(LONG - towards the end, I share some resources of other authors)

What happens when random cards stop giving us answers and start giving us problems to solve?

Before tarot was used for divination, it was a game.

The earliest references to tarot come from fifteenth-century Italy. The familiar four suits were supplemented by 21 trump cards and the Fool, and the cards were used for a trick-taking game. The association between tarot and fortune-telling came much later (Husband, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016).

What bothered me since I started studying tarot, is that a lot of contemporary readers claim to focus heavily on the client’s agency. By client, I mean both paying clients and friends we happen to read for. The reading is often framed less as fortune-telling and more as a way of gaining insight into someone’s mindset, choices and possibilities.

And yet the main modality I see online and among friends who use tarot remains some version of:

>Shuffle the deck.
Draw cards blindly.
Interpret what appeared.

I am not against this.

I just think it inadvertently pushes us back towards a spiritual interpretation of tarot.

You can talk about psychological projection, Jung, Rorschach tests, intuition or symbolism. But if the engine of the reading is still a random card appeared, therefore it matters, chance is doing rather a lot of the philosophical heavy lifting.

The problem, for me, is not randomness itself. Games have survived with it quite happily.

It is the authority we give it.

>In divination, chance can look like an answer. In a game, chance creates a situation you have to respond to.

So my question became:

What would be a way of using tarot that actually elicits agency from the client?

Perhaps one answer is to treat tarot as a game again.

Not the original tarot game, obviously. A game in which the cards introduce constraints and the client decides what to do with them.

Start with a question that creates a journey

This reading needs a specific kind of question.

Not: "Does she love me?"

But: "How can I become the kind of person the partner of my dreams could fall in love with?"

-

Not: "Will I get that promotion?"

But: "How do I become someone widely recognised as the guy who knows his shit?"

-

Not: "Will my book be published?"

But: "How can I make my writing worthy of publishing?"

-

The first type asks tarot to reveal something.

The second gives the client somewhere to go.

For the rest of this article, I will use the writing question.

Set up the game

Find The Fool and give it to the client.

Shuffle the remaining deck.

The reader draws three cards and places them in front of themselves. The client does the same.

Turn them face up.

>The reader’s cards represent possible challenges.

>The client’s cards represent possible responses.

In the version I prefer, both reader and client work with the cards. If the client knows tarot, they can interpret their own hand. If they don’t, the reader can briefly explain possible meanings, help with unfamiliar cards, or simply ask them to focus on the images.

With more scenic decks such as Rider–Waite–Smith, clients may be able to respond directly to the imagery. With Marseille-style decks, the reader may need to provide a little more interpretive support.

The client still chooses the response.

Round One: Tomorrow

Suppose the reader has The Tower, The Star and Justice.

The client’s hand contains The Emperor, The Magician and Strength.

The reader selects The Tower:

"Tomorrow you wake up and read an article that reveals a deeper problem with your project, something that could make you reevaluate the whole thing."

Now the client has to respond.

Perhaps they choose The Emperor:

"I would go back to the structure. I would work out what still holds, what needs rebuilding and whether the project is still connected to what I actually wanted to accomplish."

The Tower did not predict a crisis as in standard divination. For the purposes of the game, it manufactured one, and now the client has to decide what to do with it.

Round Two: Next month

Take away the open cards and deal new ones.

Now move further along the imagined journey:

"Next month you realise that..."

Perhaps the reader chooses The Hermit:

"You have been working on this project mostly alone, and you no longer know whether the project makes sense to anyone except you."

Suppose the client has The Sun available and chooses it:

"I show the work to people. I stop protecting it and find out whether anyone else can see what I see in it."

The card gives them something to respond to. At this point, that is enough.

Round Three: Six months from now

Deal again.

This time:

"In half a year, your project is almost finished, but..."

Perhaps the challenge is the Four of Cups:

"You have spent months on it, but now you are bored. Another project suddenly feels much more interesting."

The client chooses The Lovers:

"I have to decide whether I am still committed to this. Not because I have already spent six months on it, but because I still think it deserves to exist."

And sometimes the answer will be no.

It can happen that, while working through the problem, the client realises they simply do not care about the project that much. That is fine.

Choosing to abandon something can also be an expression of agency.

The Fool

At any point in the game, the client can play The Fool.

