The Multivalence of Astrology and Tarot

Astrology and tarot are both practices that remind us that there is no one singular answer or monolithic truth.
 
In astrology, every planet, every house, every sign, every aspect, and every timing activation carries a number of different significations and can be made meaningful in multiple ways.
Nothing in astrology means only one thing.
 
In tarot, every image on every card in every deck can mean any number of things in the context of different questions and situations, and in relation to the other cards that we pull alongside them.
 
In other words, neither of these traditions are predicated on an assumption that there is some kind of static objective truth that exists out there that we are simply attempting to reveal through our divinatory practices.
 
Rather, the inherent multivalence of these practices attenuates us to an understanding that the same situation, the same question, the same life will take on different forms of meaning under different conditions and at different times.

Rachel Pollack writes, “Story. It’s all story … Some people love the cards because they can give us glimpses of the future. Still others love Tarot as a spiritual science. To me, these too are stories, for all time, and all science, are sets of interlocking stories. For some, this might sound as if I’m suggesting that nothing in the cards is true, that it’s all made up. But I’m not sure truth is something that simply lies there, like a rock. We engage it, we bring it into being.”[1]

This is why I have said for many years that astrology and tarot have much more in common with artistic practices than attempting to frame them as some kind of science. These are practices of making meaning, and just as with making meaning of art, the meaning that we make with astrology or tarot will always be plural in its potential.
 
Elizabeth Grosz writes, “Art is created, always made, never found, even if it is made from what is found. This is its transformative effect—as it is made, so it makes.”[2]
Art is what we make from what we find—both in terms of the creation of art objects from the materials we encounter on this planet as well as the meaning that we make from what we find in the art that we experience.
 
Truth is not something like a rock simply lying there waiting to be found, but truth, like art, may be what we make from what we find.

In astrology, what we find is the movements of the planets through the sky, then we make meaning of those qualities of motion, light, proximity, and so on.

In tarot, what we find is the images on the cards themselves, renderings made by artists in other times and places, with which we make meaning here and now.
 
Like making meaning of a dance, a painting, a poem, or a piece of music, the same astrological chart can be interpreted in a myriad of different ways by different astrologers—or even different ways by the same astrologer at different times.
The same tarot cards can generate countless possibilities for interpretation by different card readers, in the context of different questions, and under different conditions.

While I would not say that astrology or tarot is inherently feminist, queer, decolonial, anti-racist, or anti-fascist, both of these traditions move us away from systems that perpetuate belief in a singular truth and toward emergent practices of making meaning that are necessarily plural and multivalent.
They remind us that more than one thing can be true simultaneously, that meaning is co-created with what we find, and that how we are making meaning is just as important as what we are making meaningful.

[1] Rachel Pollack, “Tarot is Story, All Story,” https://www.tarotassociation.net/tarot-is-story/.

[2] Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 189.