 Tyldwick Tarot, Neil Lovell There’s always so many things I want to do on a given day, and my energy and motivation rarely matches that. Every time I add a new practice/obsession into my suite of tools, I find myself hyperfocusing on that new thing to the detriment(?) of others . . . although, if those other things truly wanted to be done, they’d make themselves more alluring. Show a little leg. Come on, other things. You know that gets guys like me going, right?
Anyway, this is to say that I wanted to write this yesterday and never got around to it. And so I’m keeping it short, or attempting to, because I also have other things I need to do. (Note from future me: I did not “keep this short.”) This week I’m using deck I mentioned very briefly in my simple v. complex deck video as a deck that I really love but don’t use much because I have a hard time seeing the card title on many, many of them. I hoped that this second edition would bump up, or even enlarge, the titles, but no. Despite better card stock (the OG was gloss) and a sexy copper metallic edge, the titles remain inscrutable for me in most light. Including the light I’m writing in now. But I also think that this deck is something other than a “normal” tarot. It think this deck is particularly well suited to scrying. Not that I’m tried that, I find scrying equally inscrutable—more, even—than the titles in this deck. But those who are given to a softer frame of mind might find this deck a wonderful one to use for scrying and even path working. The deck, of course, is Tyldwick Tarot by the late Neil Lovell (1971-2018). Pour one out for Neil, folx. I’ve drawn three cards, due to the moodiness of this deck, with the reserved plan of adding at least two more if needed. Today we pulled: Five of Staves (2), Four of Coins (1), Seven of Coins (3). These cards, incidentally, are three examples of why this deck is so difficult to work with—and though I sold the original edition to benefit an organization a few years ago, actually not long before this second edition came out, I’d tried all kinds of different things to make the titles stand out—including using washi tape to write the titles on and sticking to the card. Nothing worked. It’s just a feature of this deck. It does not want to be seen that easily. Sometimes readings are like that, incidentally. Some readings simply want to play hard-to-get, the way this deck does. That can be sexy. It’s not particularly sexy to me, because I’m too dense to understand when someone/thing is flirting with me, but for people with more confidence, I’m told that’s sexy. I think that the fear of a reading being difficult to do, though, is more often a cause of people getting stuck. They anticipate having difficulty and so when they do it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy and they’re able to justify their feelings of worthlessness. I’m not saying that’s something I’ve felt, but . . . (It’s definitely something I’ve felt). The Four of Coins, our center card, actually indicates stasis—a rut. I’m quite mean to the fours, but I find them tedious. Conservative. The Four of Coins is often the most conservative of the lot, and its artistic depictions frequently indicate implied selfishness. I like that this four is bounded on either side by odd number—five and seven. Five is the least stable number and seven the most self-reflective. The 5/staves suggests the frustration we experience from feeling stuck in life. Our energy gets enfuckified and we don’t know where to put it. Every option seems, somehow . . . , stupid. Like, “Yeah, I could put my energy into that, but . . . what’s the point?” This is how I feel when I get bored. It’s not enough that I’m bored; I’m also totally opposed to doing anything that is doable in that moment. All I want to do is something else. And that’s the 5/staves, here. We get antsy, edgy, cranky, and these are all very five-y words, particularly when in the suit of fire. The 7/coins says, “Well, then, what do you want life to look like? If you’re not getting what you want out of it, have you bothered to tell life what you do want?” I can’t recall where I’ve written about this before, and I don’t know if it’s from some of my tarot work or if it’s from an old play or draft of a story I’ve written—Oh! Actually, I do know. Hold, please. Allow me to share with you a peek at my former theatre life . . . This is actually a scene from the last play I wrote before giving up the ghost. It’s never had an airing of any kind. It’s kind of a riff on The Nutcracker, but if Clara grew up and realized that all the magic she learned as a child actually damaged her because now she’s always disappointed by life. This is the start of Act II, when the adult Clara, who has just been forced to kill the Rat King, meets the Sugar Plum Fairy—who, to quote the character description, is super butch—until they’re not. A masc-femme leather daddy in a tutu. Clara enters. SUGAR PLUM FAIRY Well, well, well. Step right up, little monster. I’m the Sugar Plum Fairy. I scratch my balls and I don’t make love. I fuck. Hard. CLARA And you have a big dick. SUGAR PLUM FAIRY So you’re looking for a savior beneath these dirty sweets? CLARA For a good eclair, at least. SUGAR PLUM FAIRY Well take a seat, kid, and I’ll show you my choux. CLARA What’s it all about, Smitty? SUGAR PLUM FAIRY Flop sweat. CLARA I don’t understand. SUGAR PLUM FAIRY Hunger pangs. CLARA Sorry? SUGAR PLUM FAIRY Dental floss. CLARA This isn’t make any sense. SUGAR PLUM FAIRY That’s what it’s all about. You’re trying to escape the chaos. CLARA Wouldn’t you? SUGAR PLUM FAIRY Never. CLARA Why not? SUGAR PLUM FAIRY Chaos is all there is. Avoiding chaos means avoiding being, and I like being. CLARA I don’t. SUGAR PLUM FAIRY Know why? CLARA No, but I’m for sure about to hear you say it’s because I’m avoiding chaos. SUGAR PLUM FAIRY No, because you’re not avoiding chaos; you’re trying to avoid chaos, which is not the same thing. CLARA I thought I was going to like you more. SUGAR PLUM FAIRY How many times a day to do say that to people, places, and things? Beat. CLARA Constantly. SUGAR PLUM FAIRY Mmm hmm. You thought you were going to like life more. CLARA Bet your donut hole. SUGAR PLUM FAIRY And what, pray tell, did you think you were gonna get from it? CLARA Something . . . I thought I was gonna get something out of it . . . not this, this . . . relentlessly grim, and increasingly dim descent into . . . ouchiness. SUGAR PLUM FAIRY So you have no idea what you wanted, but you’re pissed as hell you didn’t get it? CLARA Yes. SUGAR PLUM FAIRY OK. CLARA I refuse to accept that I’m miserable because I didn’t have a clearer idea of what I wanted out of life. SUGAR PLUM FAIRY How can life give you something you don’t even know you want? CLARA Because it gives me shit I sure as fuck know I don’t want every damn day. SUGAR PLUM FAIRY Maybe it’s just tryin’a throw some shit down on the strip to see what the cat laps up. CLARA Excuse me? SUGAR PLUM FAIRY If life keeps throwing shit at you you don’t want, maybe it’s trying to throw you a bunch of different options to see what you’re actually looking for. CLARA Oh my God. Oh God. Ew. Ew. Did you hear that? Even as you said that, did you hear how ew that was? You heard that, right? That wasn’t just me? SUGAR PLUM FAIRY (Cocks an eyebrow and a cranky pose.) CLARA That’s ew. SUGAR PLUM FAIRY Life isn’t a mindreader. OK, did you catch it? How can life give you something you don’t even know you want? That’s a big question. And when I wrote that, I thought . . . Whoa . . . Because I didn’t expect to write that. Sometimes when you’re writing shit comes through you would never have found otherwise, which is one reason I do enjoy written readings. But in this case, I think I managed to connect to a truth I hadn’t detected before. If we don’t tell life what we want, how can we expect it to give it to us? Is life a mindreader? Are our guides, ancestors, angels, or whatever we call them? I mean, you’d think, but . . . evidence suggests they’re not. And I think most people will bear that out—those, anyway, who aren’t the product of nepotism and legacy admissions. Now, look. I just edited out a couple long paragraphs disproving the point I just made, at least when it comes to my life. I gave examples of things I very clearly told life I needed/wanted and that life said, “yeah, no bitch.” But that’s a different thing. There are times in life when we know what we want and life won’t give it to us. There are other times when we don’t know what we want and life will just throw anything at us to see if something is interesting. We can have both kinds of experience. This reading is talking about the second one. And so what is this actually saying? Typically, I prefer the message come directly from the cards rather than an something inspired by the cards. For example, I prefer a reading to say, “yes, look for a new job” rather than, “Oh, gee, it looks like things at work are ickypoo . . . yuck.” The first one doesn’t involve me having to make any logical leaps. The cards tell you what’s up. The second one requires me—or, really, the client—to see and react. Now, the second one can be more helpful if you’ve got a client with the ability to see themselves clearly. Not all do. Which is why I feel safer when the reading just tells you what’s up. Because if the client does get it, then I have to make the journey for them. “If things are icky at work . . . and you’re not happy there . . . and this isn’t what you want to do . . . . . ? Thennnnnnn . . . . ? MaybeYouNeedANewJob, Right???” This is the second kind. And what’s it is saying to us is, “If divination isn’t giving you what it want, tell it what you want it to do.” When I was coming back from my tarot burnout break, I was reading much better than I had beforehand—in the time I’d “rested,” I’d internalized a lot of what I’d never had time to absorb while I was greedily inhaling all the information I could about the cards. But I knew something wasn’t “right,” and around that time Lenormand started grabbing people’s attention in a major way. The conversation became very either/or. “Tarot can do this well, but lenormand does this other thing better.” Or, “tarot is so mushy and spiritual, and lenormand is DTF” — basically. And it’s like, I get why people felt that way . . . but also . . . no. If tarot isn’t doing what you want it to, ask it do something else. It’ll follow your lead. I only know this because I did it. Around the time lenny started getting big, and I recognized that I didn’t really gel with it, I started to despair. But then I thought, “Well, look: we asked tarot to be all this mushy shit. We told it to. Well, not us; our forebears. But they made it that way. It didn’t start that way. It wasn’t even meant for divination. It was a game. And if that’s true, than tarot can do anything that we ask it to. So I’ll ask it to do something else.” And I did. And it does. And that’s where Tarot on Earth came from. You can do it, too. What are you missing in your divination? Where do you feel stuck, stunted, or frustrated? Where are your energies being eaten up by things that don’t really matter do you? And why? If you don’t know, don’t worry—that’s what this week’s spread will be about. But before we get there, it is worth asking ourselves these questions without the cards to guide us. See what we think, and then see what the cards say. Are they in line? If not, — and this is the more exciting situation — where is the gap, and why does it exist? This is very cool, in my opinion, because when things don’t match, I think there’s so many interesting things that can happen in that tension. But also don’t worry too much if you can’t figure out why it’s different. Or do a reading reconciling the two. It’s possible both answers are two different symptoms of the same source ill. That’s a pretty sure bet, actually, and my guess is that the tarot reading will be the one that gets closer to real disease. It doesn’t have the same protective bias you do. A final note: One thing I intended to do in this post and forgot was to change the way I read these three cards. Partly to show you that you can read them multiple ways, but partly because I assumed I’d be working more with these images. I never got there, but an area in which I might be at risk of getting stuck is the way I tend to ignore the artwork. I chose this deck precisely because of its art. So, here’s how I read the same spread differently: The 4/Coins shows a brick wall with this window filled with coins and mystical symbols (the Zodiac, among other things). It makes me think of how the commodification of spirituality makes it so that we are more likely to get suck (four); we need to “brand” ourselves so that our clients will “remember” us—and we need not to deviate from that brand or we’ll be forgotten about. The 5/wands, with its Greco-Roman shield showing boys leapfrogging—sorry, no, fighting—reminds me that the battle between commerce and spirituality (coins/earth contra wands/fire) has always been a “thing.” The solution is to ask yourself, “what do I really want out of LIFE?” (7/coins). Let what’s important to you be your guide. This may actually take a fare amount of deep study, given how this 7 seems to closed off. But closing off is also how we get stuck. We don’t expose ourselves to the world, which kinda poisons the well—or leaves the fountainhead in his image on just a trickle. To understand what’s really important means breakout out of that walled garden (more of a 9/coins energy, tbh), in order to compare what you have to what you could have. Which I take to mean, exposing yourself to all kinds of divinatory systems and methods and taking things that light you up. A Read of One’s Own This spread is a bit of a choose your own adventure. I recommend reading through the whole thing before trying.
Let me know how it goes!
