Divinatory Art: definition

The divinatory arts are the set of practices aimed at shedding light on a situation, a dynamic or a becoming from signs and symbolic structures. Tarot belongs to this field.

Historically and culturally, tarot is inscribed among the divinatory arts, although not all approaches make the same use of it or attribute the same scope to it.

In a contemporary and rigorous perspective, the divinatory arts can be understood as a language of guidance rather than a machine for the absolute prediction of the future.

Their object is not so much to guess facts as to offer a reading of the situation: to give form to what is intuited, to put words to a dynamic and to open paths of understanding.

This conception avoids two extremes: total rejection, which ignores a long cultural tradition, and credulity, which takes every sign for an infallible announcement of what is to come.

Understood this way, the divinatory arts are a symbolic practice of accompaniment: they help to think and to decide, leaving the person as the protagonist of their own path.

Situating tarot within the divinatory arts, without reducing it to them, helps understand its history and its cultural place: an ancient practice of reading signs that each era has understood and used in a different way.