Apparently there's a small but growing movement in tech circles creating custom divination frameworks mapped to the software development lifecycle. The Fool becomes the project kickoff, that naive greenfield optimism before scope creep sets in. The Tower is production outage day. The Devil? Technical debt. I laughed when I heard that last one, but honestly, it's disturbingly apt.

From my perspective as a therapist, what's interesting here isn't the mystical component, it's the psychological function. Jung wrote about tarot as a system for accessing the collective unconscious through archetypal imagery. What these developers seem to be doing is using those same archetypes as a structured debriefing mechanism. It's safer to say "we pulled the Tower card this sprint" than to directly confront that the deployment was a disaster because of poor communication. The symbolism creates emotional distance.

I think there's something legitimate happening here, even if my training makes me skeptical of anything that looks like fortune-telling. When I run groups, I sometimes use projective techniques like the Thematic Apperception Test, where patients respond to ambiguous images and we analyze the narratives they construct. The tarot-as-retrospective approach operates on a similar principle, just with different imagery and a more specific domain application.

What strikes me clinically is how this bypasses defensive posturing. Software engineers, as a demographic, often exhibit high resistance to direct emotional confrontation in professional settings. Giving them an indirect, symbol-mediated language to discuss failures seems to lower that resistance considerably. I'm not ready to prescribe tarot decks to my patients, but the underlying mechanism warrants serious attention from anyone studying group dynamics in technical environments.