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lesson 40: tarot’s time, reiki, ai, midjourney and my journey. A hodgepodge lesson with a spell.4/15/2025  LESSON 40:
I can tell already this post will be pretty discursive. But fun! Enjoy. (Note from future me: “Fun” may have been a bit of a mis judgement—but another f-word, fascinating, applies.) This last weekend, I attended Reiki I and II training—something that, a year ago, would never have occurred to me. During the session, we got in the topic of AI. My teacher is an artist who actually likes AI for certain applications, like illustrating a slide deck. I remembered the deck I’m using this week, Lynae Ariadne Zebest’s Primordial Dreams Tarot--the only AI deck I have and use. I brought the deck out to bring to session II and enabled another buyer, one of my great special skills. (Did Reiki make me do it???) I’m not a fan of AI, but I’m not a fundy. I think that if we can countenance the environmental issues (and those are important), there are reasons to use it—including the creation of simulations for dangerous jobs, as well as accessibility for people with various disabilities. When I saw Lynae’s work at last year’s Reader’s Studio, I had a feeling it was AI—but I also kept coming back to look at it. In talking with Lynae, I learned they’re an artist (primarily sculpture) who wanted to explore the idea of using AI (MidJourney, in this case) as a divination tool. This is something that’s occurred to me, too, though I haven’t used it. They both used AI to divine the deck but also to create the imagery. When actual artists use AI, I find many of the ethical arguments that bother me less of an issue. For someone who isn’t an artist to make art with AI, there’s something one-sided about it. It’s taking art that trained the engine and not giving anything back. On the other hand, artists always give back in the form of creating and giving their work to the world—and, though AI has been trained on the stuff out there in the world, artists are always influenced by and influencing each other. But this isn’t a post about AI; it’s a reading. I just wanted to highlight why I accept this deck and not others. First, the artist is upfront about how and why they made the deck (for themself, not for release—the deck went to market after people began requesting copies); second, the exploration of AI is a spiritual/divinatory tool; third, and for me most important, the idea of using the world’s newest technology (AI) to simulate and recreate the world’s oldest technology (cave paintings). And that is what this deck is inspired by: ancient cave paintings. And I find the whole experience of this deck exceptionally cool. My only actual critique of this deck is that it’s difficult to know which cards you’re looking at unless you really study them. I’ve written the titles in tiny print in the corners so I can see them more quickly, but I’m told the creator is considering a second edition with the titles to make it easier to read. I support this. What we have this spread: Ace of Earth (4), Seven of Earth (2), The Fool/O (1), Five of Earth (3), Eight of Water (5). (If you’re new to this spread, the number following the card title indicates the order in which I drew and laid out the card. I work this spread from the middle out.) This is an EARTHY reading—and I love that, because the cave paintings are the earthiest form of art: literally. They are made of inks and dyes that come from the earth, applied to the earth. And we start with The Fool! There are times divination amazes me and this is one. Because I’m using an AI deck—a thing many, many people are entirely against, even without context—some of you may think I’m a fool for supporting this one. (I’m not; it’s exceptionally good. It’s a special deck, you can feel it.) I think, however, that this is more about having zero expectations in the act of divination, and maybe even from the tools we use. I mentioned at the start I attended Reiki I and II this week and that if you asked me a year ago that would never have crossed my mind. If you asked me six months ago, it wouldn’t have. Suddenly, it announced itself as the “next thing” in my journey and before I knew it, I was registered and signed up for the sessions. I don’t even know if I “believe” in Reiki? Like, I know it exists and helps people . . . and I’ve had it . . . but I also feel like maybe I’m not capable of doing it? Or even benefitting from it? But at the same time, literally anyone who wants to and has access to a teacher who will give them training and placements/attunements can practice it. . . For some reason, during session II I had a great morning and then a crash midway through the second half that made me think the whole thing was all a big Ponzi scheme. This morning I didn’t know what to think, and then this afternoon I offered my sister a remote session—and based on her experience, it sounds like it worked. So who knows? (Note from future me: I have had some evidential experiences in the last day that have someone changed my mind, but I’m a cynic at heart.) I chose Reiki precisely because it has become so democratic. In early days in the Western world, it could be difficult to both find and afford. These days, that’s changed. There are teachers out there who will attune you for very little, and really having the attunements is the only thing you need to have in order to practice—though some basic education would help. You cannot be a Reiki guru, because Reiki has nothing to do with you. The practitioner is a channel, a conduit through which the energy passes—not unlike tarot’s Magician. Reiki is not the practitioner’s energy; it’s its own. And the healing isn’t done by the conduit, it’s done by the recipient’s body. But by the same token, it’s in the “subtle energy” tradition and, boy, can it be subtle as fuck. One of the things we talked about in class was the ego, a topic dear to me, and how the practitioner really needs to remember that this isn’t about them. We have nothing to do with it, other than having had the attunements and serving in the role of facilitator. But the ego still wants to feel special, and I’ve been struggling with that. Because it’s not about me, I can’t be “good” or “bad” at it, which means there’s nothing to be praised or corrected for. There’s not sense of feedback, other than that clients typically will say, “wow, that was relaxing!” Nice. So is a boring story. The other thing is, the practitioner has no say on what the Reiki does inside the body of the client. We can intend that it address the client’s pain or concern, but it knows better than we do how to do that and where, so we’re really more of a squirt gun directing Reiki than we are a healer. This is as it should be, but it does make it somewhat . . . something. The thing about practicing Reiki, it seems to me (recall: I’m not an expert) is to have no expectations. That is difficult to do, but it’s actually key to reading, too. When we lay out the cards, especially for ourselves, we’re expecting something—obviously an answer, but many times we’re also expecting something else: joy or despair. “Yes, you well get the thing,” or “Yes, you are going to die soon,” or “No, you’re going to have to live a long-ass life, or “No, you’re not getting the thing.” Now, I’m not saying we’re expecting a particular outcome—only that there will be an outcome, and it will either be the best thing ever or the worst thing we’ll ever deal with. And, like the experience of Reiki, the reality is typically much subtler than that. Usually it winds up being, “You’ll kind of get the thing and then when you see it, you won’t care anymore.” Or, “No, you won’t get the thing, but you won’t be upset about that part—you’ll really be upset about the fact that you don’t feel seen or chosen.” Every reading really should start with no expectations. The Fool has none, which is why they actually are sometimes in a risky position. See, one of the things that keeps us safe is the fear that something bad will happen if, say, we ride a motorcycle on the highway without protection. Fear actually protects us. Of course for many of us, it protects us from things that don’t exist and aren’t happening, and it becomes chronic. But the point of fear is to stop is doing things that are, like . . . , bad. Flanked by two earth cards, the 7 and 5, we’re on unstable earth. That, then, suggests sands or even wetlands. Walking isn’t easy because the terrain isn’t just uneven, it is literally shifting beneath the Fool’s feet. The 7/earth reminds us that we’re in a moment of reflection, wondering what exactly it is we’re expecting and desiring from life; the 5/earth reminding is that it’s probably not what we thought it was. The goals we once had evolve and even if they remain similar, they’re different enough to not be the same at heart. In fact, we may even be afraid that our lives will end, that we will be shut out, if we stop caring about the things we used to care about and make it known that we now care about new things. But, see, that’s expectation, isn’t it? “If I stop caring about X or start caring about Y, then people will shun me . . .” Certainly that’s an expected outcome, these days, but it’s not fated. And I think this is a timely message, because the world is very different—outwardly—than it was a year ago. Six months ago, even. The quiet parts are not only being spoken out loud, they’re being shouted through the loudest microphones in the world—and the legislation that once covered marginalization with fancy, progressive-sounding language, is simply out-and-out discriminatory in ways we haven’t seen since the “US” Constitution got written by a red-headed human trafficker who played the violin. What the world needs from diviners is changing. This, in fact, happens to be why I decided to take Reiki I and II (and likely III, down the line) and why I’m separately working on a degree program in metaphysical studies. My clients have begun asking for things they used not to. I could say, “No, go elsewhere.” Or I could recognize that the job is changing and I can evolve with it. The “brand” or lineage of Reiki I was certified in this weekend is known as Usui/Holy Fire® III Reiki, received by International Center for Reiki Training founder William Lee Rand. This is an “evolved” practice, which announced itself to practitioners over time and has “upgraded” twice since then. This is what the “III” represents. It’s not level three reiki, it is the third iteration of Usui/Holy Fire® Reiki. (It’s required to use the “Registered” symbol when referencing the title in print, according to my manual. To be honest, I find that pretentious. It’s like putting the “Copyright” symbol every time you reference the title of a book or deck in print. The Primordial Dreams Tarot© would be fine once, but every time it’s clumsy and difficult on the eyes.) I bring this up not to comment on the name, because I actually feel quite lucky to have chosen the teacher I did who is trained to teach this version—the central core of learning to see ourselves with the same joy that “God” sees us is beautiful (that comes not from the course materials, but from a poem read to us at the end of each day by our teacher). I bring it up because it occurred to me this weekend that Reiki has really curated its own journey. From “arriving” to its founder (Mikao Usui, or Usui Senei), it evolved with its transition from Usui to one of its second-gen stewards, Chujiro Hayashi (from sitting to prone patients, for example), and further once Hayashi Sensei introduced it to its first “Western” steward, Mrs. Hawayo Takata—who “simplified” it for those not used to Japanese culture, thinking, faithways, and philosophy. After her death, the stewards she trained changed it further. I say “changed,” but if you follow the logic, it wasn’t they that changed Reiki; rather, it was Reiki who announced that it was time for it to be changed and that this particular steward was the one to do it. Contrary to common Western thought, Usui Sensei’s methods have not been lost. After World War II, the US’s regulations forced energy practitioners to train and license as massage therapists, and so the Usui tradition went “underground” and private, a club, to avoid this. Reiki seems to evolve as it wants to when it wants to. Much like life. The life we all knew in 2024 is gone forever. I mean, that’s always the case; the life we know six weeks ago is gone, the life we knew yesterday is gone. But we’re in a uniquely unsettled time, as the current “president” of the so-called United States today promised the president of another nation that he’d be imprisoning “homegrowns” in that foreign land, so he better start building more prisons. This is where we are, and we have no evidence to suggest that’s bluster. We cannot pretend the world is as it was. This is underscored by the Ace of Earth on the left. When paired with its nearest neighbor, the 7, we understand that one reason we’re evaluating where we are is because we are in such an unsettled, such an unformed moment. The illusion that there is anyone at the wheel is gone, as is the illusion that anyone we ever thought had the wheel was steering in the ways we assumed and were told. So . . . In fact, I will venture the somewhat self-important assertion that divination is going to become increasingly more important, in increasingly real ways. (I’m also remembering a conversation in my class this weekend about how the HolyFire® [don’t forget the symbol!] energy is “upgrading” again [the quotes are because that’s not my word, it’s not one I’d reach for; it’s Rand’s] and in some ways the Earth [as a concept and energy] is, too. “Access” to spirit and divinity seems, according to this theory, to be growing more necessary—but also more accessible to more people.) Now, we turn to the only other element in the spread: eight of water. And all I can think of is the phrase emotional labor. That’s one of the things I do enjoy about not working with the Waite-Smith images. In fact, I haven’t really used the images on any of these cards to interpret—which isn’t uncommon in my world—though the imagery does create an overall mood for me. Eights are labor, work; cups, clearly, emotion. But I want to take this further, because the theme develops. Not emotional, here, but spiritual. Spirituality isn’t necessarily implied by water, but it’s also not not implied by it. I’ve written about this in prior posts. Spiritual labor, spiritual work. Our work, and my experience is bearing this out, is also going to demand more spirituality. Both from us, and maybe from spirit. Why? Because of that ace. Life is currently so unformed, it is so unmoored, and so ungoverned that we’re—to borrow a tired phrase—out in the “wild wild west,” which weirdly does feel implied by this style of art. When there is no surety, no certainty, and—frankly—not much to believe in, spiritual work in going to become increasingly important. In essence, this reading is saying: “Calling all fortune tellers, freaks, witches, diviners, doctors (the pre-colonial kind), rooters, conjurers . . . because this is what you’ve been training for.” But it’s also saying, “Do not make this about you. Do not have expectations of what will happen, what you will be called on to do, what you will be seeing—anything. You must go in with total openness, because literally anything could happen in this most unstable of unstable times.” AI imagery, particularly this sorta expressionistic style, typically feels cold and remote to me. There’s a distance, even in more representational and photorealistic images—maybe even especially in photorealism, thanks to the uncanny valley factor—in a lot of AI art. Not so, these cards. The beasts depicted all feel somehow mythical and earthly, surreal and real. And these animals, in particular—the boar-like beast on the 7/earth, the sorta cougar/bearlike boyo on the 5/earth, and the antlered animal on the 8/water—have a protective vibe to them. Which suggests to me that there is sanctuary and safety in the spirit, too, but it must activated spirituality—these cards do not feel static in in person—for it to truly be a refuge. This is not the lesson I imagined giving. In fact, I sensed at the start that it would be discursive (it was), but fun! I wouldn’t call this fun. Of course, my outlook is somewhat bleak of late—but I’m actually not in a particularly bad mood today. In fact, I wonder if the Reiki—which I began to doubt aggressively during the last half of my second workshop—is working. But I do think there’s something to be said about going both where the cards and life take us in some ways. After my first formal Reiki session with a practitioner, one I found relaxing but not particularly memorable, I began sensing I would get certified. After I picked up a book on the topic, curiosity drove me to booking a class. I needed to know what the attunements felt like, for example, and what the symbols that are both totally secret and simultaneously all over the internet did and how they were used. It is said that when Reiki calls you, you’re inevitably going to answer. But this all happened so quickly, I had no time to find any evidence that it did anything--aside from the really dramatic stories I’d heard about people’s experiences with it. Not second- or third-hand, either. Nearly everyone I know who had experienced it had had a pretty major, memorable moment with it. I had some lovely moments during my classes, and I’m not sure what it was that made me start going into cynical mode . . . well, I do: ego. But I’m not sure what tripped it. I woke up wondering why I’d spent the money and also feeling disappointed that it didn’t work and also sad that I wouldn’t need to take level III. But I also went looking for more books about it, kept reading the parts of the manual that I hadn’t yet, and began the day by giving myself an overall session and sending a practice distance session to my sister. So . . . I’m both completely certain that it doesn’t work and that it’s just a non-denominational cult without a leader, and that it surely does work and I’m seeing little evidences all over the place. This includes something I’d taken to mean that it was all nonsense: In the time since having my initial experience as a patient and signing up for the class, my mood, outlook, and health got worse. I felt like absolutely garbage for a little more than two weeks, getting increasingly angrier and despondent, right up until the day before my class—so much so that I really thought about not going and just eating the cost (which wasn’t crazy, but wasn’t nothing—especially “in this economy”). I’d read that a “healing crises” can occur as your body starts purging garbage you’ve built up over—in my case—a lifetime. And while I wondered if that might be happening, I was egotistical (and insecure) enough to understand that I’m always the exception to the rule in a bad way. Things might work amazingly--but not on/for me. But another of the students had basically the same experience I did, and I thought--huh. I do that a lot, now. Trying not to have expectations is difficult. Especially since, of late, the magic eight ball of logic says all signs point to DOOM. Divination, oddly, has not been telling me the same things. The skeptic, one even more skeptical than I, would say: “What if it’s just giving you false hope?” To which I’d say, “sometimes that’s the only kind we can muster. Doesn’t mean it won’t keep the engine running a little longer.” And this reading shows, too, that the reality isn’t being denied by divination—but that our expectations are not necessarily the projected outcome at this time. And given the complete and total surreal lack of logic going on in the world today, it’s logical to say that the logical outcome of an action is not what we should be expecting. We live in a world where two+two does not necessarily yield four. Truth is made malleable. So logic isn’t helpful. But divination . . . ? Maybe it’s time has really come. A read of one’s own I’d written out a whole spell for this week’s spread when Weebly crashed—I cannot tell you how much I regret hosting my website with them, and how much I really recommend that you avoid using them at all costs. While my frustration hasn’t boiled over as it usually would, I’m still fucking pissed. ANYWAY. Here’s a quicker version of what I’d written, which is now lost and gone forever. 1. Fan out a deck face down and pass your hand over the cards to feel which 3 you want to select. If you use Reiki, go for it. 2. Take those three cards out without looking at them and put them aside, facedown. 3. Shuffle the rest of the deck and set the intention that the cards you draw next will tell you how your divination skills will be leveling up to meet the moment. Cut and draw at least three, but as many as you’d like, to answer that intention. 4. The three cards you took out earlier are the recipe for a spell to help you amp up to that new goal more quickly. They might be advice or instructions or even a energy that unlocks something unexpected. Let them guide you. Don’t tell them what they mean. Be quiet and they will tell you. Also, don’t go expecting thunder and lightning, here. Probably the easiest, first thing that springs to mind is the recipe. Just don’t harm yourself or someone who doesn’t deserve it.  Lustrous Lenormand, Ciro Marchetti and Toni Savory My history with lenormand is well-documented (in, like, my mind). In a nutshell, I hated it for years but I learned a lot about how to read tarot from it. When I eventually stopped listening to what people were telling me the cards meant and started listening to what the cards told me they meant, I got pretty good at it. These days, I really only use for the grand tableau, but I really do like that reading. I can’t necessarily explain why, but it’s fun to do and often leaves clients pleased with the results. I would wager, though, that it’s about as specific and can cover as much ground as a nine-card tarot reading can. So I’m not sure it’s any better; just different.
