Cards drawn
The Tower
Seven of Rods (wands), Seven of Roots (coins/penties), Temperance
Queen of Vessels (cups)
Deck: Age of Witchery Tarot by Roger J. Horne

Tis the week of Hallowe’en (I really can’t make myself say “Samhain,” no matter how it’s pronounced). And with wonderful timing, this deck arrived from Printer Studio just in time. And as I was considering the post for this week and using this deck, my mind landed on one of the two spreads I’ve been using most in this blog. This cross is a spread I don’t really use other than this blog and I only started using it impulsively to mix things up from the five-card arc I seemed to use (which I do use with clients, typically as a follow-up or secondary reading).

Like all my spreads, the spread itself and the “positions” have no inherent meaning. None of the spots “mean” anything; they’re just the places where the cards go. I work with the interrelationships of the cards now that they’re arranged this way, but the shape of all my spreads is really incidental. It’s just a way of arranging the cards so that interesting relationships develop.

But why have I been so drawn to this shape? There must be some reason.

There is and it occurred to me today. A quick story: When I do spell work, I tend to work with candles and herbs primarily. When I was learning, I would typically arrange the candles in sort of a square or circle and use herbs to connect the dots, creating a boundary around the spell—not unlike a sacred circle. But I only really did that because it’s what I learned in the various books I’d read and videos I’d seen. At some point, it occurred to me that what would make more sense is first arranging herbs on my plate or surface (what I tend to call my “canvass”) in a + sign. Just like this spread.

It is at the crossroads where throughout history people have gone to make magic. In traditions around the globe, the crossroads is a place where one might meet the devil, any number of Barons from New Orleans Voodoo and adjacent traditions (heavily influential on me, though it is not my practice), and all kinds of fae and underworld folk. The crossroads has a negative connotation in christo-culture, because of course it is where people go to sell their soul to Satan—or one of his/their/her siblings. (The Devil is a shapeshifter who manages to be all at once the gender[s] to which the practitioner is sexually attracted [sex is important to him/them/her—if the practitioner experiences sexual attraction], as well as the gender of the practitioner, and at the same time all genders. The binary is imaginary and he/they/she isn’t interested in being bound by christo-colonial norms. Bound, yes; there’s kink there. But not by gender norms, and not in any way he/they/she can’t control). The crossroads is often described as a liminal space. Many magic-minded folx say that magic lives in the liminal. Why wouldn’t it? It is everywhere and nowhere; it is potential and not; it is choice and limit. You can choose to go in any direction, but in so choosing, you’ve limited the options. 

This has become foundational to my spell work, particularly because I’m a city mouse who cannot risk (and has no interest in) being seen by others in an annoyingly middle class neighborhood, working with magic at the actual crossroads. I already have enough issue getting the maintenance folx into my apartment because I’m a homo, so . . . I don’t need to be spotted down the road lighting candles at midnight or burying the remainders of work. I use this temporary crossroads created with herbs and often a candle at each point. And so it makes sense that I would have landed on this shape for a go-to tarot spread. Why shouldn’t I? It is yet another liminal space, this time the liminality of a tarot reading—where, as soon as the cards are swept back into the deck, everything returns to its meaningless state. 

At least to my thinking. 

And so there is your lesson on why the crossroads spread, which is what I now call it. 

And what do we find at this crossroads, you li’l devils? Why, lesson nineteen of course! 

When I work with this spread, I tend to work outward from the center. At the center of this reading, we have the Seven of Roots (coins/penties). Could there be a more appropriate number to sit at the center of a crossroads? Not in my estimation. Seven nearly demands liminality from us. Introspection. It is the number of turning inward; the number of self-assessment, self-reflection, and self-regard. It isn’t innately a selfish number, though it can be if it becomes obsessive. Roots/earth might indicate the tendency toward getting stuck in a naval-gazing mode, but I think that the influence of The Tower negates that. 

The Seven of Roots asks us: why are we here? Meaning, what are we doing on this earth? Why are we even at this crossroads, asking for divinity to give us intel? And there is a real benefit to asking such questions at this time of year: as the evenings grow darker and earlier (gah!) and the liminal becomes more present. In many ways, I think of the space between Halloween and January 1st (New Year’s day, here) as a liminal, non-time; a space in which we’re not in the regular calendar—and in fact there was once a thirteenth month, which is why the numerical associations of our month names don’t make sense. (October: octo means eight, so it should be the eighth month; September, the seventh.) And just as a fact of the capitalism’s devotion to “the holiday season,” many of us are left in an unsettled state from about Halloween through to the end of the year. It is a time I’ve come to dread. I don’t celebrate Thanksgiving and (other than the decorations) I really loathe Christmas. And so of course we’d ask, “what am I even doing here?” This year, I think, the added trauma of an election amid massive fuckery across the planet is making even more of us wonder what the actual fuck. The Seven of Roots is, too. 

Of course, this blog is about divination—so it’s a time to ask ourselves “what the actual fuck” in terms of reading. Which, sigh, I sometimes ask myself. I’m constantly terrified that I will lose this particular ability, and there are many ways that could happen. Not by losing my ability to read, but a lot can happen to the brain and body as we age. And I’ve found that whenever I make something my personality, as I did once with theatre, I eventually find that it becomes toxic and I have to give it up. I’ve said recently, “Adulthood is nothing more than giving shit up that you love until finally you’re like, ‘ok, well, I guess I’m ready to be worm food now.’” This is, of course, in my darker moments, but heading into the darker half of the year, there’s the strong possibility more of those are on the way. And because I have such a tendency toward disaster thinking, something happened this morning that made me think, “Oh, this is the universe telling me I’m going to have to give up tarot, soon, too.” (It’s dumb: an ad for an event I’m reading at went out with a picture of me but no description, and it somehow felt to me like an in memoriam, in this case for my career. Dumb objectively; within, I’m always looking for signs that it’s “over.” Impermanence, baby.)

So lesson 19 begins with an actual question: “what the actual fuck?” In this case, in the realm of earth. 

Sometimes I feel a call to read the next card based on something “loud” in the reading—cards will call to me, or demand my attention. None of these cards are quiet, so where does one go next? To the other seven, of course, because it just amps up the sevenness of the reading. The Seven of Rods/Wands/Fire. Here, all the questions I ascribed to the Seven of Roots are re-asked in the suit of fire. But in this case, I think it’s not asking anymore so much as answering. Why? Couple reasons: first, I just feel it; second, the way Roger J. Horne arranged the wands looks a lot like a tick sheet, where we’re counting points and crossing them out when we’ve got a block. Normally that’s done with five. But it’s sorta giving the same vibe, here. If that doesn’t make sense to you, it’s OK. We all have different access points to readings. 

On the other side of the Seven of Rods is Temperance—a card, I have to admit, I find annoying. I am notoriously intemperate in nearly every way. 

I don’t really have much of an impulse at all for what this trio means, and this is the time where I could easily just get down on myself and start letting the intrusive thoughts win. But not this time, intrusive thoughts; I’ve got a blog to write. If Temperance were in the middle, I’d say that the two sevens need blending. But that’s not the case here, and Temperance seems almost on its own journey, uninterested in the other cards. It “moves” toward the two sevens, but looks away — not out from, kind of to the left, but the left sorta middle distance. There’s a disconnect. It’s almost as though this Temperance is, like me, not a fan of temperance. It’s almost as though intemperance is its MO in this spread. 

“Don’t bother asking why you’re here,” says Temperance, “don’t bother attempting to balance your sevens.” It’s possible the fact that this card depicts a devil that makes me say that, but remember no deck choice is an accident. Had a done this reading with another deck, another card would probably have shown up here. “You know where your roots are,” says this Intemperate Temperance(TM), “you’ve been grounded there your whole life. Where do you get ignited? Where is your fire stoked? What’s important to you in the core of your being, where your own fire burns?” The Seven of Rods, it turns out, isn’t asking us to be self-reflective in the way the Seven of Roots is; rather, it’s saying, “go deep—into your gut. What burns there?” Investigate your motor, so to speak. We could take this to mean, “what is it about divination that really lights you up? Find out. If you have to blend, blend, but err on the side of your fire.” This is very devilish in the sense of modern Satanism, which is heavily focused on self determination, on, as Crowley called it, “the will.” This is a distressing idea, particularly thanks to the individualism that is (I feel) rampant in esotericism. (For context, Satanism, as developed by LaVey, isn’t esoteric at all; in fact, it pegs off anything magical. It is an entirely a-thiestic movement focused on evangelical rationalism. At least in my understanding.) 

In last week’s blog, the one about my own struggles with my sense of self worth, I explored the idea that the issue was my lack of “play.” There are a lot of layers to that particular psychological croissant, but I left it wondering how one balances self-gratification (the healthy kind, the kind that keeps us motivated, engaged, and feeling decent despite the state of the world) with the seriousness of the times we live in. I still don’t have an answer to that. The main solution I’ve found so far is basically to allow myself time to read fiction this week. And really not until Friday. So, shrug. But there is a common thread in the world that if we’re not taking care of our needs, we cannot sustain our power to impact anything positively. 

There’s a certain irony to this row being “crowned” by The Tower. It makes me think of the ultimate tonnage of trauma going on the world, the feeling of everything crumbling—and at the same time, the need to be, like, “gee, what makes me feel really good?” Of course the Devil would ask us that in a time like this, right? But of course we know that the Devil isn’t binary. In fact, there has always been something weirdly binary about Temperance because of the two cups and the implication that each contains something unique. It’s always given an either/or quality to me. I don’t think I’ve ever really actively noticed this, but it’s been there. This one doesn’t and actually Horne has given us an even more impossible exchange of liquid between the two cups. “Yes,” this card seems to say, “you have to take care of yourself at the same time—you have to keep your fire lit. If you don’t, what’s the point?” (You may be wondering what any of this has to do with a lesson on tarot, and we’re getting there.)

The Queen of Vessels/Cups is linked to Temperance by the cups or vessels. This queen is in many ways the ultimate “caretaker” of the tarot—it is stereotypically linked with all the mom qualities we expect in a patriarchal world (this also applies to The Empress . . . with The Empress giving mom-to-be and the Queen of Cups giving post-natal motherhood). Because it’s such a stereotype of femininity, I tend to reject any interpretations that put her in that the caretaker category. But this is a reading about caring; that’s it’s whole thing: what do I care about, why, and where is my energy going? Here, I think the central column says, “If you care about the crumbling of the world, then you have to do things that will sustain your fire.” Or, if you want to read it in another way, “If you care about being a destabilizer of the status quo, you must do things that will sustain your fire.” Either way, the point is that if you want to participate in the improvement of the world, you also need to make sure you tend your fire, too. 

In essence, it’s the same thing we hear frequently. As a cis white man, I tend to feel as though this is criminal of me. But there’s a saviorism there, too, which we explored last week. And given that my battery runs low relatively quickly, I agree—even if I can’t say I’ll obey. 

What does this have to do with divination? What is the lesson about tarot? Well, I think there’s two: first, if divination is one of those things that sustains your fire, then you should do it! You should nourish and feed that part of yourself. The second part, though, is this: if you divination is directed at major perception shifts or destabilizing the status quo or healing a crumbling world, you need to make sure that you’ve got the energy (fire) to give to it. If you burn yourself out or find yourself sinking into the mud, you’re in trouble. Actually, if you find yourself sinking into “temperance” (for example “both sides ism” or “well, we have to stay balanced”), you may be in trouble—because this Temperance isn’t that Temperance. This Temperance is doing the impossible—which might, in this case, be finding ways to feel good once in a while so that you can face the work you feel your “supposed” to be doing. Either way, it is the your fire that needs tending. 

