This week’s decks: Divine Masculine Healing Oracle by Christabel Jessica, art by Cecilia G.F.
And The Queer Crow Death Magic Tarot by Frank Duffy Arts

By now, y’all know stasis, dogma, and ruts ain’t my thing. So, yesterday, as I lay in bed considering my day, I wondered whether I should head to Mystic, CT, for a little spiritual shopping. There’s a few witch-adjacent shops in the village, there. Rather than hemming and hawing, I asked my guide, who said, “Yeah, I left something for you, there.” There were a few things, actually, but one was an oracle deck I bought at the time mostly because I found myself alone in a shop chatting with the owner and felt sorta obligated to buy? Not because of her, but because I’m codependent? Anyway, I got to the car and pulled a card: Hermes (Mercury), who had some things to say about my love affair with not having difficult conversations with people in my life (which I sometimes do and sometimes do not), but also Mercury/Hermes is a divinity I have an affinity with, because he’s the ruler of divination and writing—my bread and butter. And after a pull this morning and for a friend last night, I quickly learned this was that rare winner of an oracle deck. 

Today, when deciding whether I wanted to skip this week (I have a busy week and not a lot of NRG), I got excited by the idea of pulling a card from that oracle deck to help shape this week’s lesson—and then I remembered I haven’t used the Queer Crow Death Magic Tarot, which I got recently and adore, in a minute, so I thought I’d use them both. I asked the oracle deck, “What do these dark daddies want to tell us about divination?” Krishna showed up to say “hello!” Let me pull a phrase from the guidebook, because as soon as I read it, I thought, OH YEAH: “A stark reality is many people don’t know how to feel. Instead of being taught emotional literacy, many grow up encouraged to shut it off. Now, we have a society of adults starting from scratch.”

Woof. Woof. I mean, the book is careful (and, I think, wise) to avoid (the now-cliched) “saying the quiet part out loud.” People don’t know how to feel. But in this deck related to the divine masculine, it cannot be missed—this is men. Men are broken. And that’s kind of what I love about this deck. While all the divinities and potentates depicted span the emotional spectrum, the author focuses on the lesson of their behavior, not on emulating who they are. Krishna is beloved, so that’s not a surprise, here; but the notable hunk and gym queen Adonis is discussed as learning to love your body, the body that you have now. Not the Adonis body. 

Krishna, is speaking to feeling the feeling we feel and processing them, rather than running away from them or avoiding them. And when I saw the sentence I shared above, I thought—well, of course this is men . . . but I also thought, “well, this is of course ‘America’ . . . and we export this stuff, so . . . it’s also a lot of colonial world.”

People don’t know how to feel and they don’t know how to process their emotions. We do so, today, by filling the gap with stuff. Dopamine hunting. I’m as guilty as anyone, hence my supposedly spiritual shopping trip yesterday (the little tidbits I found were quite good, though, and one of them was a gift for my partner). Even those of us who have had therapy and attempted to work on our damn selves still find the impact of the national global immaturity of grown-ass adults poisonous—so poisonous, in fact, that we, too, frequently get lost in our feelings and don’t know how to process them. 

The Krishna card suggests experiencing the experience without judgment, just as he had to do when he was shot by a hunter, Jara, in his heel. Krishna blesses and obsolves Jara before he dies and returns to immortality. Talk about emotional maturity. 

Where oracle cards frequently fall down for me is that the advice--process your emotions and grow the fuck up—is good, but . . . how the fuck does one do it? And this is where tarot comes into play. I don’t typically mix media, as it were, but I rarely use oracle cards alone. And this is a tarot blog, after all, so it made sense. I just drew three cards, partly to keep this short because I have a busy week. We’ll see how terse I can keep this. From the tarot I drew Page of Cups, Seven of Swords, Five of Swords.

While I drew the center card, the 7/swords, first and placed the others on either side, I’m going to begin on the left because this is a lovely tie in to the oracle card—not just because of Krishna’s rich, glorious blue. What I love so much about this deck, what makes my heart sing so much when working with it, is the images are glorious distillations of ideas. And this page/cups is such a one. Like Narcissus (another card in the oracle deck, incidentally—exploring self-love v. narcissism, of course) this page watches themself cry into their own tears. I think of a story Shirley MacLaine told about Liz Taylor, and how she could make a single tear drop fall from her eye and into, like, a glass of champagne or something. Killed me. So theatrical, no performative. But still, somehow, so satisfying?

Have you ever watched yourself cry in a mirror? I haven’t because I honestly, and I hate this, have some biological disposition not to cry. I can heave, but not cry. I haven’t cried in, oh, I think the last time was at the funeral of a friend’s mother in high school? And I think it was a lot to do with my poor friend’s experience of loss. (I’ve cried on stage, too, but that’s Liz Taylor-style; it’s not real. I can do that, or could, like a whiz. That supposedly made me a good actor.) 

Today, I think a lot of us walk through life imagining ourselves in closeup, just like Liz did. Partly because we consume so much television and partly because we consume so much social media, we’re weirdly always observing ourselves and performing for ourselves and others. I cannot tell you how much of my day at work I spend looking at myself in the Teams meetings. Why? I don’t know. I cannot stop doing it. It makes me super self-conscious, unless I happen to think I look cute that day, in which case I’ll get distracted by the rare moment of self-regard. 