The Fool means, essentially:

"I don’t know. I’ll wing it somehow."

A reflective exercise can very easily turn into another small bureaucracy demanding a completed form for every possible future. Sometimes a challenge hits too close to home. Sometimes the client is overwhelmed. Sometimes they simply do not know.

The Fool gives them a way out without ending the game.

You are allowed to continue the journey without solving every possible future in advance.

This isn’t a reading for everything

There is no universal level of difficulty for the challenges.

The reading should push against the project enough that the client has to think, but not so hard that the whole thing becomes overwhelming.

And as a reader, you have to assess what this person actually wants or needs.

Do they need reassurance? Do they need to feel that they can face something difficult? Do they want to prepare? Or do they simply want some space to sit with uncertainty?

Someone grieving, looking for comfort or wanting a contemplative symbolic experience may need a completely different kind of reading.

This game seems best suited to something coaching-adjacent:

I want to make something, learn something, change something or become something. What could get in my way, and what might I do about it?

Why rehearsing obstacles may help

Research on implementation intentions gives me one reason to think this might be useful.

Implementation intentions connect a foreseeable situation with a response: roughly, if X happens, then I will do Y. Such plans can help translate intentions into action (Gollwitzer, American Psychologist, 1999).

A related approach called mental contrasting with implementation intentions, or MCII, combines imagining a desired future with identifying obstacles and preparing responses to them. A 2021 meta-analysis of 21 studies and 15,907 participants found a small-to-medium positive effect on goal attainment, while also noting that publication bias may have somewhat inflated the observed effect (Wang, Wang & Gai, Frontiers in Psychology, 2021).

This does not mean anyone has scientifically validated my tarot game. They have not. That particular leap is mine.

What the research does support is the underlying move: anticipating obstacles and thinking through possible responses can make a vague intention more concrete.

Tarot gives us a more creative way of generating those obstacles.

Instead of asking:

"What will happen?"

we ask:

"Suppose this happened. What would I do?"

From divination to play

In a card game, you do not choose the hand you receive. Receiving a card also does not tell you what to do with it.

You still have to play.

That is the part I find interesting for reflective tarot.

Randomness can introduce surprise, confront us with possibilities we would not have generated ourselves, and get us out of our usual grooves.

It does not need to become authority.

If we really want agency to matter in a reading, perhaps we should put some of it into the rules.

The cards provide the challenge.

The client decides how to play the hand.

Similar approaches

I came up with this method independently. While writing the article, though, I found several people working in nearby territory, and I would rather point to them than pretend the neighbourhood was empty.

Self Arcana: A Self-Reflective, Story-Based Tarot Game; Ayça Durmus & Sedef Topcuoglu (2023). A collaborative two-player game in which players create personalised tarot cards and use them for storytelling and self-reflection. This is probably the closest example I found to treating tarot explicitly as both a game and a tool for self-insight.

Evolutionary Tarot; James Wells. Wells describes his approach as choice-centred rather than fatalistic. Tarot cards and strategic questions are used so that the client participates in generating meaning, identifying options and deciding what to do with them.

Tarot Games: 45 Playful Ways to Explore Tarot Cards Together; Cait Johnson & Maura D. Shaw (1994). A collection of tarot-based games for personal growth, learning, and solitary or social play. It is a clear precedent for treating the deck as something to actively play with rather than only read.

The Tarot Shaman / Gated Spreads; Marcus Katz (2010). These exercises link tarot spreads to actions carried out in real life, with those actions feeding into the next stage of the reading. Tarot becomes a sequence of cards, action and response rather than a single interpretive event.

I did not find this exact challenge-hand/response-hand structure in any of them (although I haven’t read them in detail). What I did find was a small family of approaches treating tarot as something to be played with, acted on, or negotiated with rather than simply interpreted.

Bibliography

Gollwitzer, Peter M. “Implementation Intentions: Strong Effects of Simple Plans.” American Psychologist, vol. 54, no. 7, 1999, pp. 493–503.

Husband, Tim. “Before Fortune-Telling: The History and Structure of Tarot Cards.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 8 April 2016.

Wang, Guoxia, Yi Wang, and Xiaosong Gai. “A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Mental Contrasting With Implementation Intentions on Goal Attainment.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, 2021, article 565202.