I’ve had a very tarot-y summer. Year, really. In a good way. I don’t feel burned out, but I do sometimes wonder if I’m pushing too hard. The reading could be reminding me that I don’t have to say “yes” to every event that I’m offered and I don’t necessarily benefit from making my whole personality one thing. Of course, there is a great degree of this work that does make me feel like I’m tending my fire, too. And I suppose here we find the more traditional concept of Temperance: do it, but not so much that you hate it. Balance. Rest. Play. Work. Nourish yourself (Queen of Vessels) so that you can fuck shit up (Tower). And fucking shit up can be whatever you need it to be in your life. In may case, it is so much about perception shifts. I want my clients to see things differently, more clearly; I want my readers to see tarot and themselves differently, as well as their abilities and potential; I want the work that I do and the things that I say to effect change in the world, too, even if I’m limited in what I can do. When I manage to change a mind, I’m shifting perspectives. That’s my “mission,” so to speak, flawed though it may be. Whatever your mission is, that’s what The Tower is in this reading. 

So that’s our lesson. Nourish your fire, so you can use your divination to fuck shit up. Took a minute to get there, but get there we did. Not bad advice, either, if you can take it — which . . . I usually cannot. 

A read of one’s own
Here, let’s use the crossroad spread in a new way. Why not? Let’s let the vertical (up/down) column tell us where we could use some nourishment in our divinatory work and the horizontal (left/right) row indicate how to nourish it. We can let all five cards speak to their own story, too, if we want to—but we’ll see whether that’s necessary. Up to you! You know I’m a fan of reading the same spread several ways. (If you didn’t know that, then hi! I like you read the same spread several ways!)

A nowhere near brief enough example.
My vertical column: Ace of Blades (Swords), Queen of Rods, Temperance(!)
My horizontal row: Eight of Rods, Queen of Rods (again), Five of Vessels

Beginning with the vertical, which explores where in my divinatory work I could benefit from some nourishment, we’ve got the first blades/swords card we’ve seen today. The ace. There’s a small-mindedness I’m feeling from this, and while I don’t like to think of myself as small-minded, it’s not out of the realm of possibility. An immaturity. And while I could easily start beating myself up again, I’ll also recognize that (like The Tower, which occupied this same spot in the first spread) the Ace of Blades often has to do with perception shifts, too. The Queen of Rods (who is buoyed by the Eight of Rods at her back) represents the ultimate tender of fires, if we continue with the nurturing aspect of queens that I reluctantly agreed to in the reading above. I think this column says that the area where I could use some nourishment is in my immature relationship to Temperance. You’ve already seen how I resist the idea as it is commonly interpreted and in fact did a whole number of how this temperance wasn’t that temperance. I’m not super clear why, though. I don’t necessarily have an intemperate relationship with tarot. I quite like it. I tend to feel at my best working on it. So perhaps it means that I’m over-thinking whether or not I’m over-doing it. 

I’ve gone ahead and added an additional card to the Ace of Blades and Temperance. The Ace of Blades got the Five of Blades. Which is definitely a card of perception shifts, too. In this case, though, I think it reductive thinking. Why? Blades cut. In this case, the five blades are cutting away at the wholeness of the ace—because fives shake up, destabilize, etc. Reductive thinking about what? The added card for Temperance was The Moon. This particular moon shows a coven of witches dancing under the somewhat dour-looking orb. I actually think this is telling me that my reductive thinking about “joining” is the issue. I was just saying today “I’m not a joiner.” I do not feel safe in “communities.” The lack of community, or my resistance to joining them, may be an issue. The Temperance card says, “look, bitch, you’re not joining a cult; you’re joining a community of like-minded weirdos dancing under the fucking moon. Relax. It’s not a forgone conclusion that you’re going to be ostracized or made to feel small.” Which is kind of fucking rude of Temperance, but remember: this Temperance isn’t that Temperance. And we’re talking about the Devil here, too. 

The crossbar or horizontal returns us to rods/fire with the Eight, of course the Queen, and closes is out with the Five of vessels. Another five. This segment tells us how to nourish the part of us that needs nourishing. My magico-spiritual isolationism is what I’m trying to “heal” or “nourish.” And at first glance, none of these cards speak to that answer. The Eight of Wands is all about effort, labor—vocation, certainly, but also just work. Passionate work, but work. There’s a quality of pushing work into the world with many iterations of this card; though this one is actually pretty static. The Queen of Rods, who we’ve really barely even discussed, doesn’t really seem to be too chatty right now, either. And Five of Cups is always a difficult card to interpret in an advice point of view, because of its constant association with “sad.” 

So, what the hell, I added two more cards. One partnered with the Eight of Rods (the Six of Vessels) and one partnered with the Five of Vessels (the Eight of Blades).  The Six of Vessels, which suggests “feeling good,” joins forces with the Eight of Rods and says “where you feel good about your work.” That’s not a full sentence, but at least we can talk more fully about the Queen of Rods. “Where you feel good about your work, your fiery potential is realized.” The Queen of Rods, in this case, kind of giving powerful bad assery—at least in a witchy way. When she (the queen) goes where her work is celebrated, makes her feel good, she is at her best. But this means facing the potential for upset (Five of Wands), which causes the mind to overwork (Eight of Blades). This isn’t the outcome we want, and it might mean I’ve misread the row. It also might mean that risk is inevitable and that over thinkers gonna overthink and the emotionally unstable gonna be emotionally unstable. All of which is true of me. But that’s not really very good advice. “Nourish yourself by doing your work in places where you feel good—even though that means you’re going to end risk feeling like shit and overthinking it?” I mean, that’s basically how I live my life right now. And if that were working, it wouldn’t be showing up here—unless it means, “keep doing what you’re doing.” But I don’t like that answer. 

If we divorce the Five of Vessels from its typical meaning, if we focus on the fiveness of it as “shaking up” rather than “upset,” it suggests a change in feelings. If we divorce the Eight of Blades from its tendency toward feeling trapped by our thoughts, we return to the concept of labor and effort. We also see the connection to four and stability times two. We have to think differently about our feelings, particularly when they’re shifting and we don’t know what they mean. That might be it. But, frankly, that also kinda pisses me off as a pile of divinatory nonsense—that kind that makes me furious when I hear readers delivering it. It’s not an answer. It’s a vague interpretation that sounds fancy but has zero use. So I have to keep digging. And this does happen sometimes. 

The Queen of Rods holds a wand (a stang) up to the Five of Vessels (see photo below), almost commanding it. To change the way we feel (Five of Vessels, a change in feelings), we have to do a lot of thinking about it (Eight of Blades). An effort has to be made to actively revise feelings about “joining” and being in places where we feel our best. An effort may also need to be made to find such places and also to deal with the fact that just because you’ve found “a” place doesn’t mean it’s “the” place—and I’m really the king of trying to get into clubs that simply don’t want me. But that’s a whole other story. 

There you have it!

Happy Hallowe’en friends, and happy new year. ​

​Couple things before we get into it. This is the rare time when I’m not only sharing a real reading with you, I’m sharing a reading I did for me. I don’t read for myself that much, but when I do I’ve noticed I tend to abandon all the “rules” that even I hold to be true. And that’s why I’m sharing this with you. The primary rule this “breaks” is the common admonition not to pull more cards after you’ve laid out the spread. I do this often when reading for myself and below you can see why. That’s the lesson of this particular post: pull more cards if you damn well want to! But don’t do it haphazardly. Have a reason, have an intent. If you’re going to use additional cards, don’t randomly pull them and hope they’ll clarify the situation; dictate to the cards (something I rarely do!) what they’re meant to be discussing. You’ll see what I mean, below. 

I’ve added some commentary from future-me and you’ll find that in bold throughout the reading. I’ve also edited out some things that aren’t any of your business. Smiley face. I didn’t intend for this to become a blog post, but as I worked through it I realized there were a lot of learning opportunities with in it. So this is a lesson on divination, but in this case the lesson is . . . me.

Finally, the topic of this reading might be triggering for some people. It’s a question of self-esteem and mental health, as well as self-perception. If you find these topics upsetting, I’d recommend skipping this one. And because this is a real reading and it’s for me, it’s worth pointing out that I’m much firmer (maybe meaner) to me than I ever am with clients. I have found that if I tiptoe around things in readings for myself, I let myself off the hook. I’ve often said, but I’m not sure this is true for everyone, that we do have to be somewhat ruthless with ourselves when we read for ourselves. You needn’t be this nasty with you, but that was kind of the whole point of the reading: I’ve been awfully mean to myself lately and I needed to dig deep and explore why. Please know that I’m A-OK, there’s no need to worry about me, and in fact doing this reading gave me the ability to download a lot of what I was feeling. Since doing it, I actually feel better. That’s obviously more important than whatever the message is. 

While I’m shockingly shy for a Leo and while it may simultaneously seem like I tend toward oversharing, I’m actually loathe to talk too much about my insecurities . . . because, well, I’m insecure about them. But I’ve also found that when I am open about my struggles, it makes other folx feel less alone. So if you take nothing else from this, I hope you’ll take that you are not the only one who downward spirals into self-loathing sometimes—and that, like me, you can probably lift yourself from it. It’s a trauma response. Many of us operate from shame. That can make us struggle. Here, you’ll see one way that manifests in my life. 

I think that’s it. 

OK. (Deep breath.) Here we go!

The Question: Why is self-hate my body and mind’s go to response to everything lately? Why can’t I do anything without that being my response? (Commentary from future me: This isn’t the clearest or most well-phrased question, but I was partly trying to figure out what the actual fuck was going on and so I let myself go long.)

Wheel of Fortune
Ten of Wands (Oppression), Knight of Disks, Eight of Wands (Swiftness)
Four of cups. 
(My intent was to pull only three cards, but I knew immediately I needed to add two more. How did that know that? Intuition, I guess; I could just feel it.)

While I wasn’t expecting to add the Wheel and Four of Cups, I’m compelled to start in that central column. The Ten of Wands suggests a supreme level of burnout, probably due to the very uncertainty of, well, everything — and the fact that you’re in an emotional rut. (I didn’t see myself that way, I didn’t feel like I was in a rut—but I realized there was a rut when I wrote that. We can’t assume we’re wrong, even when we say something in a self reading that doesn’t immediately click.) And somehow the sustained nature of that rut is fueling the burnout. Somehow you’re willingness to stay burned out, to luxuriate (4 of cups is luxury) in that is actually sustaining it. (Here we get an early sense of how direct I am with me in ways I’m not with clients. You can see me “blaming” the querent here already. Again, I needed to be really direct with myself to cut through the fog. There will be more of this.) The problem becomes the total lack of specificity that the Wheel offers. The wheel won’t turn. It’s stuck in the mud of the 4 of cups, and your energy is spent trying to shift into a gear that will get you out. But you’re simply stuck and the more energy you put into attempting to unstuck yourself, the more energy you’re wasting. You cannot get out of this rut that way. It’s a self-sustaining rut forged by the very attempts to transcend it. And because the Wheel loves to be so fucking vague, it doesn’t even want to tell you the answer to this question—it doesn’t want to give you a why. It’s attitude is just, “it’s your turn, loser.” (I don’t think I’m a loser, but because of the states I’ve found myself prone to lately, I went there. This is not evidence of directness; it’s evidence of how I was feeling about myself at the time. Again, I promise I fine!)