What would happen, though, if we observed not ourselves and how we LOOK feeling things . . . and shifted, instead, to observing the thing felt and where it comes from.

Humans are naturally curious, like pages. We can also be super vain. And I think there’s a page-like quality to that. Pages are interested in everything, including themselves. (Have you ever observed yourself masturbating in a mirror? I have. In my teens. Curiosity.) So, there’s an inevitable kind of navel-gazing that will happen with the curious. And there’s nothing wrong with that, if we can have the perspective to see the correct thing.

And now we move away from emotion—cups—to two swords cards! Two odd-numbered swords cards, the seven and the five. And these are perfect for this reading! Let’s start with the seven: the sevens ask us to look (perceive, swords) within. Sevens are rather swordsy numbers in my book, because they are so much about perceiving our reality within the realm of the suit they cover and the reading they’re in. But the 7/swords is the swordsiest. (“Charlie Brown, of all the Charlie Browns in the world . . . you’re the Charlie Browniest!”) 

The card is telling us to look deeper. Look through the single tear rolling down our beautifully-lit cheek. Where does the tear come from? Why? 

And the Five of Swords says, “it’s probably gonna be because of some of the tough stuff. This is probably the kind of thing that you’d rather pretend isn’t there, which is why you want to avoid the emotions to begin with.”

The page invites us to be curious about emotions; the swords cards advise us to be ruthless and not settle just on the silver screen surface of things. And divination can help us do that. But it ain’t easy. Some of us can be ruthless with ourselves—sometimes much too much, in ways that aren’t curious and aren’t about study, but are about rehashing the work of our bullies. Other people, because—to the point of the author of the guidebook for the oracle deck—is that a lotta muthafuckas out here are emotionally immature. They can’t. They lack the ability to self-reflect!

So . . . . we need readers to do this for us. 

Yay!

When I began reading, the ability of a reader to be more objective than a client about their own lives was touted as one of the main values of the cards. (Since, of course, we weren’t “allowed” to be fortune tellers.) The ability to reflect the client back to themselves is something I haven’t thought much about int he last ten or so years, primarily because the journey I’ve been on has had a lot to do with de-psychological-izing tarot. Mostly in reaction to the heavily psychological bent it had when I began learning. I’ve said it before, I’m not a psychologist so I feel more comfortable reading fortunes than analyzing something. That said, I think one of the most helpful, most important things we can do for anyone--not just as diviners, as human beings—is reflect people’s behavior back to themselves. 

In the new book (The Modern Fortune Teller’s Field Guide, October 2025 from Crossed Crow Books. Available for pre-order now. Contact me if you pre-order from a Black or Queer-owned bookseller—or if you are a Black or queer-owned bookseller and want to stock it, I’ve got a thank you for you, too. Wink.), I talk a lot about why reflective readings—meaning readings that reflect the client back to themselves—are so fucking helpful. So I’m not gonna give you the whole story, here, but I will say this: People respond way better to seeing themselves than they do to almost anything else. Because when we look in that mirror and we see the big ol’ booger hangin’ outta our nose? We get a fucking tissue.

It is possible that this is the most important kind of reading you can do. 

Show people how they feel and why. 
Then they can figure out what to do, next. 

Maybe this is a good thing to do when someone doesn’t know what they want a reading about! Start with a reading about what they’re feeling and why, and then, if you need to, do an expansion. 

Thank you, Lord Krishna! Jai Shri Krishna!        

A read of one’s own
This is it, kids—just what we just said: Do a reading for yourself (or, better yet, trade): Reflect what I feel right now—and why. Then spend a good, long time journaling about it.

Happy week, friends. 
See you soon!
​
tb.

(Quick note on this week’s deck. The Shadowscapes Tarot by Stephanie Law is one of the all time most stunning decks and is perhaps the reason I got back int tarot after a protracted break. I adore it.)

I thought it would be fun to play around with houses this week, like we do in Lenormand and also in astrology. Probably because astrology is much on my mind, since I’m doing a “decan walk” with Healing Burnout with Tarot and Astrology by Jackie Hope. In fact, I just finished writing the astrological associations of the cards on a few of my favorite decks so that I could see the decans as I work with clients. This time, I used my familiar arc of five, but gave it a second row. I’m now calling this a chevron. And the bottom row of cards can act as houses for the top row, but the top row can act as houses for the bottom row—and both can be paired with their mirrors and each other! How fun!

What’s also fun is my guy showed up first. The Devil! In the house of The Tower! and the Tower, conversely, in the house of the Devil. This is an erotic beginning, and it’s got a lot of big daddy energy given Mars and Capricorn. The Devil and Cap are one of the rare associations that make total sense to me. We know, of course, that the horned god of old is not necessarily the “Christian Devil,” but in associating the two, we enjoy rather a fun irony: Christianity taught us how to be witches by inventing our dark daddy. And at the center of this reading, we have the explosive sexuality—the liberation—that comes from welcoming him into your world. 

Sounds like I’m a bit of a Satanist, no? I’m not. Satanism is in fact a non-dogmatic, non-religious, fairly anti-magic way of approaching the world—sometimes with a fundamentalism of its own—that poopoos the idea that anything spiritual (Christian, Witchery, or otherwise) exists. It’s a fancy sorta nihilism, which I’m not necessarily immune to, but is not what I’m talking about when I’m talking about my guy, here. 

