I gave someone a headache explaining this recently, so you’ve been warned.
Here is my reasoning for why I think tarot has a base in science. I believe that all magic is just science we don’t understand yet, so we need to start with a type of science that we’re only barely starting to understand now: String Theory.
Here’s the physics detour I always end up giving people, in a nutshell. Instead of the universe being made of an infinite number of separate particles, imagine every particle you’ve ever heard of is actually the same particle, just showing up in a different place at a different point in time, every single time. Follow that one particle’s whole journey and you get something like a string. So instead of “everything is made of countless separate things,” it becomes “everything is one string, moving through time and vibrating at different frequencies.” Past, present, future, all of it, is just this one particle showing up everywhere it’s ever going to show up.
Take that a little further and you land somewhere spiritual whether you meant to or not. If we’re all, at the most basic level, the same particle wearing different shapes for a while, then we’re genuinely connected in a way that isn’t just a nice sentiment, it’s closer to a structural fact. Some people would say that means we are God and God is us. I don’t think you need to believe in a God-shaped entity at all for the deeper point to still land: everything is this one particle, everywhere, all at once, in a way that makes any concept of separation or individuality a bit of an illusion.
If everything is made from this particle moving through time and space, this string so to speak, then this string has all of the information of everything that has ever happened and everything that will ever happen. It’s like every atom in our universe contains the ultimate truth of everything that ever was and ever will.
This is also, honestly, why I believe tarot and other forms of divination genuinely work. Anything built on true randomness, cards, dice, bones, any chance-based method, is tapping into something real, because you’re pulling from a particle that has already been everywhere in time, beginning to end, all at once. I believe the randomness matrix opens up the string to share some of it’s information. You assign meaning to values, then you engage the random matrix and somehow, a fundamental truth falls out.
You might think this sounds like horseshit, and you might be right. I don’t claim to be a physicist, I’m just sharing a personal hypothesis. But if you do think it’s horseshit, let me ask you this? Have you ever had a genuine tarot reading from someone who knew nothing about you? If not, I encourage you to get one. You might be surprised at what information the cards reveal.
I don’t extend the same trust to divination that relies on any kind of physical control, pendulums included. I don’t mess with pendulums. Not because I think the idea is silly, but because the moment your own hand or muscle can nudge the outcome, you’ve lost the actual randomness the whole thing depends on. Cards you shuffle and cut, dice you roll, that’s different. Nobody’s hand is steering the landing.
I think there’s a version of this that shows up in real physics too, in how people talk about particle behaviour at the smallest scales, though I’ll be honest that’s the part where the science gets genuinely complicated and I’m speaking as someone who finds it fascinating, not as a physicist. But the concept of two particles being so intimately linked that their behaviour is identical whole galaxies apart sounds like magic.
I’ll leave you with a final thought. We don’t take the spiritual implications of physics seriously enough. If everything always was and everything always will be, then the truth of things is already inside you, somewhere past what your conscious brain can normally reach. Look deep enough, and theoretically, you’d already know everything that’s ever going to happen.
Whether or not that headache was worth it is up to you.
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