The Knight of Disks as your significator stares up toward the Wheel at the same time as he’s being blocked by the Ten of Wands. (He rules the third decan of Leo, which is where my birthday falls.) He, despite all his worldliness, can’t proceed. He, despite his understanding of how things work, cannot solve this problem. And it may be because earthly answers don’t fit, here. And he can’t understand that. He’s supposed to be the smartest dude in the deck; he’s the most grown, the most mature, and nothing he does makes the Wheel make sense because it doesn’t care about him. The Wheel doesn’t care about anyone or anything; it simply turns and when it lands on you, you’re fucked. Or you’re lucky. But most of us rarely get lucky, these days; that’s for people of wealth and privilege. At least the kind of luck we’re talking about, the kind where we’re not at the mercy of the fates. The kind of luck where we’re get to dictate to fate. That’s not for you. You cannot change the course of things and you cannot “pass” on your turn. You’re in a rut and you’re staying there until the wheel decides to turn again. It’s worth noting Crowley said that usually when we see this card, the person is on the upswing—people generally don’t get readings when things are fine. So by nature of the wheel turning, you are likely to see some improvement at some point soon—but we know that there’s no believing that until its seen. (Maybe the one “nice” thing Crowley ever said?) Some people are good at that, but not you and not the Knight of Disks. The Knight of Disks tries to make things make sense by the logic of the earth. The Wheel doesn’t give a flying fuck about that. This can’t make sense to you because there is no way to understand this in a banal fashion. And nothing in the reading is interested in giving you a non-banal answer, either, other than that “it’s you’re fucking turn, loser.” (Again, just a little self-flagellation. Kinky. Here’s the sitch: I actually don’t think of myself as very “disky” or “pentaclesy” at all. That said, I am in many ways—particularly as I get older. And I also tend to swing wildly back and forth between there must be a logical solution or reason for this that makes sense! and there must be some spiritual reason for this that means I’ve angered the gods or been thrown at by some asshole. So I swing back and forth, really, between air and earth. It’s also worth pointing out to me [thank you, me] that I wrote a book called Tarot on Earth which was all about the down-to-earth vibe I use in most readings . . . so, this is evidence that while we may not think of ourselves in a certain way, that doesn’t mean we’re not that way. This is one thing that makes reading for ourselves so difficult. And it’s one reason why, though it might seem somewhat unhinged, I do need to be fairly blunt with myself. I can’t negotiate my way out of the message—and for me that sometimes means I have to be harsher than I maybe “should” be.)

“Well,” you think, “It’s been my turn my whole life.” (OK, yes; I do sometimes feel that way.)

No one said the wheel turns more than once in a lifetime. (Ouch. But true. Of course it does. We are not one turn of the wheel, we are many. But also, for many of us . . . we don’t get to travel that far from the life we were born into. This despite the messages that the pop culture machine gives us about being anything we want to be.) Maybe you’re stuck because that’s the turn you’re taking this life: the stuck turn. And no matter how much you try to get out of it, you can’t, because in this existence, you’re simply stuck. (God, I hope not. 🤣)

Maybe you should luxuriate in being immobile, in being emotionally and spiritually stunted. Maybe it lets you off the hook. Why bother trying if trying is the thing that gets you burned out? Makes sense, right? If effort is the thing that is burning you out, stop making the effort. (If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll potentially recall how many times in recent weeks the message has had to do with allowing fallow times to flourish. It’s entirely possible I was talking to me that whole time.)

We have a final card we’ve yet to deal with: The Eight of Wands/Swiftness. I mean, this could suggest there is a turn of the wheel coming soon — but I know you don’t remotely believe that, and it’s also not really what the card is usually talking about. (He’s right. I don’t believe that. Although a few things since I did this reading, including this reading, have made me think that in fact I am due for a turn soon.) Most editions of this card show forward motion, direction, and arrow on the way to hitting its target. Not this one. This one shows energy going in all directions. It shows a total lack of focus. (I hate this version of this card.) Even commentators on this card aren’t really sure what they’re looking at. People say that we’re seeing pyramids from above, we’re seeing some kind of crystal, even planes of existence. It’s really just a ton of energy being misdirected, unfocused, which—let’s be honest—is exactly how you do everything. (I’m hyper aware of my ADHD since my diagnoses—but I do tend to operate this way and it is often what triggers my self-loathing, because in so doing I fuck things up that could easily not have been fuckupable . . . and that’s the core of what’s been happening. It’s not like I’m failing in any especial way. Actually, in many ways it’s been quite a good time. Sure, I sometimes [often] feel like I’m constantly trying to sit at the “cool kids” table in whatever worlds I operate in, and that I’m constantly being denied the chance to . . . but that’s also a trauma response and it’s not what’s really been causing my moods—not alone, anyway. Weirdly, it’s been dumb shit like dropping my keys or spilling a glass or fucking up a recipe. And that’s why I knew I needed to go deep with this reading; it’s not normal to hate yourself for breaking a mug or tripping on your slippers.) In many ways, it resembles the Wheel, except that in this Wheel, the energy seems way more unified. The Eight of Wands’ energy is anything but. It’s going everywhere in really jagged ways. I guess this suggests that if it weren’t self-loathing that you keep triggering, it would be something else—whatever the energy seems to hook on first. But that’s more of a guess based on the card’s imagery. (I think many of my fellow ADHDers will recognize this . . .)

Eights are associated with labor and there’s an energetic output here that is likely another reason you’re so self-loathing. Whatever energy you do have is being pulled that way. Why? Cuz it’s your turn, loser. (I mean, look: sure that sounds mean . . . and again this is why I’m NEVER that blunt with clients. In this case, it was really just good writing . . . like, I can’t turn that part off of me. It’s a structural and thematic callback. I know I’m not a loser. On the other hand, I also recognize that we do have “turns” in life where things, including our perceptions, aren’t peak. Stealing from Truman Capote, I call it “the mean reds.” It happens. What’s really dangerous is when we don’t recognize we’re there. Happily, I usually do.)

Fire is the dominant suit, which also suggests rage. (I mean, uh-huh. That part. Also: I’ve never read wands that way, but Jesus Fuck if it doesn’t make sense!!!) There’s a lot of rage (ten—the most you can have). You’re deeply angry. Furious. (“Deeply Furious” was a song in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the bizarrely-generated Broadway musical. Just thought you should know. The book writer of that show write a memoir called Song of Spider-Man, and I think it’s a good one if you like that kind of thing.) At oppression and the idea of being oppressed, if we’re looking at the keywords on the card, but you also (because you’re signified by a Knight/Knight) under the assumption that you matter. (Again, I know I matter. You’ll see me harp on this “not special” thing a few times, herein. What I mean, and again why I wouldn’t talk this way to a client, is “you aren’t more important than anyone else—even though deep down you kinda think you should be.”) The Wheel reminds us we do not. (That is true.) The Knight is like “wait this isn’t fair!” and the Wheel says “tough titty.” (Also true.) Because knights are awfully entitled (literally) they think they’re special and when their way is blocked, they try to fight through it because they’re entitled to pass. (The Princes/Knights and Kings/Knights are the cards to whom I typically assign “privilege” to. Here, I’m talking about my own privilege despite my mental health journey.) “Nope,” says the Wheel, “you are unimportant to me. You do not matter. You shall not pass. You are not special.” Something life has always been uniquely good at pointing out to you. (This is me wallowing in self pity quite beautifully. Still, how many of us feel this way, despite our privileges? I do! I often marvel at how some people succeed at life so easily, where I am frequently having to work much harder to get much less “success.” Shrug. I’m sure there are people who look at me and think, “He seems to get things so easily where I have to struggle so much to get much less.” This is why comparing ourselves is shite. And yet: we do it.)

And it’s that rage, in many ways, that we’re talking about. It’s partly loathing the self, but it’s also partly—maybe even moreso—your entitlement, to thinking you deserve or will inevitably reach some further apex. You think you’re entitled to things that life doesn’t think you’re entitled to. You think progress is inevitable. Having become the pinnacle of the deck, the final card in the deck, you’ve probably gone as far as you can go. (I know I haven’t. Keep reading.) Alexander wept for there were no more worlds to conquer. You’ve gone as far as you can go—as far as the Knight of Pentacles can go. (This is key. The Knight of Disks/King of Pentacles isn’t who I’m becoming, it’s who I am. This isn’t where I’m going, it’s where I’m coming from. What is the point of divination if not to elevate? And this is why I have a love-hate relationship with significators: they can become limiting if we think of them as the end goal, not the starting point. We are all the courts. We are all the cards in the deck. The Knight of Disks will always be my root, my core, not unlike my sun/moon/rising sign—but the aim isn’t to stay the same as I was when I was born; it’s to grow.) I suppose if you go back to the beginning of the deck, The Fool, things might change—but you’re not really that type, are you? See, the problem with reaching the Knight’s status is that we want to keep it and expand it. But that’s not how life works. It ain’t fair, but them’s the breaks. And again the more you try to fight it, the more you try to move out of the tracks laid out for you, the more burned out you get. (Here we [I] hit on a core thing to my personality: I cannot allow myself to feel foolish! I am in a rut, and in retrospect it’s in part because of my refusal to let go of the need to be perceived as an “expert” or as “cool” and “worthy.” But what I know from experience is that this denies me real growth opportunities, because I never allow myself to get messy and play—the way I demand of students who read my books/take my workshops. And you’ll see, this comes full circle at the end.)

To expand, I’ve drawn a card and placed it behind the Knight to answer what the source of this entitlement is, why you think you deserve more than life wants to give you. 
(Here is where things get crazy! I’ve gone and done it! I’ve drawn more cards—many more cards—to this spread. WHAT IS HE THINKING? Well, in this case, I drew additional cards to explore a bit about how I/Knight of Disks got the way we are. Warning, I do get a little mean again . . . I promise it’s mostly snark! Again, this is why I don’t share this shit more often! But if you’re curious, I have great support systems!)

The next question is, how can that be sustained to your best good—so that the praise the Prince of Cups gets doesn’t lead you to another downward spiral when that fades. To answer that, I’ve drawn the Hanged Man, the Seven of Swords, and the Aeon. (Here I’m actually doing a whole new reading within this one. I’m asking a new question [how to sustain this for my best good] and drawing three unrelated cards to answer this. I absolutely shuffled the unused pack and set the intention to answer this before I drew these new cards. It’s a new reading, but it’s still in dialogue with the one we’re doing—and again this is totally fine, because I’ve started thinking of reading for myself as having a dialogue with the guides or divinity or whatever makes this crazy ol’ system work so wonderfully. I have a question, I slap down a card: “Tell me more about that, stud!” “You got it, Tommy.” And I get more info. And I mean I know that’s not how many of us read, but, like, could anything be more natural? And in the energetic flow of reading, something has to be cooking between us and the liminal, so why not take advantage of it? The problem becomes when we start slapping down cards and 1) don’t have an intention behind them or a question we’re trying to clarify/answer; and/or, 2) we don’t immediately recognize the connection between these two cards and the intent, and so we give up on ourselves and the entire reading. If you’re going to do this, you have to be tenacious, bitch! You’ve got it in you!)

This is an interesting combo suggesting a prolonged period of deep-diving into this new version of you. It’ll be a new era. And you’re likely to have a bit of a breakthrough in terms of your perceptions at that point. Now. I feel compelled to say, in an unusually generous moment, that you needn’t have to wait a year to do that kind of reflection. (WHAAAT??? IS HE BEING NICE TO HIMSELF??? IS HE RECOGNIZING THINGS MIGHT ACTUALLY GET BETTER OR AT LEAST THE CLOUDS MAY PART??? Yes. Fucker. And this is an opportunity to comment on my use of this deck . . .  what am I doing still using this DECK? Reader, it works like a dream. I do not know why. I read better for myself with this deck than literally any other in my collection. Whatever. I’m going with it.) And while only one of these cards has an astrological timing associated with it, it is connecting to your rising sign (Aquarius) (we’ve had several cards connected to your sun; this is the first of your rising—the Four of Cups, Moon’s decan of Cancer, also reflects your Moon sign—which suggests, to a certain degree, a love for wallowing [luxuriating in] emotional ruts—you feel safe there, so this is potentially a habitual thing you do because you’re familiar with it—and be honest, have you ever really operated from anything other than self-loathing?) (I mean, look: I read The Velvet Rage [outdated but valuable . . . probably only to cis gay men, but a lot of cis gay men really need to face our issues] this year and . . . yeah. It’s a thing. But don’t cry for me, Argentina. I’ve got the skills to heal.) You may feel the seeds of this—or even something more than that (sevens are greater than seeds, of course; so I’m hedging my bets a little) around mid-February. Or, if not that, your tendency to do that kind of exploration will ignite around then. Sevens, of course, look within—mentality, in this case, is key to that and you’ll have the sense of stillness (Hanged Man) to really explore this new era. Makes sense. That time of winter, after the fuckery of xmas and new year, is a static time typically—and one you know you tend to feel fairly bleak during. But you may not experience that this time; you may find yourself really coming into your new Aeon. Whatever the fuck that means. (Also, hi: Look at me using astrological correspondences like a champ! Go me! Even though I think most of them don’t make sense, know what? They can help in a reading. Fuck it. I was wrong. Fine. I can say it . . . Usually on repeat until I don’t like myself anymore. KIDDING! Kidding. I’ll be here all week, tip your servers.)​

​I’m going to clear the deck, so to speak, and put all the cards we’ve drawn back into the pack--except for the five we began with. I want to come back to that central card, that Ten of Wands. (This was a fun exercise because I took all but the original five—and in the picture you’ll see how many cards I had out—and put them back in the deck. In this case, I wanted to see if we’d get any repeats!)