It’s worth noting that I tend to use the pronoun he when referring to this character, but that’s because that’s my relationship with this icon. You can and will find other things in this character and they/she/he are all valid, because the idea—the icon—represents essentially all that Christianity reviles: joy, sex, anti-patriarchy, queerness, anti-colonialism, divination, witchery, freedom, liberation, self-empowerment, community—the whole nine. When I talk about the Devil in my readings and in my spiritual practice, what I’m talking about is the seductive lure of what we do—readings, witchery, whatever it is we practice—as well as the love and tenderness that comes from this “evil” presence who understands us exactly as we are, who loves us for our flaws--and our desire to overcome them—and who understands our kinks, fetishes, what we really want, and why. He digs those things about us. And he’ll hold our hand while we go for the journey into them, which, I have found, is where unlocking our insecurities and self-esteem lives. He shows us how to love ourselves exactly for who and what we are and yearn to be, not for who and what society thinks is correct for us. 

That’s really what divination is for, too, when we think about it. We’re all trying to become the version of ourselves that is most us--that we love most, that we enjoy most, that we’re proud of and enjoy. And we, or many of us anyway, have to fight through the things that we’re taught about ourselves in order to make us fit into to the world at large. It’s amazing how early this starts happening. I think I’ve told this story before, but I was at a writing workshop many years ago at SUNY Stonybrook on Long Island. The children’s author and illustrator Peter Reynolds sat on one of the panels. He told a story about how he goes into schools all the time to talk about his books and his work, and he’ll always ask classes, “Who can draw?” He said in early grades, every kid raises their hand. But by the time we get into the early-middle grades, everyone points to the kid who’s an “artist.” We start getting told what we are well before we even understand what that means. 

Or, maybe even worse . . . we don’t. Or what we learn, instead, is that we’re a faggot, a piece a shit, a fatty, a foreigner, a [insert any of the shit kids call each other, and teachers and parents allow them to call each other, here]. We learn what we’re not: valuable, lovable, talented, smart, beautiful, worthy. And what we are . . . ? Well, we’re on our own, but since we’re not valuable, it doesn’t really matter. We are merely stepping stones for the kids who matter to run over and bully on their way to the top. 

The Devil, paired with his neighbor The Tower, begin the reading by saying that we are not what other people call us—but we can sure as fuck use people’s impressions of our valuelessness to our advantage. If we think of the Devil in the house of the Tower, we’re definitely getting dark daddy vibes (which is one of many nicknames I’ve given my man). We’re getting an explosive lover, a revelatory peek into who we are at our most essential, at our most core, at who we would be if we hadn’t been traumatized by “society” and its “expectations.” The Tower in the house of the Devil gives us a darkly satisfying method of destroying the patriarchy: by using its own tools against it. (That’s a heady idea I can’t fully develop here, but there’s something in it.)

Because this is a blog about tarot, it’s lovely to note that this is one of the things I believe are core to our work as diviners. Camelia Elias, who I’ve been vocal about having a major influence on my way of thinking about what we do, calls her style “reading like the devil.” That used to scare that fuck out of me! I had in my head still the fear of the devil thanks to my upbringing. But now I get what she means—or, rather, I get my version of what she means. That’s necessary to point out. I’ve borrowed from her the phrase “the cards don’t mean anything” and then gone on to interpret what I think she’s saying. It’s the same, here, with this phrase. And, no, I won’t be appropriating that from her beyond this post—but it does factor, here: reading like the devil means showing people exactly who they are, exactly the way they need to see it in the clearest, most impactful way possible.

I started by talking about the decans and at the time I’m writing this, we’re in the first decan of Aries—the first roughly ten days of the sign of Aries, which is the astrological new year. Aries is ruled by Mars as is the first decan of the sign, and so we get a very martial energy right here, right now—both in the time we’re living in and in the Tower card. My friend and I were talking about Mars yesterday, because she was born in the first decan of Aries and was feeling salty about Mars and its kind of toxic masculinity. And I proffered that Mars’s toxicity isn’t innate to the planet; it’s innate to our society. Mars doesn’t have to be toxic masculinity. It just has been because we have such a shitty relationship to masculinity and have had since at least Christianity, but of course the Greek myths tell us that even the Christians didn’t invent that particular poison. 

We need Mars’s energy. We need the impulse, the action, the blast, and the ejaculation. None of this need be exclusively penile. A powerful orgasm is a powerful orgasm, regardless of whose body experiences it. Yes, AFAB bodies typically experience more intense orgasms, but if you’ve never had an AFAB experience, than you’ll never know how much more powerful our orgasms might have been.

Sometimes readings need to be devilish. In this case, I, again, adopt my own version of what that means: My experience with the Witch Daddy is exceptionally loving. But he’s honest with me. He has talked me down from panic attacks, but he’s also let me sit in my tantrums because he told me to eat some fucking lunch and I didn’t feel like stopping what I was doing and so my blood sugar dropped and I’m being a bitch for no reason. He tells me the truth. Sometimes the truth is that I’m beautiful; sometimes it’s that I’m being lazy. But he always does so with the kind of generosity of spirit that a good daddy (not a father, we’re definitely in the realm of kink, here) would. And I think that’s the tone a lot of readers should aim for, too.

