 (Note: I skipped 45 and made last week 46, so this is now 45. You’re welcome!)
I rarely read with the straight-up Waite-Smith, these days. Every once in a while I get a hankering for it, usually after a nostalgic moment thinking back on my early days, but those come increasingly less often. I have so many good decks that avoid all the things I can’t stand about this one. Even the Harris-Crowley Thoth is a constant companion in a way I never imagined--but that the W-S could never be. And yet, as I say in my forthcoming book (The Modern Fortune Teller’s Field Guide, Crossed Crow, October 2025–click the title to pro-order—you’re welcome), this deck, for many people, is tarot. And I do have a soft spot for certain editions, including this one. This would be the “pink ankh” University Press edition, which I long lusted for partly because I love that back, but mostly because it’s the one Rachel Pollack mentions using in the intro to Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom — and so, somehow, and from a very early time in my reading (I found that book the very summer I found tarot), it became sort of the ne plus ultra of W-S decks to me. Honestly . . . it’s fine. 🤣 I do love the back. And the electric boogaloo color pallet, odd as it is, tickles me. My copy retains a pretty radiant richness, despite its age—and I do think this printing is from the seventies, as the box doesn’t reference University Press, but Carol Publishing Group. Anyhoo. Having selected this deck, I now need to work with it and it is funny to see it arrayed out before me. I feel zero nostalgia for it. In fact, looking at it now I find it quite fusty. Quite . . . well, Waite. But, I do believe a reader should be able to read with any deck—even ones we’ve outgrown. (Let me say that by “outgrown,” I don’t mean that I’m now “better” than this deck; merely that my affair with it—and we had a torrid one—is over. I do not believe there are “pro” decks or “beginner” decks or anything similar. If a deck works for you, it’s a good deck. Though I do take issue with shit like the “Garbage Pail Kids Tarot” and the “Godfather Tarot,” but really more from a capitalist standpoint—if they were glorious testaments to the thing they “honor,” wonderful. But also they’re just crappy money grabs.) This is my typical cross, which I haven’t used in ages, but I’ve added sort of a “cross” card to each branch of the cross—not unlike the cross card in the center of the Celtic cross. I simply applied the idea to four of the branches, rather than the central card. These cards aren’t part of the reading in the same way, because I said so. They offer additional context to the cards they complement, but they don’t interact with any others. They might support their parent card to offer a big “but” (and I cannot lie), either way they are context not the main event. But let’s start in the middle with the four of coins. Speaking of fusty! This is such a fusty card and it’s one I really have never liked. There are many popular decks where the image on this one veers shockingly close to old anti-Jewish tropes in Europe—which should not surprise you, because Europe was and often is still rather anti-everything. I always say, the image on the card isn’t the card; it’s a value judgement of the card. The way that Smith depicts this image, we experience miserliness. This is all well and good, but what we’re protecting is very little. Fours are early on in the process. We expect this kind of behavior from a nine or a ten, not a four. But four is the first time in the sequence of the ten numbers that make up the pips where we find fustiness. This is the moment where we see, “Oh, we’ve gotten we think want! I better stop now and protect it at all costs!” Four is a super anxious number. It is terrified to let go because it doesn’t believe that it can keep anything for good. And of course it can’t. The five inevitably comes along and destroys it. But because the four held on so tight, they experience far more trauma than they would have had they taken a more Zen approach: “This is already broken, and every moment I have with it is special.” As I pan out and look at the four cards that surround the four (clockwise, King of Swords, The World, The Hierophant, Eight of Cups), I’m drawn by the aggressive, dominating vibe that sits above and below it. The combination of the King of Swords with the Hierophant makes me think of Bible thumpers who pummel the world with their “religion.” (Lemme tell you something, kids: if finding Jesus turned you into an entitled, arrogant prick who thinks they get to tell other people what to do, guess what . . . you haven’t found shit.) There’s a defensiveness to this kind of behavior. I always say that people who are sure of their faith don’t need to convert anyone. They know what they know and they get what they need. Only insecure people, people who truly do not believe, and in fact fear that deep down it’s all a lie, need to go out and proselytize. Because the only evidence they can find of their faith is when their bullying finally wears someone down into “salvation.” You know