I want to understand that one better, because—while I’m not necessarily wrong about anything I wrote above, I also haven’t given you much kindness. (Thank you, me! See? I softened up a bit, here. I decided, “Give the boy a break, you dumb bitch!” [Kidding, again. That was my best Liz Lemon.] But this highlights why I’m sharing this . . . sometimes we have to go through the dark to get to the light. Sometimes we have to vent all the garbage so that we can find what’s recyclable; we have to let the compost decompose before it can be useful. This isn’t bad. It’s only when we let these things fester and eat at us and never deal with them that we’re in trouble. Know what I mean?) Well. The reading hasn’t. (Right. The Reading. Pas moi.) I had to stop myself several times throughout and ask myself to what degree my own bias was impacting the cards. I’m not saying I didn’t find evidence for what I wrote, but I am admitting that I’m not maybe the best person to find more uplifting evidence in this reading at this time. Given the subject happens to be, well . . . me. (Gurl, right??? Woof.)

I’ve put the other four cards aside, though not back into the pack. I don’t want to see any of those showing up again right now. (The four cards surrounding the ten.) I also want to pause and note that while I’ve been writing this reading, I kept getting a sense memory of my twenties—something that came from a scent I couldn’t quite place that kept arriving in my nose. And I did burn some incense earlier, but that’s not the smell. And I can’t place what it was now because I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time. I wish I’d paused and done so, but maybe I’ll get it again as I keep working. Who knows? It’s also entirely possible the incense in the other room is the scent and somehow something in it was triggering a memory. I’m not sure. (This happens to me a lot, but I was never able to place it. That also happens a lot. I’ve noticed that my sense-memory gets stronger the older I get.) (A note from FUTURE future me: I did remember. Cigarettes. 🤣)

Anyhoo—I’ve drawn the Three of Cups (Abundance), the Ten of Swords (Ruin) and the Two of Swords (Peace) to explore how, if at all, the Ten of Wands and its impenetrable wall can be blasted to bits. The Three of Cups (center) is Mercury’s decan of Cancer. Here, your beloved pal Mercury is in your moon sign. (He’s talking to me. I love Mercury. The god, not . . . not the poisonous metal.) And while I’m immensely turned off by words like abundance and gratitude, (BIG TIME) which sound like bullshit platitudes (especially now), there is something about Mercury’s playful and irreverent relationship to . . . everything that is interesting to me, here, and the sense of experiencing that playfulness as an emotional reality. Play isn’t necessarily a word associated with Mercury, but how could it not be so? He’s a trickster; in this deck, he’s the Magician; he’s also a writer and messenger (as such, he’s a tarot reader or diviner—just fyi), and there’s a possibility that the lack of abundance of his energy in your life is one reason why you’re prone to more dramatic tendencies right now—you have no sense of play left. At all. (And I realized that the whole reading was pointing to this lesson, this message. Was that the answer I started out looking for? Not if you look at the question I asked. But recall that I began by saying my question wasn’t that well-worded and, in fact, I was really trying to figure out what I needed to know . . . because I knew [and know] why i downward spiral that way. I already told you: it’s a trauma response. So even though my questions was “why” what I really wanted to know was “how”—as in, “how to get out of this funk?” Did it take me a long time to get there? Yes. But just like a dialogue, we had to go the long way round to figure out what we were really trying to say. And this is the great benefit of reading this way. Rather than limiting ourselves to one question and one locked set of cards, we instead engage in dialogue with divinity, with the cards, however you want to think about it. It’s a dance, but when we’re reading for ourselves the dance needs to be more circuitous. I guess. Point is: I never would have landed here with the question I asked and the cards I drew . . . but it’s what I needed to know. And by thinking like a detective or an excavator, I kept digging and trying new things—gathering more context—until I landed on the answer I finally realized I needed.) Nothing is fun to you anymore. (This, alas, is quite true—and something I have to address. I feel it’s tacky to enjoy anything when the world is so fucked up. We’ll touch on more of this in a bit.) An abundance of fun, or at least a growing exploration of playfulness, may be something that can push through the dross of that ten. Threes being expansive suggest that both your emotional and spiritual wellbeing can benefit from adding play into it—like, by just fucking around and finding out, your emotions and spirit will expand with it. 

The card is flanked by another ten—the Ten of Swords—and another swords card, the Two of Swords. The Ten of Swords is styled “ruin” (yay!) and the argument can be made by that thinking so much about ruin, you’re ruining yourself. That sounds a lot like a privileged thing to say, though, and we both know you think that it’s not appropriate to experience any kind of joy while the world in burning. (Toldja.) We both know that deep down you think you’re a fucking martyr, and to return to the arrogance question we know that you have an arrogant attitude about that. (OK, this is mean, but . . . not untrue.) “Look how I know how painful everything is, look how I suffer for it!” I don’t mean to denigrate your reality that way, but it’s a performance. (Is it? This comes down to a philosophical question . . . can altruism ever be fully generous? Can any activation ever not have a performative aspect? I don’t know the answer to that. Do I feel good when people I respect like my points of view? Yes. Is that why I share them? No. I truly want to help perceptions shift.) (REDACTED . . . in summary: “your slacktivism is performative.”) 

OK, maybe that’s a little ungenerous of me—but come on. How much of your behavior is influenced by what you want people to think about you? And you’re ruining yourself doing it. Because you don’t have any play, you don’t have any peace. Have play, have peace. (This might make a little more sense had I left in more of what I took about above . . . but I am shockingly scared of fucking up or not knowing the “right” answers . . . mostly because I don’t want to hurt people! I know what the fuck it feels like to be erased, ignored, stepped on, and marginalized. But a little of it is that I don’t want it to damage people’s perceptions of me . . . the ones who I admire, anyway. And that’s, again, ego! And what this is really saying [I know because I wrote it] is that . . . you gotta let go and get messy sometimes. But even as I say that now, my mind goes “but what if people think you don’t care about their issue!” Complexities!)

Now, that’s easier said than done, isn’t it? (Boy, is it.) (REDACTED BUT I CAN’T SUM IT UP BECAUSE FUCKING PAGES QUIT ON ME AND I LOST WHATEVER IT ISAID.) The Two of Swords reminds us two things can be true at the same time and you’re about to write about dialectics, anyway, so this is on brand for you. I mean, and I hate to say it this way, the lesson of this reading is in some ways you’re not that special. Instead of taking that to mean you don’t matter, take it to mean you’re not a fucking messiah, so why don’t you let yourself have a little fun every once in a fucking while. Know what I mean? You’re not letting yourself off the hook, you’re letting your battery recharge. Sorry if that’s not a cute look for social media, but it’s probably the only way out of this very rut you think you have to stay in because, to return to the Knight of Disks, you think you’re so “important.” That’s the saviorism that comes with arrogance. Y’aint Jesus, buddy, so quit tryina be a damn martyr. (This actually is part of what I deleted above . . . and it’s something I’ll spend the rest of my life, however long it may be, trying to figure out. How much joy is acceptable when everything is awful and your tax dollars are funding some of the main reasons why . . . ? At the moment I guess the answer is “enough to stop you from burning yourself out and hating yourself.” Which, I mean . . . , honestly still seems like too much to me. But several people have said to me in the last couple years, “you really need to have some fun.” I can’t remember how. To be honest, it’s never really been part of my nature—not since school, anyway. But that’s trauma for another day. What matters here is a point I made when doing the reading, wayyyyy back about 7,000 words ago: if the King/Knight of Penties is the last card in the deck, then the card that follows him has to be The Fool—and that, I think, is where healing lies in this case.)

Or something. Who knows? (And here I negate myself, again. 🤣)

Final thoughts: Listen, if you got this far—thank you. I hope that it did teach you something, at least something more interesting than the tales of my own descent into shitty self image (a term we used to use a lot in the nineties—it was the one time Catholics got to swear!). 

The lesson is: experiment; use more cards, but with intent; keep digging, keep excavating; reading for yourself isn’t like reading for others . . . it’s harder, and it requires more tenacity, more context, sometimes more ruthless self-appraisal, and often a lot of grace. Be Sherlock Holmes. Be Einstein, who once said that it wasn’t so much that he was smart; it’s that he sat with the problems longer. That’s the point, but I hope that this whole peek into my mind helped make it more memorable. 

A read of one’s own
It would be morally reprehensible of me to do a demo reading of a spread after over 8,000 words! But I do have a spread for you to try. 

Start with the five card cross I used above. Use it to answer a question. Read it in pairs and trios, etc., but as it gives you information, pull additional cards to add more nuance to some of them. You don’t need to do all five. I didn’t. I pulled cards on three of them (the Knight, the Ten of Wands, and the Wheel—plus a fourth set, related but not part of the original draw). If you think of a side question, pose that to the remaining stack. Whatever you do, though, add the additional cards with intention—know why you’re drawing them and what they are to speak to. Then be tenacious about figuring it out. 

Don’t put too much pressure on yourself! Play! Experiment! Have fun!!! (I mean, that was the overall lesson for me, here, and it’s part of the lesson for you!)

\Cards drawn: Devil (4), Hanged Man (2), Knight of Wands (1), Knight of Pentacles (3), Six of Wands (5). 
Deck: The Bohemian Gothic Tarot (3rd edition) by Alex Ukulov and Karen Mahoney 

I had a feeling this Devil card would show, as it’s my least favorite devil card probably in any deck. It’s actually one reason I don’t use this one more. I hoped it would change in the most recent edition, but it hasn’t. A close friend detests the Justice card in this deck because it shows two fuckers with the Malleus Maleficarum--but that doesn’t bother me, because I think it actually shows you exactly what justice looks like in the christo-colonial world, at least since the that proto-edgelord, proto-incel piece of fan fick arrived in the hands of powerful shitheads the world over. One thing I’ll say about this deck: it usually shows you the darker aspect of many of the cards, which is kind of the point. Anyhoo . . . the blog:

With two knights in the spread, we could have a lot of action—although one of them stares dead-eyed into the middle distance and the other . . . well. He could use some head, as it were (it’s giving the battle scene at the denouement of Bedknobs and Broomsticks). We’ve also got a knight in the Six of Wands, who is actually active and appears to be leading their army of the dead out of the reading. And then on the other side of the reading we’ve got . . . all . . . that.

No cups, no swords; two wands, to majors, one penty. I think this is the first time we’ve had such a fiery/majory reading in this blog. But what’s the lesson? Good question. And I’m having one of those moments where I don’t really feel like doing the work to figure it out. I had a bad day. I accidentally knocked a tray of handmade kyphi (ancient Egyptian incense that requires a lot of grinding of woods and resins by hand and it’s a workout) off the surface on which it sat, and it and I both downward spiraled. It was hours of work and weeks of drying—all for some supposedly sacred fumigation . . . and I knocked it all right onto the floor. And I had an absolute meltdown because I do shit like that all the time and after forty-five years of it, it really makes me dislike myself. I needed someone to give me grace today and the only one who could do it really didn’t want to and really couldn’t afford it: me. In fact, I had a moment of self loathing so deep, I thought about cancelling all my upcoming bookings and just saying “fuck it.” 

What am I tell you that? I’m stalling, honestly.

Not unlike this weirdly static Knight of Wands, whose ghostly gaze seems somehow to be looking both everywhere and nowhere. This usually most active of knights has parked his horse (is that a thing?) and strode off a bit. Why? What’s he doing? 

Maybe he’s stalling like me. 