It’s the tone I aim for. Where I perhaps diverge from Camelia Elias is her brave willingness to say what needs to be said, regardless of whether or not the client is ready for it. I have a tendency to hedge my bets somewhat, which isn’t always a good thing. People find in that a tendency to negotiate with the answer. (“Ok, but you’re saying he could come back at some point, right?” “No, Diva Cup. He’s gone.”) But I also recognize that sometimes people can’t hear an answer they aren’t ready for, and so I try, where I can, to temper justice with mercy and deliver the reading in an honest way, but that leaves room for people to sort out their shit on their own. If I say, “this relationship is hurting you and you need to get out” I might be telling the truth, but I also might be saying something that will make the client dig in their heels and become even more dedicated to the relationship than they were before the reading. Humans are complex, that way. 

Expanding out a little (and see how much we can get with just two cards?), we’ve got the Hierophant in the house of the Sun (and, conversely, the Sun in the House of the Hiero), as well as the Six of Wands in the house of the Two of Pentacles (and vise-versa). The Hierophant is perfectly set up to act as all of those things the devil is anti: the shame, the gatekeeping, the pressure to be “correct,” etc., and the Sun highlights the ways in which this institutionalized bullying is accepted and acceptable. We live under the scorching heat of these expectations, and, to a degree, these expectations create a scorching heat for us that we can’t actually endure. We’re being asked to bend ourselves into shapes we were never meant to dance into and that’s not healthy. The 6/wands and 2/pentacles, on the other hand, suggests a major sense of breaking through. Both cards are associated with Jupiter, the planet of expansion and bigness. The Jupiterian nature of growing breaks the chains of expectations. The 2/pentacles connects to the Devil because it’s also associated with Cap, so there’s that big GOAT (greatest of all time) energy, again; and a resilience and ability to make oneself comfortable in any environment (think of how mountain goats seem shockingly comfortable and safe wherever they go, including the sheer side of a mountain). The 6/wands is connected to Leo, the sign of owning our gifts. The astrological combination suggests that doing what we do best (Leo and the Devil) is in fact the way to smash through (Jupiter) the Hiero’s bullshit. But the cards themselves also suggest that victor (6/wands) comes in part from being attracted to our own lives (2/pentacles—twos attract, pentacles suggest “life”) and, I’ll go out on a limb here, stopping the juggle we typically see on this card. (Why do I get to say this character is ending their juggle? Cuz it feels right to me.)

What’s interesting to me is that the bigness of the cards on the left (the Hiero and Sun) seems to overpower the smallness of the minors on the right—but in that comparison is the lovely elegance of what this reading seems to be saying: getting out of this bullshit actually isn’t a big, scary task. It’s simply . . . being ourselves. That ain’t easy, not by a long shot, but it’s not something that has to be endured. Becoming ourselves is quite enjoyable, in fact. the solution is simple, even if the doing of it involves the Devil and the Tower. 

On the far left, we have two pages: the Page of Wands and of Cups. Fire and water. Pages don’t get astrological associations. They’re fully elemental. It is said, by the esotericists, that they rule their elements. I tend to associate pages with air. Because pages learn, they’re airy. And they’re messengers, which is also airy. This would make it such that we’re looking at airy fire and airy water. Air is a boon to both those elements, because air (oxygen) is fuel to fire and water needs aeration for it to remain potable and healthy. Air is also curious, which is anther reason it makes sense for them to be pages. All of this suggests that we be foundationally curious about ourselves, about what we really are deep down—in particular in the realm of magic/spirituality/witchery, whatever you want to call it, because the combination of fire and water (and air) suggests these aspects of our lives, and the context of this reading (divination) demands it. 

On the other side of the spread, we’ve got the Queen of Wands and Judgment. The rest of the courts don’t get typical astrological associations, like the other minors; they represent, or “rule” three decans—but never the three decans of the same sign. They’re off-center. The q/wands rules the third decan of Pisces and the first and second decan of Aries (which is where we are now!—no time like the present, kids). Judgment is associated with the element of air, much like my pages—so we’ve got an air/fire combo here, with implications of strong belief (pisces) and that same connection to Mars’s energy (Aries). 

Queens are the master of their suit, the represent the highest achievement of their element. (Kings don’t; they represent having achieved and now reaching into sage or emeritus mode—queens, on the other hand, are doing the achievement as we speak, so to speak). The full embodiment of creative, powerful, gleeful, joyful force brings us to a great awakening in ourselves. The air of Judgment floods the fire with oxygen, making a gorgeous flare up of gifts—of talents—that makes us feel like the bad-ass the Queen of Wands suggests. (Despite the decanic associations of the q/wands, I typically associate the card with Leo. This is because I have a deck that I’ve had since my very earliest days with tarot that labeled her that way. As such, it’s always in my mind even if it’s not on the cards.) 

