I loved last week’s post so much, I wanted to continue on the theme of immersive, “spectacular” divination experiences. Except I don’t entirely know what I’m after. So I thought it would be fun to go and do something I never do anymore! A spread with assigned positions! Not only that, but after working with a great reader a couple weeks ago on their experience with the this spread, I thought—eh, it’s such an annoying spread, but why not give it yet another go! So I’m giving you the full Celtic Cross this week, baby, on the theme of creating more “theatrical” divination experiences. 

If you don’t know me, or if you’re new to my work: Hi. I’m Tom Benjamin and I fucking hate this spread. I think it’s one of the main reasons beginners throw in the towel. I think it was made without a lot of forethought and I’m certain it was invented by someone who really couldn’t care less about divination. But I don’t actually know where it comes from. (I believe the first play we actually see it is in the PTK, Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A.E. Waite, but I could be wrong.) I have my own version of it, which you can find here. But for our purposes today, we’re going with the OG. Now, all that said, many many many readers have great results with this spread. But I think it is unnecessarily difficult and unfocused.

But let’s dive in, shall we? I typically summarize the cards I pulled, but with this many I recommend looking at the photo caption. This is the Zodiac Tarot by Cecilia Lattari (writer) and Ana Chávez (artist). It’s been printed by USG on some really unfortunate card stock—shuffling is a workout. And that’s too bad, really, because I think this deck would be far more popular if they had gone with their usual, workmanlike and yet effective, stock. 

Overall, the spread is pretty balanced—but there are no majors. Interesting!

To make the nonsense of this spread easy to remember, here’s how I define the spots:

The situation + what crosses the situation
Above you, intellect; below you, body. This is the cards above and below the situation and cross. “Intellect” and “body” are metaphorical, here; I don’t mean literally. You might say “the head” and the “heart.”
Behind you (yesterday), before you (tomorrow). These are the cards to the left and right of the situation.
The column, from the bottom up: 
What you’re contributing.
What your environment is contributing.
Hopes and fears.
The future.

That’s not entirely on brand for the spread, but it’s just a little easier to remember than Waite’s specious writing.

The Situation + Cross: 7 of Wands crossed by Knight of Cups.
Sevens typically get to a point of self-reflection and re-evaluation. The Seven of Wands, then, is going to be a re-evaluation of our fire: our creativity, our passions, our desires, our goals, the things that keep us motivated. The things in which we fervently believe. Our evangelisms, so to speak. I think in this case we can take all of this to suggest tarot, because, if you’re here, that’s probably a passion point of you—and it is, after all, the theme of this blog. This is a moment to re-evaluate our sense of who we are as diviners, what’s important to us, what motivates us, what we want to be—and how we want to be seen. (The Seven of Wands is associated with the Mars decan of Leo. Leos love to be seen—aggressively, as Mars ain’t shy. This is rather a performer’s card when we think of it astrologically. A real actor needs Mars’s potency, tenacity, and drive to achieve their goals. This is an energized card! Mars gets a bad rap, but none of the signs are “bad”—no different than there are no “bad” tarot cards. Mars has Martial qualities, that’s all; sometimes those matter. 

We’re crossed by an elemental—in this deck, fire of water. The Knight of Cups. We often think of fire and water as adversarial, but if you’ve read prior posts you know that I do not. Especially when there’s a balance, as there really is in this overall spread. That said, I think in this context there is a little struggle between fire and water—between performance (fire) and spirituality (water). There’s an anxiety: “If I get too performative, will I lose the depth?” Fair question, and, in fact, it is one of my main concerns coming off of last week’s post. I love the idea of a more romantically theatrical reading experience for my clients, but not at the cost of real, deep meaning. But the Knight of Cups is a believer, truly; they all are, really, and this knight—which tends to be seen as a bit of a cad in romance readings—can actually be considered a sustainable knight in his best iterations, because he is such a blend of supposed “opposites” (fire and water). So he doesn’t need to worry about it too much; he’s got the editor inside that will prevent him from doing something too theatrical without any depth. Still, that’s not likely to ease his tension; he’s going to feel that because it’s part of his nature. (Boy, do I understand that!)

Above/“The Intellect”: Four of Pentacles
The 4 of penties is such a fascinating card in this case. And here we find one reason I dislike this spread so much. One card is simply not enough context! For me, anyway. Greedy, greedy deck pig that I am. And this card is the sun’s decan of Capricorn, a sign I honestly don’t know much about—other than that it’s the goat (I love goats!) and it’s the sign that kicks off winter. There’s a romance to Capricorn in that goats are relentless, and they are at home in strange places. Think of mountain goats. Look at the goats climbing up the Italian damn in this NatGeo piece. They can do things in strange ways. The sun, which is Leo’s home, also appears here. We might think of the card in this way: There is a way to perform (sun) that is both theatrical (the theme of the reading) that is radically practical—simply by making what is easy for you (the goats) and showing it to the world (again, the sun in cap). Here, I’ve really discarded much of the card’s typical meaning! But it’s quite exciting to do that and also think about the four as being a number of sustainability. The sustainable thing is to do what you’re already doing but recognize that it is impressive to the person who can’t—the way a mountain goats climbing an aqueduct is both impressive and totally at home. 

Below/“The Body”: Knight of Wands
I can’t help but see this card as saying, “what you do is spectacular simply because what you do is spectacular”—which is something I would never say about myself, but is a very Leonine quality.  (Although talk to any Leo I know, and none of us think about ourselves that way. Though many of us think about our pals that way.) Just do more of what you do, dive deeper into your own coolness. This is fire of fire and as a result, kind of a radiant card. “You radiate magic,” it says, “you radiate spectacle.” OK. Again, not something I’d ever say about myself, but I can say it to y’all!!! I can also say that you are aggressively (knight) magical. Take that!

