Putting it all on the cards

A Benedictine monk from Glenstal Abbey believes tarot cards have much to offer. But don't expect them to tell you if you're going to meet your soulmate at the bus stop. According to Mark Patrick Hederman, use them positively and they can be powerful psychological and spiritual tools, revealing our unconscious life, writes Arminta Wallace.

Ask most people to name a tarot card and they'll probably say the Hanged Man. Ask them to name six and they may well get stuck after two or three: the Fool, the Alchemist, the Empress . . . . For anyone who isn't au fait with the Mind, Body, Spirit section of their local bookshop, the Tarot belongs to the realm of dodgy fortune tellers and to the occasional crime novel. But this week in Dublin, a workshop on the Tarot as a spiritual and psychological tool will be given by a Benedictine monk under the auspices of the Irish Analytical Psychology Association.

Mark Patrick Hederman of Glenstal Abbey believes the Tarot can provide powerful insights for anyone who uses the cards positively. "Tarot cards are not the Devil's pack or anything like it," he says. "They were originally Christian in their imagery and in their symbolism, but they have been hijacked for three centuries by occultists and cartomancers. What I'm trying to do is reclaim them for spiritual purposes and use them for meditation, rather as if they were icons."

Hederman's interest in the Tarot was sparked on a visit to Boston in 1991, when he saw the world's oldest existing pack, hand-painted for an Italian nobleman by near- contemporaries of Michelangelo in 1466, and was struck by their potential usefulness.

"In 1999, I wrote a book called Kissing The Dark, which everybody thought was Kissing In The Dark, but anyway," he says. "What that book was actually saying was that we've got to get in touch with the darkness in ourselves and in the world. Kissing seemed to me a good image because, apart from the fact that it has often been used in mystical language to describe a relationship with God, it means you don't necessarily have to understand but you do have to touch."

In his new book, Tarot, Titanic And The Twin Towers, which will be published in May, Hederman expands on the theme of our darker nature, referring to and using the Tarot. He believes that unless we get in touch with our unconscious, and fast, we're heading for another 100 years of disaster and mayhem.

"We tend to think of Stalin and Hitler as almost pantomime figures of horror," he says. "But the 20th century was full of people who were not in contact with their own unconscious. People in charge of institutions and people in families can be extremely cruel to those around them if they haven't made some kind of mediating connection with their unconscious side."

A tarot pack has 78 cards: 22 trumps, or major arcana, and 56 suit cards, or minor arcana. The major arcana, with archetypal images such as the sun, the world and the star, offer what Hederman calls an idiot's guide to the unconscious. "If you look inside your unconscious, you'll find there are demons as well as fairies there. Those are all personified in the Tarot - and getting in touch with those demons allows us to live in a way that prevents us from being monsters, really, because that's the side of us that is instinctual and that sometimes reacts in ways we don't understand or can't control. Addiction, for instance, comes from that area of the unconscious. That's why any way of coming into contact with it can be helpful."

Dreams and art are the usual ways of tapping into the unconscious, but for many people, says Hederman, art is too difficult and dreams too obscure. Tarot, on the other hand, is easy. "It's like a game, it's easily available, you can bring it on a train or have it in your room, so why not have a go?"

Why not, indeed. Because, most people would probably say, they don't want to turn up the Death card and find out they're about to be run over by a bus. Others may be keen to know whether they're likely to meet their soulmate at the bus stop.

Neither outcome is on the cards as far as Hederman is concerned, however. "The use of the cards for telling the future and that sort of stuff came into being 300 years ago in Paris, when a renegade priest and a Protestant minister decided they were the secret coded wisdom of an ancient Egyptian religion and could be used for cartomancy. But there's no evidence of there being any truth in all that hocus- pocus. My own view is that any person who pretends that they can tell you what's going to happen in the future is a liar. The future hasn't at all happened yet, and nobody knows what it's going to be. I don't believe in that and I don't approve of it."

So what will he be doing in his workshop on Saturday morning - and the Friday-night lecture that precedes it? "In the lecture," he says, "I'll be trying to allay people's fears and encourage them to use the cards. And on the Saturday, people will pick out a set of cards from colour photocopies and we'll start using them. Thinking symbolically means, essentially, thinking in images, and that's exactly why tarot cards are so available to everybody - because they're pictures. So you're looking at the actual picture; what are the colours in it, what are the symbols, the shapes."

The latter will provide plenty of shocks for anyone unfamiliar with the pack. "I've used them in my book to analyse the actual event of the Twin Towers," says Hederman. "One of the cards is called the Tower. If people haven't seen it, they can't believe it - it shows two people falling out of a tower that has been struck at the top by fire. But I'm not making predictions, just giving a wider perspective - and saying something about our psychology.

"The Twin Towers were about the most phallic thing that has ever been created, and at the moment they were destroyed there was a woman architect in the building opposite who was doing a project on how to make them less phallic. She records all this in a journal called the American Scholar - and it's fascinating what, exactly, she was trying to do."

And the verdict of the cards? "The lesson," says Hederman, "is that you shouldn't stick to that kind of rigidly masculine architecture. It's this masculine and feminine principle that is represented in the Tarot - the Devil, for example, is both. Masculine and feminine, not man and woman. After all, Jung and Freud and all these people realised that we're just a few chromosomes short of being one or the other."

Hederman has already given several lectures on the Tarot at Glenstal Abbey, using a set of cards painted by Lorcan Walsh that belong to the poet Risteard Mulcahy. Does his enthusiasm for the Tarot not cause consternation among his Benedictine brothers? "Well," he says, "I think by this stage they've got over consternation on my behalf. But we did get e-mails from as far away as Mexico to say what a disgrace it was to have the tarot cards on a beautiful Benedictine website."

He is, however, unrepentant. "The cards provide a wisdom which is not my wisdom - it's known by many people. Critics will say, well, wisdom must mean a secret doctrine of some kind or other. But what it boils down to is that mystery, which is what all religion is about, cannot be written down. It's something that's lived rather than something that's put into a formula or a creed."

• Kissing the Dark: Connecting with the Shadow, a public lecture by Mark Patrick Hederman, takes place at 8 p.m. this Friday at Milltown Park, Sandford Road, Dublin 6. Tickets cost €15 (concessions €6). The Tarot and Synchronicity workshop is this Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1.30 p.m. Tickets cost €30; booking is advisable. Contact Therese Hicks on 086-3406642.