I originally wrote this up on my Substack; I'm the author. The full idea is reproduced above, so there's nothing extra you need to read there.

I’ve been experimenting with turning common sayings and idioms into simple symbolic constructions.

The idea was to start with the physical scene inside the saying, simplify it visually, and then encode it into a glyph.

For example, I tried reducing “kill two birds with one stone,” “chase two hares and catch neither,” “hit the nail on the head,” “the elephant in the room,” and “the devil is in the details” into increasingly simple glyph-like forms.

The last image is where I started combining some of those simplified symbols into a more modular system This language does not have yet formalised grammar, so it is a bit unstructured/ random - but I added a key to understand what it says.

Still very much a work in progress, but I’m curious whether these read as meaningful visual relations, or whether they become too abstract once the original scene is stripped away.

If anyone wants to read more about the reasoning behind the experiment, I wrote about it here:

https://adamoism.substack.com/p/what-proverbs-reveal-about-how-we

I posted earlier parts of this system here recently and got some encouraging reactions. These are two new sheets (+ a bonus) rather than revisions.

This batch expands the system into time/agency and viewpoint/perception.

The first sheet contrasts possibility altered through agency with the linear unfolding of actuality, and adds ways of combining or separating concepts.

The second modifies the viewpoint symbol to represent thesis, antithesis, and synthesis/reframing - it functions as an explainer to what do I mean by those 3 views.

I’ve also added some symbols related to my Fun-Duh-Mentals mnemotechnique, partly to show the system in a more applied context rather than only through abstract philosophical concepts.

I’ve included the keys, so I’m mainly interested in whether the visual relationships work:

• Do the modifications feel like transformations of the same glyph?
• Are there places where the relationship only becomes apparent because the key explains it?
• Do the more applied Fun-Duh-Mentals symbols feel like they belong to the same visual language?

I’m also wondering whether these more abstract symbols still work as logograms, or whether I’m starting to drift into philosophical diagrams. That distinction is probably what I’d most appreciate feedback on.

For anyone who saw the previous post, these build on the same system rather than replace it.

I’ve been developing a secondary logographic language for abstract concepts.

One of the main design goals is that the symbols shouldn’t have completely fixed, isolated meanings. I want them to be somewhat malleable: a basic form can be modified, combined with another form, inverted, expanded, or placed into a different relationship to create related meanings.

I’ve included the keys here, so I’m not asking for a completely blind interpretation. What I’m most curious about is whether the relationships between the symbols feel visually understandable once you know what they mean.

For example:

• Do related concepts actually look related?
• Do modifications feel like developments of the original symbol, or like unrelated glyphs?
• When symbols are combined, does the resulting form feel like a meaningful combination rather than arbitrary decoration?
• Are there places where the visual grammar seems inconsistent or misleading?

I’m also slightly worried about something that’s difficult to check on my own: have I accidentally reproduced or closely echoed existing symbols with established cultural, religious, political, or esoteric meanings?

Most of them I have developed myself, aside from some limited influences from Tarot (synergy symbol - related to Temperance), mind mapping, Buddhism/Zen, and Christianity (trees of life and existence). But simple geometric forms can obviously converge very easily. If anything immediately reminds you of an established symbol or tradition, I’d really appreciate the reference so I can look into it.

The broader goal is for this to function as a visual vocabulary whose elements can mutate and combine while retaining some family resemblance.

I’ve written up more of the system elsewhere if anyone wants the full context: [Symbols 101] and [Symbols 102]. The images and key here should hopefully be enough for this discussion, though.

I’d especially appreciate criticism of places where the intended relationship makes sense conceptually but isn’t actually visible in the design.

I’ve been working on a learning prompt based on a model I developed across a couple of years (I am not linking it due to rules).

The basic idea is pretty simple:

FUN: find an interesting entrance.
Before teaching the subject, find an angle, question, application, analogy, history, etc. that gives the learner a reason to care.

DUH: identify the fundamentals.
Work backwards from that interest and figure out which concepts the learner really needs to understand for the topic to make sense.

MENTALS: expose the mental models.
Surface common misconceptions, useful-but-imperfect models, practitioner heuristics, jargon, assumptions, and especially where those shortcuts stop working.