Yesterday: Two of Wands
Mars in back, now in his home sign: Aries. Springtime!! Of course, what we’re looking at here is the “colonial” card. Somehow, what the Golden Dawn took from this astrological decan was the wanderlust of stealing land—of looking at the entire globe as our domain. And I take this to mean that, in the past, we—readers—have relied a lot on traditions that have, to a large degree, been appropriated. I mean, there’s very little in “white” culture that hasn’t been, because when Christianity invented Colonialism is a mass-market spiritual tool for making scads of money, they destroyed the cultures that belonged to white communities around the globe—and then went about doing that to people of global majority. This is almost to say that, Yesterday, you relied on traditions that didn’t have much to do with you. You thought about magic as a lot to do with what you could take from others, what you could beg, borrow, and steal—and, in the context of this reading, we’re talking about the way we read, how we interpret, etc., the things we did were in many ways things that belonged to others. This, of course, implies something about the today card we’ll look at next—but it also suggests that we used to be less mature. Obviously twos are low numbers, and so of course not particularly “grown.” But in addition, Mars in Aries is the beginning of spring, and so we get the very early development of the year—the western astrological year, anyway. So there’s implied immaturity there. And I don’t mean that word as a pejorative. It’s absolutely a thing we all have to experience in different parts of our lives. Immaturity is only a problem when we refuse to grow!

Tomorrow: 8 of Swords
This is not a card we necessarily want to see in the future position, is it? At least when we think in terms of Golden Dawnery. But Jupiter and Gemini are both expansive concepts. Jupiter is simply huge; Gemini is insatiably curious. Combine the two and we have a massive hunger for exploration. If we return to the typical Waite-Smith image and Crowey’s title (interference), we seem somehow constricted—which is a much more Saturnine quality. Why are we so constricted, why are we blindfolded, why are we experiencing “interference.” In fact, we’re not; in fact, this card is asking us to shift our focus. It is saying, “put a blindfold on and bind your body, lock yourself away—and in this state, let inner space (rather than outer space) guide you. Remember, we think of swords as words and communication—intellect. That all feels very external, but I think swords also suggest imagination. They have do. Where the fuck else does writing, story, communication come from? Anyone verbal can use  language, but our imaginations take the language and make it ours. Turns of phrase, etc., come not from grammar books, but from the poetry we both experience and internalize—and that which lives within us already. And I don’t think swords get enough credit for their imaginal ability. 

In fact, I now believe that the imagination is the key to so much of spirituality—and that we’ve found the imaginal devalued precisely for that reason. If we can make the imagined seemed silly, pointless, even unsound and “crazy,” then we cut off a major onramp to our guides. It is through imagination that we discover who our guides are, how they communicate with us, and even how powerful something imagined can physically become when we are deep into the moment.

The “binding” experienced by the candidate in this card isn’t the prison we assume; it is, rather, a forced stillness meant to achieve a transcendent meditative state. Jesus Christ, what a fucking sentence! What is wrong with me? 🤣 Anyway, yes.

Earlier I said that the 2/wands (yesterday) said something about this card. It does. Instead of looking without for your divinatory spectacle, instead of taking other people’s methods, rather we force ourselves to go deep within our own imaginal realm to discover what “theatricality” lives there. What does your imagination—which, after all, is the greatest audience for theatre and spectacle—have to say about what can make your readings more immersive? That is the key. 

We’ve completed the cross in the middle without too much drama! Yay us! Let us now turn our attention to the column, which moves from the bottom up. 

What you’re contributing: 2 of Pentacles
Another two and another pentacles card, this one Jupiter’s decan of Cap. We’re back with mountain goats and we’re back with expansiveness, with biggery (so to speak). If we consider the “colonial” nature of the 2/wands, which we explored earlier, perhaps we can detect a similar “outwardness” here—a similar sense of . . . “well, I could use what’s mine, but . . . then there’s this other thing that other people seem to like better . . .” It takes the spiritual two and transforms it into a life two. In this case, there’s a bit of a tug-o-war happening between earthy practicality (pentacles, Capricorn) and expansiveness (Jupiter). And twos are naturally tug-o-warish because they have magnetic qualities: they draw and they repel. 

This card, I think, offers us a bit of a down-to-earth sense of critical reacting. I wanted to say “critical thinking,” but it’s not; that might be the Two of Swords. This is reacting, because the earthiness of the card is embodied in ways that the intelligence of the swords isn’t. There are times our minds can feel divorced from our bodies. There are times when we don’t even notice our minds. This is the second. It’s like we’re able to encounter an experience and decide relatively quickly whether it feels like “ours” or not. I also think it’s interesting to consider that, as the final suit in the deck—and with the pentacle as its object, which represents all the elements—contains the rest of the deck. So it’s earth and everything else in tarot, because the earth is made up of loads of things, too. And because we have been exposed to so much in the suit of earth, we’ve been through the rest of the deck, we have a good editing eye. “This is for me, this is not for me.” So, this is a long-winded way of saying, You bring a lot of experience which makes it possible for you to experience something and decide quickly whether it’s useful for you or not. What you bring to your divination is a critical eye that allows you to avoid doing things that are out-of-step with your values. (Coins/Pentacles=value). 

What your environment is contributing: Queen of Swords
This particular queen can be a little gate-keepy, and I think about this card not unlike the “Judgment” card, in the sense of feeling judged. In this case, though, I feel this isn’t the reality—or if it is, it’s not that important. What matters more is your perception of feeling judged, rather than whether or not you actually are being judged. So you think you’re somewhat threatened or harshly viewed by your contemporaries. Whether or not you are, though, is irrelevant. The prior cards demonstrate that. You’re no longer looking for other people’s approval of your style; you’re allowing your style to emerge from you and your experience. 