This week, I stumbled across a lenormand deck I’ve never used. Literally stumbled. It must have been under a pile of clothes I had in the bedroom and over the however-long-it’s-been-there, it wheedled its way to the floor, where I tripped on it. I have no idea how long I’ve had it. It may have been a pre-order? Can’t recall. Anyway, it’s the Lustrous Lenormand, by Ciro Marchetti—noted tarot and oracle designer and skeptic—with a book by Toni Savory, of the World Divination Association. When I saw it there I thought, Well, I should look at that. And then I thought, What if I ask it for a lesson about the tarot for this week’s blog. And here we are. Using my double chevron of a few weeks ago, we get: Mice (4), Rider (2), Snake (1), Bouquet (3), Heart (5) Dice (9), Stork (7), Clover (6), Child (8), Man #2/Them (10). You’ll note I have a card here, Dice, that’s not usually in lenny decks. There’s a handful of additional cards in the deck, including Time, Well, Bridge, Masks, Labyrinth, and Closer Look. When I do a GT, I typically remove any extra cards—but not when doing something like this. I like the variety. My favorite lenny deck, The Maybe Lenormand, has a whole slew of additional cards making it a fifty-two card deck, and I love it. The other thing is, you’ll note we have Man #2. This deck offers two men and two women cards, which shows in some ways that we’re progressing and in other ways that we still can’t conceive of things beyond the binary. When presented with the choice of significator cards in lenny decks, I typically leave the two men in or the two women—depending on who is hotter—and refer to them as you (the client) and them (the other). In this case, there’s a man with gray hair that was second in the deck when I looked through it, so he became Man #2. But you’ll note, above, I added “them” and that’s how I’ll refer to the card here. In this case, I take it to suggest the client or the subject of the reading, regardless of gender expression or identity. Let’s dive in. The symbolism in lenny decks isn’t supposed to matter, and since the symbolism on tarot decks rarely matters to me . . . that’s a-OK! I did this same spread using a tarot a few weeks ago and suggests that the cards below act as houses for the cards above and the cards above act as houses for the cards below. (If you’re unfamiliar with lenormand, when I say “houses,” think of astrology. If you have the Sun in Leo, as I do, your sun expresses itself in a Leonine way—which in my case, is both hot-tempered but also hot-blooded (ahem). This combo takes place in the seventh house, the house of relationships and partnerships. And so my Sun in Leo expresses itself through relationships. And I will tell you, as long as I’ve known that placement it has never made sense—until not long ago when I realized how often I make the people in my life serve as defense attorneys against my insecurity and as validators for my talents. Go figure. That’s kind of what houses “do.”) One thing it was hard for me to get used to was how the cards color each other, which is odd because that is something so integral to my tarot practice. But there are so many contexts with tarot and not much of any with lenormand, because, again, the images don’t “mean” anything. We’re not “supposed” to interpret them the way we interpret the art on a tarot card. Frankly, I think that’s hogwash. If you want to use the image, fuckin’ do it. Who’s stopping you? The lenormand police? Fuck them. On the other hand, I actually don’t pay any attention to the image other than where they’re facing. In this case, the snake “faces” down to the clover, which is both its house, and the house the clover sits in. We have a snake functioning in a clovery way; we have a clover functioning in a snakey way. Those are not the same, but both likely will matter! What’s a clovery snake? Let’s start there. When interpreting lenny, or anything, I fold fast to something I learned from Camelia Elias: function over symbology. She didn’t phrase it that way, but it’s how I sum it up for myself. The function of a snake matters more to me than the cultural associations of a snake. Now, a snake doesn’t have any “function” other than “being a snake,” unlike the heart, which is a pump. So when I think of the items in the deck that are living things in their own right (people, child, dog, stork, tree, fish, fox, birds, mice . . . think that’s it), I think instead of their behavior. What is the behavior of a snake? They’re windy, twisty, stealthy, speedy. We could say they’re poisonous, but that’s a judgment; snakes don’t exist to poison. Only poison does that. If the card were venom, that would be poisonous. Poisonous snakes poison when they’re in danger. The thing they do is defend, not poison. Make sense? Now, contextually, cards around the snake might suggest they’re in defense, in which case poison may be the likely outcome. But we don’t have any evidence for that, and in fact a quick glance at the cards suggests there isn’t any. Here, I can feel lenormand readers screaming at me. “No! You’re making it mushy and tarot-y!” In fact, I’m not. This card is typically meant to suggest “the other woman.” There’s no contextual relevance for that because this is a reading about tarot, not about sex. If I clung to that, I’d already be fucked. Frankly. And that’s so often where I got stumped with this pack. I wasn’t “allowed” to take the card farther away from it’s “real meaning,” but the “real meaning” didn’t fucking make any sense! Know why? Because symbols don’t mean anything in a reading if they don’t mean anything to the reader. Divination uses the reader in the act of interpretation, and if “the other woman” is just not what makes sense to the reader—and if something else does—then the “real meaning” is nonsense. So far, the only thing contextualizing it is the clover. Let’s consider what a clover’s purpose or function is: it’s ground cover (and a much safer bet than the grass we love in the so-called US to pour chemicals on). Now, it’s well-known that clovers are lucky—and I don’t exclude that meaning from the card, because, in a way, the clover has so evolved to suggest “luck” in Europeanized places that it’s hard to resist (same for love and hearts, which is why, sometimes, the heart suggests that, too). Clovers are easy to miss, they’re low to the ground, they’re not valuable unless you’re looking for one, and if you’re not in need of luck you don’t care about them—so you don’t think about them. Actually, when you look at what we’re dealing with, here, we have a “snake in the grass.” There’s a loaded expression, that means someone is hiding something—but, again, when we look at what it’s literally saying, we’re seeing exactly where a snake is supposed to be. (Incidentally, we’re not talking about yard grass in that expression; we mean the tall, natural grasses that exist in natural habitats untainted by Scotts Turf Builder). So, we have someone/thing in its natural habitat. And, while that might seem like a threat to the outsider, it isn’t. It is, in fact, exactly where we’re supposed to be. What of the clover when we consider it in the house of the snake? What’s a snakey clover? Weirdly, I don’t think they change each other much when we flip them—which isn’t always the case. The snake is the thing at home; the grass, the home the thing is in place in. They’re so closely wed, they mean the same thing to matter what—but this tells me that the top row, when viewed out of context of the bottom row, will focus on the thing (the reader) and the bottom row will focus on the habitat, with special attention to the client, thanks to the Them card we already talked about. Let’s expand outward. (It’s hard to write out readings like this without making them seem overcomplicated. It’s not really; this typically happens quite fast. But to explore all the possibilities in writing takes words.) The snake is flanked immediately by the rider (in the “house” of the stork) and the bouquet (in the “house” of the child). So we have a storky rider and childish bouquet. A storky rider, really, is one who returns. Storks are migratory. The rider is, too, but the storks ensure that “he’ll” come back. They turn him into a boomerang. The bouquet is small or undeveloped. Bouquets are typically associated with gifts, any that makes total sense: what else is a bouquet of flowers for? Sure, it can symbolize different things: love, grief, thanks, apology—but it is always, at essence, a gift. Even when purchased for the self and certainly when placed on a sacred space. We’ve got an undeveloped gift. That will always return. Interesting, interesting. I’m going to stay in the top row just for clarity’s sake. That takes us, then, to the mice (in the house of the dice—what a neat little poem, there) and the heart (in the house of “them”/man #2). When a card falls in one of the significator houses, we say that this expresses an aspect of that person. So the client, in this case, is heart-y. In theory, the people cards have no actual meaning other than representing people, but when they happen in contexts where that doesn’t make sense, I’ll think in terms of projective (“you,” in this case Man #1–not drawn) and receptive (“them,” in this case Man #2). Which means that the heart represents the client, but when we look at the heart in the house of the client or the “them,” we’re getting the “receptive” vibe—so the reader is giving to the an acceptor. Which sounds so convoluted, that, again, this can be difficult to write. Essentially, the heart represents something being given by the reader and accepted by others. Which make sense. I referenced the heart being a pump. In the case of an animal’s heart, it’s the pump giving us life. In this case, the client is the lifeblood of the reader’s world. The client keeps them going. Even though, we may feel nervous (mice) that this is all just a big gamble (dice). Mice behave nervous. That’s a trait normally assigned to the birds. Because they, too, behave nervously. I tend to view the birds more to do with talking, noise, because they’re noisier than mice. Gossip, then, is something I’ll see with the birds. The mice are typically associated with diminishment or theft, because they eat away at things. But so does every living thing. And what I’d say to anyone reading this who thinks my correspondences are wrong: you have to find this stuff for yourself, the meanings have to come from you. If you don’t, you’re just reciting nonsense. Mice are more “skittery” and anxious than birds; birds are louder and talkier. Maybe they’re anxious, but “theft,” the common association for mice, isn’t helping me in this reading. (Also, birds steal as much as mice.) This whole top row, then, seems to say to be: “Don’t get nervous (mice) that your gifts (bouquet) will abandon you—they will always come back (rider/house of stork). You may think your gift is small or underdeveloped (bouquet/house of the child), but your heart beats with your clients (heart/house of Them), so when you follow your heart (the heart follows the rider in the spread, and, in fact, could be his direction—he’s facing that way), the road may be windy, but your gifts will always give you what you need (the way the heart gives life to the body). Trust your gifts, then, they will always be there for you as long as your focus is the client.” Turning our attention to the bottom row, we are safe and naturally in our element (clover/house of snake—yes, this sounds like “home,” and I almost used that word—but house would be more appropriate. But “in our element” makes sense with this combo), and our inner direction (stork as migratory animals with instincts/house of the rider). The gamble, though anxiety-making, is worth the effort—as long as we don’t let our ego (child/house of bouquet) interfere with our devotion to the client (Them/house of heart). The purists may say that me bringing in ego is a big no-no, because I don’t have “evidence” to support that. But of course I do. Ever met a spoiled child? Too many gifts (bouquet)? They’re all ego. Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden, say. We’ve seen them. Veruca Salt, right? That’s ego, baby, and incidentally adults look exactly like that when we do this. The child in the house of the bouquet can get spoiled. One may say that there needs to be cards right next to it to indicate that, but fuck it. One thing I don’t think I’ve ever talked about before is what I’m going to call implied context or need context. Here’s what I mean: A reading will sometimes take you in a direction that makes sense given the cards you’ve worked with, but not enough to answer the question fully. There are a few cards left to interpret, and they have to fit the narrative you’re telling—either proving it or disproving it, to whatever end that matters. This means that these remaining cards are forced by the reading into potentially unnatural but perfectly legitimate interpretations. Hence, the spoiled child situation. That didn’t occur to me in my initial interpretations, but the fact remains that I got to a point in the reading where I needed them to do a job and they had to step up to it. “Little gifts” made sense in the top row, but not in the bottom. Spoiled brat, as something to avoid, made sense given that we’re talking about having anxiety about losing our gifts. The combo says that the only thing that could do that is letting our ego take over, so don’t—pay attention to the last card in the reading, the client. Boom. Letting go of the fear of “doing it wrong” is so important no matter what you’re learning. I really loathe fundamentalism, and the only thing I hold to be fundamentally true is that you have to figure it out for yourself. All the books by the great authors are wonderful inspiration, but the time comes when you have to put them down and it’s just you and the cards—whatever system you’re working with—and you have to let them guide you. And to do that they’re going to call on the parts of you that are most likely to get the results needed. The cards don’t care what I, or Camelia Elias, or Regina George, or anyone things of them. They care what you think in that moment, because you are the one in the role of messenger. All the long discussions about which system is better for which kind of reading kind of wash up to something we all hate: gatekeeping. It’s not intentional, I mean gatekeeping rarely is, but it does it nonetheless. When we announce this is the correct way, we also announce anyone who doesn’t do this is wrong, and so valueless in my eyes. There is a right way to do most things: the way you do them. Open heart surgery? We wanna follow the guidebook. A psychic reading? Throw the guidebook away. As well as all the pedants who are so insecure in their method that they only feel confident when bullying others into doing it their way. It’s like Christianity for diviners. And it’s cringe. To start this reading, I asked what the lenormand could teach us about tarot. But I think it told us what we need to know about all forms of divination: namely, focus on the client, get out of your own way, trust your gifts. Regardless of the system. It’s about them, the client, and getting an answer is exponentially more important than pleasing someone else’s sense of “correctness.” Your job isn’t to satisfy someone else’s ego, not even your own—not even your client’s, to be honest. It’s to answer the question. As Camelia Elias says, it’s to read the damn cards. Seconded. Obviously, if your the client that doesn’t change. A Read of One’s Own Pull a spread of any kind of card you like to answer the following:
For my example, I’m sticking with lenny, cuz why not? I drew five cards for each (lenormand is a more-is-more situation for me), from left to right.
There you have it, friends. Let me know what you think. And I’ll see you soon. tb. (  This week’s decks: Divine Masculine Healing Oracle by Christabel Jessica, art by Cecilia G.F.