He’s flanked by two dramatic stories. In one corner, on our left (his right), we have The Devil and the Hanged Man. This is an interesting combo because they’re quite opposite. The Devil tends to be active, projective, aggressive; the Hanged Man, static (like this knight). I really hate this image of The Devil. I think that making the “devil” an exclusively negative card, as this one appears (to me), is just a reconfirming of christo-colonial stories about who is good and who is evil. It shows us how deeply we’re impacted by these stories even if we’re not or never were Christians. But I will take it as it comes. So on this side, I see a path where he stays in an endless cycle of stuckery and fuckery—a bad relationship, a stale job, a tendency toward self flagellation when (for example) he knocks a fucking tray of hand-ground, hand-formed, hand-sweated-over incense to the floor and has a menty b. There’s great comfort in the familiar, even if the familiar sucks. The devil we know, right?

In the other corner, the headless Knight of Penties and the Six of Swords. If this knight had a head, he’d be looking at the Knight of Wands like, “dude . . . what the fuck?” But he’s not because he can’t. Because he’s been knocked headless by the banalities of his own suit. How do I know that? Because it just came out of my fingertips. The Six of Wands, literally the only card with any sense of progress here, wants to fuck off into the future—with their army of skeletors. There’s a tug-o-war with the self that we see depicted in these two cards. The desire to stay and make things better for the other knight . . . even as doing so is causing him to lose his head and (I’ll wager) more and more pieces of him—and the desire to get out of this situation, even if it means ripping a part of himself off and leaving it behind. Except we can’t do that. So he’s forced to drag all this crap behind him. 

If we were looking at this reading as a choice, we’re in a situation with the Knight of Wands has two choices and neither of them are good: he can stay in the same garbage doing the same crap and experiencing the same highs and lows; or, he can continue to study himself and his life while trying desperately to break out of it. 

The aim of this blog is, as always, to pull from these randomly drawn cards a lesson about divination. And I suppose we could say this reading is reminding us that sometimes we’ll have readings where every option is crap and the client’s likely to stay stuck for a while. And that’s certainly a thing that happens. But I’m not convinced that’s the lesson, here. So I’ll keep digging. 

Mirroring the cards (using “reflecting” cards, or the cards that are symmetrically opposed to each other), I have two new pairings: Devil/Six of Wands; Hanged Man/Knight of Penties. The Devil and wands have a natural affinity for each other, because devils like things “hot” — and if I ignore this image, it is The Devil’s “job” to fuck up the status quo. I’ve been reading a lot about devils lately, and I’ve come to realize that what is considered devilish or satanic is whatever the powerful decide is bad. Witches are “satanic” because they present the church with competition. Anyone who lives on the margins, anyone who is remotely fringe, is “satanic” by these standards. This is one reason I get cranky when the card is depicted negatively. It’s just a confirmation of the idea that anything “other” is “evil.” It’s true that the card is frequently associated with addiction, but that’s because that’s what the church wants us to think. They want us thinking that if we experience “the devil” we’re going to get burned. 

What if I turn what I think I see? What if I turn that notion of the devil on its head, even working with this image? Suppose this winged entity isn’t injecting the desperate figure in front with drugs. What if she’s administering an antidote? What if this is the cure to the figure’s ills. Perhaps this devil is a “witch” who can help this figure with what the industrial powers cannot. These things must be done in “secret” (the darkness of the card) because we can’t be caught disobeying the rules. I read recently read (in Orion Foxwood’s The Flame in the Cauldron) “What is spoken fades away, but what is written may hang you some day” (this was his teacher, Lady Circe). Incidentally, if that’s true, I’m among the most fucked. But I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. If I read this card that way, turning this image, then when I pair it with the Six of Swords, I get someone setting off after recuperating. After some mysterious antidote administered by mysterious “witch.” This suggests that the solution to our Knight of Wands’s dilemma is to seek “alternate routs” (as the road signs say during construction). 

What of the Hanged Man and the Knight of Pentacles? Both are in rough shape.  One suspending upside down, however meditatively, and the other is headless. In both cases, the head is not where it’s supposed to be—the head is not in the game. Which offers one reason why the Knight of Wands has dismounted and stares off into the distance. He’s stuck because he lost his head, but the solution to forward motion (we can imagine the knight in the Six of Wands “becoming” the Knight of Wands, when it’s time—even though they don’t resemble each other) is this witchery proffered by the scary-seeming entity. And I think that is the lesson . . . There are times when the solution to a reading lies in the place that seems scariest, weirdest, “darkest,” or least acceptable. Sometimes the answer lives in the spaces you’re “not supposed” to go. 

One sort of easy example of this, maybe not quite as dramatic as the words I used above, is the way I handled the fact that I didn’t like my initial interpretation of this cards or the lesson they indicated. I could have given up, scrapped the reading, redone it and used a deck that I vibe with a little better. But instead of doing that, I took the thing that was bugging me most (the image of The Devil in this deck) and went “deep.” What else could I see? So often we limit ourselves to what it seems like we’re seeing. In doing that, we miss what’s really there. 

I often say that whatever makes divination work uses the reader as much as the cards. By which I mean, they’ll take advantage of our moods and tendencies as much as they will our reactions to specific cards. This is why two readers answering the same question and getting the same answer might get completely different cards. Somehow they end up in the same place but the route they took (the cards drawn) were totally different. Neither of them would have landed on the same interpretation had they gotten the other reader’s spreads. In this case, it’s not a secret that I can’t stand the implications of this Devil card—and that becomes part of the reading. It’s probably exactly why the card showed up. Because the divination divinities knew that I was in a bad mood and would have a little bitchy moment about the card—and that, if I were tenacious and practicing what I preach, I would “get there.” 

In this case, not only did I do the reading, I became part of it. I became one of the cards because of my oft-asserted crankery around that depiction. But I wouldn’t have gotten the answer, I wouldn’t have unlocked the reading, had I not dug into the very thing I disliked and found a new way to make sense of it, to recontextualize it in a way that makes sense for me and the way I read. (I feel compelled to say that I actually do like this deck; I don’t use it much because of this card, but also because I rarely use theme decks with clients.)

If you can, when you are struggling with a reading or with a card in the reading, take a look at the thing that seems to be the least helpful or the part that makes no sense—lean into it. What I don’t mean is staring at it until you lose your will to ever pick up the cards again. Instead, it’s simply asking ourselves what else we could be looking at. There’s a phrase we use in learning design that comes from the tech world: iterative development. In this way of working, you might write a first draft of a learning design. But rather than going on to the next step, you’d pause and do a completely different “first” draft that doesn’t resemble anything you already did. And then you did a third “first” draft, this completely different from the other two. The idea here is that you might use your first design, you might use the third, but you would never have had the idea for the third unless you forced yourself to do it. In many cases, your final draft will likely be a mix of all three. 

Readings can work that way, too. Much of the time, the first path we take works. Not always. But even if you’ve got a “good enough” answer, if you don’t “feel” it then keep going. There’s nothing wrong with that. At worst you’ve gathered data you didn’t need; at best, you’ve added a whole new set of information that gets you and/or your client closer to where they want to be. I always say that every reading is an experiment, and this is a case in point. You can read one spread of cards three ways and see what you get. (This is one of many reasons I love my nine-card square so much.) And when you try to re-interpret a spread, start with what you’re not connecting with. Go “deep.” What you see when you first lay out the cards is the surface impression. What happens if you don’t accept that. What if you were forced to take the Waite-Smith Three of Swords and interpret it as representing the happiest thing ever to happen to someone? You could do it. Try it now. It’s totally possible. (I once interpreted that card as a Brazilian barbecue because that’s where they serve lots of roasted meats [including chicken heart] on long skewers. I’ve written recently how I saw swords as pipes.) What lies beyond what we assume we’re looking at?

Or, what happens when you cast your eyes across a spread and one of the cards just doesn’t fit? In a recent entry here I said you don’t have to start there. You don’t. But what if you do? What if you don’t look at the other cards until you’ve found a way of reading that incongruent card in a way that makes contextual sense? I can tell you that the rest of the reading will probably be unlike anything you’ve ever done before and probably in a very good way. Look, not every card carries equal weight in a spread and sometimes a card that doesn’t “fit” is really just offering a little grace note, an accent, or even carrying one card to another the way vowel sounds carry consonants. If you give it a go and can’t make it make sense first, don’t worry about it. Maybe it’s not that important. But why not give it a try? You won’t know what you could discover until you decide to take the chance. 

I know that seems scary, particularly if you’re sitting across from someone else and they’re waiting for you to reveal their future. (I did a reading for a friend recently on video and she hadn’t had time to watch it yet and she said, “It’s so weird to me that you know my future and I don’t.” It was funny.) But remember as the reader, you facilitate the experience. You’re are fully within your rights as a reader to say, “OK, we’re gonna go on a crazy little journey right now and I think it’ll pay off—but if it doesn’t, no worries. I still know where we’re going to go.” It’s OK to do that. Why not? Every time I’ve said something similar to a client, they’ve gotten excited. They’re part of an experiment! They’ve inspired you to try something new! I know it’s weird to suggest that you don’t necessarily “know what you’re doing,” but we don’t know what we’re doing every time we spread the cards. Anything could happen and we take the gamble we’ll be able to make it make sense. Usually we do. Sometimes we don’t. We’re human. And clients enjoy being part of the process. If you’re reading for someone else and you say, “I think we should try something really wild” they’ll almost always laugh a little and look both happy and slightly apprehensive and they’ll say, “OK!” Because they know you’ve got their back. And you do. 

READER: I think we should get wild with this interpretation. 
CLIENT: OK!
READER: I get the weird feeling that this card means you’re gonna become a hot air balloon pilot!
CLIENT: I am absolutely never doing that, I am terrified of heights.
READER: OK, let’s look at it this way, instead . . . !

When you’re reading for yourself, I recommend writing them out our recording them so you can listen to them later. I think this allows you to separate yourself from your own question and puts you in “reader” mode. And then, because you’re not as worried about getting the “right” answer, you’re more likely to experiment. And I bet that as you do the experiment, you’re going to suddenly find something that “clicks.” It happens so much. 

OK . . . this all takes us to . . .

A Read of One’s Own
This isn’t an easy one to develop a spread for! So instead of giving you a reading spread, what I want to offer in this case is a bit of an experiment . . . Grab a deck (if you have more than one, grab one you like but don’t use much). Go through it and pick out the cards you wish were different or that show imagery counter to the way you read the card. Make a little stack of these cards and set the rest of the deck aside. (I’ve chosen to call this stack of cards you don’t love “cranky cards” for the rest of those post.)

What you do next depends on the number of cards you chose. If you have between one and three, randomly throw in some additional cards—another three, maybe. Enough that you can shuffle a bit, but not so many that you won’t get any of your cranky cards if you were to draw three from the pile. 

If you have four or more, you can add more cards or not—but again, don’t add so much that you won’t get any of your cranky cards. 

Now, shuffle your little stack of cranky cards and filler. When ready, draw three. Begin by looking at the crankiest of the cranky cards and begin to reinterpret the image in a way that you like. If you were to look beyond the image, or if you were inventing a story for the image that was somehow the exact opposite of what the artist seems to have intended. How would you read this combo if you did that for each of the cranky cards? 

Come up with an “answer” or a meaning for the reading—as if you were doing a general reading. Write it down. And then take a little time away. Maybe a day. 

Then, come back and think of a place in your life where this answer to a question you didn’t ask could help you. It’s OK if nothing comes, but I bet if you’re tenacious and get playful with the answer, you will find a way that this reading is telling you something you needed to know even if you didn’t know it when you shuffled the cards. If nothing connects, that’s OK. It’s really about the experimentation. Maybe it’s going to answer a question you’ll suddenly have in the coming days. Maybe it was just a silly game to play to help you out of a rut. Either way, it’s worth doing. 

Let me know how it goes—and have a great week. ​

​The Star (2), Nine of Cups/Happiness (1), Justice (3)
From Vanessa Decort’s glorious Sun and Moon Tarot. 