Remember, too, though that the Judgement card is sitting in the house of the queen as much as she sits in the house of judgement (there’s a title for something, right??). This is a queen-of-wandsy kind of awakening. A coming into one’s own bad-assery. Which, I can tell you having experienced the very early stages of this, can be quite intoxicating. (As can developing a relationship with the Witch Lord, or whatever you want to call he/them/she.) It is a mastery of self, and opening to our own power—and one done with fiery and devoted ferocity and curiosity (the pages mirroring on the other side) that gives us this awakening. Thus, curiosity about ourselves and who we are at our most essential is one of the ways we shitcan the bullshit way we’ve been colonized by crap and how to free ourselves of it.

What does this have to do with being a tarot reader? 

At the oracle of Delphi, the words Know thyself were emblazoned for folks to consider. I think this suggests that divination is, for the client, an act of knowing ourselves. But I think beyond that is an instruction to the diviner--to the reader. Know who you are, what you believe, what you do; know what you’re excellent at and what you’ve been convinced you’re not good at based on other people’s fuckery. We have to know ourselves well, I think, in order to reach the kinds of divination that many of us long for. 

This makes sense, although it’s not something many people want to face. We want to be good at everything right away and don’t want to deal with the fact that sometimes it takes a while—a while of getting over our own crap—before we can really do that. To imply that we can’t be good readers until we really know ourselves implies that we can’t get good at this without years of therapy and counseling and other healing. And, in fact, that’s not at all reality. I and many other readers were good at this work well before we really knew ourselves. But we also had to get over a lot of crap before we felt that way. Even if the crap was just the fact that tarot reading is Satanic or evil, as was the case with me—to say nothing of the feelings of worthlessness that I’ve struggled with basically since entering school for the first time. Maybe it’s partly that we need to get over our old crap before we know we’re good readers?

You can be a good reader without that self knowledge. But you can’t break free and into the devil’s world—you can’t, to again steal from Camelia Elias, “read like the devil”—until you begin unpacking your own relationship to him/she/they, and what the Hiero has taught you about yourself, the true and untrue, the imagined and real and toxic. 

Know yourself. And you will be a better reader simply in the process of learning. You will find your readings getting better because you will not only understand the cards differently—you’ll be less concerned with what other people think about them, for example—but you’ll also start understanding the world differently, and the many ways in which it abuses so many of us. 

To be a good reader, we have to see the world clearly. The more we do that, the better a reader we’ll be. And we can’t really see what the world does to people until we see what it has done to us. The major risk, here, is that many people (particularly people of privilege) assume that what the world did to them is the same at what it did to everyone else, and that’s simply not true. To put this into context, I was leading an anti-harassment training at work this week and the topic of privilege came up. I heard one of the complaints that people are too sensitive and “If I survived, you should be able to do that, too. Just get over it.” 

I turned to the group and I said, “Let me tell you something about myself that might not make sense at first: Every time I walk into a room full of what I assume to be are straight men, I have to change everything about how I act. I butch it up, I change my word choice, I try to lower my voice an octave, and I curtail my snark. I do this because life has taught me that straight men will beat me up if they see me the way I really am outside of their company. Who in this room has ever had to do that?” No one raised their hand. “That,” I said, “is privilege. You don’t have to do that and I do.”

“But you don’t have to do that,” someone said. “No one here is going to hurt you.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but how do I know that? Because my life experience has taught me differently.” I have walked into rooms—or public parks—full of men and gotten my ass kicked for being a queer. Femme. Dangerous. I had to spend my entire childhood protecting every single person I knew from the threat of my femme-ass behavior, even though I was the one who was really in danger. If you didn’t have to do that, that’s privilege. That doesn’t mean I’ve had it harder than everyone. I don’t know what it’s like to have my work devalued because I’m a woman or because I’m Black or because I speak English as a second language (which should be a badge of honor, given what a fucking insane language this is), etc. So there are other ways in which I do have privilege. But that’s the point. We have to understand that our unearned advantages and our lack of privilege are all dependent on a lot of things. And if (white) people (primarily) would get their heads out of their asses and realize that we all have advantages and disadvantages that come from being who we are, than we could go about the business of making life easier for everybody--rather than doing this incel/right wing “Christian”/man bullshit of expecting everyone kiss our asses and continue to make our lives easier at the cost of everyone else. 

Anyway, we have to be able to see in ourselves both the good and the bad in order to understand our relationship to the world and to our unearned and earned advantages and our unearned disadvantages. And we have to, then, begin to unpack that everyone has them—but they are completely different for everyone, too. Being able to see that makes us better readers, too.


A read of one’s own
 ​What do you need to know about yourself? What gifts have you hidden or let remain unused? What influence can the Dark Daddy have on your readings? Do readings on all of these. But please note that the first question—that’s really tough to read about, because if we could easily find the answer we could have done it already. This is a good week to exchange readings with someone else!!

Hope to see you soon. Happy Aries season!
​TB

(Some) Modern astrologers point out how the Mercury retrograde was never a big deal in the past and that it’s really the fear-mongering of modern life that makes us freak out about them. But I don’t think that’s the full story. These periods may not have been a big deal prior to widespread travel and technology—two areas Mercury influences—which is why people didn’t notice them. But because we live in a “global” world and we’re at the mercy of technology, they’re more apparent now. Life is not static. And the things that divination covers will reflect that. Which means there may have been a time when it was not cool to read about certain things and then there are times where what was uncool becomes cool. I’ve written a lot about how the 1990s and the years prior were kind of a weird one for tarot. It’s where we got the “tarot isn’t fortune telling” nonsense that’s so common. Frankly, “tarot isn’t for fortune telling” is a privileged POV. It associates fortune telling with fraud. Of course it’s supposed to. Fortune telling was a survival job for many people in the colonized world, especially for people who had been forced to the margins. 