And The Queer Crow Death Magic Tarot by Frank Duffy Arts By now, y’all know stasis, dogma, and ruts ain’t my thing. So, yesterday, as I lay in bed considering my day, I wondered whether I should head to Mystic, CT, for a little spiritual shopping. There’s a few witch-adjacent shops in the village, there. Rather than hemming and hawing, I asked my guide, who said, “Yeah, I left something for you, there.” There were a few things, actually, but one was an oracle deck I bought at the time mostly because I found myself alone in a shop chatting with the owner and felt sorta obligated to buy? Not because of her, but because I’m codependent? Anyway, I got to the car and pulled a card: Hermes (Mercury), who had some things to say about my love affair with not having difficult conversations with people in my life (which I sometimes do and sometimes do not), but also Mercury/Hermes is a divinity I have an affinity with, because he’s the ruler of divination and writing—my bread and butter. And after a pull this morning and for a friend last night, I quickly learned this was that rare winner of an oracle deck. Today, when deciding whether I wanted to skip this week (I have a busy week and not a lot of NRG), I got excited by the idea of pulling a card from that oracle deck to help shape this week’s lesson—and then I remembered I haven’t used the Queer Crow Death Magic Tarot, which I got recently and adore, in a minute, so I thought I’d use them both. I asked the oracle deck, “What do these dark daddies want to tell us about divination?” Krishna showed up to say “hello!” Let me pull a phrase from the guidebook, because as soon as I read it, I thought, OH YEAH: “A stark reality is many people don’t know how to feel. Instead of being taught emotional literacy, many grow up encouraged to shut it off. Now, we have a society of adults starting from scratch.” Woof. Woof. I mean, the book is careful (and, I think, wise) to avoid (the now-cliched) “saying the quiet part out loud.” People don’t know how to feel. But in this deck related to the divine masculine, it cannot be missed—this is men. Men are broken. And that’s kind of what I love about this deck. While all the divinities and potentates depicted span the emotional spectrum, the author focuses on the lesson of their behavior, not on emulating who they are. Krishna is beloved, so that’s not a surprise, here; but the notable hunk and gym queen Adonis is discussed as learning to love your body, the body that you have now. Not the Adonis body. Krishna, is speaking to feeling the feeling we feel and processing them, rather than running away from them or avoiding them. And when I saw the sentence I shared above, I thought—well, of course this is men . . . but I also thought, “well, this is of course ‘America’ . . . and we export this stuff, so . . . it’s also a lot of colonial world.” People don’t know how to feel and they don’t know how to process their emotions. We do so, today, by filling the gap with stuff. Dopamine hunting. I’m as guilty as anyone, hence my supposedly spiritual shopping trip yesterday (the little tidbits I found were quite good, though, and one of them was a gift for my partner). Even those of us who have had therapy and attempted to work on our damn selves still find the impact of the national global immaturity of grown-ass adults poisonous—so poisonous, in fact, that we, too, frequently get lost in our feelings and don’t know how to process them. The Krishna card suggests experiencing the experience without judgment, just as he had to do when he was shot by a hunter, Jara, in his heel. Krishna blesses and obsolves Jara before he dies and returns to immortality. Talk about emotional maturity. Where oracle cards frequently fall down for me is that the advice--process your emotions and grow the fuck up—is good, but . . . how the fuck does one do it? And this is where tarot comes into play. I don’t typically mix media, as it were, but I rarely use oracle cards alone. And this is a tarot blog, after all, so it made sense. I just drew three cards, partly to keep this short because I have a busy week. We’ll see how terse I can keep this. From the tarot I drew Page of Cups, Seven of Swords, Five of Swords. While I drew the center card, the 7/swords, first and placed the others on either side, I’m going to begin on the left because this is a lovely tie in to the oracle card—not just because of Krishna’s rich, glorious blue. What I love so much about this deck, what makes my heart sing so much when working with it, is the images are glorious distillations of ideas. And this page/cups is such a one. Like Narcissus (another card in the oracle deck, incidentally—exploring self-love v. narcissism, of course) this page watches themself cry into their own tears. I think of a story Shirley MacLaine told about Liz Taylor, and how she could make a single tear drop fall from her eye and into, like, a glass of champagne or something. Killed me. So theatrical, no performative. But still, somehow, so satisfying? Have you ever watched yourself cry in a mirror? I haven’t because I honestly, and I hate this, have some biological disposition not to cry. I can heave, but not cry. I haven’t cried in, oh, I think the last time was at the funeral of a friend’s mother in high school? And I think it was a lot to do with my poor friend’s experience of loss. (I’ve cried on stage, too, but that’s Liz Taylor-style; it’s not real. I can do that, or could, like a whiz. That supposedly made me a good actor.) Today, I think a lot of us walk through life imagining ourselves in closeup, just like Liz did. Partly because we consume so much television and partly because we consume so much social media, we’re weirdly always observing ourselves and performing for ourselves and others. I cannot tell you how much of my day at work I spend looking at myself in the Teams meetings. Why? I don’t know. I cannot stop doing it. It makes me super self-conscious, unless I happen to think I look cute that day, in which case I’ll get distracted by the rare moment of self-regard. What would happen, though, if we observed not ourselves and how we LOOK feeling things . . . and shifted, instead, to observing the thing felt and where it comes from. Humans are naturally curious, like pages. We can also be super vain. And I think there’s a page-like quality to that. Pages are interested in everything, including themselves. (Have you ever observed yourself masturbating in a mirror? I have. In my teens. Curiosity.) So, there’s an inevitable kind of navel-gazing that will happen with the curious. And there’s nothing wrong with that, if we can have the perspective to see the correct thing. And now we move away from emotion—cups—to two swords cards! Two odd-numbered swords cards, the seven and the five. And these are perfect for this reading! Let’s start with the seven: the sevens ask us to look (perceive, swords) within. Sevens are rather swordsy numbers in my book, because they are so much about perceiving our reality within the realm of the suit they cover and the reading they’re in. But the 7/swords is the swordsiest. (“Charlie Brown, of all the Charlie Browns in the world . . . you’re the Charlie Browniest!”) The card is telling us to look deeper. Look through the single tear rolling down our beautifully-lit cheek. Where does the tear come from? Why? And the Five of Swords says, “it’s probably gonna be because of some of the tough stuff. This is probably the kind of thing that you’d rather pretend isn’t there, which is why you want to avoid the emotions to begin with.” The page invites us to be curious about emotions; the swords cards advise us to be ruthless and not settle just on the silver screen surface of things. And divination can help us do that. But it ain’t easy. Some of us can be ruthless with ourselves—sometimes much too much, in ways that aren’t curious and aren’t about study, but are about rehashing the work of our bullies. Other people, because—to the point of the author of the guidebook for the oracle deck—is that a lotta muthafuckas out here are emotionally immature. They can’t. They lack the ability to self-reflect! So . . . . we need readers to do this for us. Yay! When I began reading, the ability of a reader to be more objective than a client about their own lives was touted as one of the main values of the cards. (Since, of course, we weren’t “allowed” to be fortune tellers.) The ability to reflect the client back to themselves is something I haven’t thought much about int he last ten or so years, primarily because the journey I’ve been on has had a lot to do with de-psychological-izing tarot. Mostly in reaction to the heavily psychological bent it had when I began learning. I’ve said it before, I’m not a psychologist so I feel more comfortable reading fortunes than analyzing something. That said, I think one of the most helpful, most important things we can do for anyone--not just as diviners, as human beings—is reflect people’s behavior back to themselves. In the new book (The Modern Fortune Teller’s Field Guide, October 2025 from Crossed Crow Books. Available for pre-order now. Contact me if you pre-order from a Black or Queer-owned bookseller—or if you are a Black or queer-owned bookseller and want to stock it, I’ve got a thank you for you, too. Wink.), I talk a lot about why reflective readings—meaning readings that reflect the client back to themselves—are so fucking helpful. So I’m not gonna give you the whole story, here, but I will say this: People respond way better to seeing themselves than they do to almost anything else. Because when we look in that mirror and we see the big ol’ booger hangin’ outta our nose? We get a fucking tissue. It is possible that this is the most important kind of reading you can do. Show people how they feel and why. Then they can figure out what to do, next. Maybe this is a good thing to do when someone doesn’t know what they want a reading about! Start with a reading about what they’re feeling and why, and then, if you need to, do an expansion. Thank you, Lord Krishna! Jai Shri Krishna! A read of one’s own This is it, kids—just what we just said: Do a reading for yourself (or, better yet, trade): Reflect what I feel right now—and why. Then spend a good, long time journaling about it. Happy week, friends. See you soon! tb.  (Quick note on this week’s deck. The Shadowscapes Tarot by Stephanie Law is one of the all time most stunning decks and is perhaps the reason I got back int tarot after a protracted break. I adore it.)
I thought it would be fun to play around with houses this week, like we do in Lenormand and also in astrology. Probably because astrology is much on my mind, since I’m doing a “decan walk” with Healing Burnout with Tarot and Astrology by Jackie Hope. In fact, I just finished writing the astrological associations of the cards on a few of my favorite decks so that I could see the decans as I work with clients. This time, I used my familiar arc of five, but gave it a second row. I’m now calling this a chevron. And the bottom row of cards can act as houses for the top row, but the top row can act as houses for the bottom row—and both can be paired with their mirrors and each other! How fun! What’s also fun is my guy showed up first. The Devil! In the house of The Tower! and the Tower, conversely, in the house of the Devil. This is an erotic beginning, and it’s got a lot of big daddy energy given Mars and Capricorn. The Devil and Cap are one of the rare associations that make total sense to me. We know, of course, that the horned god of old is not necessarily the “Christian Devil,” but in associating the two, we enjoy rather a fun irony: Christianity taught us how to be witches by inventing our dark daddy. And at the center of this reading, we have the explosive sexuality—the liberation—that comes from welcoming him into your world. Sounds like I’m a bit of a Satanist, no? I’m not. Satanism is in fact a non-dogmatic, non-religious, fairly anti-magic way of approaching the world—sometimes with a fundamentalism of its own—that poopoos the idea that anything spiritual (Christian, Witchery, or otherwise) exists. It’s a fancy sorta nihilism, which I’m not necessarily immune to, but is not what I’m talking about when I’m talking about my guy, here. It’s worth noting that I tend to use the pronoun he when referring to this character, but that’s because that’s my relationship with this icon. You can and will find other things in this character and they/she/he are all valid, because the idea—the icon—represents essentially all that Christianity reviles: joy, sex, anti-patriarchy, queerness, anti-colonialism, divination, witchery, freedom, liberation, self-empowerment, community—the whole nine. When I talk about the Devil in my readings and in my spiritual practice, what I’m talking about is the seductive lure of what we do—readings, witchery, whatever it is we practice—as well as the love and tenderness that comes from this “evil” presence who understands us exactly as we are, who loves us for our flaws--and our desire to overcome them—and who understands our kinks, fetishes, what we really want, and why. He digs those things about us. And he’ll hold our hand while we go for the journey into them, which, I have found, is where unlocking our insecurities and self-esteem lives. He shows us how to love ourselves exactly for who and what we are and yearn to be, not for who and what society thinks is correct for us. That’s really what divination is for, too, when we think about it. We’re all trying to become the version of ourselves that is most us--that we love most, that we enjoy most, that we’re proud of and enjoy. And we, or many of us anyway, have to fight through the things that we’re taught about ourselves in order to make us fit into to the world at large. It’s amazing how early this starts happening. I think I’ve told this story before, but I was at a writing workshop many years ago at SUNY Stonybrook on Long Island. The children’s author and illustrator Peter Reynolds sat on one of the panels. He told a story about how he goes into schools all the time to talk about his books and his work, and he’ll always ask classes, “Who can draw?” He said in early grades, every kid raises their hand. But by the time we get into the early-middle grades, everyone points to the kid who’s an “artist.” We start getting told what we are well before we even understand what that means. Or, maybe even worse . . . we don’t. Or what we learn, instead, is that we’re a faggot, a piece a shit, a fatty, a foreigner, a [insert any of the shit kids call each other, and teachers and parents allow them to call each other, here]. We learn what we’re not: valuable, lovable, talented, smart, beautiful, worthy. And what we are . . . ? Well, we’re on our own, but since we’re not valuable, it doesn’t really matter. We are merely stepping stones for the kids who matter to run over and bully on their way to the top. The Devil, paired with his neighbor The Tower, begin the reading by saying that we are not what other people call us—but we can sure as fuck use people’s impressions of our valuelessness to our advantage. If we think of the Devil in the house of the Tower, we’re definitely getting dark daddy vibes (which is one of many nicknames I’ve given my man). We’re getting an explosive lover, a revelatory peek into who we are at our most essential, at our most core, at who we would be if we hadn’t been traumatized by “society” and its “expectations.” The Tower in the house of the Devil gives us a darkly satisfying method of destroying the patriarchy: by using its own tools against it. (That’s a heady idea I can’t fully develop here, but there’s something in it.) Because this is a blog about tarot, it’s lovely to note that this is one of the things I believe are core to our work as diviners. Camelia Elias, who I’ve been vocal about having a major influence on my way of thinking about what we do, calls her style “reading like the devil.” That used to scare that fuck out of me! I had in my head still the fear of the devil thanks to my upbringing. But now I get what she means—or, rather, I get my version of what she means. That’s necessary to point out. I’ve borrowed from her the phrase “the cards don’t mean anything” and then gone on to interpret what I think she’s saying. It’s the same, here, with this phrase. And, no, I won’t be appropriating that from her beyond this post—but it does factor, here: reading like the devil means showing people exactly who they are, exactly the way they need to see it in the clearest, most impactful way possible. I started by talking about the decans and at the time I’m writing this, we’re in the first decan of Aries—the first roughly ten days of the sign of Aries, which is the astrological new year. Aries is ruled by Mars as is the first decan of the sign, and so we get a very martial energy right here, right now—both in the time we’re living in and in the Tower card. My friend and I were talking about Mars yesterday, because she was born in the first decan of Aries and was feeling salty about Mars and its kind of toxic masculinity. And I proffered that Mars’s toxicity isn’t innate to the planet; it’s innate to our society. Mars doesn’t have to be toxic masculinity. It just has been because we have such a shitty relationship to masculinity and have had since at least Christianity, but of course the Greek myths tell us that even the Christians didn’t invent that particular poison. We need Mars’s energy. We need the impulse, the action, the blast, and the ejaculation. None of this need be exclusively penile. A powerful orgasm is a powerful orgasm, regardless of whose body experiences it. Yes, AFAB bodies typically experience more intense orgasms, but if you’ve never had an AFAB experience, than you’ll never know how much more powerful our orgasms might have been. Sometimes readings need to be devilish. In this case, I, again, adopt my own version of what that means: My experience with the Witch Daddy is exceptionally loving. But he’s honest with me. He has talked me down from panic attacks, but he’s also let me sit in my tantrums because he told me to eat some fucking lunch and I didn’t feel like stopping what I was doing and so my blood sugar dropped and I’m being a bitch for no reason. He tells me the truth. Sometimes the truth is that I’m beautiful; sometimes it’s that I’m being lazy. But he always does so with the kind of generosity of spirit that a good daddy (not a father, we’re definitely in the realm of kink, here) would. And I think that’s the tone a lot of readers should aim for, too. It’s the tone I aim for. Where I perhaps diverge from Camelia Elias is her brave willingness to say what needs to be said, regardless of whether or not the client is ready for it. I have a tendency to hedge my bets somewhat, which isn’t always a good thing. People find in that a tendency to negotiate with the answer. (“Ok, but you’re saying he could come back at some point, right?” “No, Diva Cup. He’s gone.”) But I also recognize that sometimes people can’t hear an answer they aren’t ready for, and so I try, where I can, to temper justice with mercy and deliver the reading in an honest way, but that leaves room for people to sort out their shit on their own. If I say, “this relationship is hurting you and you need to get out” I might be telling the truth, but I also might be saying something that will make the client dig in their heels and become even more dedicated to the relationship than they were before the reading. Humans are complex, that way. Expanding out a little (and see how much we can get with just two cards?), we’ve got the Hierophant in the house of the Sun (and, conversely, the Sun in the House of the Hiero), as well as the Six of Wands in the house of the Two of Pentacles (and vise-versa). The Hierophant is perfectly set up to act as all of those things the devil is anti: the shame, the gatekeeping, the pressure to be “correct,” etc., and the Sun highlights the ways in which this institutionalized bullying is accepted and acceptable. We live under the scorching heat of these expectations, and, to a degree, these expectations create a scorching heat for us that we can’t actually endure. We’re being asked to bend ourselves into shapes we were never meant to dance into and that’s not healthy. The 6/wands and 2/pentacles, on the other hand, suggests a major sense of breaking through. Both cards are associated with Jupiter, the planet of expansion and bigness. The Jupiterian nature of growing breaks the chains of expectations. The 2/pentacles connects to the Devil because it’s also associated with Cap, so there’s that big GOAT (greatest of all time) energy, again; and a resilience and ability to make oneself comfortable in any environment (think of how mountain goats seem shockingly comfortable and safe wherever they go, including the sheer side of a mountain). The 6/wands is connected to Leo, the sign of owning our gifts. The astrological combination suggests that doing what we do best (Leo and the Devil) is in fact the way to smash through (Jupiter) the Hiero’s bullshit. But the cards themselves also suggest that victor (6/wands) comes in part from being attracted to our own lives (2/pentacles—twos attract, pentacles suggest “life”) and, I’ll go out on a limb here, stopping the juggle we typically see on this card. (Why do I get to say this character is ending their juggle? Cuz it feels right to me.) What’s interesting to me is that the bigness of the cards on the left (the Hiero and Sun) seems to overpower the smallness of the minors on the right—but in that comparison is the lovely elegance of what this reading seems to be saying: getting out of this bullshit actually isn’t a big, scary task. It’s simply . . . being ourselves. That ain’t easy, not by a long shot, but it’s not something that has to be endured. Becoming ourselves is quite enjoyable, in fact. the solution is simple, even if the doing of it involves the Devil and the Tower. On the far left, we have two pages: the Page of Wands and of Cups. Fire and water. Pages don’t get astrological associations. They’re fully elemental. It is said, by the esotericists, that they rule their elements. I tend to associate pages with air. Because pages learn, they’re airy. And they’re messengers, which is also airy. This would make it such that we’re looking at airy fire and airy water. Air is a boon to both those elements, because air (oxygen) is fuel to fire and water needs aeration for it to remain potable and healthy. Air is also curious, which is anther reason it makes sense for them to be pages. All of this suggests that we be foundationally curious about ourselves, about what we really are deep down—in particular in the realm of magic/spirituality/witchery, whatever you want to call it, because the combination of fire and water (and air) suggests these aspects of our lives, and the context of this reading (divination) demands it. On the other side of the spread, we’ve got the Queen of Wands and Judgment. The rest of the courts don’t get typical astrological associations, like the other minors; they represent, or “rule” three decans—but never the three decans of the same sign. They’re off-center. The q/wands rules the third decan of Pisces and the first and second decan of Aries (which is where we are now!