Let’s start by taking one card at a time, dearies: Nine of Cups. There can be too much of a good thing and nine represents that. I think it was Mae West who said “too much of a good thing can be wonderful.” (If she didn’t, it was Nigella Lawson—but I’m fairly sure Nigella, one of my great loves, was quoting Mae West . . . another of my great loves. Gay men, y’all. We have a type.) Queen Mae was right, but sometimes--sometimes--it can burn you out, and I think that’s what happened with me. But I also think that I wasn’t spiritually connected to the work anymore, and what’s interesting about that is what pulled me back into tarot was eschewing all the spirituality that dogged me to that point. 

When I began reading in the late nineties, tarot has kind of synonymous with Wicca—at least from what I was experiencing in the nascent interweb communities. And honestly, I tried to get into Wicca. I read my Scott Cunningham (I know he’s considered problematic now, but he was at the time the gentlest and least arrogant voice I encountered in that space, and so he’s who I clung to. He--we--contain multitudes. I got to meet his sister recently [she’d actually won a copy of my book!] and listening to her talk just a little about him reminded me that, though problematic, he was a generous human. Based on what I know about him, I do believe that had Scott lived he would have seen the need for evolution. I know that sounds like justification. It isn’t. I have no interest in defending mostly anyone these days. But based on his work, I think he would have gotten it had he lived.) But in Wicca, I just found a new dogma. It was more to memorize, more motions to go through, and more icky ritual. I don’t do ritual. I find it embarrassing. It’s performative to me and I know that there is great power in ritual, but it’s well to know that my Catholic upbringing and the joyless drag show of the Catholic mass informed that view and I just can’t shake it—even though I was a theatre girl for so long. Go figs. 

The Golden Dawnery was always a turnoff for me, even before I could articulate why—and though I tried to engage it, again I just saw more dogma. And this dogma was closely aligned to the dogma of my childhood, so it didn’t even have the sexiness of Wicca (which, also, not that sexy—sorry). Now I know that Wicca was directly inspired by Hermeticism, so I understand why I disliked the two so much. 

I traded one kind of limiting dogma for another. And my attempts to make that work . . . fizzled. I found the esotericism interesting at an intellectual level. Clearly I often still do. I enjoyed the time I spent working on The Tarot School’s correspondence courses, and I always enjoyed my conversations with Wald and Ruth Ann—who I admire a lot. But nothing in those esotericisms and correspondences ignited me. In fact, they took me further from tarot. The tarot I was trying to find. They took me farther from life. And tarot is life, or it’s about life anyway. But I didn’t know that, then. I thought I was doing something wrong. I thought I was dumb. 

This is the part of the story where I tell you how my schooling taught me that I’m stupid. By the time I’d reached, oh, sixth grade, I accepted that I wasn’t very bright. Everyone kept telling me I wasn’t trying and I was trying—or I was trying the way I knew how. But I was objectively lazy: I avoided my homework; the innards of my Catholic school desk looked not unlike my own innards—gory; I struggled with understanding things that everyone else got instantly; and, even when I did succeed, my teachers told me I hadn’t—they didn’t believe that I’d really done the assignment, so they told me to go back to my desk and . . . what? Pretend to work? So I did. And what I did get good at was hiding and concealing. But I knew I was an idiot. By the time I got to high school, I had nothing left in the tank and the only thing that kept me going was theatre (see last week’s post, please—we now know how that love affair turns out). I nearly wound up flunking out of school. I spent every summer in summer school. And I had no selfhood left so I made no real effort to get into college. I flamed out in community college and in the embers of that debacle I found corporate training and tarot. Through those two things, I learned I wasn’t (amn’t) dumb. But that’s a story for another day. The salient point here is that, though I’d learned I wasn’t dumb by the time I stepped away from tarot, I had an innate tendency to doubt everything I did. Including tarot. And as the esoteric stuff failed me, I began to assume I was the problem. I always assume I’m the problem. 

But that’s not the only thing that stopped me. I often say I’d burned myself out with tarot, and that’s partly true. When I gave it up, I had been weirdly pushing too hard to consume too much information and produce too much product. But that’s not unusual for me. I do that with just about everything. (I was going to use that as a way of blaming myself for “giving up” on theatre, but I had the ability to pause and say, “No, you’re letting go of that because you can no longer accept the abuses of power and refusal to change or atone.” Growth!) I think what really happened is that the return on investment dried up. I wasn’t getting out of it anywhere near what I was putting into it. And that’s not anyone’s “fault,” I think I’d reached a tipping point. As many of us do. 

We don’t typically think of the Nine of Cups behaving this way, but it’s not out of the realm of validity to say that each time you add a number to one of the minors, you’re “spending” the energy of the ace. We can think of the aces in a suit as the whole pizza. Each new number subdivides that whole, weakening it. This is counter to how many of us view the ascending numbers—we usually tend to think of each higher number as more of its suit. Totally real, totally useful, totally valid. But there are times when it makes sense contextually to consider the depletion of the potential represented by the ace—and I think that’s a pretty good way to look at nines and tens. The suit has been “spent” by that point. I don’t know whether it was burnout or what, but by the time I put my cards down for what I thought would be forever, I’d spent whatever I had and there was nothing left in my tank. Because we’re talking about cups, this indicates that I’d spent myself emotionally as well as spiritually, because those are two aspects of the suit of cups. 

It’s also relevant to point out, thanks to cups, that this also coincided with the beginning of a long term relationship—and because of that, there was some degree of shame involved, too. Some part of me that didn’t want potential mates thinking I was weird or creepy, because there was already so much against me: I wasn’t rich, thin, hot, or fit. So to add being a weirdo tarot reader into the mix was a bridge too far, maybe. I know that was part of it and while I don’t necessarily think that’s depicted in the card or this reading, I’ll admit it was a factor. (It turned out not to be something worth worrying about, but it’s there nonetheless.)

This card receives the title Happiness in the Thoth tradition, and while I think it’s perfectly fine to ignore the word any time it’s irrelevant—I’ve also found that, if I dig, it can usually afford some additional nuance (sometimes it’s the main interpretation of the card!). Here, I think it reminds me that I was really perfectly fine with the choice. I didn’t grieve it the way I do with theatre because I never really thought of it as that big a part of my life. I enjoyed it until I didn’t, and that was fine. It was a hobby. While I sometimes fantasized about writing books about it or teaching it, I really had no desire to make it a profession or a vocation. I had other things I was doing; other purposes for being on this planet. Tarot was just something I did when I was in the mood. And I wasn’t in the mood anymore. It happens. I didn’t feel like I was losing something, and it’s not like I threw away all my cards and books. I put them away. I assumed mostly because I’d spent so much on them. But I wasn’t worried at all—a massive rarity for a freak like me. 

Now, on to the next card. The Star: I don’t believe in destiny. There’s something majorly privileged about the idea and it makes me uncomfortable. Things being “meant to be” make no sense. It’s meant to be that the world is destroying itself? It’s meant to be that powerful, greedy, wealthy white cis gendered het men get to run the show and have done for centuries at the expense of so much human life and culture? It’s meant to be that they’ve taught everyone else to operate from this scorched earth, it’s-mine-or-else mentality that half the people on this planet (OK, maybe less) are willing to throw their own best interests out the window just to make other people’s lives worse? No. I cannot believe that any of this is divinely inspired and I can’t believe that if there is divinity they prefer the lives of certain people over others, unless we’re talking about divinities who loathe wealth and greed. I can’t accept it. And I know that destiny is a central concept in many world faiths, and while I’m a big believer in not negating people’s experience or faith (providing it isn’t harming others), I will not accept that some people have everything and some have nothing just because it’s “meant to be.” I don’t accept that it’s part of some karmic wheel, either (and, from what I can see, nor does the actual concept of Karma, which differs dramatically from the lazy way that term is used in pop culture and new age spirituality). 

That said, I do think we can be on a path and not know it. And I think The Star highlights that part of my journey, too. The idea that I’m “supposed” to be working with divination makes my skin crawl. It puts me in a position of being “special” in a way that I hate. Again, it’s the implication that I somehow have some divinely ordained responsibility that other people don’t; that I’m unique or somehow important. Ew. No. I’m not special. I’m not important In any way. (I mean in any way that makes me different from anyone else.) And in fact much of the journey of my adulthood has been letting go of the idea that I should be. 

I guess, if I were to give it language, I might say that The Star indicates that my being is particularly well suited to doing this kind of work, and that I was moving in this direction even though I didn’t know it. I mean I’m objectively not well-suited to the world I was trying to be part of. Most days I’m not really sure I belong in the tarot world, either, to be honest. I spend most of my time feeling not cool enough, not well-connected enough, not worthy enough. I’m not as star struck by the divinatory and new age glitterati as I used to be, I’m not really start struck by anything anymore—because that has burned me more than once. And while part of me wants people to be like, “OMG, Tom Benjamin is so cool!” I also am terrified of anyone thinking that because I know at some point I’m going to screw up and let them down. It’s a strangely double edged sword and you’d be surprised how much of my time that inner battle wages in me. I’m constantly curious what it feels like to be a person who, ya know . . . likes themselves. 

But the way I know that I’m well suited to this work, and why I think The Star shows up here, is because when I am doing this work? When I’m doing it well? All of that self flagellation goes away. It’s just me, the cards, the client, and the question—and we’re engaged in this beautiful dance. Even when I’m working with a client through a difficult conversation, even when I have to tell someone that what they want isn’t on the immediate horizon (or at least not a horizon that I can see), I don’t experience the self loathing. I actually experience a sort of non-state, a place where I’m simply there doing the work. Now I have to be clear: this isn’t every time, not by a long shot. But it happens enough that I’m able to look back and recognize it. The only other times I feel that way is when I’m writing or cooking. Those seem to be the three parts of my life where I’m the gentlest version of myself to myself. And I think that’s part of what’s represented by The Star. 

But that’s not addressing about the fact that this reading is about why I gave up tarot, not why I picked it up again. I picked it up again, based on the above, because there was something in my body chemistry that needed it. But it didn’t need it then. And what it did need, what my being needed, is another aspect of The Star I don’t talk about much: rest. 

The Star’s association with things like “hope” always left me cold. I’m not and never have been a hopeful person. There is a peace to the card, though, especially when we consider the heat of what comes before it. If we think about The Devil and The Tower as more erotic than destructive (and I typically do think that), The Star is “after care” (I term that also makes me cringe, but I’m a weirdo). It’s rest. It’s respite. It’s stillness and quite and nighttime. Not the intensity of The Moon’s night, which is also a card that has erotic or energetic connotations. Rather, it’s the rest that comes from REM sleep. From simply being in the throes, for lack of a better word, of slumber. We might call this the hibernation card, and if I were designing an animal tarot deck (I’m not), I’d probably but a sleeping bear on this one. 

Long story short, I put it down because I needed to. I needed to rest. I’d really starting getting bitchy about the questions I was getting to read about (this was at the free tarot networks, which was my only real way of reading for others at the time). I’ve told this story before, so I won’t get too much into it here, but I’d grown to really get pissed at questions I deemed “stupid.” These days I don’t think any questions is stupid, so you can see how far I’ve come—but I really started getting angry at people who wanted to know what I perceived as dumb shit, when we had the power to read about any of the world’s great mysteries! (See, basically, everything I’ve written since is an exploration of why that was bullshit.) Even though I didn’t like the esotericists, I’d adopted their snobbery. 

I needed to let all that go and that required rest. And I think The Star is an apt card because we can both be resting and progressing at the same time. If you’ve read Tarot on Earth, you know how often I write breaks into the activities. That’s because we need to let what we learn grow and ferment and infiltrate our bodies before we take on more. “Cramming” isn’t good, and leads to the kind of burnout where you, say, start resenting the earnest and honest questions of people you volunteered to read for. 

We have to take breaks and I, to sort of borrow from Alanis Morissette, equated stopping with death. A break meant never picking something up again. And so I would push myself until I reached the point where I’d overworked myself to the point of hating the thing I used to love. I did it with my day job, I did it with acting, and I did it with tarot.