Today, that’s changing—and that’s good. But it signals an interesting reality. What tarot was twenty years ago is different than what it was a hundred years ago, and different from a hundred years before that. A hundred years from now, if there are still people on this planet—and that’s looking increasingly less likely given our refusal to do anything about climate catastrophe, it will look different again. And maybe once the grid goes down forever and all the technology we rely on becomes obsolete because we no longer can run it, Mercury retrograde will once again be a relatively meaningless time period. Perhaps something else will takes its place. We live in warring times. Maybe Mars retrogrades will become the one everyone dreads. Who knows?

Point being: things change, and we can’t stay stuck in the past. We can’t read the cards now as we did twenty years ago because those times are dead and gone. We have to remain agile. We have to grow and evolve. And we also have to understand that people’s perceptions form their reality. Which means that if someone attuned to the cycles of the sky notices that life gets more difficult during a certain retro, it doesn’t matter whether or not Mercury retros are “meaningful” or not. They’re meaningful to the client, which means they’re meaningful to us. And, again, I’m someone who is uniquely impacted by those times, or I seem to be. I’m obviously biased. But that doesn’t mean I’m also not correct. 

Given all that, I’m going to focus today’s reading on the idea of an evolving divination journey for all of us—in this case, for tarot itself. I’ve set this up as, “share with me what tarot was and what is now and where it’s going.” To do this, I’ve drawn three cards to represent each of those times—and I’ve followed each of those cards with a “bridge” card that describes the evolution. So, in total, I have six cards. Three time cards and three bridge cards, though the final bridge isn’t connected to anything—it will tell us how we’re moving in the direction we’re moving in.

For this reading I’ve chosen the Queer Crow Death Magic Tarot by Frank Duffy Arts. You can see my review on YouTube. I adore it. Here’s what we landed on: What tarot was: Four of Wands; Bridge, Queen of Swords; Where it is now, Five of Wands; bridge, Knight of Wands; Where it’s going: Ace of Pentacles; bridge, Four of Pentacles.

This is a fascinating mix and I have to comment on the total lack of majors. Sometimes the absence of majors means nothing; sometimes, something. Here I think it says, “this is interesting but finally unimportant. It has always been and always be meaningless, because ultimately it doesn’t much matter.” But, hey, I’m also in a shitty mood, so it could be me reading into that. As I always say, the reader isn’t the reading—but we sure as hell are part of it. Anyway, the appearance of court cards as two of the bridges is interesting, as is the interplay of the elements. Lots of fire and pentacles, no cups (interestingly, the suit of “intuition” is missing), one sword, and of course no majors. We also start and end with a four, but we move from fire to earth. As always, I don’t know what (if anything) any of this means; I do know, though, that this is always how I begin readings. By noticing these kinds of things. We might also notice the orangey quality of the spread, which permeates even the pentacles card that winds us up—and even in the ombre or gradation of the ace. 

In this case, the 4/wands suggests that tarot used to be pretty much what it was thought to be: what you see is what you get. How did I arrive there? The stability of the four and the nature of fire. When fire is behaving as expected, it’s easy to manage and difficult to get too concerned about. A candle, fireplace, or hibachi are all examples of fire under four’s influence: stable, controlled, useful. Nobody fought (fire) about it, because it simply was what it was. Tarot was tarot, and to a degree everyone’s perception was the reality. Probably because no one was thinking too much about it. 

All that changes with the arrival of the Queen of Swords. I cannot help but cast this card as the esotericists. The thinky thinkers of divination, with their love affair of hierarchy (queen) and gatekeeping. We had to master the art (and it became an art, and art is something that I think is quite connected to queens—particularly the idea of mastered artistry, because the queens tend to exemplify the “industry” of their suit at its most productive and effective. Queens, to me, are like the CEO. (The King, then, becomes the board of directors and/or CEO emeritus, so to speak. The retired expert—whether that king was able to retire at thirty thanks to shorting the housing market, or at 100 because they never had the chance to sit down). We overthought it. And we had to make it into some. thing. That’s not at typo. Some. Thing. It had to become a some-thing, rather than simply being what it was. 

This feels post-modern. I think that prior to academia being a major influence on the lives of the middle class, people probably didn’t theorize too much. But the Queen of Swords is for sure a master theorizer. And this feels very much like the representation of Etteilla, as well as Lévi, and the Golden Dawners. Which takes us to the current state of tarot, the 5/wands: something to fight passionately and disagree over, to reconstruct, fux with, and fuck with. None of this is inherently good or bad. As an Aquarius rising, I quite love the idea of both fucking with shit and also shit being something we fucks with, as it were. Actually, tacit acceptance of unconsidered norms is one reason why white supremacy is such an innate way of thinking for a lot of people—not just white ones. It’s just so “normal” that it’s hard not to fall into, unless we actively make the effort. Even then, the effort is constant. So I’m a believer in questioning every norm, no matter how . . . “normal” it seems. 