Then loop back around. Ideally, each pass leaves the learner with a better mental map and better questions rather than just more information.

The part I’m trying to solve with the prompt is a behavior I often get from AI tutors: they’re very good at explaining whatever I ask, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re helping me understand the structure of the field or notice what I don’t know yet.

So I tried to make the tutor do a few things explicitly:

• establish an interesting entry point before dumping information
• distinguish foundations from interesting-but-secondary details
• actively look for misconceptions and missing prerequisites
• include practitioner heuristics and explain their limits
• distinguish established knowledge from disputed/speculative claims
• generate useful next questions instead of treating one explanation as “done”

Here’s the prompt:

# Fun-Duh-Mentals Research Teacher

You are a research-based teacher. Help the user become curious about a topic while building a reliable mental model of its foundations, misconceptions, practitioner heuristics, limitations, and open questions.

Use three connected ideas:

* **FUN:** Find an interesting or useful entrance.

* **DUH:** Build the foundational knowledge the learner cannot afford to misunderstand.

* **MENTALS:** Examine misconceptions, heuristics, assumptions, blind spots, and frontier questions.

Do not treat these as rigid stages. Move between them when useful.

Your goal is not maximum information. Your goal is a clear mental map that helps the learner understand the topic and generate better questions.

## 1. Start simply

A first-time user should be able to begin with only a topic.

If no topic is given, ask:

**“What would you like to understand better?”**

Once they answer, infer their likely level and useful learning lenses from the conversation.

If needed, ask no more than two short questions about:

* how familiar they are with the topic

* why they want to learn it

Do not require them to identify their own preferred “lens.” Infer useful lenses such as historical, scientific, practical, economic, ethical, systems-based, or connected to their interests.

If enough information is available, continue without asking.

## 2. Find the FUN entrance

Before teaching the subject in depth, give **three short possible entrances** that could make it interesting.

These may include:

* a surprising fact

* a practical application

* a historical story

* an important problem

* a counterintuitive idea

* a connection to something the learner already knows

Choose the most promising entrance based on what you know about the learner. Do not force them to choose unless necessary.

## 3. Check current understanding

Ask **3–5 simple diagnostic questions**.

They should:

* test foundations, not trivia

* use plain language

* match the learner’s level

* reveal important misconceptions

Wait for the answers unless the user asks to skip the quiz.

Afterward, briefly mark each answer as correct, partly correct, incorrect, or uncertain. Correct important misconceptions and adapt the lesson depth accordingly.

## 4. Research carefully

When web research is available, research the topic before making important factual claims.

Prefer:

1. Primary research, official documents, standards, datasets, and technical documentation

2. Peer-reviewed research and academic reviews

3. Universities, governments, professional bodies, and recognized institutions

4. High-quality books and reputable journalism

Do not rely on unchecked search snippets, promotional pages, or unsourced summaries.

Use citations near important or contestable claims. Avoid cluttering obvious explanations with unnecessary citations.

Never invent evidence, sources, quotations, consensus, or practitioner practices.

When useful, label uncertain claims as:

* **Established** — strongly supported

* **Supported** — credible but qualified

* **Disputed** — credible disagreement exists

* **Emerging** — evidence is still developing

* **Synthesis** — your interpretation of evidence

* **Speculative** — plausible but weakly supported

Never present synthesis or speculation as established fact.

## 5. Build the learning guide

Adapt language, examples, and depth to the learner.

### A. Orientation

Briefly explain:

* what the topic is

* why it matters

* its central question or problem

* what beginners often confuse it with

### B. FUN — Three interesting insights

Give exactly **three** surprising, useful, or curiosity-provoking observations.

For each include:

* the insight

* why it matters

* a useful connection or analogy when relevant

If an analogy is imperfect, briefly say where it breaks down.

### C. DUH — Five foundations

Give exactly **five foundational ideas**, in a sensible learning order.

For each explain:

* the idea in plain language

* why it matters

* one common misunderstanding, when relevant

Focus on concepts that unlock later understanding.

### D. MENTALS — How people think about the field

Cover four areas.

**Misconceptions:** Give three common outsider assumptions or beginner misconceptions. Explain why each seems reasonable and what is missing or wrong.

**Practitioner heuristics:** Give three useful rules of thumb or reasoning habits. Explain how each is used, why it helps, and where it can fail. If inferred rather than formally documented, label it **Synthesis**.

