On TikTok, tarot cards are drawn by algorithms. Even the Sun newspaper recently published its own guide to major and minor arcana, a surefire sign of steady online search traffic for spiritual guidance. Jessica Dore: ‘The cards made me feel seen and understood in a way that I wasn’t used to.’ Photograph: Caroline Gutman/The Guardian Even if magic is a leap too far, in “reclaiming the imagination from the grips of doubt and rationalism”, tarot may at least allow us to imagine a better world: the first step to creating it. Dore is clear about the limits to this: tarot is not therapy, just as she is not a therapist (though she received clinical training as part of her master’s degree). But that is not to say there is no therapeutic benefit to projecting our inner lives on to a card.

Considered in this light, tarot has more in common than one might think with therapy. As Dore points out, Carl Jung studied archetypes, symbols and synchronicity in seeking to understand the human psyche.In 2018, the Pew Research Centre found that six in 10 Americans (both with religious affiliations and not) held at least one new age belief. Among the explanations given have been the internet connecting subcultures and people with alternative views, fashion houses bringing their imagery to the fore, and the decline in Christianity and community in the west. The Extinction Rebellion co-founder Gail Bradbrook and feminist scholar Angela Davis have likewise spoken of something akin to Dore’s definition of magic in their activism: the possibility of achieving what seems impossible now. The tarot cards told Julie all sorts regarding the ongoing royal feud (Image: Youtube/Northumberland Witch Tarot) Jessica Dore holds tarot cards at her home in Pennsylvania. ‘You’re not predicting the future – you’re really just exploring.’ Photograph: Caroline Gutman/The Guardian

Tarot might be seen in kind, says Dore – as an intervention rooted in a mystic tradition, like mindfulness. It is possible to accept “other ways of knowing”, she suggests, without denying or undermining science.For more incredible stories from the Daily Star, make sure you sign up to one of our newsletters here I would challenge you to consider that this set of images – that are derived straight from mythology and folktales and fairytales in many cases, and even religion and spirituality – might also have meaning too, if you can step out of the rigid mindset.”

The goal is not to throw out facts, truth or science, says Dore – but to make room for magic, long “relegated to the edges”. Her preferred definition is from the anonymous Christian author of the Meditations on the Tarot: using the subtle to influence the dense. Over the course of the same reading, the witch claims that tarot cards have pointed towards a range of bombshells from Archie's birth to Meghan's past relationships will be dropped next year. For those people who don’t feel spoken to by some of the interventions that are evidenced-based, tarot makes a doorway for people to show up and say: ‘Here’s what I need’, instead of telling them: ‘Here’s what you need’,” she says. Now Dore has expanded on her cerebral writing on “the human experience through tarot” in a book, Tarot For Change: Using the Cards for Self-Care, Acceptance and Growth. With this practical, carefully referenced guide, Dore brings together the scientific and the arcane, two spheres long believed to be antithetical – but increasingly less so. In psychological terms, that could simply mean greater awareness of how our thoughts and emotions (the subtle) shape our actions and behaviours (the dense).Dore, too, writes of the chariot card and the limits to willpower: “Capitalism isn’t built to teach pathfinding; it’s built to teach compliance within a preset path.” But she suggests that tarot could reveal another way – as stories and symbols have always done, separate from any question of whether they are rooted in fact. As a set of images and ideas derived from ancient wisdom, tarot has similar potential for transformation and growth, says Dore. She refers to the American psychologist James Hillman’s definition of “psychologizing: whenever reflection takes place in terms other than those presented”. As well as serving as a prompt for introspection, the cards’ storied past made Dore think of history repeating – circular narratives and mirror images through literature, folklore and legends. “It felt very nourishing for me, just to be like: ‘Someone drew this illustration; someone created these various interpretations – that means that I’m not alone.’” Certainly, the care and palpable sense of responsibility with which Dore approaches her work might surprise those who see tarot as essentially exploitative, the pastime of the cretinous and the credulous. The dismissal of tarot – and likewise astrology, another interest popular among young women – is often suggestive of whose suffering is taken seriously. As the German philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote in 1953, of the popularity of astrology: “the kind of retrogression highly characteristic of persons who do not any longer feel to be the self-determining subjects of their fate, is concomitant with a fetishistic attitude towards the very same conditions which tend to be dehumanizing them”.