that I can draw and I can put my own spin on it, and it can be like this sort of grand project for me.
And then a lot of those artists then go on to publish their decks.
So there's a few different components that have come to it, I suppose, as well.
Another is the sort of decline in the West anyway of the importance and centrality of the institutional religions.
And there's a more kind of mix and match approach to spirituality, especially among younger people today.
And yeah, there's an aspect of it that's also kind of lifestyle that segues with the sort of self-care, you know, that kind of approach to spirituality, but also to promoting practices that are good for mental health and so on.
And I think that the flexibility of the tarot is one of the things that really attracts people to it rather than what is perceived as the inflexibility of the more kind of orthodox institutional religions and spiritual practices that were maybe more common a generation or two ago.
I know you'll appreciate this because of your work in technology.
A lot of people are telling me these days, and there may be some circumstantial evidence to back it up, that we may be in some kind of technical matrix, that this may not be real, and that what you think is unpredictable is actually predictable and there's a plan behind it all and there's a creator, some technical figure that might have made all of this.
The matrix suggestion.
It would seem to me that Tara would fit right in there.
Absolutely.
That's certainly one way you could look at it.
And again, to highlight that's a metaphysical proposition.
You know, that's where that is sort of situated, let's say, in the philosophical discourse.
So it's definitely a very interesting question.
You know, I read one of the sources for a critical introduction to tarot is Alexander Marchand's The Universe is Virtual, where he proposes a kind of a template for that.
But it's not his unique idea.
There's many people that ponder it, even high-profile technologists like Elon Musk has commented on it and so on.
So yeah, I suppose one way to reason through it is, given that that's true, what does it imply?
And how can we make sense of other things if we assume that and try it out?
And that is exactly the kind of, that's what I mean whenever I talk about philosophical approach.
I don't mean spending hundreds of pages reviewing Aristotle or Plato.
It's more of the kind of attitude of inquiry where we say, okay, given that, what then?
And try to reason through it ourselves, which is, for me anyway, is a very enjoyable exercise.
But I also think an aspect of personal growth can be through that.
It's really in our hands.
We can try at least to understand these things ourselves.
My philosophy teacher at university in Liverpool was from Newcastle.
He was a Geordie and he used to refer to Plato.
But he was very good.
I never forgot the allegory of the cave.
And if my listener is not aware of the allegory of the cave and Plato, I promise you it's not going to bore you and it has a lot of relevance to where we're at in this world today, I think.
I mean, look, I think it's fascinating that you have taken this approach to it.
It is almost an academic approach.
I mean, this is not a Gee Wiz book by any manner or means.
But having said that, in your researches towards the book, did you come across any of the stories through history, maybe some of them apocryphal, I don't know, maybe some of them recent and real, where people have said, my God, I went for a tarot reading and it did this for me that was absolutely life-changing.
Did you come across any stories like that?
People certainly, as I mentioned before, come into the tarot often through a kind of personal mystical experience that sort of makes them question, how can I apply this to my own life?
And opens that interest for them.
Then they start doing tarot readings by Dax themselves and develop a practice.
And that then deepens for them.
But actually, the focus on a predictive tarot isn't maybe as popular in the more modern scholarship on tarot.
In fact, Benabel Wen, who I interviewed for a critical introduction to Tarot, her book, Holistic Tarot, she's explicitly against the fortune-telling aspect or what she calls predictive tarot and proposes analytic tarot.
Now, she doesn't say that it can't be done, but that it's not useful, or it's not what she promotes as the most useful way to use tarot.
So analytic, sorry to jump in, but analytic tarot being where I was given a character analysis and predictive being the element of it that said, you're going to go to London, go to America.
Yes, I think so, broadly speaking.
But in practice, actually, the techniques are very similar.
It's more in how you use it and also what is the sort of ethics of it.
I discussed a little bit the kind of power that actually a tower reader has if you accept that predictive readings are possible.
Then, you know, it's actually something that's ethically fraught.
Even if you don't think that it's possible, there's that aspect where some people think that it's the work of charlatans, and especially when money changes hands, there's always that aspect.
But I think people might be surprised to find out that a lot of modern tarot readers are less inclined to propose that it's used to find out about the future, that it's better to understand about the present and about how,
you know, what steps can I take now to improve my life, or how can I better understand things that are going on or have happened, rather than trying to find the cheat codes of the universe, if you like, and what's going to happen tomorrow.
And especially, you know, because there's an aspect of, I mean, you might remember the Back to the Future movies where whenever I can't remember the lead character's name, but they had the sports winnings and they were able to win with bets, huge bets.
So why aren't people doing that with the tarot?
So there's an ethical aspect to it that I think in the modern day, it definitely gives people pause for thought.
Everything comes back to Marty McFly in the end, I think.
So Simon, this is not a book for people who want a bunch of gee whiz stories, but if you want to think about the subject, this is the book for that, I think, because you've given a great deal of contemplation to it.
And I'm glad that you did.
If you were asked to sum up where you're at now, Ritaro, where would that be?
At the moment, I'm very interested in the Christian underpinnings of tarot.
You know, I'm interested in really understanding where its place is within Christianity, if at all.
And what I'm being led to through the research is that it really is like an ostracized family member.
But in terms of my own personal practice, I do look at the cards semi-regularly, and I do think about my own life in a bigger way because of doing it.
Tarot is essentially a way to make meaning and a kind of narrative meaning.
And of course, we think about our own lives as a story.
People have written stories using the tarot, and it's for the same reason.
So I definitely think that it's a tool, no matter what conclusions you may draw on how and why it works, it can provide, I think, insights one way or the other.
And the thing that I would say if we were doing this on broadcast radio in the United Kingdom, and I'm going to say it here on the podcast as well, obviously regard the conversation that you've heard as being, well, the phrase that we use on radio is for entertainment purposes only.
I'll say for enlightenment purposes only.
Please don't live your life by it.
And if you're considering booking a reading with a tarot reader, then, you know, do it.
But, you know, take it for what it is and don't live your life by it, I think is what I would say if I was on air.
You know, I don't have to say that on the podcast, but I think it's important that I do.
Simon, thank you very much.
Indeed, are you planning to research anything else or is that it?
Yeah, as I mentioned at the start, I have been looking into AI, especially image generating AI.
But I'm sort of opening up a little bit at the moment and taking a lighter approach.
I'm not sure where exactly I'll go next, but I am continuing to read a lot of philosophy.
And I suppose I really am interested in understanding why people are attracted to beliefs and the history of belief and so on.
So I think that it'll be in that area that I continue to write.
Well, that's fascinating.
How we believe what we believe, I think, is, and you could apply that to religion.
You could certainly apply it these days to politics and many other spheres of life, Simon.
The book is called A Critical Introduction to Tarot.
How would we get it?
I'm talking to people here around the world.
So how would they obtain it?
Because I know it's only just been published.
Yes, it's been just published in the UK.
The release date for the rest of the world is the 1st of January.
You can get it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, but it's also in many other places around the world.
I think if you just search for Critical Introduction to Tarot or go to my website, simonkenny.co, that's C-O-S.
at the end, you'll be able to find it.
Absolutely.
Thank you for your time, Simon.
Thank you for having me.
It's been a pleasure.
Simon Kenny, your thoughts, welcome, of course.
And I'm sure that Simon himself, as you heard, he's got a website, would be keen to get your thoughts if you have any to give him.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the Unexplained Online.
So until we meet again, my name is still Howard Hughes.
This is still the Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all else, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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