who else does that? Schoolyard assholes. Donald Trump. Colonizers. Know who never did that? Christ. Just for the record. Proselytizing is as big a sign of insecurity as a guy walking around talking about how high his body count is. When it’s real, it speaks for itself. (I guess?) Luckily, I added more cards for context. The King of Swords is contextualized by the Knight of Pentacles and the Hierophant by the Seven of Pentacles. Two more pentacles cards. Of course, they don’t interact with each other—only the cards they touch; but the fact that there are two cards, underscoring the central one, is quite cool. (For the record, I would count the additional “cross” cards in the elemental makeup of the reading, which puts this one decidedly in the Pentacles category.) This is already getting too long, sigh, so let me begin to summarize what happens by each of these being contextualized by penties: First, it suggests the meeting of spirituality and commerce, or spirituality and life. We might say that these cards (this central column) regard the idea of spiritual businesses. For example, the new diviner who believes deeply that they must set up shop and make this their business right away. But we might also step away from that depth of literalism and say, too, that it’s about the diviner who believes that the spiritual and the banal are the same thing--and the potential toxicity of the combo of the kng/swords—hiero is merely just a much more down to earth (pentacles) fervency. They really believe this. I do. Increasingly. In fact, I’ve said in this very blog that I have realized my issue with esotericism is its escapism—it’s deep desire to run from humanity. But, no: we are embodied here, like it or not, and we then have a responsibility to each other because of that. True enlightenment is finding spirit in that, as basically all ancient and indigenous cultures seem to have believed, rather than escaping from the dross of being on this planet. The goal, I think, is to leave it better than you found it, somehow; not to run away from it entirely. And there are going to be spiritual people who fervently disagree with me. They will talk about Buddhism and other paths that seem to indicate a transcendence of human being. But that, the more I read about the world, seems to be a gross misinterpretation of Buddhism, based largely on white European misunderstanding of the Asian cultures from which Buddhism emerged and then came to us. There’s a saying in Japanese Buddhism (and, I’m sure, in others) that I love: Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Being enlightened doesn’t give us license to escape life. It means that we have access to higher knowing that can help us ease the suffering of others. (It’s not lost on me that I’m writing this in the throes of my post-Reiki I+II honeymoon. Mikao Ussui, recipient of the Reiki we know today, did exactly that after his enlightenment experience.) Spirituality that is disengaged is a vacation. It is not truly connected to spirit. And I ain’t saying we don’t need vacations. But the goal of enlightenment isn’t a permanent vacation. It’s, again, to leave the world somehow better than we found it. To set ourselves on the path to being a good ancestor. That’s enlightenment. All the other shit you can find just as easily getting well and truly stoned, to be honest. Once we “get” our spirituality, we want to “keep” our spirituality. We want to hold it, as the 4/coins does, because it feels good and because—and this seems to be rather a modern thing—we then want to identify with it, so we can tell everyone this is who I am. This is why everyone and their brother ID’s as a witch on social media these days, whether or not they have any concept of what they’re actually saying about themselves. A witch is someone pushed to the margins who discovers the power there, not someone who is looking for a persecution narrative of their very own, but who doesn’t identify with “Christianity.” This should be a gut-check for all of us, by the way. When we feel excited to share our spiritual path publicly, it’s wise to pause first and ask ourselves whether we want to share the “good news” (a phrase I’m stealing from evangelicals, but that’s what it feels like—and when you do feel like something you’ve tried has helped, you want to--and should want to--spread the word . . . to people who are interested in hearing it only) or whether we want attention. There are times when we’re purely identity-signaling. Or even wealth-signaling, given how consumer-driven the witch market is getting. I’m not immune from it. I don’t share that much about my path on socials, but what I do share is shared partly to signal a certain kind of “look, I’m in the club, too!” vibe. Where I’m most guilty of this is in my sharing of lust-worthy tarot decks! That’s where my insecurity really shows! I mean, listen: I love watching a good lust-worthy deck video, but I also know that when you’ve got one of “those decks,” the thirst comments on the deck feel almost as good as actual thirst comments, so . . . sure, there’s a thing going on there. I mean, fuck! I