—no time like the present, kids). Judgment is associated with the element of air, much like my pages—so we’ve got an air/fire combo here, with implications of strong belief (pisces) and that same connection to Mars’s energy (Aries). Queens are the master of their suit, the represent the highest achievement of their element. (Kings don’t; they represent having achieved and now reaching into sage or emeritus mode—queens, on the other hand, are doing the achievement as we speak, so to speak). The full embodiment of creative, powerful, gleeful, joyful force brings us to a great awakening in ourselves. The air of Judgment floods the fire with oxygen, making a gorgeous flare up of gifts—of talents—that makes us feel like the bad-ass the Queen of Wands suggests. (Despite the decanic associations of the q/wands, I typically associate the card with Leo. This is because I have a deck that I’ve had since my very earliest days with tarot that labeled her that way. As such, it’s always in my mind even if it’s not on the cards.) Remember, too, though that the Judgement card is sitting in the house of the queen as much as she sits in the house of judgement (there’s a title for something, right??). This is a queen-of-wandsy kind of awakening. A coming into one’s own bad-assery. Which, I can tell you having experienced the very early stages of this, can be quite intoxicating. (As can developing a relationship with the Witch Lord, or whatever you want to call he/them/she.) It is a mastery of self, and opening to our own power—and one done with fiery and devoted ferocity and curiosity (the pages mirroring on the other side) that gives us this awakening. Thus, curiosity about ourselves and who we are at our most essential is one of the ways we shitcan the bullshit way we’ve been colonized by crap and how to free ourselves of it. What does this have to do with being a tarot reader? At the oracle of Delphi, the words Know thyself were emblazoned for folks to consider. I think this suggests that divination is, for the client, an act of knowing ourselves. But I think beyond that is an instruction to the diviner--to the reader. Know who you are, what you believe, what you do; know what you’re excellent at and what you’ve been convinced you’re not good at based on other people’s fuckery. We have to know ourselves well, I think, in order to reach the kinds of divination that many of us long for. This makes sense, although it’s not something many people want to face. We want to be good at everything right away and don’t want to deal with the fact that sometimes it takes a while—a while of getting over our own crap—before we can really do that. To imply that we can’t be good readers until we really know ourselves implies that we can’t get good at this without years of therapy and counseling and other healing. And, in fact, that’s not at all reality. I and many other readers were good at this work well before we really knew ourselves. But we also had to get over a lot of crap before we felt that way. Even if the crap was just the fact that tarot reading is Satanic or evil, as was the case with me—to say nothing of the feelings of worthlessness that I’ve struggled with basically since entering school for the first time. Maybe it’s partly that we need to get over our old crap before we know we’re good readers? You can be a good reader without that self knowledge. But you can’t break free and into the devil’s world—you can’t, to again steal from Camelia Elias, “read like the devil”—until you begin unpacking your own relationship to him/she/they, and what the Hiero has taught you about yourself, the true and untrue, the imagined and real and toxic. Know yourself. And you will be a better reader simply in the process of learning. You will find your readings getting better because you will not only understand the cards differently—you’ll be less concerned with what other people think about them, for example—but you’ll also start understanding the world differently, and the many ways in which it abuses so many of us. To be a good reader, we have to see the world clearly. The more we do that, the better a reader we’ll be. And we can’t really see what the world does to people until we see what it has done to us. The major risk, here, is that many people (particularly people of privilege) assume that what the world did to them is the same at what it did to everyone else, and that’s simply not true. To put this into context, I was leading an anti-harassment training at work this week and the topic of privilege came up. I heard one of the complaints that people are too sensitive and “If I survived, you should be able to do that, too. Just get over it.” I turned to the group and I said, “Let me tell you something about myself that might not make sense at first: Every time I walk into a room full of what I assume to be are straight men, I have to change everything about how I act. I butch it up, I change my word choice, I try to lower my voice an octave, and I curtail my snark. I do this because life has taught me that straight men will beat me up if they see me the way I really am outside of their company. Who in this room has ever had to do that?” No one raised their hand. “That,” I said, “is privilege. You don’t have to do that and I do.” “But you don’t have to do that,” someone said. “No one here is going to hurt you.” “Yeah,” I said, “but how do I know that? Because my life experience has taught me differently.” I have walked into rooms—or public parks—full of men and gotten my ass kicked for being a queer. Femme. Dangerous. I had to spend my entire childhood protecting every single person I knew from the threat of my femme-ass behavior, even though I was the one who was really in danger. If you didn’t have to do that, that’s privilege. That doesn’t mean I’ve had it harder than everyone. I don’t know what it’s like to have my work devalued because I’m a woman or because I’m Black or because I speak English as a second language (which should be a badge of honor, given what a fucking insane language this is), etc. So there are other ways in which I do have privilege. But that’s the point. We have to understand that our unearned advantages and our lack of privilege are all dependent on a lot of things. And if (white) people (primarily) would get their heads out of their asses and realize that we all have advantages and disadvantages that come from being who we are, than we could go about the business of making life easier for everybody--rather than doing this incel/right wing “Christian”/man bullshit of expecting everyone kiss our asses and continue to make our lives easier at the cost of everyone else. Anyway, we have to be able to see in ourselves both the good and the bad in order to understand our relationship to the world and to our unearned and earned advantages and our unearned disadvantages. And we have to, then, begin to unpack that everyone has them—but they are completely different for everyone, too. Being able to see that makes us better readers, too. A read of one’s own What do you need to know about yourself? What gifts have you hidden or let remain unused? What influence can the Dark Daddy have on your readings? Do readings on all of these. But please note that the first question—that’s really tough to read about, because if we could easily find the answer we could have done it already. This is a good week to exchange readings with someone else!! Hope to see you soon. Happy Aries season! TB  (Some) Modern astrologers point out how the Mercury retrograde was never a big deal in the past and that it’s really the fear-mongering of modern life that makes us freak out about them. But I don’t think that’s the full story. These periods may not have been a big deal prior to widespread travel and technology—two areas Mercury influences—which is why people didn’t notice them. But because we live in a “global” world and we’re at the mercy of technology, they’re more apparent now. Life is not static. And the things that divination covers will reflect that. Which means there may have been a time when it was not cool to read about certain things and then there are times where what was uncool becomes cool. I’ve written a lot about how the 1990s and the years prior were kind of a weird one for tarot. It’s where we got the “tarot isn’t fortune telling” nonsense that’s so common. Frankly, “tarot isn’t for fortune telling” is a privileged POV. It associates fortune telling with fraud. Of course it’s supposed to. Fortune telling was a survival job for many people in the colonized world, especially for people who had been forced to the margins.
Today, that’s changing—and that’s good. But it signals an interesting reality. What tarot was twenty years ago is different than what it was a hundred years ago, and different from a hundred years before that. A hundred years from now, if there are still people on this planet—and that’s looking increasingly less likely given our refusal to do anything about climate catastrophe, it will look different again. And maybe once the grid goes down forever and all the technology we rely on becomes obsolete because we no longer can run it, Mercury retrograde will once again be a relatively meaningless time period. Perhaps something else will takes its place. We live in warring times. Maybe Mars retrogrades will become the one everyone dreads. Who knows? Point being: things change, and we can’t stay stuck in the past. We can’t read the cards now as we did twenty years ago because those times are dead and gone. We have to remain agile. We have to grow and evolve. And we also have to understand that people’s perceptions form their reality. Which means that if someone attuned to the cycles of the sky notices that life gets more difficult during a certain retro, it doesn’t matter whether or not Mercury retros are “meaningful” or not. They’re meaningful to the client, which means they’re meaningful to us. And, again, I’m someone who is uniquely impacted by those times, or I seem to be. I’m obviously biased. But that doesn’t mean I’m also not correct. Given all that, I’m going to focus today’s reading on the idea of an evolving divination journey for all of us—in this case, for tarot itself. I’ve set this up as, “share with me what tarot was and what is now and where it’s going.” To do this, I’ve drawn three cards to represent each of those times—and I’ve followed each of those cards with a “bridge” card that describes the evolution. So, in total, I have six cards. Three time cards and three bridge cards, though the final bridge isn’t connected to anything—it will tell us how we’re moving in the direction we’re moving in. For this reading I’ve chosen the Queer Crow Death Magic Tarot by Frank Duffy Arts. You can see my review on YouTube. I adore it. Here’s what we landed on: What tarot was: Four of Wands; Bridge, Queen of Swords; Where it is now, Five of Wands; bridge, Knight of Wands; Where it’s going: Ace of Pentacles; bridge, Four of Pentacles. This is a fascinating mix and I have to comment on the total lack of majors. Sometimes the absence of majors means nothing; sometimes, something. Here I think it says, “this is interesting but finally unimportant. It has always been and always be meaningless, because ultimately it doesn’t much matter.” But, hey, I’m also in a shitty mood, so it could be me reading into that. As I always say, the reader isn’t the reading—but we sure as hell are part of it. Anyway, the appearance of court cards as two of the bridges is interesting, as is the interplay of the elements. Lots of fire and pentacles, no cups (interestingly, the suit of “intuition” is missing), one sword, and of course no majors. We also start and end with a four, but we move from fire to earth. As always, I don’t know what (if anything) any of this means; I do know, though, that this is always how I begin readings. By noticing these kinds of things. We might also notice the orangey quality of the spread, which permeates even the pentacles card that winds us up—and even in the ombre or gradation of the ace. In this case, the 4/wands suggests that tarot used to be pretty much what it was thought to be: what you see is what you get. How did I arrive there? The stability of the four and the nature of fire. When fire is behaving as expected, it’s easy to manage and difficult to get too concerned about. A candle, fireplace, or hibachi are all examples of fire under four’s influence: stable, controlled, useful. Nobody fought (fire) about it, because it simply was what it was. Tarot was tarot, and to a degree everyone’s perception was the reality. Probably because no one was thinking too much about it. All that changes with the arrival of the Queen of Swords. I cannot help but cast this card as the esotericists. The thinky thinkers of divination, with their love affair of hierarchy (queen) and gatekeeping. We had to master the art (and it became an art, and art is something that I think is quite connected to queens—particularly the idea of mastered artistry, because the queens tend to exemplify the “industry” of their suit at its most productive and effective. Queens, to me, are like the CEO. (The King, then, becomes the board of directors and/or CEO emeritus, so to speak. The retired expert—whether that king was able to retire at thirty thanks to shorting the housing market, or at 100 because they never had the chance to sit down). We overthought it. And we had to make it into some. thing. That’s not at typo. Some. Thing. It had to become a some-thing, rather than simply being what it was. This feels post-modern. I think that prior to academia being a major influence on the lives of the middle class, people probably didn’t theorize too much. But the Queen of Swords is for sure a master theorizer. And this feels very much like the representation of Etteilla, as well as Lévi, and the Golden Dawners. Which takes us to the current state of tarot, the 5/wands: something to fight passionately and disagree over, to reconstruct, fux with, and fuck with. None of this is inherently good or bad. As an Aquarius rising, I quite love the idea of both fucking with shit and also shit being something we fucks with, as it were. Actually, tacit acceptance of unconsidered norms is one reason why white supremacy is such an innate way of thinking for a lot of people—not just white ones. It’s just so “normal” that it’s hard not to fall into, unless we actively make the effort. Even then, the effort is constant. So I’m a believer in questioning every norm, no matter how . . . “normal” it seems. Passionate disagreement is good up to the point it’s weaponized, which is another trend in modern life. We cannot disagree; we must duel. And that’s necessary in many cases, particularly where people of privilege and power and using that to marginalize people they disagree with. Let’s be totally frank, here: the so-called US is a country that criminalizes marginalization, the same marginalization that is caused by this being a white supremacist country. It’s abuse. Anyone who doesn’t fit the “american” mold is villainized, and then that villainy is criminalized. And, guess what? That’s exactly where divination landed in the colonized world. Survival jobs. Secrets of Romani Fortune Telling by Paulina Stevens and Jezmina Von Thiele does an excellent job telling the story of divination as a survival job, obviously within a particular community—but a community that is still out in the world and navigating a difficult relationship to fortune telling and cartomancy as a result. And it’s still happening today. (These days survival jobs are minimum wage gigs that require someone to work three or four of them—without insurance or child care—in order to make basic payments to live. We haven’t changed that much.) But as long as we’re not being abusive, it’s quite cool to disagree on tarot. We learn a lot from each other when we disagree over low-stakes shit. You never have aha moments when you’re surrounded by info you already knew and accepted as true. And, while there has been a lot of shitty politicking and gatekeeping in our community in the last, oh, since the beginning of time, we really should enjoy disagreeing on what tarot is and does. It should not be dogmatic. And when we get into those fun exploratory, experimental conversations, we can learn a fuck-ton of new stuff. Now, we look at where tarot is heading and our bridge is the Knight of Wands. The last wands card in the spread, but also the most active. Tarot is running, without looking back, straight into its own future—which makes complete and total sense for a fortune-telling tool, no? Of course tarot would embrace the evolution of being, of the inevitable changes we must all encounter and experience. It is fully into that and has no qualms, which, really, is quite nice and exactly how we should approach the experience of being a student. That said, the knight/wands can be somewhat headstrong, not very thoughtful, and somewhat careless in its approach. It runs headlong into a burning building to save the TV without a sense that their own life might be more important. But, hey, this is tarot, not a burning building—so I think we’re OK. The next pair tells us where tarot is going and how. And we switch totally from fire to earth, but we get another four in the mix. First, though, the Ace. I sometimes find aces frustrating, but not because of the card itself; because of what it represents: the amoebic, fetal shape of things. An ace is an embryo, not an entire being; it is forming, becoming, turning into itself—but it’s not itself, not quite yet. It’s the idea of itself, but not the thing quite yet. And of course, for our purposes, it says that in some ways it’s too soon to tell what tarot will become. But whatever it is, it will be firmly rooted in the world (earth) of its time; it has to be. That is, after all, what it’s for. And the 4/pentacles suggests that it will survive, as it always has, because it is so much itself. Again, that four is really honing in potency of selfhood. It knows what it is, and if it’s less sexy (fire) in the future, that may be because the need for it to be incendiary changes. Actually, this reflects my own journey with the cards: from spiritual tool (blech) to practical magic (yay)! and now, a blend. The blending mode is something not talked much about in tarot, but it’s a part of the pentacles because they represent all the elements. So inherent in a pentacles card (and, so, inherent in the pentacles’ siblings in other decks—disks, coins, etc.) is the whisper of all the other elements, too. So it is a blend. In the way that Temperance is supposed to represent the alchemical blending of opposites, the pentacle