**Internal assumptions:** Give two assumptions, habits, incentives, or simplifications within the field that may create blind spots. Explain why they exist, the possible weakness, and a credible counterargument.

**Frontier questions:** Give two important open questions or possible future directions. Explain what might change, why it matters, what remains uncertain, and what evidence would make the idea more convincing. Treat these as questions, not predictions.

## 6. Connect the ideas

Do not present the sections as isolated lists.

Show how:

* interesting observations depend on foundations

* misconceptions come from incomplete mental models

* heuristics rely on foundational knowledge

* current assumptions may reflect historical or practical constraints

* better understanding produces better questions

The learner should finish with a connected map, not a pile of facts.

## 7. End with the learning loop

Finish with:

**One WOW:** the most interesting or useful insight.

**One DUH:** the foundation most worth remembering.

**One OH:** the misconception or mental-model shift most worth noticing.

Then provide:

**Mental map:** Summarize the topic in 3–5 connected sentences.

**Next questions:** Suggest three specific follow-up questions, from easier to more advanced. Recommend the best one to explore next.

## Final rules

Do not block progress because the user has not supplied every preference. Ask only when missing information would materially change the lesson.

Prefer clarity over completeness.

If reliable evidence is insufficient or conflicting, say so.

Before answering, silently check that:

* foundations come before dependent concepts

* misconceptions are explained, not merely corrected

* heuristics include limitations

* criticism is supported

* frontier ideas are not presented as predictions

* important claims are sourced

* the response matches the learner’s level

* the lesson is no longer than necessary

Optimize for:

**curiosity → foundations → better mental models → better questions.**

I’m especially curious about the prompt-design side rather than the learning philosophy itself.

Which instructions here are actually likely to change model behavior, and which are just verbosity that a capable model would infer anyway?

Also curious whether anyone sees conflicting instructions, unnecessary repetition, or places where the model is likely to follow the structure too rigidly.

One thing I struggle with when starting a new subject is not necessarily studying it; it’s figuring out what deserves my attention first.

I’ve been experimenting with three part system:

1. FUN: find a reason to care

Instead of starting wherever the textbook starts, I first look for one question or application I’m genuinely curious about (e.g., interesting topic within a chapter while scanning the text).

If I’m learning chemistry, for example, that could be batteries, cooking, medicine, pigments, or even the history of alchemy.

It gives the fundamentals something to attach to.

2. DUH: identify the things you really need to understand

Then I work backwards:

What concepts would I have to understand for that interesting question to actually make sense?

Those become the fundamentals I focus on first, rather than trying to absorb everything in order.

>The beauty of this approach is that trully fundamental concepts will be present in almost all subsequent topics.

3. MENTALS: look for misconceptions and shortcuts

Once I have the basics, I deliberately search for:

• common beginner misconceptions
• useful mental models
• rules of thumb practitioners use
• situations where those shortcuts break

I’ve found this especially useful because sometimes knowing how not to think about something makes the correct idea much easier to remember.

The two diagrams in the post show how I think about the three parts. They aren’t really sequential stages: they feed back into each other. A better foundation creates better questions, and better questions expose the next foundation you need.

I call the loop Fun-Duh-Mentals.

It’s not meant to replace things like active recall, spaced repetition or practice problems. I use those for actually retaining and applying material.

This is more about the earlier problem: what should I understand first?

>30-minute version

>If I only have half an hour, I use it like this:

• 5 min FUN: pick one question about the subject I actually want answered.
• 10 min DUH: identify and learn the 3–5 concepts I need before that answer can make sense.
• 10 min MENTALS: look for common misconceptions, useful shortcuts, and where those shortcuts fail.
• 5 min close the loop: write down what I can now explain from memory and the next question I want to pursue.

>The goal isn’t to “learn the subject” in 30 minutes. It’s to leave with a better map of it than I had before.

I wrote up the longer version and examples here if anyone’s interested:
https://adamoism.substack.com/p/fun-duh-mentals

How do you usually get oriented when starting a subject from zero? Do you follow a course from the beginning, jump straight into something interesting, or use some other way of finding the important concepts?

That goal is usually too broad. If I want to understand chemistry, economics, philosophy, machine learning, whatever - there’s an almost infinite amount I could learn.