Hopes and Fears: Nine of Cups
Jupiter in Pisces. I always think of Pisces as the “believer” sign. I think it’s a sign often associated with noted religious leaders, and even though the church says that Jesus was born on 12/25, it’s long been known this is simply a date borrowed from prior traditions where the sun god dies and is reborn. “Historians” say Jesus was likely born in spring, and others have said that he had to have been born a Pisces. That’s all to say, that I think of this as the sign of a true believer. Not a performative one, like much of modern spirituality, but a real deal, bone-deep believer in the thing. And this is interesting because, as we saw last week, this is the “wish card.” So it’s like being someone who really believes in wishes, who wishes to believe, and who ultimately feels compelled to give themselves over to the fullness of this belief . . . fully. Ahem. This is both a hope and a fear, because we worry we’ll lose our identity if we give into this as fully as the card suggests—much the way people worry they’ll lose themselves in relationships if they’re not careful (and/or like those of us who have actually done that and lived to regret it!). What I sense, here, is the desire (cups) to give into the spirituality of divination fully—but the fear that in so doing, one loses oneself in it and cannot do the other thing anymore. The other thing being more practical work. We worry that if we go off the “deep end” of magic, we’ll never come back. Which, frankly, fair. I can attest—it’s seductive. But the final card in the reading will stop us from doing that. 

The future: Five of Pentacles
Mercury’s decan of Taurus is sometimes a struggle because pentacles like to stay still and so does Taurus; Mercury does not. So this is a card that no one wants to see in the “outcome” position, which is what this is typically called. But fives shake up and pentacles are banal, so this is a shakeup of the banal. Listen, as someone who is fairy “fixed” I am similar to Taurus, although it’s not prominent in my chart. I think of Taurus in many ways as the most fixed sign. But stagnation is no good. Mercury (who has been implied here when we saw Gemini) shakes up that stasis. Mercury is very five-like. And, yes, there’s going to be tension between the desire to sit still and the desire to move, but no matter how hard we try to remain still life keeps going. So this isn’t a bad card, or it’s only a bad card if you’re trying to avoid growing. This card is growing. We can experience growing pains, but we’re still going to grow and growing is worth it. The earth sometimes gets depicted as too banal (by me), but the earth is not inert. And being “grounded” doesn’t mean being “stuck.” 

What this suggests to me, really, is that pedantry is always something worth outgrowing. By this I mean, whenever we decide “tarot is for this!” we should immediately turn around and do the exact opposite with it, just to remind us that it’s both everything and nothing; anything and everything; and always something other than the thing it is, while totally being that thing, too. 

The outcome, then, is that no matter what, our divinatory practice is going to grow—no matter whether we want it to or not. And hopefully we want it to, because the alternative is kinda sad. We can’t help but grow. And that’s good! So, ultimately, it’s not worth worrying about too much. No matter what we’re doing, we’re on the journey we’re journeying on, and so we’re moving and growing regardless. Which is good news!

Summing it up
Welp. Am I Celtic Cross covert now? 

No. I still don’t like it and I don’t particularly think it’s a good spread. I think that I could have gotten a better, clearer answer by using a different spread. But I also believe in doing things we don’t like sometimes in the service of keeping ourselves from getting stale—and also because we have to remind ourselves why we don’t like the things we don’t like, partly to see if we still don’t like them. I think it’s important to know why you don’t like the things you don’t like. It makes it harder to protect yourself from growing. 

Ultimately, I think this reading suggests that the way to make tarot more theatrical, more immersive, is to make it more yours. Whoever you are, turn within and find the magic of tarot that belongs specifically to you. When you do this, when you’re reading like you and unlike any other reader, you can’t help but radiate spectacular vibes because you’re doing what you’re doing in the way only you can do it. And there’s something wonderfully empowering about that. I always say, I don’t want the people who take my classes or read my books to read like me. We already have me. We need you to read like you. That’s the goal. And when you do that, growth and impressiveness and coolness and “theatre” will simply happen. It’s part of the nature of what we do. 

A read of one’s own. 
This week, let’s allow the spread to help us examine our reading style—and where we might benefit from being more “ourselves” in the process. 

Position 1 - One technique or area in which case you may be unduly influenced by others and could benefit from some youification. 
Position 2 - One way you might bring more “you” to that part of your reading practice.
Position 3 - One benefit for you of doing this. 
Position 4 (optional) - One benefit for your clients of doing this. 

I really, truly recommend doing at least two cards for each of these. I just don’t think one gives enough context. As always, three is wonderful!

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This week, I’m using a deck I’ve never used before. The Tarot of Prague was given(!) to me by a friend who was considering rehoming it—and who could have sold it for mucho money, given how Baba decks go. So when I was going through my collection today for my underrated decks video, I saw this and though I don’t think it’s underrated (thought I do include a Baba deck!), I thought I should give it a go. And given that my pulling this deck down was tangential to underrated things, I thought it might be fun to ask something this week along the lines of: What’s an underrated divination technique or tactic that we could benefit from exploring? 

Before I get to the reading, I want to point out that these kinds of questions can be tricky because there’s implied certainty within it: in this case, that there is an “underrated” technique or tactic! Maybe there isn’t! If there isn’t the reading doesn’t have a way of telling us that. There’s no way for the cards to say, “Look, friend. This question is dumb. I don’t have an answer for you.” What tends to happen instead, then, is that the reading becomes a slog, hard to do, and the result remains unsatisfying. This is really to say that the question part of the readings is actually harder than the reading and to remind you that if you’re struggling with a reading, it may not be your talent; it may simply be that you asked a lazy-ass question, as I do nearly every time I read for myself. 