Passionate disagreement is good up to the point it’s weaponized, which is another trend in modern life. We cannot disagree; we must duel. And that’s necessary in many cases, particularly where people of privilege and power and using that to marginalize people they disagree with. Let’s be totally frank, here: the so-called US is a country that criminalizes marginalization, the same marginalization that is caused by this being a white supremacist country. It’s abuse. Anyone who doesn’t fit the “american” mold is villainized, and then that villainy is criminalized. And, guess what? That’s exactly where divination landed in the colonized world. Survival jobs. Secrets of Romani Fortune Telling by Paulina Stevens and Jezmina Von Thiele does an excellent job telling the story of divination as a survival job, obviously within a particular community—but a community that is still out in the world and navigating a difficult relationship to fortune telling and cartomancy as a result. And it’s still happening today. (These days survival jobs are minimum wage gigs that require someone to work three or four of them—without insurance or child care—in order to make basic payments to live. We haven’t changed that much.)

But as long as we’re not being abusive, it’s quite cool to disagree on tarot. We learn a lot from each other when we disagree over low-stakes shit. You never have aha moments when you’re surrounded by info you already knew and accepted as true. And, while there has been a lot of shitty politicking and gatekeeping in our community in the last, oh, since the beginning of time, we really should enjoy disagreeing on what tarot is and does. It should not be dogmatic. And when we get into those fun exploratory, experimental conversations, we can learn a fuck-ton of new stuff. 

Now, we look at where tarot is heading and our bridge is the Knight of Wands. The last wands card in the spread, but also the most active. Tarot is running, without looking back, straight into its own future—which makes complete and total sense for a fortune-telling tool, no? Of course tarot would embrace the evolution of being, of the inevitable changes we must all encounter and experience. It is fully into that and has no qualms, which, really, is quite nice and exactly how we should approach the experience of being a student. That said, the knight/wands can be somewhat headstrong, not very thoughtful, and somewhat careless in its approach. It runs headlong into a burning building to save the TV without a sense that their own life might be more important. But, hey, this is tarot, not a burning building—so I think we’re OK.

The next pair tells us where tarot is going and how. And we switch totally from fire to earth, but we get another four in the mix. First, though, the Ace. 

I sometimes find aces frustrating, but not because of the card itself; because of what it represents: the amoebic, fetal shape of things. An ace is an embryo, not an entire being; it is forming, becoming, turning into itself—but it’s not itself, not quite yet. It’s the idea of itself, but not the thing quite yet. And of course, for our purposes, it says that in some ways it’s too soon to tell what tarot will become. But whatever it is, it will be firmly rooted in the world (earth) of its time; it has to be. That is, after all, what it’s for. And the 4/pentacles suggests that it will survive, as it always has, because it is so much itself. Again, that four is really honing in potency of selfhood. It knows what it is, and if it’s less sexy (fire) in the future, that may be because the need for it to be incendiary changes. Actually, this reflects my own journey with the cards: from spiritual tool (blech) to practical magic (yay)! and now, a blend. 

The blending mode is something not talked much about in tarot, but it’s a part of the pentacles because they represent all the elements. So inherent in a pentacles card (and, so, inherent in the pentacles’ siblings in other decks—disks, coins, etc.) is the whisper of all the other elements, too. So it is a blend. In the way that Temperance is supposed to represent the alchemical blending of opposites, the pentacle represents the weaving together of disparate parts of life into a unified hole.

In essence, tarot will be and do whatever we need it to do—as it has always done, and as it will always do. Because that is its nature: amendable, agile, adaptable, and affective. Affective, not effective; it picks up the affects of its time, place, and practitioners. (But it’s also effective, too, or none of us would be here talking about it.)

To sum up, then, tarot sort of always will be what it’s always been: a tool that adapts to the needs of its users, given the state of the world at the time its being used. It will countenance psychology, spirituality, and banality; it will accept fortune telling and self-exploration. The only thing I don’t think it will accept being is a tool of the oppressor. Divination, like witchery, is a tool of the marginalized. When it is used to oppress, it turns on itself and becomes useless. Not because it has lost its use, but instead because anything liberation-centered (and divination is a tool of the people who need liberation: women; marginalized ethnicities and races; nations and communities; witches, people of global majority; etc.) that is used to oppress immediately cancels itself out. But that’s kind of a heady idea I don’t have fully fleshed out, yet, so I won’t waste too much word count on that. In essence, I guess, you can’t free people with handcuffs, so you can’t imprison people with a key. Tarot is the key. Tarot helps us know, and to quote the old TV PSA, knowing is half the battle. We can’t un-know once we know, and tarot will always provide knowing—which means it is anti-oppressive, even when used by oppressors. Wow, hunh? Come for the tarot, stay for the pretentious, inscrutable mind-benders. Bonus!

Anyway, point is: tarot is both always what it always was and will be, and is concurrently always changing and becoming something new—something to fit its times. Which is a great way to highlight dialectics, a term that is somewhat pretentious, too, but that is super helpful in modern life: the idea that two seemingly opposing ideas can be true at the same time without canceling the other out. Cool, right? Divination is such a process of dialectics, such a mass of conflicting and true things, that it’s helpful for us as readers to ponder the bigness of that. But it’s also important for managing to get through the day, lately, because so much of what we’re living through both seems utterly impossible and totally inevitable at the same time. 