Next: Justice, a card I never really enjoy seeing in readings thanks to its imaginary nature. As I’ve said before, this is one of the changes Crowley made to the Thoth deck that I like—the retitling to Adjustment. I don’t read it the way he intended it to be read I don’t think but I also don’t care. One of my great loves is using the work and words of things that hurt me or others to negate the harm they did. So I use Crowley’s deck in all kinds of ways he would have hated. Anyway, Adjustment: I like the concept better and it can still retain the concept of justice which, if we’re being honest, should be a thing that adjusts to the situations presented with it. I have a friend who has spent years working with mothers on various aspects of pre- and post-natal care and has told me about many, many women she’s spoken to over the years who wound up in prison pregnant or with young children thanks to a broken taillight and some unpaid parking tickets. That’s not fucking justice. Justice would recognize that a single mother about to bring a child into the world—and, let’s be generous: nobody, really--should wind up in prison for parking tickets and broken taillights. That’s just another modern way in which we criminalize poverty in this so-called country. Anyway, the point is, older depictions of “Justice” are static and the Crowley-Harris revision isn’t, and that’s why I like it. Happily, this stunner of a deck (again, we’re using the Sun and Moon Tarot) presents us with a butterfly, which subtly hints to the concept of “adjustment” while keeping the older title. And what’s so right about this card in this context is that I took the break because my caterpillar days were over and my butterfly days were beginning. 

Jesus that’s a pretentious thing to say, isn’t it??

Well, pretench or not, it’s something worth talking about—particularly if you’re experiencing fear that you may never pick up a thing you once loved that you’ve put down. Earlier I said breaks are necessary. The butterfly metaphor makes sense. If a caterpillar insists on remaining a caterpillar, it will suffer—because it can’t. Now, I don’t know whether caterpillars know what they’re going to do when they’re born. I don’t think science knows, either. While the general assumption seems to be, as of the time I’m writing this, that insects lack the “hardware” to “know” this will happen, I can’t imagine that there isn’t some awareness. See, a caterpillar isn’t even really “born” a caterpillar; their whole pre-butterfly lives are a series of transformations, moltings, the like, that help them grow. When the time is right, they wrap themselves in a cocoon and, as it’s been explained to me, “digest themselves.” What happens inside that cocoon ain’t pretty. The caterpillar turns itself into goo that eventually divides and multiplies in such a way that the butterfly forms. 

What I didn’t know prior to writing this is that caterpillars (which more accurately are larvae) are born with “imaginal disks”—groups of cells that, as I interpret it, hold the place for what the insect will become. They are the butterfly, but not yet. These cells survive this self-digestive process, eventually forming wings, eyes, reproductive organs, etc. So within the caterpillar at birth is are these imaginal disks of what it will become once it eats itself alive and shits itself out, which is admittedly a coarse way of saying something . . . but it’s a coarse way of saying something that, in my experience, humans do at a metaphorical level at least once and often multiple times during our lives. And I think that’s part of what was happening for me, here. 

Again, this runs the risk of suggesting that I’m some kind of special somewhat who was “born” to do this. I don’t think that’s true at all. I guess what I’d say is that . . . we’re all born with imaginal disks of what we might be (rather than the caterpillar’s, which are what they must be). Our metaphorical imaginal disks maybe nudge us toward certain kinds of things, but not necessarily any one specific thing. A caterpillar must become a butterfly (or moth or whatever, they don’t all turn into Monarchs); we, though, maybe have like different lanes or paths that take us to our version of that. And I think that’s why this particular card shows up here. And that actually does tie into a common way I read Justice: as the “right” or “correct” thing. I put those words in quotes because I think there’s something imprecise about them—but they’re OK for our purposes here, as long as you don’t think I think I’m somehow insinuating that I’m “better” than you. (See, I did it with the quote marks again. I love punctuation!) I stopped reading because it was right to. I think I’d reached the end of the line, or anyway the end of that particular part of my journey. I needed to let it go. It was time. I didn’t know that I’d pick it up again, nor that when I picked it up again it would become such an intense part of my life. But I didn’t worry about it because I (and this is so weird to say right now) . . . didn’t care. I didn’t. I didn’t miss it. At all. Didn’t think about it once I put the cards down—and only really remembered I even had ever done them was when I’d open my closet and see my most used decks hanging from their little bags on a hook near my clothes. 

I was going to say . . . “I’m lucky they survived.” I had a mold issue in that apartment. And then I didn’t say that. Well I did, obviously, I typed it above—but I stopped myself from leaning it for two reasons: One, they were all commercially made cards which are loaded with chemicals. But also . . . maybe . . . ? They survived because they were supposed to? I lost a bunch of books in that place. Ones I actually did want to keep, so—it’s interesting that they got damaged and none of my cards did. 

So, really, that’s kind of the story—at least contextualized by these three cards. But I suppose someone may wonder, Well: What brought you back?

And it’s the same thing that, I think, brings everyone back to tarot: ASMR videos. 

OK,  I know that’s not what brings everyone back. But I happened to stumble on ASMR videos way back toward the end of this respite and one of the creators I stumbled on was an artist who was making ASMR videos about a collage tarot deck she was making. She wasn’t a tarot reader and didn’t, as I recall, “believe” in it. I think she sort of worked on the images based on a little white book. I can’t quite recall, but it’s what I remember. I know she printed some copies and sold it, too, but I no longer remember the name and it went out of print ages ago. And, like many YouTubers, she seems to have disappeared into the ether. But it was weirdly those videos that got me thinking about it again. Not right away. That took time. But the inkling was there. This was the early days of YouTube, incidentally, or at least my experience with it. It must have been around 2010? I think I was in my early thirties at that point. 

Actually, you know what? I now know exactly what year it was. 2009. Because there was one thing—a deck—that brought me fully back into the fold. The Shadowscapes Tarot by Stephanie Law. That was published in 2009. I happened, on a whim, to browse the aisles of a Barnes and Noble and my eyes fell on that deck and I couldn’t look away. I snatched it off the shelf, paid for it, brought it home, and fell in love. It is stunning. I probably should have used that deck for this blog, but as always there’s no accidents when we do these things. And I think the Sun and Moon deck managed to provide the right cards, particularly that butterfly (which, honestly, is not one of my favorite cards in that pack—though I like them all, there are a few [as there always are] that I would have . . . done something different with). 

What happened next could fill another blog, but I don’t really need to write it because my YouTube Channel and my first two books (Tarot on Earth and Your Tarot Toolkit—the indie one with my name on it, not the one that came out later from Llewellyn) are sort of about that journey. Not in the sense that I share with you what I was doing or going through was I was writing them, but in the sense that they both reflect what I did to land where I am now. And my forthcoming book kind of fills in the blanks since Your Tarot Toolkit was released a few years ago. 

So there you have it. That’s the story of how and why I put down tarot for a few years (I don’t recall how many because I can’t figure out how to see when I finally gave up. If I picked it up again in 2009, then I’m assuming I put them down around 2007? Which sounds . . . not wrong. So maybe two years, maybe three? It may actually be shorter time than I thought it was, but of course it also wasn’t a part of my daily life back then as it is now, so—like everyone—my practice waxed and waned. But it doesn’t matter how long it lasted. It lasted as long as it needed to and that’s the hard part for many of us to deal with. I was lucky because I thought I was done and didn’t care. And it wasn’t even a big drama, like the one I shared with you last week. I just said, “This is stupid” and put the cards down. You know that thing where they say, “One day you’ll do this thing for the last time and you won’t know it’s the last time”? It wasn’t like that. The last time I picked up the cards, I realized one day, was the last time . . . 

And then it wasn’t. 

Creating spread off this lesson (which, alas, is really more of a personal narrative than a straight up lesson) isn’t easy. But, I can’t leave you hanging, can I? So here’s what I’ve come up with. 

A read of one’s own
This spread is meant to help you prepare for fallow times, like the ones I describe. The difficulty with these is we generally don’t know they’re coming. Unlike burnout, there isn’t a moment where we go I can’t do this anymore! It’s usually more a thing where we put something down and then one day realize we may never do it again. Also, in this case, I’m not going to offer a sample reading. I think I’ve gotten personal enough. Wink. 

As always, you can use as many cards as you’d like for each position. I recommend three, but do what works for you. 

Position One: This card or these cards represent how you can calm any anxieties around the worry that we’re leaving something we love behind. 

Position Two: This card or these cards represent how we might make the most of these fallow times. 

Position Three: This card or these cards represent what we can do during fallow times to ensure we don’t feel stalled. 

This spread is probably best for times when you’ve realized you’re in a fallow period—but it doesn’t have to be. You can reword things a bit to bring you to thinking about what you might do if and when you reach that place. 

Hope you enjoyed this little deep dive into my psyche! See you next week!

​ (My intent, when I started this week’s lesson, was to use a single card and explore how the symbols within it can be read much like I read a multi-card spread. I actually started doing that, and wrote a good four of five pages of nonsense—but I knew I was avoiding the topic I needed to discuss this week. I didn’t want to, partly because it’s fairly personal, and also partly because it really doesn’t showcase how I work with one card. That was yesterday. Last night, after mulling it over, I decided to backspace over all that specious crap and just talk about what this lesson is trying to say—which is really the point of reading cards. And I share this with you for two reasons: first, and simplest, sometimes we start taking a path with a reading and discover that it’s not taking us where we thought it would. Second, I was doing the thing I constantly say not to: I was trying to force a reading to do something I wanted it to and that it had no interest in. So it’s an opportunity to highlight my own willfulness. I think that’s good, because in the social media culture we’re all impacted by, it’s rare we see folks every talking about how they fucked up. So, there you go! I fucked up!

When I drew this card, I snorted. I’m going to provide some unusually personal context, here, because it’s relevant to the ultimate lesson this card presents. And, who knows, maybe it’s a bit of an exorcism for me, too. 

For most of my life, I’ve been involved in the theatre. In my youth, I dreamed of starring on Broadway. It was all I wanted. It didn’t matter that I was short, overweight, fairly femme, had zero self confidence, and couldn’t afford to live in New York. I wanted that. At some point in my 20s, I fell out of love with that dream. Mostly because I’d realized I really loved writing. And I’m a much better writer than I ever was an actor. I’m actually a pretty good playwright—more than that, if I’m being honest. I’m pretty exceptional, in fact. And I was happy with that evolution. I went to grad school and got my MFA in it, and for the most part I really enjoyed that process—even if the cost was insane and I regret endebting myself in that way, I also made some really close friends who I value a lot. 

But things were not as rosy as I wanted them to be, and once I finished my MFA it seemed to a certain degree that theatre was finished with me. That was all starting to cause me great anxiety up until the arrival of COVID, when theatres shut down and all of us were done with it for an undetermined length of time. In the space of theatrelessness, lots of revelations came out nationally and locally about the extent of predatory behavior that was both known and tolerated throughout professional and community landscapes. And this forced me to look at the times I’d experienced predatory crap as well as the times I’d witnessed it and said nothing. Then there were the times I justified bullying, verbal abuse, and other traumatic situations because “that’s just the way it is in the arts.” And I couldn’t sit with that anymore. I joined a few attempts to create accountability—and when those fizzled, I made attempts to influence to the limited degree that I could using social media and private conversation. Those failed, too. I’m not influential, particularly in the local theatre community, because theatre communities tend to be rather exclusive—and when I resigned from a residency (which I did because of shitty behavior from my “boss”), I knew I was essentially sealing my own coffin—at least locally. 

Since lockdown ended and theatre has returned, the way it has returned is . . . to exactly the way it was before. All the promises of “doing the work” were broken, all the DEI officers hired were ignored and eventually either quit or were budgeted out, and the revelations of bad behavior (often illegal behavior) were papered over and forgotten about. But not by me. And my tolerance for it has been shot all to hell (as I assumed would happen generally). 

Concurrent to that, I had a few of my own personal experiences that left me wasted. This includes a production of a piece I’d written by a nearby company who—after informing me (not asking me) that they’d be producing it, went on to do so all the while refusing to pay me royalties on my work. Playwrights earn royalties when their plays are performed. It’s how we make money. We don’t make much, but any time you produce a play that hasn’t fallen into the public domain, the authors must be paid. Unless, apparently, the writer is someone you think you’re “doing a favor” for. I’m sorry, fuck you. No. Not a favor. A theft. And so it took several arguments with the theatre’s board of directors—and threats of taking their behavior to the public forums and to the Dramatists Guild to get my what I was owed. 