represents the weaving together of disparate parts of life into a unified hole. In essence, tarot will be and do whatever we need it to do—as it has always done, and as it will always do. Because that is its nature: amendable, agile, adaptable, and affective. Affective, not effective; it picks up the affects of its time, place, and practitioners. (But it’s also effective, too, or none of us would be here talking about it.) To sum up, then, tarot sort of always will be what it’s always been: a tool that adapts to the needs of its users, given the state of the world at the time its being used. It will countenance psychology, spirituality, and banality; it will accept fortune telling and self-exploration. The only thing I don’t think it will accept being is a tool of the oppressor. Divination, like witchery, is a tool of the marginalized. When it is used to oppress, it turns on itself and becomes useless. Not because it has lost its use, but instead because anything liberation-centered (and divination is a tool of the people who need liberation: women; marginalized ethnicities and races; nations and communities; witches, people of global majority; etc.) that is used to oppress immediately cancels itself out. But that’s kind of a heady idea I don’t have fully fleshed out, yet, so I won’t waste too much word count on that. In essence, I guess, you can’t free people with handcuffs, so you can’t imprison people with a key. Tarot is the key. Tarot helps us know, and to quote the old TV PSA, knowing is half the battle. We can’t un-know once we know, and tarot will always provide knowing—which means it is anti-oppressive, even when used by oppressors. Wow, hunh? Come for the tarot, stay for the pretentious, inscrutable mind-benders. Bonus! Anyway, point is: tarot is both always what it always was and will be, and is concurrently always changing and becoming something new—something to fit its times. Which is a great way to highlight dialectics, a term that is somewhat pretentious, too, but that is super helpful in modern life: the idea that two seemingly opposing ideas can be true at the same time without canceling the other out. Cool, right? Divination is such a process of dialectics, such a mass of conflicting and true things, that it’s helpful for us as readers to ponder the bigness of that. But it’s also important for managing to get through the day, lately, because so much of what we’re living through both seems utterly impossible and totally inevitable at the same time. A read of one’s own Where have you been, where are you going, and where are you now? Let’s recreate this spread for ourselves. Here’s a super quick example for you, with the question for this week’s spread: “What was tarot for me when I started, what is it now, and what will be be in the future?” Fascinating. What was tarot to me: 9/swords; bridge, Queen of Wands What is tarot for me: 10/swords; bridge, 8/penties Where is tarot going for me: Emperor; bridge, 8/swords The 9/swords is fascinating for a few reasons. I don’t talk about nines as obsession much, but the eight, nine, and ten of swords (really, of all suits) do contain obsessive elements. They are “all in” on themselves. They often have a core of labor, effort, pushing, striving; they’re difficult, because we know the finish line is in store, but we can’t get there quite yet. This pushing typically leads to burnout, which is why I think of the nines as burnout cards. They represent that state of everything just being too much and having to work too hard to get where we’re going. Which is very much how I approached my learning—exactly the opposite, incidentally, of what I tell students to do today. And I did get burned out and I did give it up. But nines, like all numbers, aren’t all bad—and there’s an effusion in nines. They can be construed as negative because they can be “too much” — and there’s are times when too much of a good thing is wonderful, and times where it’s really just too much. For me, it was both. But there was an expect of me that really kept the tarot at bay. It was never the thing I was supposed to be doing; it was a hobby that I enjoyed, but that wasn’t my main mission. And swords can be a little stand-offish, too; they’re somewhat cerebral, and they make me think of my own neurodiversity and the ways in which I can sometimes feel overwhelmed by things that want too much from me. (It’s a problem, particularly in my relationships [romantic and otherwise]—not that I’d never admit that publicly, of course. 🤫) The bridge between where I started and where I am now is the queen/wands. To have one card stand in for what is the entirety of my reading “career” (25+ years) is kinda silly, but it is interesting that we have another queen filling that spot—just like the queen/swords did, above. The Queen of Fire, in this case, suggests to me an embracing of the fire within, the fire of divination—the centrality (queen, as both expert but also as foci) of the tarot to my being. To my life, and the fire it creates within me. This is quite true and in fact represents really well the transition from the flame of my interest from what I thought I needed to be doing (not tarot) to what I should be doing (tarot, apparently). And so this makes a lot of sense to me. What fascinates me are the seemingly negative cards that make up a lot of the rest of the reading. Looks like I’m fucked! The 10/swords, as where I am now, doesn’t actually feel negative to me. In fact, the skull here isn’t representative of death at all. No, it’s much more literally the head. My head is full of tarot! Which it is! I think of it when I wake, I think of it as I go to sleep, and I think about it throughout the day. My skull, my noggin, is full (10) of thinking (swords) about this art. It really has become a consuming aspect, and not in a negative way. What it has done, in fact, is filled in the negative space in my life left by the theatre. And it was more than eager to do that, which I think is another sign I know that I was avoiding something that really wanted me. Now, I want it equally—and then appearance of the 8/pentacles as the bridge suggests a sort of bee-like humming along, happily working on a thing that feels quite natural. Fair, true, lovely. And I like this as a way of describing my journey, because it’s accurate—but also because it suggests kind of an ease and naturalness that’s comforting and is kind of what we aspire to as readers. Just being comfortable doing the thing. We actually have two eights, the 8/penties and the 8/swords. More on that presently. Let’s first talk about the Emperor, which represents where tarot is headed for me. Four is of course related to eight, so that enhances the connection. A lot of people don’t like the Emperor, but I do—because, as all cards, he’s not just one thing. And so he can represent good qualities as much as negative ones, and here we get a sense of confidence and even of inevitability. Not quite to the degree that Death suggests inevitability, but I frequently talk about how kings and emperors are, to use a terrible expression, to the manor born. They are expected to be what they are, because it’s what they were always supposed to be. It’s what they were born for, what they were built for. And that’s a really nice way of looking at this card. The Empress and the Queens have to negotiate doing jobs that they are typically excluded from thanks to patriarchy, but the emperor is doing what he was always expected to do. There’s a hominess to that that’s quite exciting, and an ease, and a confidence—all of which is good. The danger, though, is in this card’s sense of entitlement. That is a risk for me, as it is for anyone who grows confident in something, and that must be avoided. The thing about the cards is that often their good and bad qualities are valuable to consider simultaneously. The 8/swords suggests a general ease with doing the thing—eights are work, but work we enjoy and that we fit into naturally (this is typically represented in the 8/pentacles, but this quality exists in all eights within the realm of their suit). The cage or trap that we typically see in Wait-Smith version of this card is often seen as negative, something that needs to be escaped from, but again that’s a value judgement on the card, not the card’s meaning. Anything can become a cage if we get lazy, including ease. In fact, it is when we feel comfortable that we’re most likely to get stuck in a rut. We lose the ability to want to feel the discomfort that comes from growing. And so this is both a promise and a threat: you will feel incredibly comfortable, sure, confident, and purposeful in what you do--but don’t you fucking dare get complacent or lazy, or, worst of all, arrogant. Which, as a Leo sun, is a constant struggle. That’s me! What about you? What did you come up with?  I get to try out a new deck today (the Vintage Tattoo Tarot by Alyssa Wilson), so I thought, “why not use a layout I never use!” So I thought, what shapes do I avoid in readings? And I realized I don’t use triangles very much—so, what the hell?
There’s something interesting about this shape, not least of which is how unappealing I find it as a spread layout. Yes, unappealing. While I chose it, I wouldn’t choose to chose it normally; this is purely an exercise in getting out of my typical way of doing things—because neural pathways can, if we get lazy, become ruts. And in many ways, I think the 2/swords can do that, too; especially when laid out in this way—with the two swords laid out side by side rather than balanced in a person’s hands. I quite like that this card has eyes on it. Swords are related to perception, seeing, even though we tend to think of them more as thoughts and words. Of course, thoughts and words are merely an expression of our perceptions, aren’t they? Not really much else, at least much of the time. And the eyes that appear at the tips of each sword suggest that perception can become damaged in a rut—the way these swords create kind of a road. And then the two moon crescents, sorta suggested arrested development—a term I tend to reserve for the Hanged Man, but that is appropriate wherever our perceptions are “arrested” (stuck). It’s almost as though the swords in this card want to pierce those eyes just to shape up this static. This is uncommon for a two, at least in my usual interpretation. That said, twos are magnets. They attract and repel. If they do both too well, it makes sense that we would get stuck in a state of suspended animation. The moon phases can’t change; the eyes can’t rest or even blink. And that makes us tired. Perceiving things the same way too long makes us bored. It’s like cabin fever. The more we stare at the same thing, the more excruciatingly infuriating it can become. I imagine this is similar to what parents feel when their kids are on their 12,000th watch of Frozen or whatever. (Hi, Disney! You’re sure showing your whole ass to us this month—fuck you!) Repetition or suspended animation can make us tired. Even too much rest. Languishing. Something I’ve been doing this winter. For multiple reasons. Too much of even a good thing can be infuriating. This two creates a triad with the next cards: the 2/cups and the five/cups. The two brings the prior card “down” with it—when our mind is still, so are our emotions. Whether that’s good or bad depends a lot on context, but since I’m dealing with the topic of getting stuck in a rut, let’s say in this case it’s “bad.” Or bad-adjacent, anyway. As our brain goes, so do our feelings and sensations. As our brains atrophy, so goes our feelings. I recall the Fight Club episode of 30 Rock: Liz Lemon has to go on leave because of an attempt to do “sexual espionage” to save her show from a consultant. She meets three wealthy divorcées who don’t work and have too much money, “mild lupus, and great insurance.” After weeks of daily massage and spay appointments, shopping, and mani-pedis, Liz discovers how the ladies stop their pleasure centers from shrinking: a fight club! (“I brought a role of quarters to hold in my fist!”) (Incidentally, this episode features three great theatre performers as those divorcées: Elizabeth Marvel, Kerry Butler, and Mary Catherine Garrison.) The 5/cups? Well that’s the fight club, silly! In order to stop ourselves from spiritual and emotional atrophy, we have to mix it up! The fives always make people sad. We can thank the Golden Dawn for that. All those happy-looking cards and keywords on the GD cards aren’t exciting. When I say I generally prefer neutral decks for readings, this is why. And actually, here’s a card that manages a neutral affect. Sure, we’ve got some tears—but they’re artistically styled and in fact they show us what happens when we stay in a rut too long: those swords will stick you in the eye and the tears will start flowing. Just so your body can feel SOMEthing new! (Addiction works in a similar way, incidentally.) What this means, really, is: if you don’t shake things up—life will shake them up for you! So you might as well take advantage of the autonomy to do that while you have it, because . . . Here comes row three and The Tower! (Followed by the 7/coins and the High Priestess.) When we refuse to make changes in life, or to take action, life will generally make that choice for us and it won’t ask what we’d prefer it to do. At these points, we’re sort of at the mercy of the fates, and all we can do is sit with what we’ve let life bring us and figure out what it means to us. That’s the 7/coins. The looking within to understand how we yielded the results we got. The High Priestess kinda keeps that from us, because we’re not in control anymore; we ceded that to the fates, remember. She’s not really that interested in helping us. That’s not her MO. Her MO is “that’s for me to know and you to find out.” Of course, there’s another way to read that row, too. Say the Tower is a stick of dynamite and you’re the one lighting the wick (the 5). This isn’t literal dynamite, of course; we’re giving the theoretical dynamite of fucking around and finding out—which is what the next part of this row re-contextualizes as when we read it in this way. The 7/coins says that you’re going to then have the agency (which we took back by making the change ourselves), you’re going to be more aligned with your mission or core—and that your own guidance will take you in the right direction, even if you don’t super know what that direction is. See, the HP can be a gatekeeper (someone else), but they can also be ourselves. When they’re us, they’re intuitive and they can feel their way through—but they have to rely on that, because they’re not going to be able to see the whole way. The card’s connection to Cancer and the moon see to that. We have to feel our way forward. But we can. The novelist EL Doctorow said that writing a book is like driving a car at night with the headlights on. You can only see a few feet in front of you, but you make the whole trip that way. That’s what the HP suggests. What, then, is this reading saying? “Try new shit before new shit tries you.” Or, to put in a better way, “keep playing and making divination fun, keep experimenting, so that you don’t get bored with it and find it suddenly give out on you.” This is a thing I’ve experienced. I’ll spare you the story; I’ve told it lots before. The thing, though, is we can all fall victim to it—if we keep doing the same thing over and over and never trying anything new. When I was in undergrad the first time, I had a teacher who in retrospect was pretty nasty to me—but who was also the head of the department. But he did say one thing I tell students in classes I lead, no matter the topic: Don’t just say you hate something. Figure out why. I find this to be essential in life for all kinds of reasons, and I think if more people did this there’s a chance this country may have avoided its trajectory. Just because you try something doesn’t mean you have to do it forever. Lots of women try dating cis het men and decide that they’re better off alone. You can discard anything that doesn’t work for you. But if you don’t try it, you’ll never know what you could have learned from it. This is one reason I’m weirdly glad for my tenacious attempt to learn Lenormand, despite really finding it an unhelpful system (less so now, but I only use it for the GT). In trying to learn a system that really wasn’t working for me but that seems so popular with everyone else, I thought I was trying to keep up with the trends. Instead I was teaching myself how to read tarot better. I would read something about lenny and think, “Oh, I like that. How could that work with tarot?” Turns out, great! Much of my tarot reading technique comes from lenny—including some of my tarot card meanings, including The Star. For what it’s worth: It wasn’t until I gave up trying to read Lenormand that I actually got good at it. And, as mentioned, I really don’t enjoy doing readings with it other than the grand tableau. That I find quite a fun exercise, and it tickles me to use a system where every card in the deck comes into play. But if you ask me for a reading and let me choose, I’ll usually pick tarot. I just really feel connected to it and partly because of the ups and downs I’ve had with it (including my oft-repeated story of giving it up). At the same time, my tarot readings grew and grew and grew! I just kept experimenting with stuff from Lenormand that I liked, even when I didn’t like the damn cards! I’m a fundamentalist about very few things. One of them is the importance of lifelong learning and experimentation. That sounds like corporate bullshit. It’s not. We can so easily get stuck in divinatory ruts (or any kind of rut) if we don’t do that. You can feel it when you’re working with a reader who has. They often will sound much like a new reader reciting long-memorized card-meanings, but they do so with a disengagement and distance that shows they both know these in and out and also stopped caring ages ago . . . It’s sad. I once saw an Instagram post. I can’t recall the poster, but it was about Witchery and it said “It’s natural for your practice to wax and wane.” And I thought, “Oh, interesting.” But it makes sense, right? Because if you keep doing the same thing over and over, well, it just becomes . . . exactly like church. Which is the height of spiritual disengagement: a performative, mostly endured, rarely engaged liturgy of obligation with decreasing attendance. God. I think back to the days when the church had the priests facing away from the congregation and speaking in Latin. The parishioners didn’t even mumble the responses as we did when I was a kid. Or, I don’t know, maybe the fact of everyone facing in the same direction, speaking a dead language, held more magic, somehow. Anyway, the point is, when something goes on endlessly with no shakeups, no adjustments, no new experimentations . . . dust settles, atrophy kicks in, and the magic dies. That goes for jobs, it goes for relationships, and it goes for divination systems. Maybe this is one reason why lenny got so hot for a while. People had gotten tired of doing the same thing with tarot. I know I had. And now you have my books because of that! (YAY!) Now, I find tarot endlessly rich with possibilities. Even changing the shape of spread—even using a shape you find unattractive as a spread—can give you some insight. Before I wrap up, it’s also possible to read this spread from the bottom up, technically backwards. It might go something like this: Those whose spiritual practice (HP) are aligned with their true values (7/coins) will always be exploding [yes, NOT a typo for “exploring”] new worlds (Tower)—it is the natural state of the relationship to this thing (5/cups). In fact, they are most attractive spiritually (2/cups+swords) when they let their soul (HP) guide them, rather than their intellect (2/swords). Reading it backwards kinda gives the opposite answer, but says the same thing. Cool, no? A read of one’s own. This week, I encourage you to draw this triangle and ask “Where can I stand to mix up my practice, so that I don’t get stagnant or stuck in a rut?” See what happens. Have fun. Read from the top down. Read from the bottom up. Do all of it! Find as many answers to the question as you can, and then sum it all up into a quick action plan that you can put into practice you’re very next spread! Lemme know how it goes. Til next time. TB.  I loved last week’s post so much, I wanted to continue on the theme of immersive, “spectacular” divination experiences. Except I don’t entirely know what I’m after. So I thought it would be fun to go and do something I never do anymore! A spread with assigned positions! Not only that, but after working with a great reader a couple weeks ago on their experience with the this spread, I thought—eh, it’s such an annoying spread, but why not give it yet another go! So I’m giving you the full Celtic Cross this week, baby, on the theme of creating more “theatrical” divination experiences.
