It wasn’t long ago that fortune telling with cards was an underground art, shrouded in mystery, practiced by the marginalized, notorious, or eccentric. Today, tarot has gone mainstream and there is a proliferation of decks and a wide-spread resurgence of interest in divination. Is this a passing fad of uncertain times, or is there something deeper going on? In this lecture, Alan Scalpone will illustrate how the standard 78 card deck of tarot is indeed a highly useful tool for deep self-exploration, creative insight, and so much more. Tarot is, just like dreaming, “a royal road into the unconscious”and a way to pragmatically engage with the mysteries of the psyche to form a more durable relationship to the Self. This talk will include a discussion of the history and theory of tarot cards along with hands-on practical instruction about how to develop one’s own relationship to the cards. Most importantly, we will see how tarot divination praxis strongly resonates with the ideas and principles of C.G. Jung and Depth Psychology.  

Originally hailing from Chicago, Alan Scalpone is a multi-instrumentalist musician and composer who has played in dozens of bands and toured extensively in America and Europe. His eclectic musical career includes performance art, large scale theater works, film soundtracks, and studio work. Parallel to his music, Alan has maintained a life-long interest in the psychological, paranormal, and esoteric. Since arriving in Nashville in 2012, he has pursued this passion through the discovery of tarot and has subsequently given hundreds of readings at metaphysical shops, private gatherings, and school fairs. Alan has been lucky to have some very capable tarot mentors including T. Susan Chang and Nancy Antenucci.