In psychological terms, that could simply mean greater awareness of how our thoughts and emotions (the subtle) shape our actions and behaviours (the dense).

As the German philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote in 1953, of the popularity of astrology: “the kind of retrogression highly characteristic of persons who do not any longer feel to be the self-determining subjects of their fate, is concomitant with a fetishistic attitude towards the very same conditions which tend to be dehumanizing them”.Tarot simply asks that we hold ourselves open to it, says Dore. “The beautiful thing about tarot is that you will meet the card where you’re ready to go.” Dore is clear about the limits to this: tarot is not therapy, just as she is not a therapist (though she received clinical training as part of her master’s degree). But that is not to say there is no therapeutic benefit to projecting our inner lives on to a card. Tarot is among a range of mystic practices to have seen a mainstream resurgence in recent years. Most obvious is astrology, now almost adjacent to psychoanalysis in our shared lexicon – but there’s also psychics, reincarnation, supportive spiritual energies (such as with manifesting), and even witchcraft. Tarot, she thought, could be a similar conduit to awareness and introspection. These two strands – barriers to self-help, and tarot as a path to it – travelled together in Dore’s mind, culminating in a “strange and unlikely marriage”: she became a licensed social worker and full-time tarot reader. Now Dore has expanded on her cerebral writing on “the human experience through tarot” in a book, Tarot For Change: Using the Cards for Self-Care, Acceptance and Growth. With this practical, carefully referenced guide, Dore brings together the scientific and the arcane, two spheres long believed to be antithetical – but increasingly less so.

In 2018, the Pew Research Centre found that six in 10 Americans (both with religious affiliations and not) held at least one new age belief. Among the explanations given have been the internet connecting subcultures and people with alternative views, fashion houses bringing their imagery to the fore, and the decline in Christianity and community in the west. After nearly 100 years of work to ground psychology in evidence and empirical studies, we might see such idiosyncratic influences as outside the scientific scope. But all through human history, spirituality has factored into concepts of mental health and wellbeing – not necessarily reductively.Jessica Dore: ‘The cards made me feel seen and understood in a way that I wasn’t used to.’ Photograph: Caroline Gutman/The Guardian