# Magic and Time: Lessons from the Tarot May 21, 2024 [ Giovanna Parmigiani ](/people/giovanna-parmigiani) *Edited by* [*Aaron Michael Ullrey*](/people/aaron-michael-ullrey "Aaron Michael Ullrey"). *The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting CSWR scholars and their research.* There is a Mediterranean pinewood that Viola and I call our pineta, our pinewood. Viola is a magic practitioner, one of my closest Southern Italian interlocutors. This pinewood is not a public place. Signs promise dire consequences for crossing the surrounding fence, yet our pineta is a refuge: peaceful, grounding, balancing. Some of my most memorable moments and insightful breakthroughs as an ethnographer and as a human being happened there, often linked to Viola’s generous tarot readings. Sitting in an old wooden playhouse for children, she asks questions and delivers advice from the cards. Asking better questions, she says, moves the reader and the questioner closer to the answers. Sometimes the answers arise through body rather than mind. She is right. Inebriated by the smells of pines and rosemary, juniper and myrtle, with Viola and her tarot cards life is undeniably sweeter, the future is not so scary. ![Photo of pine trees shot from the ground looking up](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/hds_cswr/files/img_4845.jpeg) Divinatory and meditation tools, tarot cards foster self-awareness. They are a part of practices that many people call magic, as do my southern Italian and Arizonian ethnographic interlocutors. Allegedly originating in northern Italy during the fifteenth century, tarot cards emerged as a card game, though some interpreters and practitioners trace them to ancient Egypt. Decks have seventy-eight cards: twenty-two major arcana, from The Fool (0) to The World (21), and fifty-six minor arcana, divided in four suits. Major Arcana images describe the Fool’s journey toward full self-awareness, realizing The World. Major Arcana cards refer to external, powerful, eventful forces. Minor Arcana, instead, deal with more mundane energies. Drawing cards from the shuffled deck and positioning them in particular patterns (spreads), the reader assesses the querent and creates a (healing) narrative. The more I engage my ethnographic fields sites among practitioners of alternative spiritualities in southern Italy and in Arizona, the less I understand magic to be practices or traditions. Magic is a way to sense and to make sense of the world. Magic is a non-scientific, though epistemologically sound, aspect of human consciousness that experiences subtle connections in the world, between things and through people. Participating in magic and engaging participatory consciousness makes the subtle connections more apparent and more potent. Everyone can experience magic, regardless of their beliefs or spirituality or religious affiliations. Magic is a universal form of knowledge. It is as well-attested in the West as it is elsewhere despite the neglect by the modern Western mainstream. Magic is a way of knowing; it is not a faulty way of thinking. Magic is ethically responsible; it is not psychological manipulation. Have you ever experienced magic connections? Do you ever feel connections with a particular animal, tree, or plant? Have you ever sensed, without evidence, that an argument had just concluded prior to you entering a room? Do you ever undergo synchronicities or meaningful coincidences? These magic experiences are based on what anthropologist Susan Greenwood calls “participatory consciousness,” an embodied form of analogical thought that highlights connections between things, events, places, emotions, and human and non-human persons and bodies, even random connections. Magic is an ordinary part of everyday lives, whether or not people acknowledge it. Conscious cultivation of participation is the core of diverse traditions and practices called “magic.” Approaching the observation, study, and practices of Tarot reading, which is ubiquitous in my fieldwork, I pay attention to lived dimensions using a participatory lens. Tarot is divination that experiments with the future in the present. Tarot cards and their readings challenge participants’ linear understanding and experience of time and temporality. The past, present, and future in Tarot are perceived separate but contiguous. The future can inform the past, just as the past influences the future. ![Hands loosely holding a deck of Tarot Cards](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/hds_cswr/files/img_7331.jpeg) Usually, history is imagined as a line. Causes have clear effects, and causes precede effects in time. Linear historicity, though, is not the only historicity available to people, and it is not the only time mode that matters in people’s lives. Tarot encourages the consideration, acknowledgement, and experience of non-linear historicity, this is what I call “expanded present” in my forthcoming book The Spider Dance. The expanded present embodies time and space. Coeval past, present, and future flow through linear time(s) and cyclical times: past, present, and future happen at the same time. Perceivers experience the expanded present when they embrace and expand their awareness of different dimensions, rhizomes, presences, and connections that are all embedded in the past-present-future coevality of the here-and-now. Interlocutors in my field sites and Viola, especially, articulate the Tarot’s healing and generative gifts arising when experiencers tune into the coevality of time through the cards’ magic. In the participatory dimension of practice, tarot querants and readers describe experiencing life from the point of view of empowered, whole persons. These are the entities we truly are, who we are meant to be but have not yet become. See also:- [ Mysticism ](/topic-tags/mysticism) - [ Researcher Reflections ](/topic-tags/researcher-reflection) - [ Transcendence and Transformation ](/programming-threads/transcendence-and-transformation) - [ Gnoseologies ](/programming-threads/gnoseologies)