A read of one’s own
Where have you been, where are you going, and where are you now? Let’s recreate this spread for ourselves. Here’s a super quick example for you, with the question for this week’s spread: “What was tarot for me when I started, what is it now, and what will be be in the future?” 

Fascinating. 
What was tarot to me: 9/swords; bridge, Queen of Wands
What is tarot for me: 10/swords; bridge, 8/penties
Where is tarot going for me: Emperor; bridge, 8/swords

The 9/swords is fascinating for a few reasons. I don’t talk about nines as obsession much, but the eight, nine, and ten of swords (really, of all suits) do contain obsessive elements. They are “all in” on themselves. They often have a core of labor, effort, pushing, striving; they’re difficult, because we know the finish line is in store, but we can’t get there quite yet. This pushing typically leads to burnout, which is why I think of the nines as burnout cards. They represent that state of everything just being too much and having to work too hard to get where we’re going. Which is very much how I approached my learning—exactly the opposite, incidentally, of what I tell students to do today. And I did get burned out and I did give it up. 

But nines, like all numbers, aren’t all bad—and there’s an effusion in nines. They can be construed as negative because they can be “too much” — and there’s are times when too much of a good thing is wonderful, and times where it’s really just too much. For me, it was both. But there was an expect of me that really kept the tarot at bay. It was never the thing I was supposed to be doing; it was a hobby that I enjoyed, but that wasn’t my main mission. And swords can be a little stand-offish, too; they’re somewhat cerebral, and they make me think of my own neurodiversity and the ways in which I can sometimes feel overwhelmed by things that want too much from me. (It’s a problem, particularly in my relationships [romantic and otherwise]—not that I’d never admit that publicly, of course. 🤫)

The bridge between where I started and where I am now is the queen/wands. To have one card stand in for what is the entirety of my reading “career” (25+ years) is kinda silly, but it is interesting that we have another queen filling that spot—just like the queen/swords did, above. The Queen of Fire, in this case, suggests to me an embracing of the fire within, the fire of divination—the centrality (queen, as both expert but also as foci) of the tarot to my being. To my life, and the fire it creates within me. This is quite true and in fact represents really well the transition from the flame of my interest from what I thought I needed to be doing (not tarot) to what I should be doing (tarot, apparently). And so this makes a lot of sense to me. 

What fascinates me are the seemingly negative cards that make up a lot of the rest of the reading. Looks like I’m fucked! 

The 10/swords, as where I am now, doesn’t actually feel negative to me. In fact, the skull here isn’t representative of death at all. No, it’s much more literally the head. My head is full of tarot! Which it is! I think of it when I wake, I think of it as I go to sleep, and I think about it throughout the day. My skull, my noggin, is full (10) of thinking (swords) about this art. It really has become a consuming aspect, and not in a negative way. What it has done, in fact, is filled in the negative space in my life left by the theatre. And it was more than eager to do that, which I think is another sign I know that I was avoiding something that really wanted me. Now, I want it equally—and then appearance of the 8/pentacles as the bridge suggests a sort of bee-like humming along, happily working on a thing that feels quite natural. Fair, true, lovely. And I like this as a way of describing my journey, because it’s accurate—but also because it suggests kind of an ease and naturalness that’s comforting and is kind of what we aspire to as readers. Just being comfortable doing the thing. 

We actually have two eights, the 8/penties and the 8/swords. More on that presently. Let’s first talk about the Emperor, which represents where tarot is headed for me. Four is of course related to eight, so that enhances the connection. A lot of people don’t like the Emperor, but I do—because, as all cards, he’s not just one thing. And so he can represent good qualities as much as negative ones, and here we get a sense of confidence and even of inevitability. Not quite to the degree that Death suggests inevitability, but I frequently talk about how kings and emperors are, to use a terrible expression, to the manor born. They are expected to be what they are, because it’s what they were always supposed to be. It’s what they were born for, what they were built for. And that’s a really nice way of looking at this card. The Empress and the Queens have to negotiate doing jobs that they are typically excluded from thanks to patriarchy, but the emperor is doing what he was always expected to do. There’s a hominess to that that’s quite exciting, and an ease, and a confidence—all of which is good. The danger, though, is in this card’s sense of entitlement. That is a risk for me, as it is for anyone who grows confident in something, and that must be avoided. The thing about the cards is that often their good and bad qualities are valuable to consider simultaneously. 

The 8/swords suggests a general ease with doing the thing—eights are work, but work we enjoy and that we fit into naturally (this is typically represented in the 8/pentacles, but this quality exists in all eights within the realm of their suit). The cage or trap that we typically see in Wait-Smith version of this card is often seen as negative, something that needs to be escaped from, but again that’s a value judgement on the card, not the card’s meaning. Anything can become a cage if we get lazy, including ease. In fact, it is when we feel comfortable that we’re most likely to get stuck in a rut. We lose the ability to want to feel the discomfort that comes from growing. And so this is both a promise and a threat: you will feel incredibly comfortable, sure, confident, and purposeful in what you do--but don’t you fucking dare get complacent or lazy, or, worst of all, arrogant. Which, as a Leo sun, is a constant struggle. 

That’s me! What about you? What did you come up with?

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