At any rate, I proceed: In this case I decided to draw three cards and then allow that first three to tell me if we needed additional cards and, if so, where they wanted to live. In this case, the reality of the second and third cards (flanking the center) being majors, I decided to give each a card to its  side. This is something you might try if you’re struggling to understand a major in a spread. Sometimes they seem so “big.” If you’re struggling, go ahead and add a minor card to it and see if that helps contextualize it. That will often bring the “bigness” down to earth. If you draw a second card and it’s a major, you can use it or simply decide that you will draw until you get a minor between 1 and 10, rather than a trump or court. 

Today we have, 4 of Swords (4), The Magician (2), 9 of Cups (1), Strength (3), Queen of Cups (5). I typically tend to work from the middle outward when laying out cards. No idea why. It works for me. 

The 9/cups is the wish card, and so out of the gate I think that’s something fun to consider. “The Wish Card” is a super old fashioned way to think. I’m too lazy to get up and look at any of my books, so I’ll just rely on my admittedly faulty memory—but I don’t think this comes from anything prior to or concurrent with the Golden Dawn. I think it pre-dates Eden Gray, but maybe not by much? Anyway, Eden Gray is one of the places I saw it (I think). And the idea of a “wish card” definitely jives not with our much more “empowered” cosmology, these days. We don’t make wishes; we “manifest” (if you didn’t see my monologue about that term on BlueSky earlier this week, I recommend it). Manifesting isn’t wishing. When we wish, we wish do so on a star; when we wish, we’re in essence praying. Manifesting is somehow bossier than that and I don’t know how to say it any differently. I guess what I mean is this: wishing is a request for collaboration from the divine; manifesting is a demand for gifts. As someone who is relatively new to the spiritual aspect of working with divinity and spirit guides, I can tell you—my spirit guide might find me making a demand kind of kinky now that we’ve worked together rather a lot in the last few months, but I also wouldn’t do it because I do think of him has a collaborator and not a servant. In fact, if anyone is anyone’s servant, I’m his—because I’m embodied, I have the ability to do things he can’t. (He would want you to know, and in fact I can feel him insisting that I say this right now, that he doesn’t like the the idea of me as a servant—beyond, of course, the idea of kink. Which is good, because I don’t like hierarchies. 🤣 We’re rather well-suited.) 

Wishing is old fashioned. Quaint. Innocent. It’s Disney, but Disney the way you see it as a kid who believes in magic, not as an adult living under capitalism. I like that for our purposes, because in a way this reading is kind of teasing out something potentially “retro.” 

I could go into the 9/cups more, but I don’t want to decide too much about it right now. I don’t want to impose myself on it yet; I want to let the remainder of the cards, or at least the two flanking it, guide me a bit. I want to see how the other cards contextualize this first. (I should note, if you’ve read my prior posts, you might see that I didn’t do my usual thing of going through the numbers, suits, and elements at the start of this one. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I forget or something else distracts me. This is what I mean when I say, “Have a foundation, but be open to what happens.”)

The Magician, Mercury, appears to the left; Strength, Leo, to the right. Why am I calling on the astrology? Mercury always matters when we’re divining. He/They is a messenger and traditionally governs divination, at least in part. And, of course, astrology is also rather an old divination technique. Leo, which is my sun sign, doesn’t necessarily feel relevant here—but I’m proud I remembered it. 

Looking at these two, you might already sense why I decided to put the second set of cards to the side of the majors. (The other option would have been above and below the 9 of cups). Sometimes the majors are big and sometimes they’re not. And here they’re actually playing kind of quiet. So I’m going to shade them with the cards that flank them. The Magician is flanked by the 4 of Swords. This connects to the messenger aspect of Mercury, because swords/air are the communication cards. Four is a stable, thoughtful number; it is meticulous, slow, and undistracted. That is in sharp contrast to the magician, who is (or can be) unstable, quick, and totally distracted. (Mercury has ADHD.) 

Strength is shaded by the Queen of Cups—and here we find another card often associated with divination. The Queen of Cups is frequently referred to as the “intuition” card, or the diviner card. Because the watery nature is doubled (cups, water; queen, water), she experiences heightened sensitivity and so might be considered the most psychic card in the deck. I’ve always hated the word psychic. In fact, just now I couldn’t even remember how to spell it and kept getting it wrong. It makes me feel uncomfortable. I’ve done my number on this more than once, but I’m biased against it. I can’t help but associating it with fraud, even though the reasonable argument could be made that my work with tarot falls under the realm of psychic work. 

So we have a strong psychic. (I keep adding an extra fucking “H” to the word psychic. I keep spelling it psychich. I have no idea why.)

Stable, thoughtful magic; strong psychic intuitive.
The wish card. 

This is all giving big fortune teller vibes, I’m sorry. I’m actually laughing as I write this because the thing I said to myself as I planned this post was, “Whatever you do, don’t make it about fucking fortune telling, because people are going to think you’re just plugging your forthcoming book, The Modern Fortune Teller’s Field Guide--coming from Crossed Crow in Autumn, 2025 and preorders are now open.” OK, maybe I didn’t say it that way, but I did say it. (Pre orders are now open through the Crossed Crow site; it’ll be a bit before you can find it on resellers. So if you’re concerned about shipping, I’d wait. That said, resellers tend to only offer books that have large advanced presales, so if you can afford to preorder through CC, I’d so appreciate it.) Anyway. I really didn’t want to make it about that. And, in fact, I think that the appearance of the 9/cups, the wish card, as well as the second cups (queen) making this suit now the dominant force, we have a slightly dreamier and more romantic answer than simply “fortune telling.” 