If you don’t know me, or if you’re new to my work: Hi. I’m Tom Benjamin and I fucking hate this spread. I think it’s one of the main reasons beginners throw in the towel. I think it was made without a lot of forethought and I’m certain it was invented by someone who really couldn’t care less about divination. But I don’t actually know where it comes from. (I believe the first play we actually see it is in the PTK, Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A.E. Waite, but I could be wrong.) I have my own version of it, which you can find here. But for our purposes today, we’re going with the OG. Now, all that said, many many many readers have great results with this spread. But I think it is unnecessarily difficult and unfocused. But let’s dive in, shall we? I typically summarize the cards I pulled, but with this many I recommend looking at the photo caption. This is the Zodiac Tarot by Cecilia Lattari (writer) and Ana Chávez (artist). It’s been printed by USG on some really unfortunate card stock—shuffling is a workout. And that’s too bad, really, because I think this deck would be far more popular if they had gone with their usual, workmanlike and yet effective, stock. Overall, the spread is pretty balanced—but there are no majors. Interesting! To make the nonsense of this spread easy to remember, here’s how I define the spots: The situation + what crosses the situation Above you, intellect; below you, body. This is the cards above and below the situation and cross. “Intellect” and “body” are metaphorical, here; I don’t mean literally. You might say “the head” and the “heart.” Behind you (yesterday), before you (tomorrow). These are the cards to the left and right of the situation. The column, from the bottom up: What you’re contributing. What your environment is contributing. Hopes and fears. The future. That’s not entirely on brand for the spread, but it’s just a little easier to remember than Waite’s specious writing. The Situation + Cross: 7 of Wands crossed by Knight of Cups. Sevens typically get to a point of self-reflection and re-evaluation. The Seven of Wands, then, is going to be a re-evaluation of our fire: our creativity, our passions, our desires, our goals, the things that keep us motivated. The things in which we fervently believe. Our evangelisms, so to speak. I think in this case we can take all of this to suggest tarot, because, if you’re here, that’s probably a passion point of you—and it is, after all, the theme of this blog. This is a moment to re-evaluate our sense of who we are as diviners, what’s important to us, what motivates us, what we want to be—and how we want to be seen. (The Seven of Wands is associated with the Mars decan of Leo. Leos love to be seen—aggressively, as Mars ain’t shy. This is rather a performer’s card when we think of it astrologically. A real actor needs Mars’s potency, tenacity, and drive to achieve their goals. This is an energized card! Mars gets a bad rap, but none of the signs are “bad”—no different than there are no “bad” tarot cards. Mars has Martial qualities, that’s all; sometimes those matter. We’re crossed by an elemental—in this deck, fire of water. The Knight of Cups. We often think of fire and water as adversarial, but if you’ve read prior posts you know that I do not. Especially when there’s a balance, as there really is in this overall spread. That said, I think in this context there is a little struggle between fire and water—between performance (fire) and spirituality (water). There’s an anxiety: “If I get too performative, will I lose the depth?” Fair question, and, in fact, it is one of my main concerns coming off of last week’s post. I love the idea of a more romantically theatrical reading experience for my clients, but not at the cost of real, deep meaning. But the Knight of Cups is a believer, truly; they all are, really, and this knight—which tends to be seen as a bit of a cad in romance readings—can actually be considered a sustainable knight in his best iterations, because he is such a blend of supposed “opposites” (fire and water). So he doesn’t need to worry about it too much; he’s got the editor inside that will prevent him from doing something too theatrical without any depth. Still, that’s not likely to ease his tension; he’s going to feel that because it’s part of his nature. (Boy, do I understand that!) Above/“The Intellect”: Four of Pentacles The 4 of penties is such a fascinating card in this case. And here we find one reason I dislike this spread so much. One card is simply not enough context! For me, anyway. Greedy, greedy deck pig that I am. And this card is the sun’s decan of Capricorn, a sign I honestly don’t know much about—other than that it’s the goat (I love goats!) and it’s the sign that kicks off winter. There’s a romance to Capricorn in that goats are relentless, and they are at home in strange places. Think of mountain goats. Look at the goats climbing up the Italian damn in this NatGeo piece. They can do things in strange ways. The sun, which is Leo’s home, also appears here. We might think of the card in this way: There is a way to perform (sun) that is both theatrical (the theme of the reading) that is radically practical—simply by making what is easy for you (the goats) and showing it to the world (again, the sun in cap). Here, I’ve really discarded much of the card’s typical meaning! But it’s quite exciting to do that and also think about the four as being a number of sustainability. The sustainable thing is to do what you’re already doing but recognize that it is impressive to the person who can’t—the way a mountain goats climbing an aqueduct is both impressive and totally at home. Below/“The Body”: Knight of Wands I can’t help but see this card as saying, “what you do is spectacular simply because what you do is spectacular”—which is something I would never say about myself, but is a very Leonine quality. (Although talk to any Leo I know, and none of us think about ourselves that way. Though many of us think about our pals that way.) Just do more of what you do, dive deeper into your own coolness. This is fire of fire and as a result, kind of a radiant card. “You radiate magic,” it says, “you radiate spectacle.” OK. Again, not something I’d ever say about myself, but I can say it to y’all!!! I can also say that you are aggressively (knight) magical. Take that! Yesterday: Two of Wands Mars in back, now in his home sign: Aries. Springtime!! Of course, what we’re looking at here is the “colonial” card. Somehow, what the Golden Dawn took from this astrological decan was the wanderlust of stealing land—of looking at the entire globe as our domain. And I take this to mean that, in the past, we—readers—have relied a lot on traditions that have, to a large degree, been appropriated. I mean, there’s very little in “white” culture that hasn’t been, because when Christianity invented Colonialism is a mass-market spiritual tool for making scads of money, they destroyed the cultures that belonged to white communities around the globe—and then went about doing that to people of global majority. This is almost to say that, Yesterday, you relied on traditions that didn’t have much to do with you. You thought about magic as a lot to do with what you could take from others, what you could beg, borrow, and steal—and, in the context of this reading, we’re talking about the way we read, how we interpret, etc., the things we did were in many ways things that belonged to others. This, of course, implies something about the today card we’ll look at next—but it also suggests that we used to be less mature. Obviously twos are low numbers, and so of course not particularly “grown.” But in addition, Mars in Aries is the beginning of spring, and so we get the very early development of the year—the western astrological year, anyway. So there’s implied immaturity there. And I don’t mean that word as a pejorative. It’s absolutely a thing we all have to experience in different parts of our lives. Immaturity is only a problem when we refuse to grow! Tomorrow: 8 of Swords This is not a card we necessarily want to see in the future position, is it? At least when we think in terms of Golden Dawnery. But Jupiter and Gemini are both expansive concepts. Jupiter is simply huge; Gemini is insatiably curious. Combine the two and we have a massive hunger for exploration. If we return to the typical Waite-Smith image and Crowey’s title (interference), we seem somehow constricted—which is a much more Saturnine quality. Why are we so constricted, why are we blindfolded, why are we experiencing “interference.” In fact, we’re not; in fact, this card is asking us to shift our focus. It is saying, “put a blindfold on and bind your body, lock yourself away—and in this state, let inner space (rather than outer space) guide you. Remember, we think of swords as words and communication—intellect. That all feels very external, but I think swords also suggest imagination. They have do. Where the fuck else does writing, story, communication come from? Anyone verbal can use language, but our imaginations take the language and make it ours. Turns of phrase, etc., come not from grammar books, but from the poetry we both experience and internalize—and that which lives within us already. And I don’t think swords get enough credit for their imaginal ability. In fact, I now believe that the imagination is the key to so much of spirituality—and that we’ve found the imaginal devalued precisely for that reason. If we can make the imagined seemed silly, pointless, even unsound and “crazy,” then we cut off a major onramp to our guides. It is through imagination that we discover who our guides are, how they communicate with us, and even how powerful something imagined can physically become when we are deep into the moment. The “binding” experienced by the candidate in this card isn’t the prison we assume; it is, rather, a forced stillness meant to achieve a transcendent meditative state. Jesus Christ, what a fucking sentence! What is wrong with me? 🤣 Anyway, yes. Earlier I said that the 2/wands (yesterday) said something about this card. It does. Instead of looking without for your divinatory spectacle, instead of taking other people’s methods, rather we force ourselves to go deep within our own imaginal realm to discover what “theatricality” lives there. What does your imagination—which, after all, is the greatest audience for theatre and spectacle—have to say about what can make your readings more immersive? That is the key. We’ve completed the cross in the middle without too much drama! Yay us! Let us now turn our attention to the column, which moves from the bottom up. What you’re contributing: 2 of Pentacles Another two and another pentacles card, this one Jupiter’s decan of Cap. We’re back with mountain goats and we’re back with expansiveness, with biggery (so to speak). If we consider the “colonial” nature of the 2/wands, which we explored earlier, perhaps we can detect a similar “outwardness” here—a similar sense of . . . “well, I could use what’s mine, but . . . then there’s this other thing that other people seem to like better . . .” It takes the spiritual two and transforms it into a life two. In this case, there’s a bit of a tug-o-war happening between earthy practicality (pentacles, Capricorn) and expansiveness (Jupiter). And twos are naturally tug-o-warish because they have magnetic qualities: they draw and they repel. This card, I think, offers us a bit of a down-to-earth sense of critical reacting. I wanted to say “critical thinking,” but it’s not; that might be the Two of Swords. This is reacting, because the earthiness of the card is embodied in ways that the intelligence of the swords isn’t. There are times our minds can feel divorced from our bodies. There are times when we don’t even notice our minds. This is the second. It’s like we’re able to encounter an experience and decide relatively quickly whether it feels like “ours” or not. I also think it’s interesting to consider that, as the final suit in the deck—and with the pentacle as its object, which represents all the elements—contains the rest of the deck. So it’s earth and everything else in tarot, because the earth is made up of loads of things, too. And because we have been exposed to so much in the suit of earth, we’ve been through the rest of the deck, we have a good editing eye. “This is for me, this is not for me.” So, this is a long-winded way of saying, You bring a lot of experience which makes it possible for you to experience something and decide quickly whether it’s useful for you or not. What you bring to your divination is a critical eye that allows you to avoid doing things that are out-of-step with your values. (Coins/Pentacles=value). What your environment is contributing: Queen of Swords This particular queen can be a little gate-keepy, and I think about this card not unlike the “Judgment” card, in the sense of feeling judged. In this case, though, I feel this isn’t the reality—or if it is, it’s not that important. What matters more is your perception of feeling judged, rather than whether or not you actually are being judged. So you think you’re somewhat threatened or harshly viewed by your contemporaries. Whether or not you are, though, is irrelevant. The prior cards demonstrate that. You’re no longer looking for other people’s approval of your style; you’re allowing your style to emerge from you and your experience. Hopes and Fears: Nine of Cups Jupiter in Pisces. I always think of Pisces as the “believer” sign. I think it’s a sign often associated with noted religious leaders, and even though the church says that Jesus was born on 12/25, it’s long been known this is simply a date borrowed from prior traditions where the sun god dies and is reborn. “Historians” say Jesus was likely born in spring, and others have said that he had to have been born a Pisces. That’s all to say, that I think of this as the sign of a true believer. Not a performative one, like much of modern spirituality, but a real deal, bone-deep believer in the thing. And this is interesting because, as we saw last week, this is the “wish card.” So it’s like being someone who really believes in wishes, who wishes to believe, and who ultimately feels compelled to give themselves over to the fullness of this belief . . . fully. Ahem. This is both a hope and a fear, because we worry we’ll lose our identity if we give into this as fully as the card suggests—much the way people worry they’ll lose themselves in relationships if they’re not careful (and/or like those of us who have actually done that and lived to regret it!). What I sense, here, is the desire (cups) to give into the spirituality of divination fully—but the fear that in so doing, one loses oneself in it and cannot do the other thing anymore. The other thing being more practical work. We worry that if we go off the “deep end” of magic, we’ll never come back. Which, frankly, fair. I can attest—it’s seductive. But the final card in the reading will stop us from doing that. The future: Five of Pentacles Mercury’s decan of Taurus is sometimes a struggle because pentacles like to stay still and so does Taurus; Mercury does not. So this is a card that no one wants to see in the “outcome” position, which is what this is typically called. But fives shake up and pentacles are banal, so this is a shakeup of the banal. Listen, as someone who is fairy “fixed” I am similar to Taurus, although it’s not prominent in my chart. I think of Taurus in many ways as the most fixed sign. But stagnation is no good. Mercury (who has been implied here when we saw Gemini) shakes up that stasis. Mercury is very five-like. And, yes, there’s going to be tension between the desire to sit still