That experience left me shaken, exhausted, furious, and sad. And it became clear to me at that point something wasn’t right. It’s one thing to be treated like crap by people you don’t know, but I had a relationship to this organization—in fact, many of my worst experiences, the times I was treated least well, were times where I knew the organization. Like, somehow their familiarity with me made it OK to disrespect me. But in fact it wasn’t only that experience, it was the thirty years of experiences leading up to it—and the industry’s collective refusal to face their (our) own garbage, their racism, anti-fatness, anti-femme-ness, their usury, their classism. All the things. And I slowly realized . . . there wasn’t space there for me, anymore. Because I cannot accept this behavior—when directed at anyone, not just at me. 

That takes me to this weekend, when a script submission I forgot about had come back with an acceptance letter. At least to the next phase of the selection process. And I had an absolute panic attack. The head of the program asked that those of us selected to move to the next phase write back with an acceptance or a decline. After talking it over with a couple friends who know me, I declined. But that wasn’t the end, because I had two more responses from that person and their partner trying to assure me that there wasn’t any risk to me (I’d shared a very high level of what I’d been going through), especially since there was at least once more phase and I might not be selected. 

It is a writer’s dream to be encouraged in this way, but each new attempt to relax me caused me more agony—more panic, and on top of that a whole host of other things: shame, depression, grief, anger, confusion, and above all self doubt. Was I just punishing myself for others’ behavior? Was I burning a bridge (we’re taught never to burn bridges in the theatre, as you never know who knows who and is going to impact your hiring down the line)? What if I changed my mind and wanted in down the line? Was I just acting from depression or trauma? I spent much of the last five days riddled with shame. This was a no-win for me. The idea of going back into a theatrical situation sent me into panic mode; the idea of giving up on myself and my work felt . . . well, actually, like ceding defeat. And the victors were everyone single piece of shit who dehumanized me in my career. How could I let them win? 

And now here I am, writing this to you—on a tarot blog. But it’s got a purpose. You’ll see, soon.

There’s in a line in Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s famous musical Company: “There’s a time to come to New York, and there’s a time to leave New York.” I guess, in my case, it’s time to (metaphorically) leave New York (meaning my theatre life). And that is really difficult because I hung my whole identity on that part of my life for my entire adulthood. It made me special, different, not part of the herd. It was especially important to me since I’ve never been able to make my living that way, instead having to sell my labor to corporations in order to make ends meet. Being this thing, this playwright, saved me from the oblivion of being a normie. Even though I’d gotten to a point where every encounter with the artform I’d worked so hard at left me feeling like shit about myself—even positive encounters, like this weekend. 

There’s a time to leave New York. 

And now we get to the lesson, or the beginning of it: There are times when, for whatever reason, something we’ve clung to, something we may have defined ourselves in terms of, suddenly stops serving us. Maybe it actually becomes painful. Maybe it becomes dangerous. This can be true of relationships, jobs, hobbies, anything. Sometimes the thing we wanted most turns out to be the thing that was slowly poisoning us. And when that happens, it’s easy to see how important it is to excise that thing—but also easy to see how incredibly difficult it is to do it. 

That is the tension of Death and the lesson for this week. Sometimes we have to leave things behind, even though we love then—even though we’re exceptionally good at them—in order to heal, to grow, or to save ourselves. (I should add that writing about this feels incredibly indulgent and shameful, not only because I hate showing my feelings but also because we’ve just had a major hurricane in the US and the world is falling apart and I’m here whining about the fact that I don’t get to be a playwright when I grow up. I mean go fuck myself, right?)

There was a time when this happened for me and tarot, in fact; though I didn’t really grieve it. I’d gotten sick of it and put it away, assuming it wasn’t going to matter anymore. I hadn’t tied my identity to it. That made it easier. Now that I’m in the process of being left by the theatre (I can’t seem to leave it on my own), I run the risk of defining myself in this realm—this tarot, Tom Benjamin realm. And I have to be very careful in the next few years that I do not start to believe that I “am” something “special” because of this work. In a way, that’s why I don’t use my real name in this part of my life (even though I’m constantly telling people to use it after they meet me). It’s like, there’s a version of myself that is Tom Benjamin and he does the tarot stuff—but “I”, whatever “I” is, isn’t that. But, if I’m honest, it’s not all that effective in managing my ego. It’s probably just another thing I tell myself to make myself less anxious. 

To stop yapping about my own whiney drama, let me take this back to divination—which, after all, is the whole point of this blog. It is true you may come to a time where tarot (or witchery, or anything else) may no longer serve you. You may discover one day that you’re in an abusive relationship with it. Or, more ideally, that you and it simply have irreconcilable differences. And if you’ve tied your identity to that, the death of that relationship will be painful. That doesn’t mean it’s not going to be important, but it will hurt more. Because it’s not the relationship that’s ending; it’s the part of you that you thought was the center, the ideal, the version of you everyone liked most or even that you knew people were a little jealous of (where my fire signs at?). So it’s helpful now to consider whether or not your ego is tied to something you do. Are you identifying your value, your personhood to something that is part of you but that isn’t you? And if so, what are the potential consequences of that?

Now, it’s entirely possible you’ll never reach such a breaking point with divination—or anything else. I hope you don’t. It fucking sucks. But life, especially as we get older, is often about letting go, so if this doesn’t some day apply to tarot, it will likely to apply to something else. But it also needn’t be as big as “I’m leaving the theatre forever!” or “I’ll never pick up a deck of tarot cards again!” Not all of you are big fucking drama queens, like me. I am incredibly defeatist and incredibly dramatic and I also suffer from something that a lot of neurodivergent folks do: rejection sensitive dysphoria (look it up—if you have it, your mind is about to be blown.)

This could easily be applied to a style, a technique, even a deck—something that you’ve grown to identify with, that “defines” you and your “style.” Obviously these cases aren’t going to be quite as cry-me-a-river as the example I’m sharing above, but these kinds of transitions can be difficult, too. They’re low-risk objectively, but that really doesn’t ease the ego—who views every threat to its safety in the same way as it reacts to an on-coming heard of bison or a train. Everything that threatens the ego ignites the fight, flight, or freeze systems and that means that we’re going to suffer a little (or a lot) when it’s time to let go. 

But let go we must. 

It is the clinging that makes us suffer so, and I think this is what the Buddhists are trying to tell us. We suffer because we cling to identities that keep us too rooted in the material. Now, I’m not someone who thinks the human race should be focused on the spiritual all the time. Most of us can’t be and even if we could it can be just as demoralizing as anything else, particularly when we feel like we’re not getting what we need from it. But I do see the point that we suffer by holding on to what’s already dead. 

We can’t grieve until we’ve accepted something is over. And we can’t even begin to do that until we let go. Like Kate Winslet, letting go of skeezy Leonardo DiCaprio’s hand, we have to let go. 

And fuck off if it isn’t difficult! (Cont’d below picture.)

​In my draft yesterday, I focused on various symbols that make up Frieda Harris’s illustration, and I focused for a while on the two figures that swirl between the skeleton’s legs (enlarged above). One, robust and hale, looks like they’re about to head into battle—ready to free themselves from the chaos. The other looks to be reaching, reaching, reaching until they become all arms—drifting slowly out of the equation, losing steam, and depleting. What’s the difference? I didn’t know yesterday, but having explored the card in this way I know it’s the reaching. The long-armed clinger (there’s a name) is trying to hold on to what is gone. The other figure isn’t interested in clinging to anything, only in breaking free. And we’d do well to emulate that figure, because they have a greater chance of survival. Because it ain’t over yet.

That’s the thing about the Death card in tarot. It’s not the final card. There’s more game left to be played, it’s just that this round is over. 

This week’s spread is inspired by these two figures. (More on that below.)

This particular depiction of Death is fascinating on many levels, and one reason I love Harris’s work so much. But in Michael Osiris Snuffin’s The Thoth Companion, he discusses how the webbing that features in the card seems to form a (ahem) cock-like (not his term) appendage emerging from the skeleton’s pelvis. This leads the eye up and out of the card, but also brings our attention to the bubbles that flank the, um, shaft. I can’t recall if Snuffin compares them to testicles, but now that I know there’s a cock in the card I can’t see anything else. Which is by way of saying that this is a life-giving card—and an important part of this conversation. 

This isn’t the last card in the tarot, or even the majors; it’s just the middle of the road (ish). And if we accept this image of death as spraying his seed all over the landscape (and there are more humanoid figures in those . . . balls . . .), we recognize that this death card isn’t reaping. He’s sowing. 

Another deck I used almost exclusively for a while (as I seem to be now with the Thoth) was the Wild Unknown. And that Death card taught me something about the idea, too. It shows a carrion bird, rotting on the ground. It’s not a pleasant image, but it is a reminder—a memento mori, so to speak—that what has come and gone is fertilizing the ground. It’s usually a metaphorical fertilization. What we’ve been through makes what we will go through possible, usually in better, healthier ways. (This is one reason why, though, I’m so anti-embalming when we die. We cannot fertilize anything if we’re riddled with cancer-causing agents designed to make us look . . . not dead . . .? Like . . . ? Embalming made sense during the US Civil War because families wanted to see their slain loved ones once before they were buried. Now? It’s insane. And awful for the embalmer, who is exposed to these chemicals all day. Anyway.) 

Death makes us think we’re losing something, but that’s mostly because we don’t yet know what we’re gaining. When it’s not a literal death, we’re almost always gaining something. Even if that something is just the self respect to not put ourselves in positions that might damage our mental health, say. 

And this takes us to this week’s spread.

A Read of One’s Own
I really only recommend doing this spread if you suspect there is something you’re clinging to—no matter how big or small. If you don’t have anything like that, this will frustrate you. And it’s why the example I share will be generic. If you don’t, hang on to it—use it with clients or friends . . . and maybe one day you’ll need it for you. 

Card/set one represents the thing that we are clinging to. This is what we’d benefit from letting go of. For many, many reasons I do believe that this should be three cards rather than one, but that’s up to you. Below, for brevity, I use one. 

Card/set two represents the reacher I talked about in describing Harris’s image. It’s the ways in which we’re clinging to the thing and/or (it can be both) how it’s depleting us. 

Card/set three represents the hale, hearty figure who seems ready to fight. This tells us a way out of the enstuckification we’re experiencing. 

Finally, card/set four represents what could come to life once we do let it go. What’s the thing waiting to be born that can’t be until we let go of what’s died. 

Quick example: (This is for an imaginary client and for brevity I’m just using one card.)
Card one — what my client is clinging to: The Hierophant. In this case, I think this would be a religious tradition or spiritual path that has stagnated, become too dogmatic, too limiting, too restrictive, probably to “old.” I think of those who are clinging to outmoded ideas about tarot or witchcraft—for example, someone who believed that witches can’t curse . . . but deep down thinks maybe they should. 

Card two—how we’re clinging to it/and or how it’s depleting us: Seven of Wands (Valour). Oh, we think this part of our path makes us virtuous and heroic! (I tend to use “we” in readings when I mean “you, client, are the problem”). Oh, if we stay the course and show how virtuous we are, everyone will be impressed . . . meanwhile you’re spending all your energy doing that, and literally no one cares. 

Card three—how to get out of the enstuckification: The Magus/Magician. Oo, not what I expected! But in this case, I think the key is to actually do the things you think you’re not supposed to. I also think there’s a certain amount of experimentation and willfulness, here. The card is associated with Mercury, so there’s a kind of playful cosmological promiscuity that I associate with that god. This is the magician not as con artist but as mad scientist. 

Card four—what could be born from letting go of this dead thing? Four of Cups (Luxury). Oo, a new sense of emotional stability and ease. A sense of contentment. The restlessness ends, and a stabler spiritual journey begins. Quite nice!

OK my friends. There you have it. Hope you have a great week!