An example: I follow this shockingly handsome goth guy on Instagram for no other reason than that he’s my ideal man—except for the fact that he’s very clearly a straight. He recently offered to his followers the ability to buy from him a hand-written love letter that he would send to you through postal mail. That was it. Just a random love letter written by a hot goth boy on the internet who has kind of a steam punk romantic sense of theatre, honestly. 

And when I see this combo of cards, that’s what I think of. Not just the idea of old fashioned “wishing,” which I do think is part of it, but a sense of romance, a sense of drama, a sense of pageantry . . . and a sense of theatre. 

I’m a shockingly prosaic reader. It’s been kind of my brand since I started out doing anything “publicly.” I like to have a sweet tablescape at events, but beyond that I don’t really dress up in any special way when reading (I actually kind of feel embarrassed doing that?) unless I’m asked to, and when I’m asked to (rare) I usually try to find something that’s as close to civvies as possible. I don’t like calling attention to myself, and I think that’s a lovely thing. I want the focus to be on the client and the message. But . . . there’s nothing saying a little romance isn’t worth it. There’s nothing saying a little flair, a little art direction, couldn’t achieve a new layer of client of experience. 

A few weeks ago, I finally got my ass to Salem to see the Spiritualism exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum with my friend Liz. It was a freezing cold, snowy/rainy northeastern day. And though I, too, live in the coastal part of this colonial landscape, Salem was decidedly—even violently--colder. But once inside the really stunning museum (it’s wonderful, truly; I got to see an Iris Apfel exhibit a few years ago that I loved)—you should go if you’re in the area. So many people skip it because they’re focused on Halloween, and to a degree PEM used to like that—they didn’t want to get in on the kitsch. But they’ve loosened up a bit, I think, especially with an exhibit like this and another recent one about monster movie posters. So, you can have spooky fun there, too, and see some wonderful exhibits. Anyway, the point is that I wandered around the exhibit exploring the history (much of which I knew thanks in part of Mitch Horowitz’s wonderful Occult America, a book I reference a lot) and thinking about—well, a lot of things, really. 

I thought about how Spiritualism itself emerged from a deep human need to connect with the divine, or with the unknown. And it always seems to ramp up in popularity around times of loss—wars and pandemics, generally—because of this very deep human need. And then I think about the way that it’s typically considered not only old fashioned fraud, but also pseudo-spirituality. I mean has any faith produced more frauds than Catholicism, and does that corporation get called a fake religion? No. Anyway. I also think about an episode of The Haunted Objects Podcast that I listened to about Uri Geller. They explored how, early in his career, he was pushed to add magic tricks and illusions into his appearances because people were getting bored with the spoon thing. So, he did—because he needed money. And now there are people devoted to him being a fraud. I don’t know whether he is or isn’t; to be honest, I don’t know much more about him than that was in that podcast. I didn’t even realize he was contemporary. But what I’m getting at is the way capitalism made him compromise himself, not the fact that he was a con man (assuming he’s not one). 

Capitalism is what caused fraud in Spiritualism, not divinity. And because this is one of the first industries in the post-industrial colonial world to be led by and center women, we have to recognize that much of what we “know” about it today is propaganda created by patriarchy. Including the church, who fucking loathes competition of any kind—which is why they hate fortune tellers and why we’re called frauds. Count how many frauds you’ve heard of who read tarot? Count how many frauds you’ve heard of in the church? Yeah. I don’t for a second doubt that the early practitioners of Spiritualism were believers and I don’t doubt that many of them had the ability to communicate with — something divine. Whether it was ghosts, daemons (there was a time when all spirits were called daemons), angels, guides, whatever—we do this whenever we read cards, no matter our cosmology, so we know it’s probable that at least some Spiritualists had “it.” But then came showbiz.

Showbiz is poison, kids. Listen. Daddy knows. 
Showbiz made Spiritualism fraud. 

It is time again for me to tell you about Black Herman, sort of the ur-Uri Geller in a way. He was a stage magician for sure, but in fact also a root doctor, healer, and fortune teller. And eventually racism and the NYPD got to him on charges of fraud. They claimed he was pretending to be a doctor without credentials. Lots of people were. “Medicine” was new and most people couldn’t afford doctors. What made Black Herman a target? He was a hugely popular act around the country to Black and white audiences. That’s why. He had the temerity to be popular, successful, beloved and Black —an entrepreneur and healer. But the thing that made it easier for them to claim him as a fraud was because of the stage magic—which did blend over into Spiritualism. (A perhaps apocryphal story, also in Occult America, tells of Herman and his assistant visiting local cemeteries to memorize the names of the local dead before performances.) We know the cops could have gotten him they wanted to, but their job was easier because of the performance of Spiritualism, not because of his actual healing practice. The woman who complained about him wasn’t one of his actual clients; it was an undercover cop who entrapped him.

This is to say that I don’t advocate for divination as performance. Partly for the sanity and benefit of the reader. We have to remember that the power structures exist to keep us from being taken seriously—up to the point where it benefits those power structures to make a public example of us and try to make us an enemy (we’re both powerless and dangerous? Sure, Jan.). And given the unhinged fuckery of the right wing, I don’t doubt we may see shit like this again over the next few years. I pray not, but I say this to advocate for truly ethical and responsible divination—by which I mean, don’t be a fucking fraud, if nothing else. 

Allllllllllllll of that said, what’s to say people couldn’t use a little romance in their experience? Theatre needn’t be contrived. It can be quite real. Spectacle is simply something that feels special. In the spread for the week I’ll share my example, which will be literally “how can I make my divination more ‘spectacular’?” I like spectacle more than theatre just because I’m fighting with the theatre right now. 

