Shauna Aura Knight recently made a post about creating your own tarot cards using collage. It's an intriguing idea, and her methodology is useful as a way of doing some deep work with Tarot that nonetheless allows you to create a personal connection with a given card through not only the act of creation, but also meaningful pathworking done with the collage to get at the heart of the meaning of the Tarot card (Note: the image for this post is a collage tarot card that Shauna created and I'm using it with her permission).
One of the other uses of this technique is that it could also act as a form of enchantment. In the capacity of enchantment, the creation of a collage tarot card would be focused on not just helping the person understand the meaning of the card as it relates to his/her own internal work, but also understand the card as it relates to the world, and specifically to what function the card is supposed to embody to the world at large. I think the word function is critical here, in understanding the purpose of the Tarot card. Actually, I find the word function is critical in understanding magic generally, but that's a post for another day. Anyway, the tarot card you create via collage will be one that fits a particular function. That function is partially derived from the card itself. For example if the card is two of swords, then part of the function of the card is derived from being the two of swords, but part of the function is also derived by your understanding of what that function is and how it applies to the world at large. So a question to ask would be: "What does the Two of Sowrds mean to me and how does that meaning function in my life and in the world at large.
What makes Tarot cards useful is the relationship the cards have with each other. While the 2 of swords has its own meaning, context, and function, all of that changes in relationship to other cards. What the 2 of swords means and how it functions is altered in part by the combination of other cards. For the magician this is useful as a form of enchantment, because what s/he does is pick out the relevant tarot cards and line them up to produce specific outcomes. The functions of the cards interact with each other to modify the enchantment and produce a specific result that occurs because of the functions the cards embody and perform when used for enchantment.
When I do a tarot working for enchantment, it works in the following manner: I shuffle the cards and then start pulling cards out. I don't set them up into a spread right away, until I've pulled all the ones I need to pull. Once I'm satisfied I then arrange the cards into a spread that connects each card to the other cards and creates a sequence of functions that perform the enchantment. To activate the enchantment, I read the cards and through the act of reading, simultaneously internalize the cards, imprinting them and their functions into my consciousness so that I can embody them, and externalize the cards by evoking their functions into the world in order to start aligning the variables effecting the enchantment. Approaching enchantment in this way insures that the internal beliefs and values of the magician is aligned with the objective reality s/he is seeking to manifest. I find that it creates a path of least resistance, if you will. If you choose to make collage tarot cards, then you can add in the creation of the cards as part of the enchantment. The creation of the card can be understood to be a gathering of the meaning/function of the tarot as well as the creative force of the magician, with the end result being a personalized card that uniquely represents the function of the card.
What I like about using Tarot cards for enchantment purposes is that they can help the magician make logical sense of the enchantment. The spread is used to create a sequence of steps/functions that generate specific actions, which in turn generate specific outcomes. That's how magic works, in my experience. You create or follow a process you understand and you use that process to program a specific result into reality. It's so simple that it might cause a person to struggle with it, but why make magic more complicated than it needs to be?