just did it at the start of this post, didn’t I, talking about my amazing vintage find! So . . . ya know. None of us are immune from it. I guess where I’m going with this is that the advertising of our practice (versus the sharing, which is something we do when we’re too excited not to) is distracting us from our practice—so it’s not actually practice, anymore. For example, I was setting myself up to do a sound bath this afternoon and just as I’d gotten ready, I thought, Oh should I live stream this?? And then I—thankfully—thought, No, idiot—you can do things just for yourself. And I did. (And it’s a good thing I didn’t live stream, because I was embarrassingly dripping sweat the whole time because I’m not used to using a meditation stool on the floor--which I only do because I want to keep my crystal singing bowls close to the ground because they’re fragile and I’m a klutz.) Where is this reading going? Glad you asked. Focus. The Eight of Cups (contextualized by the 9/swords) and The World (contextualized by Strength) remind us that this path is a particularly spiritual one, and yes moving forward — moving at all — can be scary (8/cups+9/swords), there is vastly more exciting potential to find our ideals and ideal selves when we recognize the whole world is our oyster—as long as we don’t sit inside on a sunny day (world/strength), so to speak. Which I did not expect to write, but which is a thing I’ve been feeling myself rather deeply. I’m a boy who really feels compelled to sit inside on sunny days, these days--any days, honestly. I have zero social battery, and even seeing my lovely friends is sometimes quite difficult. And when I woke this morning and remembered I needed to write this today, I thought, “Oh, you know, perhaps I should do a reading on why I’m self-isolating so much and then use that as the blog.” But I didn’t do that, because I forgot by the time I sat down to write it. In a way, the spiritual journey—the exploration of spirituality—can be so exciting that we do want to four-of-coins our way through life: sit on a sunny days and read about all the things. But spirituality is also something that needs to be found and experienced in the world around us. It cannot be merely theoretical. It has to be put into practice. Particularly for witches who understand the power of the margins, because we also should understand that the power of the margins means that we can effect social change with our spirituality. Activated spirituality is the goal, then, and that’s what I think this reading is about. We can study all we want, but if we don’t put it into practice it’s worth nothing. (And it’s funny because this last week I was quite lazy about my Reiki self practice and this morning I finally made myself to do it and instantly felt better—so clearly this is about me.) So, our spread this week will be about activating our spirituality. A Read of One’s Own
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 Sometimes I don’t know what deck to use, sometimes they all want to come to the party. Such was the case this week, which wasn’t helped by impulse-buying another deck yesterday and wanting to show you that. But, I’d weirdly already felt compelled to use this one—and, also, happened to send it to my sister for her birthday—so I decided to stick to that plan, even though I’m always hot2go with new stuff.
This is Tarot of the Magic Forest, one folx might be surprised to see me using. I’ve said I don’t really “do” whimsy. It’s true, at least with tarot. But there are some “cute” decks that I really like that that have a vibe that belies their cuteness. This is one. (Dame Darcy’s Mermaid and the Silver Acorn are two others, off the top of my head.) This week, I’ve drawn: Eight of Cups (4), Moon (2), Fool (1), Seven of Cups (3), King of Swords (5) This deck really wanted a workout! I kept shuffling and shuffling and it wasn’t ready to relax yet. Sometimes decks are like that. If I were a deck, I imagine I would love the fuck out of getting shuffled. I hope it feels good. It seems like it would be a really sexy experience. I’m slightly stoned, right now, but not enough to take that any further. (I write these on Sunday.) (It’s also worth noting that, as mentioned, I sent this to my sister for her birthday. [Her first deck, how do ya like that?] It arrived shortly before my settling down to compose this, and she did her first spread. The Fool was her first card, too! Synchronicities!) WHERE ARE WE GOING? That is the question. The enlightened ones frequently counsel us mere mortals to “be as the beginner” or a child; to reach for “beginner mind,” a state I haven’t experienced much of. I imagine it as a combination of total curiosity with zero expectation. The idea that anything and everything coming our way is A-OK, because that’s simply the state of things. I can’t speak for the enlightened ones, but this is how I interpret it. And I’ve often said in this very blog that this is the state we should aim for when we sit down to do readings. But the cards flanking the Fool in this spread remind me of another truth: even when we do