But I like the idea of a little romance, a little experience. Maybe an immersion.

Immersive experiences are huge in the arts right now. I think it’s a very human need to counter our constant digital immersion. It’s like virtual reality, except it’s not virtual. It’s augmented reality, but (almost) entirely analog. Back in the beforetimes, I went to see the well-known experience Sleep No More, which is supposedly a retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth set in a decaying hotel. Everyone is masked upon arrival and then shoved into an elevator. The doors of the elevator randomly open and you’re shoved out into onto that floor—often apart from whoever you came with. They really want you to experience this without holding anyone’s hand. And so you do. You wander through this “hotel” (it’s a massive stage set, but one that feels exactly like a haunted hotel—and graveyard and aslyum . . . so many spaces exist within that hotel). There are “scenes” performed by actors throughout the rooms and characters you can follow, but nothing is linear; everything is meant to simply be experienced like a fever dream, walking through, following this character—until they lose you, and you’re left alone for a moment—and then a party erupts around you and a murder is enacted. It’s quite surreal. It’s spooky. I didn’t find it particularly sexy, but there were definitely other audience members there who seemed to—which made the danger of the experience realer, and in fact audiences members eventually started to get grabby to the point that the whole show needed to be restaged and audiences could be bounced for reaching out and touching what was not theirs to touch. And on one hand, yeah, don’t fucking touch actors. On the other hand, what a testimony to the creation of an immersion so experience that people can’t help but reach out. (But again, no! Bad!)

What might we borrow from this experience or kind of experience in our divination? How could we put on a “show” that manages to be both totally real and authentic and yet somehow romantic and full of spectacle? 

This is an exciting question to ponder! Even as it makes me somewhat anxious, because as a former performer, I have no desire to do that during my readings. But I do like the idea of ambiance. It’s not always easy to create, and this does get to my secret desire to have my own fortune telling parlour--with a u—that has books and classes and seminars and lots of jewel toned velvet furniture and a little divination museum to boot. (Someone please give me money to do this!!!!! And the energy to make it happen!!!!. )

I mean it could be as simple as using my creative writing background to do written readings for clients in an old style way . . . hand written, sent by post, wax seal . . . that sort of a thing. I mean that would be very clearly ripping off my Instagram crush, but you get the idea. Just a little twist, just a little magic, just a little sparkle to make it something special . . . something more than “just” a reading (which should never be lost to spectacle, and I really do believe that fundamentally)—but is an experience. People like experiences. 

What might you do? I love this question and I may even make a video about this! It’s rather an exciting idea. And I think not a bad business thing—give yourself a “thing,” a “niche” that works. I know a fabulous reader locally, The Vintage Mystic, who does this so well—she’s got a chifforobe full of vintage 1920 garments and jewelry, all of which she looks fabulous in. And it’s perfect! She’s gotten gigs reading in the cemetery for themed events. How cool, right? Just a little theatre, just a little something special. 

I’m actually really inspired right now! I think I may be revisiting this in several ways. 

Before I get to my sample reading of the sample spread, I want to point something else out about this reading: I didn’t really spend that much time with the cards. I got kind of a beginning from them that prompted me to go down a primrose path of ideation. (Jesus, there’s a pretentious sentence.) I don’t think I’d necessarily do that with a client, unless it was taking me to some really interesting places—and I imagine that channels are probably doing just that—but when reading for ourselves, especially in writing, it’s an incredible thing to follow a thought where it takes you. That’s when you’re really reading, and, in fact, my secret to reveal to you is: the things that you find when you’re writing that way, kind of stream-of-consciousness following an idea . . . those are the times your spirit guide is leading you and that’s one way you might begin to access them. FYI.

A read of one’s own
This is a simple spread. Pull any number of cards you want to answer the question, “How can I bring authentic-yet-theatrical spectacle to my divination?” 

Since the Tarot of Prague prompted this sort-of fairy tale of a reading, I’m sticking with it! I totally did not expect this, but I’m super delighted by it. I think is my favorite of all the posts I’ve written!

To answer my question I drew, in a cross:
                         Queen of Wands (4)
7 of cups (2), Knight of Wands (1), 10 of cups (3)
                               Emperor (5)

The Knight of Wands is our axis and the first card that went down. The Fiery Seeker! Interesting. Flanked by two cups cards! The dreamy-ass seven and the full-as-fuck ten! I like to remind folks that fire and water are not, by nature, adversarial; they can be quite productive together, and I think this is an example of such a time. Flanking the fiery knight (and I associate knights with fire, too, so this would be fiery fire), the two cups cards help him “stay in his lane.” What is that lane? Still figuring that out. 🤣

The Queen of Wands and the Emperor form the vertical column. The queen takes the knight’s energy and makes it useable, practical, kind of like a conduit. The Emperor, the OG four card, the stabilizer, grounds him. He’s very, very tightly contained in this reading; he can’t stray very far from this path; he can’t let his ego or his flair get the better of him. 

What he can do is inspire dreaminess. A usable, grounded dreaminess. 
He can do this in many ways, but I just got the idea to offer a dreamy reading. Some kind of spread that’s designed to focus on what you should be dreaming about, or where dreaming wants to happen, where we benefit from dreaming—and dreaming big! 
I feel like I want to use the word “poetry,” even though there are no swords cards and I really don’t think you can have poems without swords for many reasons (swords are words, but also poems are tight and swords edit). Poetics, maybe, rather than poetry?
So then the reading becomes based on the idea that at every moment in your life, you absolutely have to dream big about something! And this reading might present you with an immersive road map!

