Hi Tarot Tribe it’s Ethony and today I am talking some JUICY Destiny and the Tarot.

I am going to be talking about Choice, Fate, Destiny and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, and the New Members of the Tarot’s Destiny’s Child.

All of these topics go across mythologies, cultures and religions. I am not going to be delving deeply into religious beliefs just FYI, but I do honor that peoples’ belief systems will play a part in how they come to these concepts. I also asked the question to the members of the Tarot Readers Academy Facebook Group and I have some really great comments on the topic from our community.

As with everything I share, take what resonates with you and leave the rest. I hope that this topic gets us talking about a Tarot Reader’s role in how people view a Tarot Reading and the role people have in their lives.

Choice Centred Life vs Destiny

Some people believe that we are here as a random act of evolution. Some people believe everything is a divine plan. Some people believe that it is somewhere in between. It is actually a lovely thought that the Divine (however you choose to see it or not) is also learning as it creates and expands. Tarot has no religion and that is one of the beautiful things about it.

You don’t have to belong to one camp or the other when you are a Tarot Reader but it will for sure affect how you do conduct a Tarot Reading. You may see the Tarot as showing you the road that has been prepared for you or that the Tarot is showing you options opened to you.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies and Tarot

Self-fulfilling prophecies are super fucking interesting and something that Tarot Readers deal with every time we are reading the cards for our Clients. I am sure there are experienced Tarot Readers out there who have had Clients who totally see what they want and make choices in their lives to fit a certain outcome. I have had people come to me and say things like ‘A Tarot reader once told me I was going to be married to a llama farmer by 26 and have three children and I usually ask them something along the lines of ‘well, is that what you want?’

So what is Self-fulfilling Prophecy?

I am going to hand it over to sources that can explain this in a much better way than me for the definition.

“A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior.

The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true. This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.

In other words, a positive or negative prophecy, strongly held belief, or delusion—declared as truth when it is actually false—may sufficiently influence people so that their reactions ultimately fulfill the once-false prophecy.

Self-fulfilling prophecy are effects in behavioral confirmation effect, in which behavior, influenced by expectations, causes those expectations to come true. It is complementary to the self-defeating prophecy.” Source

I had a boyfriend for a brief time many moons ago who met me while I was working at a metaphysical store and he was totally against Tarot because of his beliefs about self-fulfilling prophecies. He saw his sister get a Tarot Reading, see what she wanted to see and then take the actions that made that reading come to pass. It is an interesting thing when this happens and while this can be seen as SFP for short, she clearly liked what she saw if she was following the path towards it.

It can totally go the other way, when we see that something is doomed in the cards we can also take the steps towards that. Giving up in a way.

The Tarot can be a tool to help people self fulfil their own prophecies but so can just about anything: palm reading, prayer, meditation. This is another reason I believe that we have choices. Big or small, they are still choices.

My personal practice around this is to remind people in their readings that the Tarot does not predict a fixed or fated future and that they have choices. But again, this is because I believe in the power of choice, even in a magical world with a higher intelligence, which I also believe.

For Tarot Readers who have just started out, I would recommend sitting with these concepts and ensuring that you are clear with your clients about what you believe the Tarot can and cannot predict and show for their lives. It will make your life a lot easier and manage your clients expectations.

From the Community

I asked the members of our Tarot community over at the Tarot Readers Academy FB page what they thought and there were a lot of comments that support both ideas espousing a co-created universe. Here are some I wanted to share to get some different perspectives about the subject.

Monique –  Fate is what we are born with and cannot be changed. Destiny is what we do with it.

Barbara – I  believe we are on a path with many crossroads, dead ends, rest stops, and destinations. The choices we make and the people we meet along the way nudge us in one direction or another. I also believe that when you ask The Goddesses or Spirit or The Universe for guidance or to manifest or to help, then we receive what we ask for. The key is to ask and to believe and to look and be aware for signs and gifts along the way, as well as ditches and pits we can fall into.

Ann-Marie –  I think we have a predestined life we set up before we come to earth, but we always have free will. So if we get off track, we’re directed back. We always have a choice in everything though.

Erin – I believe that no matter what our choices are, fate and destiny will change our course if that is for our highest good. Thinking of it like fate/destiny are the roads, and we are the car – we can choose to take a different route to see and experience different things, but we will end up in the same place at the end.

Angela –  I believe we control our lives overall. There is no fate or destiny. There are things that might be better for us or more fulfilling but we can choose to ignore those if we want for some reason. There are also going to be things out of our control sometimes but overall, we control our lives imo.

Hayley –  I believe we create our own futures. I believe that the energy we put out to the universe gets returned to us. I do not believe in destiny, “an eye for an eye” or that people will get punished when they do bad things. I believe we can draw anything we want to us…We are not pawns in a game of chess, we are co-creators and anything we want to do or achieve, we can. Any “lessons” that we learn are for growth purposes not punishment – and we’ve either directly or indirectly created them for ourselves whether we realize it or not.

Marie-Helene – Choices. I don’t believe the Universe would doom anyone with a miserable or evil fate, yet there are miserable and evil people in this world, who are a product of circumstances and choices made.

Gary –  I believe we manifest our own destiny by how we respond, react, and the meanings we give to the things that happen in our lives. Tarot provides guidance and insight for those situations and may provide direction, but the final decision to act or not to act is always ours.

If you would like to see the full conversation it is still up on the Facebook Group

What do I believe?

I would prefer to have ideas rather than beliefs. Thanks Dogma. Honestly one of the best movies about faith ever and I love the energy around having ideas rather than beliefs that hold me back or deny me growth.

So my idea around this is that we have choice in our lives but that there are things that are out of our control (call it destiny if you want) too, especially that we can not control other people and what they are going to do with their lives.  

Without the responsibility of choice in our lives we can blame everyone else for where we are and what is happening with our lives. We can blame an evil for making us do horrible things. We can praise a unseen good for us living a life where we are kind to people. What I think that does is rob humanity to be humane. I also understand that this point of view is colored by my path as a Witch: we believe in being responsible for our lives.

I also think there are choices within Destiny. I really feel that there are pivotal moments in my life that I can reflect on feeling that it was meant to be. Like my son.  I was told at 15 that I was going to have a very hard time having a child and may not be able to at all and then 15 years later having a son. That is some divine stuff right there. But there are choices that I had to make to have my son. Some may have been divinely guided, some may have been me fulfilling a soul contract or agreement that I made with some souls before I incarnated into this body.

All of my personal experiences aside (and that was just one), I believe the Tarot can really empower our lives.  It can be our mirror: it can show us what is really going on, what our motivations are and allow us to see different pathways forward.

When I am reading for a Client I often see more than one way forward and most of my Tarot Spreads that I create for my Clients reflect what I naturally see. I see what is likely to pass if my client does nothing and continues down the path that they are on. I see what they can choose if they want to go a different way.

The Tarot can show us the possibilities and the person that we want to be. It can show us the lessons we are learning and help us move towards a path that is for our highest good (destined or guided or not) and that will allow us to enjoy our lives as much as we can. At the end of the day, we have to be the ones who choose to walk the path in front of us. We have all seen that people can opt out of things in life, jobs, relationships etc.

This is a conversation I wanted to have with our community for a long while. I would love to hear what you think and how you feel the Tarot plays a part in the grand scheme of it all. Let me know in the comments below.