Steeped in a tradition of its own, many people are under the misunderstanding that the Tarot can divine the future. While there is some truth to the efficacy of using the Tarot for looking into the future, it's the Tarot's user who is looking ahead, making far-reaching assumptions at very high levels of abstraction based on experience, foresight and memory. The higher level of abstraction we go in our thinking, the more we rely on models onto which we shape our deductions. Like drawing runestones, watching birds flying or tracking the path of a feather downstream, I find that the tarot is best described as a thinking tool, a device for constructively clearing your thoughts and for thinking ahead along a line of possible what-ifs.

The tarot has often been attacked by superstitious Christians as being somehow Satanic (which is odd considering the appropriation and use of divinatory tools has been around a lot longer that the Christian appropriation of images used to form Satan) -- perhaps it's because when used properly and with care and understanding, the Tarot can often make you ask questions that make you see connections and solutions hithertofore unseen, without the requirement for divine contemplation or intervention.

This section deals with many aspects of the Tarot deck and my own personal approach to it as a tool for creative thinking and opportunistic planning. It's not unlike the process of thinking advocated by users of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) techniques.

If you are a spiritual person and wish to draw upon whatever belief system you have, then using the Tarot may be especially insightful if you use it to sort out answers to problems of a personally spiritual nature. I don't believe that the Tarot per se forms part of any single coherent spirituality - except perhaps the belief that we can work out many of our own problems by looking within, but there is no reason why the Tarot cannot be used in a spiritual context - providing you are aware that any insights or conclusions you drawn from the Tarot are your own.

That said, the images from the Tarot are often metaphysical, iconic and "other worldly"; images from these and other forms of divinatory hardware (such as Runes, rock art and drums used for drumming into states of altered consciousness etc.) all have an artistic history with its roots formed from a specific culture (often the culture of its origins) but the Tarot often uses images that are historically based - which are sometimes at odds with the images of the culture that the Tarot operates within - hence the amazing diversity of decks, styles and even methods of reading the cards. Most people, when they think of the Tarot, think of the Platnik deck or the Ryder-James deck - famous decks replete with images from mediaeval and dark ages superstition.

We no longer live in mediaeval times, nor do we relate to the symbolic languages of that era, (nor, hopefully do we follow the superstitions) so it follows that some people (myself included) prefer to use a more modern deck - devising methods of reading and interpreting cards based on less prosaic imagery, even devising different ways of drawing and laying out the cards. With this end in mind I find that the Vertigo Tarot is an excellent tool for the postmodern abstractionist.

Its images lend a great deal of respect towards its comic and traditional Tarot roots, yet it updates and revises many of the images and icons associated with the cards, yet keeping the abstractions the same. Justice may be a blindfolded woman brandishing a sword in the traditional and mediaeval decks - but who would have envisaged a second world war gas mask as justice? Strangely it works for me - Justice is blind, but it's also isolated - for good or bad we've added a modern layer (possibly of cynicism) on top of the cards. Our levels of abstraction have been deepened to a point where a blindfolded woman merely represents a historic image - something that we come to with a modern-day perspective and modern thinking's baggiage.

Although the Vertigo Tarot is a limited edition item. If you find you've been looking for a modern Tarot deck replete with modern representations of old images -- this may be the one that feels right for you.