Oooo, this is fun brainstorming. Perhaps this is an immersive reading that builds on itself as more dreams are revealed. Perhaps there is the use of poetics, somehow, the way that Enrique Enriquez uses them (I don’t know that I’m capable of his level of poetry, but let me tell you—if you want to see someone totally immersed in tarot, watch the documentary about him. It’s called Tarology and I managed to find it on Amazon ages ago). 

This is all quite tantalizing. 
More soon!
​
Anyway, I’d love love love to hear what you come up with! Let me know and have a great week. 

Headed back to questions from the divination community this week! Today, we look at this: What divinatory tools/skills/modalities am I cultivating in 2025? To broaden that a little more, I’ll think about it in terms of divinatory trends and methods that will or can thrive this year, as well as finding things for your divinatory practice that will make you feel like your growing and/or thriving.

This week, I chose The Darkness of Light Tarot by Tony DiMauro. It’s an absolute stunner of a creation, though it came out at a weird moment and its entirely white cast of characters meant it remained destined for my shelf. A friend and I talked about the deck yesterday, though, and I thought this was as good a place as any to revisit it. Why not? I’ve got so many decks on the shelves that don’t get any love—and as I handed over a deck I love to this friend who I know will use it more, I realized it might be worth doing a bit more of that. Revisiting and potentially finding new, loving homes. But that’s not the point of this post; just some delightful commentary from yours truly. 

In an arc of five, we’ve got: 7 of Blades (4), La Stella (2), Knight of Cups (1), Three of Wands (2), Ace of Cups (5). 

Let us note the absence of earth, herein. Out of the gate, we know we’re not being asked to stay tethered to anything old or familiar. In fact, the exclusion of only earth from the line suggests that escaping the bonds of banality may be either necessary or desirable, depending on one’s point of view. Water/Cups holds an edge in the spread, being the only element represented twice. 

The Knight of Cups wants to be the central character, which is apt for knights, and I think there’s a certain dreaminess about this card that suggests escapism. I’m not an advocate of escapism, that you likely know, but let’s note that the question is not what “should” we be cultivating, but rather what “are” we cultivating. So this isn’t advice as much as it is a description of our collective divinatory tendency. I don’t, however, think escapism is the only quality the card depicts and here is where the reader’s life experience meets the cards in front of him. I have been feeling for a lot of the last year that a sea change was happening in terms of divination needs. My clients have started asking questions I’m never asked—questions about ancestors, spirituality, curses, magic, and mediumship. And this makes total sense for two reasons. 

First, humans in the industrialized/colonizer world frequently return in a big ways to spirituality—particularly alt spirituality (at least since “alt” became a necessary qualifier)—during and after times of global catastrophe. We are not yet out of the global pandemic and we face news of new diseases threatening our safety every day. Humans also seeks spirituality in times of or after war. The Spiritualism movement in the so-called US took off in the years after the “Civil War,” and again after the two World Wars. We are in a moment following massive, indescribable loss. Of course people’s connection to their honored dead and their understanding of their own temporariness drive them toward questions of spirituality. 

Second, we’re also in a moment where the “spirituality” of others is being used to destroy the lives of already marginalized communities. A lot of people recognize the sheer fuckeduppery of this and at the same time are craving a connection to something larger than themselves. I also think a lot of people on the supposed left who replaced their childhood Christianity with evangelical liberalism are discovering that this religion turns out to be as hollow as the prior—perhaps more.

The dreaminess of the kn/cups need not be romanticism. It may be a Don Quixote-esque quest for the ideal. (Full disclosure, I honestly only know that story based on the musical Man of La Mancha; I can’t claim to have read the book.) The fact that the Knight is preceded by the Star, a pretty strong and also idealistic sense of direction, ennobles him (although it also could make him a bit dippy and dreamy, too) it’s the 7/blades that keeps us in check. Sevens are invested in things that are deeply important to the querent. We’re not talking about unimportant stuff here. So we do have a Knight of Cups shaped by the marriage of the 7/blades and the Star: serious, introspective, deep, focused, idealistic. This makes up for the lack of earth, I guess, making him somewhat “saner” than Don Quixote. 

What does the knight move toward? The Three of Wands and the Ace of Cups. I’ve written elsewhere in the blog about how spirituality can be detected in the cards through the suits and how they behave. Fiery spirituality is evangelical; watery spirituality is intuitive and fluid; airy spirituality is intellectual, theological, perhaps even scientific; earth spirituality is grounded, deep, earthy, practical. As we turn our attention to the 3/wands, we recognize how it’s “contained” by two water/cups cards. One could make the argument that this is intuition containing the evangelical, which we might take to mean the containing or capturing of fundamentalism with the fluid joy of, well, not-fundamentalism. And that might be part of it; I’m sure that most folx in the divination landscape have an eye kept firmly on the “religious” right and its fundie bullshit. I think, though, that I read this trio a little differently. I read fire here, evangelism, as “activating.” How I land there is that threes are expansive, as we know; fire, of course, hot and alive. Spirituality activates intuitive spirituality. 

I’ll use myself as an example, because it’s all I’ve got. I have actively kept spirituality out of my divination. There are many reasons, not the least of which is the damage that Christianity did to me in my childhood. It still worked. Quite well. And in fact, the further I took divination away from spirituality, the better I got at it. My readings became clearer, more useful, more satisfying; my interpretation process went from stress to delight. I went from kinda liking reading and being kinda good at it, to loving reading and looking forward to doing it. And that worked for me. And it worked for the clients I eventually began booking. And now it’s not enough. Neither I think for me or my clients. I have, as I’ve also hinted at here, been on a more active spiritual journey lately, and I absolutely have seen similar in the questions I’m getting. 

