Tarot or Astrology?

To which I say, "Duh... why not both?"

Asking whether you need tarot or astrology is like asking if you would rather have tacos or margaritas. (And, I thought of that tacos/margaritas analogy well before I thought to use the Old El Paso "Why Not Both" meme, stg)

Tacos and margaritas serve two very different purposes. When you really need food, a margarita isn't the right solution. When you really need an adult beverage, tacos aren't going to cut it.

It doesn't mean you don't enjoy both. And it's not an either/or.

If you are mentally or emotionally wrestling with a decision where you need some clarity, then a tarot reading will help you frame the situation in new ways, or will surface up hidden issues you weren't considering. Tarot is like a colorful Rorschach test to help your brain solve a problem. And if you don't have a specific problem to solve, they are a fun way to access more insight from yourself about a situation or the future. Tarot is a medieval card game that helps you look in the mirror from different angles. Its outputs are based solely on you, and your energies.

If you want to better understand your literal place in the universe, and learn more about what influences there may be on you now, or at the time you were born, or what influences there may be on people and places around you -- an astrology analysis will look at the astronomical data for a point in time and give you a synthesis of the potential impacts. Astrology has as its foundation the science of the positions of planets and stars, and has accounted for millions of data points over millennia, to identify celestial patterns that affect humans.

In fact, astrology used to be part of astronomy -- they were one discipline. At one point, all astronomers believed that we could study the sky to learn more about human behavior.

Then, in the Middle Ages, science caught up, and scholars began to separate that which we could observe then prove, from that which we could observe then feel. (Which is why there are still astrologers who only practice traditional astrology, while others have gone onto a more modern set of beliefs. But that's another post for another time.)

tl;dr

Tarot is an internal exercise. It's a self-contained activity that allows you to help your brain process information in different ways. If you never pull the cards and turn them over, the reading never happened.

Astrology is an external exercise. It shows a human's place in the universe relative to the planets and stars. If you never get an astrology report, the Moon will keep orbiting the Earth and the Earth will keep orbiting the Sun.

Both have value and purpose, depending on what you seek to accomplish. Just like tacos and margaritas.