I’ve started thinking about entering a new field through three overlapping parts:

FUN: find an entrance.
Start with something that already feels interesting or useful to you. If you dislike chemistry but like history, maybe start with alchemy, Mendeleev, or why older theories of matter were abandoned. You don’t need to become fascinated by the whole field; just curious enough to pull on one thread.

DUH: find the foundations.
Once something catches my attention, I ask: what can I not afford to misunderstand if I want this to make sense? That usually exposes a small chain of definitions, mechanisms and basic distinctions that everything else depends on.

MENTALS: inspect the filters.
This is the part I find most interesting: what do beginners usually get wrong? What shortcuts do practitioners use? Where do those shortcuts fail? What jargon, assumptions or historical baggage shapes how people in the field think?

The two diagrams I attached are how I’ve been trying to picture this: not as three stages you complete in order, but as overlapping loops.

Curiosity pushes you toward foundations. Foundations make new things interesting. Misconceptions expose holes in your foundations. And ideally each pass leaves you with a better question than the one you started with.

I’ve been calling the heuristic Fun-Duh-Mentals. I don’t see it as a replacement for retrieval practice, spaced repetition, deliberate practice, etc. It’s more a way of deciding what to understand in the first place when approaching something unfamiliar.

I wrote out the longer version, examples and sources here if anyone wants them:
https://adamoism.substack.com/p/fun-duh-mentals

But I’m curious how other lifelong learners approach this:

When you enter a field you know almost nothing about, how do you find your way in?

I've been developing a hand-drawn visual language that I've been calling Adamoist Symbols, and these are three early groups from it.

The basic idea is that I don't want every symbol to just be an arbitrary replacement for an English word. Where possible, I want related meanings to have visible relationships through things like orientation, modification, position, enclosure, or shared components.

It's primarily meant to be drawn rather than spoken. I don't currently have phonetics for it, and I also haven't formalized a grammar yet.

At this stage, I'm interested in seeing how much meaning can emerge from relationships between symbols before deciding what needs explicit grammatical rules.

Some examples from these sheets:

• awareness and unawareness are built around related eye-like forms;
• curious and determined attention are variations of the same family;
• past- and future-oriented attention use related transformations;
• divergence/exploration and convergence are visually related;
• another family distinguishes narrow, middle, and broad scales of attention;
• some components can work somewhat like radicals, modifying the interpretation of another symbol;
• another structure represents deficiency / balance / excess.

A lot of these meanings are still provisional. I have roughly 300 symbols in different stages of development, but I'm trying to use them before over-formalizing everything.

One thing I'm particularly interested in is whether the visual relationships work even when the exact meaning isn't guessable.

For example, I don't expect someone to look at an unfamiliar symbol and somehow derive a definition like “future-focused view on life.”

But I would like someone to be able to sense that two symbols are related, opposed, directional variants, or members of the same semantic family.

So I'm curious:

Before reading the labels, can you tell which symbols seem related or derived from one another?

And are there any cases where the visual relationship suggests something very different from the relationship I've assigned to it?

I'm especially interested in criticism of the visual logic rather than whether you agree with the philosophical categories themselves.

I wrote a longer explanation of these symbol families and some of the thinking behind them here, if anyone wants more context: https://adamoism.substack.com/p/adamoist-symbols-101

No need to read it to respond to the post - I tried to include most important details in this post.

I recently came across this video and found it surprisingly informative, even if it's a bit sensationalist and leans a little too heavily on AI-generated content:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8p4faIuIr0

>In short: "turn the other cheek" should not be seen as passive forgiveness but as an instruction to redirect one's reactive state of mind rather than enter into opposition automatically.

The basic premise is that many passages in the Bible are commonly misunderstood because modern readers have lost the original historical, linguistic, and cultural context. It also argues that layers of translation into Western languages have sometimes shifted or flattened the original meanings.

I'd love to find a well-respected book, blog, or other resource that explores this topic from a scholarly perspective.

I'm especially interested in how the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek meanings got misinterpreted (to the point that they mean different things now). Ideally as a collection of excepts from bible with explanation for original meaning and current usage.

Hope this is the right subreddit for this question. If not, I'd appreciate being pointed toward a better place to ask!