that, sometimes we still don’t know what the fuck it is we’re looking at. And y’all? Been there. More than I can count. I mean, I think after a few years reading at events I’ve probably changed this ratio, but I would say there was a good chunk of my reading life where as many readings didn’t make sense to me or never came to fruition as actually did. Maybe I’m over estimating that, but I’ve had some struggles, y’all. And I truly, truly don’t know how I came out the other side, sometimes. I mean, I know how: tenacity. I made it my mission to do it. But that is profoundly unlike me, dear ones. Profoundly unlike me. The Moon and the 7/cups remind us that the goal of beginner’s mind can be easier to achieve than we’d like it to be, sometimes—particularly when there’s a human being sitting on the other side of the cards waiting for an answer. What happens when that happens? What happens when our open state of curiosity and zero expectation turns into the shocking realization that we have zero expectations because what we see on the table in front of us doesn’t look like anything that could ever communicate! These two cards themselves hold clues, but before I explore them (assuming I remember to), let’s widen our lens and consider the remaining cards: 8/cups, king/swords. When we face failure in a spread of cards, we either want to move away and forget it or get defensive and pout. That’s how these two cards read, here. We go from openness, to panic, to defeat. It’s a cycle I think a lot of readers dance and I know I definitely have. And it might be tempting in a reading that describes our occasional divinatory falterings, to add more cards to see what can we do about it. But, in this case, I think the cards that describe the situation are their own antidotes. Consider: The 7/cups does suggest confusion and an inability to interpret (if we think of cups/water as divination, which is within its realm for sure—then those cups in the sky are the spread—and the gawp-eyed gaze of the rabbit in the corner is our inability to make sense of what we see). But that’s not the totality of the card. Sevens, considering the number alone for a second, are introspective. They turn within for reflection and evaluation. They come after the halfway point, which is a perfect chance to pause and ask ourselves where we are—and, in the case of the Seven of Cups, how we feel about things. Even what we believe about things. (The “belief” aspect is heightened by the fact that this card neighbors a sword, the thing, and so there is an elemental influence that skirts cups into the realm of spirituality.) When we are doing a reading and we can’t see anything—and in this case, we can’t; the sun did not shine, it was too wet to play . . . and so we sat in the house, all that cold, cold, wet day (ahem)—when we’re doing a reading and can see, we’d do well to close our eyes (metaphorically) and feel the reading. Because, and here’s the magic of the combination of Moon and water, sensation and intuition become heightened in this environment. Tarot is primarily a visual medium, but not exclusively. I have no doubt a person with blindness could read, as long as they had a system of knowing that the cards on the table are. We have number, we have element, we have associations and sense memories and keywords and archetypes. When we’re calling on parts of the card that aren’t the image, tarot moves from a visual medium to something else. The cards are prompts, but the artwork isn’t the thing that “matters” in this case. We begin using what I call “math” to work our way through in these cases. (Element + number = meaning, for example.) But we can also feel our way through the spread by paying attention to the physical and emotional impulses we experience while waiting for meaning to come. What if--stay with me, here--what if . . . the fact that you got stuck with these cards was actually part of the message? What if one of the clues to reading the cards is that you got blocked when you laid them out. Here are some possible ways that might play out:
This is not to say that you should accuse your client of being the reason you can’t read. Only that the experience of being blocked may be a part of the overall message of the reading. “I’m feeling a major block of energy right now. Is there something I should know about that? It could just be me, but it’s powerful and distracting.” This is somewhat craven of me to say, but some clients do love things like that. It’s very b-movie. It’s the kind of thing people expect readers and psychics to say, but of course there is likely a reason readers and psychics say it—they’re feeling it. I misquote Yoav Ben Dov, who said that everything that happens in a reading is meaningful (or something similar—it’s been so long now, I keep re-writing it my way). I agree. And though many of us don’t necessarily pay attention to the physical/emotional sensations that hit us during a reading, when we’re stuck or stumped we might do well to pay attention to them. I might go so far as to say we should consider what we feel beyond stuck. Is there a kind of stuck that