One might say, and this is odd to think given that my first book was called Tarot on Earth, that I was a pretty watery reader. By this I mean the spiritual connection was all intuitive and unseen, if it was there at all (I think now it was and I couldn’t see it). My readings weren’t activated by spirituality; they were activated by . . . I’m not really sure what, because I didn’t hold any particularly solid view of why tarot worked. It just did and I liked that. I would have said I was airy, but I think there’s something about water that’s innately trusting and doesn’t think too much about things. And that’s weirdly how I handled my understanding of how to read, if not the way I actually interpreted readings. If that makes sense. 

But of late the call to activate my work with some deeper meaning has been there and while it’s not about changing how I read, it is about changing to some degree the things I’m willing to read about. It’s also guiding my own continuing education. My focus is and will continue to be on ways of bringing more ethical spiritual support to my clients when and if they ask for it. I’m not, I want to be very clear, interested in people who try to foist their own spiritual shit on others, regardless of whether it’s “Christian” or not. When people want spiritual guidance from me, I want to be able to provide it. But only under that condition. For example, I’ve had clients ask me if I do any kind of blessings for people. That’s not something I currently offer, but it’s something that I’m exploring as something I might be comfortable with one day. 

And I think that’s the overall sorta journey of this reading. The spiritual is going to play an increasingly important and activated role in people’s divinatory work in 2025 and probably beyond. And that’s not remotely surprising to me. In fact, it makes me wonder whether I’m not simply offering up a big old pile of confirmation bias to you, except that I can see all of this in the cards. 

One thing I like to do, just to check myself, is look at the spread and see if any other combos jump out to me. So far I looked really at three sets of the cards: The Knight of Cups alone, the Knight in context of the Star and 7/blades, and the Knight in context of the 3/wands and ace/cups. Other combos worthy of exploring are the mirrored pairs, which would give us the 7/blades paired with the ace/cups and the Star paired with the 3/wands. 

Air and water have an affinity for each other, partly because what I think of as air—oxygen—is a big part of what makes water water. When we really consider (swords) what’s really important (seven) to us, we inevitably have big spiritual breakthroughs (ace/cups). 

What of the 7 of blades’ typical association with thievery and chicanery? Well, I’ve never really bought that—and that’s not what the Golden Dawn seems to have intended, anyway, which means that’s not really what PCS was drawing. The title of the card is futility, not theft. It’s doing something even though we think it won’t work, or even though it likely will not produced the desired result—or any result. Which may be what introspection and even a focus on the spiritual might seem like. “It’s futile to care about this.” But I’m of the opinion that now and for the first time in my life that our communal survival may actually depend on just that. 

The pairing of the Star and 3/wands is fun. In part because the Star is a “fire” card given that stars are, as I like to remind folx, being flaming balls of gas. We are always growing, this combo says. Why? The Star is our journey and threes expand. The fieriness of all of this, too, leads to that growth—because as long as there’s fuel, fire will grow. Whether we want to grow or not, we’re doing it; and if we’re diviners, we’re growing with the expectations of our clients or friends, because their questions are going to start moving along with the collective un/conscious. We are quite literally influenced by each other, which means that even if you’re a reader who has no desire to explore spiritual topics in your readings, you may very well find yourself getting more related questions this year than ever before. 

This is not in the cards, but I feel compelled to say it given tarot’s long association with spirituality. Whatever the history of the cards, and we are slowly finding more indications of what might have been the real history both of the deck and its use in fortune telling (see 78 Acts of Liberation by Lane Smith, and Secrets of Romani Fortune-Telling by Jezmina Von Thiele and Paulina Stevens for examples), when the hermiticists got their hands on tarot, they stole it from the every day person and coopted it for the wealthy person. To whit, they stripped it of its “fortune telling” meanings and history and wrote over that with things that only rich people had the time to care about. 

This is not the spirituality I’m talking about here. 

When I say spirituality here, I’m talking about the personal, individual connection to divinity--as well as the personal, individual participation in the collective magic of liberation. That’s a pretentious phrase. It’s important, though. Witchery or any of its sibling spiritualities, are and always have been about the marginalized. 

Marginalized is a good word. Pushed to the margins. 

Witchery and divination are tools of the margins.

And so we cannot escape into esotercism that way the moneyed men of the Golden Dawn attempted to (leading, in many cases, to massive mental health issues for some of them, by the way). And it’s temping to escape. When we discover the pure bliss of spiritual moments and the joy of truly connecting with our guides, it’s intoxicating. Real life can become even more banal and even less attractive, making us want to surrender to the spiritual entirely—like some kind of divine opium. We have to be careful of that, and we have to be careful not to fall into spiritual privilege. Whether a client wants an answer to a spiritual or a banal question, the readers’ job is always to read within the context of life. If we don’t remain connected, rooted, then we can start giving the kinds of readings that help no one—exactly the kinds of readings I so actively rebelled against years ago. 

Diviners must keep one foot in both worlds. 

The absence of earth cards in this spread does highlight a risk that I pointed out to begin with: dreaminess. We do need to guard against getting so lost in the spiritual that we do lose touch with reality—and, as a result, the ability to understand the conditions our clients operate under, and what a real person living a real life can do under real circumstances to avoid or improve them. Does that make sense? Yes to spiritual development and even welcoming more of that into the reading room; no to getting so divorced from reality that we can’t function in it or read about it. The fortune teller, alas, cannot float away. We are needed here on earth. 

And, as always, I offer you this week’s spread! I lack the energy today to demo it, but I know for certain you don’t need me to. Let me know how it goes!!

A read of one’s own

1. Where/how spirituality is already beginning to reshape my work
2. How I might bring it more fully into my work
3. how to avoid floating away
4. how to manage the banality after the high of spirituality