THE TAROT TOK EXODUS AND THE JESUS ARCHETYPE
There was a massive kerfuffle recently on TarotTok. I feel aggressively old just typing that word, but we have to talk about it.
A prominent tarot influencer suddenly announced she was "born again," renounced her entire practice, and deleted her account. She burned the digital house to the ground. I give it three months before she reemerges as a monetized Christianfluencer, but the fallout was immediate. The tarot community panicked. Everyone started writing think-pieces about the terrifying pipeline between the occult and fundamentalist Christianity.
People were shocked. They shouldn't be.
The Search for Absolute Certainty
The occult-to-evangelical pipeline is very real, and the psychology behind it is incredibly simple. Both spaces attract people who are desperate for absolute certainty.
A lot of people do not use tarot as a tool for self-reflection. They use it as a crutch. They want the cards to act as an infallible fortune teller that removes the burden of making their own choices. When reality inevitably hits, and they realize the deck is just cardboard and they still have to do the actual work to fix their lives, they panic. They experience a total crisis of faith.
So they abandon the cards and run straight into the arms of an institution that hands them a pre-packaged savior, a rigid rulebook, and the promise that if they just follow the script, everything will be fine. It is the exact same desperate search for control, just wearing a different aesthetic.
The Reverse Pipeline
I came from a Catholic upbringing. It actually pushed me in the exact opposite direction. The rigid dogma, the weaponized guilt, and the utter lack of agency drove me straight to the tarot table. I wanted a spiritual practice where I actually held the power.
Because of that baggage, I spent decades aggressively rolling my eyes at anything remotely Christian. But lately, I have been listening to the audiobook of Dayspring by Anthony Oliveira on my afternoon walks.
It completely shattered my preconceived notions. Oliveira strips away the sanitized, megachurch version of Christ. He paints a portrait of a deeply human, radical, messy, flesh-and-blood person. It gave me a brand new perspective on the guy.
Am I converting? Hahahahahah. No. Absolutely not.
The Chaos Magic Loophole
But here is where chaos magic comes into play. You do not have to buy into the institutional dogma to find absolute value in the archetype.
In chaos magic, nothing is mutually exclusive. You take the pieces that work and you discard the rest. You can pull a daily tarot card, channel Agatha Harkness to survive a corporate meeting, and still recognize the profound, radical empathy of the human being at the center of the Christian story.
You can respect the carpenter without kneeling to the church that burned people at the stake.
Spirituality is not a zero-sum game. You do not have to delete your entire personality and denounce your past just because you discovered a new perspective. If your spiritual practice cannot handle the messy, contradictory reality of being human, it is not a practice. It is just a performance.