we’re feeling? This is a cruder way of explaining this than I’d prefer, honestly, but is it a constipated stuck? Or is it a bottleneck stuck? Where in your body do you feel it? I often feel it, annoyingly, in my sacrum—the very bottom of my spine, at the top of my ass. An intense restlessness hits me there, sometimes, and I cannot make it go away. And when I feel that way in a reading, there may be something to the client being in a similar boat. Panning out again, the 8/cups and king/swords almost say “pan out” — the 8’s movement and the king’s eagle-eyes. But I think this simply moves us to step two of the process: applying the intellect to the sensations. In the prior step we felt our way through the cards, or started to. In this step, we apply reason: “OK, does that sensation or feeling make sense in this context? What evidence do I have for this?” That last part, I think, helps a lot—at least if we’re learning to trust this kind of ability. It gives us bounding box. If I can’t find evidence for it in the reading (the whole experience, not necessarily the cards), then I should put it on the back burner, at least for a bit. For example, let’s say that I experienced a stuck feeling that I realized occurs right between my eyes. That’s where I’m feeling it most intensely, because when I try to force myself to see something in the cards I can feel my third eye tingle in an unpleasant way, or I feel it getting disagreeably warm. I consider whether or not this has any connection to the question or contexts I’m working with. Say this is a reading for someone who just wanted a general spread. There is no question or theme, and I already know the cards didn’t really guide me to one, either. As I try to make sense of this, I feel this tension between my eyes and I glance up and see that the client is looking down with their eyebrows furrowed. I take note of the fact that their face indicates they’re feeling something in the area between their eyes. That could indicate something to me. That’s the “witch eye” or (more commonly) the third eye or pineal gland. If someone is experiencing a blockage there, they might be struggling with their spirituality, their self-perception, or their view of the world. If any one—or all—of those connects to one or more of the cards on the table, great! Run with it! But if you don’t see any evidence, it may not be “there” yet. You could ask, “I feel like you’re potentially experiencing a struggle in the area of your worldview or spirituality. Is that something that feels true?” The thing about asking that question is the client may not know. If they did, they likely wouldn’t require a reading. So you might have to take their answer with a grain of salt. “I’m not sure . . .” is a likely answer and may simply mean, “No, but I’m afraid to tell you.” As I say a lot, too, perhaps the experience is a metaphor. If the tension between your eyes isn’t literal—like a struggle with someone’s pineal gland—what could it mean to have tension between the eyes? What if it means they’re got a target on them at work? Like the site on a rifle. And suddenly all those coins cards make sense . . . target practice. Or, what if it means they’re not using their intuition in a situation where they should be seeing things clearly. If the reading isn’t making sense to them, it’s possible they’re blocking their own ability to see the reality. Would I say that to a client? Probably not. What good what it do? And can I be sure I’m correct? No. But, if nothing else, it can soothe me if I feel tempted to downward spiral. Reading our body during a reading isn’t a tactic I’ve talked about much before this year. Of course, things have put me on a course of energy work lately and so the idea of the body is more present on my mind. Typically I prefer to forget I have one. That gets more difficult the older I get. For example, my right shoulder is screaming at me to, please, for the love of god, learn how to sit at a desk and writer rather than plop up on some pillows chest-down on the bed like a teen. And yet it is the only way I can write! At least when I’m not at work! Anyway, the point is—we are part of the reading and our intuition is more than “merely” our thoughts—which is one reason why this reading has so little air in it. (Telling that it lacks fire, too, eh? And I think that’s key. I think it reminds us that we can’t go off and start thinking all energetic experience are useful in a reading. We need restraint, and this reading has it.) But I think it’s quite an exciting thing to think about, paying closer attention to what our bodies are telling us during readings. And in this week’s spread, we’ll explore how to do that more regularly. A read of one’s own Here’s a spread to explore where we might listen to our bodies more during readings:
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AboutEach post is a tarot reading about the tarot, a lesson about the cards from the cards. Each ends with a brand new spread you can use to explore the main concepts of the reading. Archives
August 2025
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