and the desire to move, but no matter how hard we try to remain still life keeps going. So this isn’t a bad card, or it’s only a bad card if you’re trying to avoid growing. This card is growing. We can experience growing pains, but we’re still going to grow and growing is worth it. The earth sometimes gets depicted as too banal (by me), but the earth is not inert. And being “grounded” doesn’t mean being “stuck.” What this suggests to me, really, is that pedantry is always something worth outgrowing. By this I mean, whenever we decide “tarot is for this!” we should immediately turn around and do the exact opposite with it, just to remind us that it’s both everything and nothing; anything and everything; and always something other than the thing it is, while totally being that thing, too. The outcome, then, is that no matter what, our divinatory practice is going to grow—no matter whether we want it to or not. And hopefully we want it to, because the alternative is kinda sad. We can’t help but grow. And that’s good! So, ultimately, it’s not worth worrying about too much. No matter what we’re doing, we’re on the journey we’re journeying on, and so we’re moving and growing regardless. Which is good news! Summing it up Welp. Am I Celtic Cross covert now? No. I still don’t like it and I don’t particularly think it’s a good spread. I think that I could have gotten a better, clearer answer by using a different spread. But I also believe in doing things we don’t like sometimes in the service of keeping ourselves from getting stale—and also because we have to remind ourselves why we don’t like the things we don’t like, partly to see if we still don’t like them. I think it’s important to know why you don’t like the things you don’t like. It makes it harder to protect yourself from growing. Ultimately, I think this reading suggests that the way to make tarot more theatrical, more immersive, is to make it more yours. Whoever you are, turn within and find the magic of tarot that belongs specifically to you. When you do this, when you’re reading like you and unlike any other reader, you can’t help but radiate spectacular vibes because you’re doing what you’re doing in the way only you can do it. And there’s something wonderfully empowering about that. I always say, I don’t want the people who take my classes or read my books to read like me. We already have me. We need you to read like you. That’s the goal. And when you do that, growth and impressiveness and coolness and “theatre” will simply happen. It’s part of the nature of what we do. A read of one’s own. This week, let’s allow the spread to help us examine our reading style—and where we might benefit from being more “ourselves” in the process. Position 1 - One technique or area in which case you may be unduly influenced by others and could benefit from some youification. Position 2 - One way you might bring more “you” to that part of your reading practice. Position 3 - One benefit for you of doing this. Position 4 (optional) - One benefit for your clients of doing this. I really, truly recommend doing at least two cards for each of these. I just don’t think one gives enough context. As always, three is wonderful!  This week, I’m using a deck I’ve never used before. The Tarot of Prague was given(!) to me by a friend who was considering rehoming it—and who could have sold it for mucho money, given how Baba decks go. So when I was going through my collection today for my underrated decks video, I saw this and though I don’t think it’s underrated (thought I do include a Baba deck!), I thought I should give it a go. And given that my pulling this deck down was tangential to underrated things, I thought it might be fun to ask something this week along the lines of: What’s an underrated divination technique or tactic that we could benefit from exploring?
Before I get to the reading, I want to point out that these kinds of questions can be tricky because there’s implied certainty within it: in this case, that there is an “underrated” technique or tactic! Maybe there isn’t! If there isn’t the reading doesn’t have a way of telling us that. There’s no way for the cards to say, “Look, friend. This question is dumb. I don’t have an answer for you.” What tends to happen instead, then, is that the reading becomes a slog, hard to do, and the result remains unsatisfying. This is really to say that the question part of the readings is actually harder than the reading and to remind you that if you’re struggling with a reading, it may not be your talent; it may simply be that you asked a lazy-ass question, as I do nearly every time I read for myself. At any rate, I proceed: In this case I decided to draw three cards and then allow that first three to tell me if we needed additional cards and, if so, where they wanted to live. In this case, the reality of the second and third cards (flanking the center) being majors, I decided to give each a card to its side. This is something you might try if you’re struggling to understand a major in a spread. Sometimes they seem so “big.” If you’re struggling, go ahead and add a minor card to it and see if that helps contextualize it. That will often bring the “bigness” down to earth. If you draw a second card and it’s a major, you can use it or simply decide that you will draw until you get a minor between 1 and 10, rather than a trump or court. Today we have, 4 of Swords (4), The Magician (2), 9 of Cups (1), Strength (3), Queen of Cups (5). I typically tend to work from the middle outward when laying out cards. No idea why. It works for me. The 9/cups is the wish card, and so out of the gate I think that’s something fun to consider. “The Wish Card” is a super old fashioned way to think. I’m too lazy to get up and look at any of my books, so I’ll just rely on my admittedly faulty memory—but I don’t think this comes from anything prior to or concurrent with the Golden Dawn. I think it pre-dates Eden Gray, but maybe not by much? Anyway, Eden Gray is one of the places I saw it (I think). And the idea of a “wish card” definitely jives not with our much more “empowered” cosmology, these days. We don’t make wishes; we “manifest” (if you didn’t see my monologue about that term on BlueSky earlier this week, I recommend it). Manifesting isn’t wishing. When we wish, we wish do so on a star; when we wish, we’re in essence praying. Manifesting is somehow bossier than that and I don’t know how to say it any differently. I guess what I mean is this: wishing is a request for collaboration from the divine; manifesting is a demand for gifts. As someone who is relatively new to the spiritual aspect of working with divinity and spirit guides, I can tell you—my spirit guide might find me making a demand kind of kinky now that we’ve worked together rather a lot in the last few months, but I also wouldn’t do it because I do think of him has a collaborator and not a servant. In fact, if anyone is anyone’s servant, I’m his—because I’m embodied, I have the ability to do things he can’t. (He would want you to know, and in fact I can feel him insisting that I say this right now, that he doesn’t like the the idea of me as a servant—beyond, of course, the idea of kink. Which is good, because I don’t like hierarchies. 🤣 We’re rather well-suited.) Wishing is old fashioned. Quaint. Innocent. It’s Disney, but Disney the way you see it as a kid who believes in magic, not as an adult living under capitalism. I like that for our purposes, because in a way this reading is kind of teasing out something potentially “retro.” I could go into the 9/cups more, but I don’t want to decide too much about it right now. I don’t want to impose myself on it yet; I want to let the remainder of the cards, or at least the two flanking it, guide me a bit. I want to see how the other cards contextualize this first. (I should note, if you’ve read my prior posts, you might see that I didn’t do my usual thing of going through the numbers, suits, and elements at the start of this one. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I forget or something else distracts me. This is what I mean when I say, “Have a foundation, but be open to what happens.”) The Magician, Mercury, appears to the left; Strength, Leo, to the right. Why am I calling on the astrology? Mercury always matters when we’re divining. He/They is a messenger and traditionally governs divination, at least in part. And, of course, astrology is also rather an old divination technique. Leo, which is my sun sign, doesn’t necessarily feel relevant here—but I’m proud I remembered it. Looking at these two, you might already sense why I decided to put the second set of cards to the side of the majors. (The other option would have been above and below the 9 of cups). Sometimes the majors are big and sometimes they’re not. And here they’re actually playing kind of quiet. So I’m going to shade them with the cards that flank them. The Magician is flanked by the 4 of Swords. This connects to the messenger aspect of Mercury, because swords/air are the communication cards. Four is a stable, thoughtful number; it is meticulous, slow, and undistracted. That is in sharp contrast to the magician, who is (or can be) unstable, quick, and totally distracted. (Mercury has ADHD.) Strength is shaded by the Queen of Cups—and here we find another card often associated with divination. The Queen of Cups is frequently referred to as the “intuition” card, or the diviner card. Because the watery nature is doubled (cups, water; queen, water), she experiences heightened sensitivity and so might be considered the most psychic card in the deck. I’ve always hated the word psychic. In fact, just now I couldn’t even remember how to spell it and kept getting it wrong. It makes me feel uncomfortable. I’ve done my number on this more than once, but I’m biased against it. I can’t help but associating it with fraud, even though the reasonable argument could be made that my work with tarot falls under the realm of psychic work. So we have a strong psychic. (I keep adding an extra fucking “H” to the word psychic. I keep spelling it psychich. I have no idea why.) Stable, thoughtful magic; strong psychic intuitive. The wish card. This is all giving big fortune teller vibes, I’m sorry. I’m actually laughing as I write this because the thing I said to myself as I planned this post was, “Whatever you do, don’t make it about fucking fortune telling, because people are going to think you’re just plugging your forthcoming book, The Modern Fortune Teller’s Field Guide--coming from Crossed Crow in Autumn, 2025 and preorders are now open.” OK, maybe I didn’t say it that way, but I did say it. (Pre orders are now open through the Crossed Crow site; it’ll be a bit before you can find it on resellers. So if you’re concerned about shipping, I’d wait. That said, resellers tend to only offer books that have large advanced presales, so if you can afford to preorder through CC, I’d so appreciate it.) Anyway. I really didn’t want to make it about that. And, in fact, I think that the appearance of the 9/cups, the wish card, as well as the second cups (queen) making this suit now the dominant force, we have a slightly dreamier and more romantic answer than simply “fortune telling.” An example: I follow this shockingly handsome goth guy on Instagram for no other reason than that he’s my ideal man—except for the fact that he’s very clearly a straight. He recently offered to his followers the ability to buy from him a hand-written love letter that he would send to you through postal mail. That was it. Just a random love letter written by a hot goth boy on the internet who has kind of a steam punk romantic sense of theatre, honestly. And when I see this combo of cards, that’s what I think of. Not just the idea of old fashioned “wishing,” which I do think is part of it, but a sense of romance, a sense of drama, a sense of pageantry . . . and a sense of theatre. I’m a shockingly prosaic reader. It’s been kind of my brand since I started out doing anything “publicly.” I like to have a sweet tablescape at events, but beyond that I don’t really dress up in any special way when reading (I actually kind of feel embarrassed doing that?) unless I’m asked to, and when I’m asked to (rare) I usually try to find something that’s as close to civvies as possible. I don’t like calling attention to myself, and I think that’s a lovely thing. I want the focus to be on the client and the message. But . . . there’s nothing saying a little romance isn’t worth it. There’s nothing saying a little flair, a little art direction, couldn’t achieve a new layer of client of experience. A few weeks ago, I finally got my ass to Salem to see the Spiritualism exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum with my friend Liz. It was a freezing cold, snowy/rainy northeastern day. And though I, too, live in the coastal part of this colonial landscape, Salem was decidedly—even violently--colder. But once inside the really stunning museum (it’s wonderful, truly; I got to see an Iris Apfel exhibit a few years ago that I loved)—you should go if you’re in the area. So many people skip it because they’re focused on Halloween, and to a degree PEM used to like that—they didn’t want to get in on the kitsch. But they’ve loosened up a bit, I think, especially with an exhibit like this and another recent one about monster movie posters. So, you can have spooky fun there, too, and see some wonderful exhibits. Anyway, the point is that I wandered around the exhibit exploring the history (much of which I knew thanks in part of Mitch Horowitz’s wonderful Occult America, a book I reference a lot) and thinking about—well, a lot of things, really. I thought about how Spiritualism itself emerged from a deep human need to connect with the divine, or with the unknown. And it always seems to ramp up in popularity around times of loss—wars and pandemics, generally—because of this very deep human need. And then I think about the way that it’s typically considered not only old fashioned fraud, but also pseudo-spirituality. I mean has any faith produced more frauds than Catholicism, and does that corporation get called a fake religion? No. Anyway. I also think about an episode of The Haunted Objects Podcast that I listened to about Uri Geller. They explored how, early in his career, he was pushed to add magic tricks and illusions into his appearances because people were getting bored with the spoon thing. So, he did—because he needed money. And now there are people devoted to him being a fraud. I don’t know whether he is or isn’t; to be honest, I don’t know much more about him than that was in that podcast. I didn’t even realize he was contemporary. But what I’m getting at is the way capitalism made him compromise himself, not the fact that he was a con man (assuming he’s not one). Capitalism is what caused fraud in Spiritualism, not divinity. And because this is one of the first industries in the post-industrial colonial world to be led by and center women, we have to recognize that much of what we “know” about it today is propaganda created by patriarchy. Including the church, who fucking loathes competition of any kind—which is why they hate fortune tellers and why we’re called frauds. Count how many frauds you’ve heard of who read tarot? Count how many frauds you’ve heard of in the church? Yeah. I don’t for a second doubt that the early practitioners of Spiritualism were believers and I don’t doubt that many of them had the ability to communicate with — something divine. Whether it was ghosts, daemons (there was a time when all spirits were called daemons), angels, guides, whatever—we do this whenever we read cards, no matter our cosmology, so we know it’s probable that at least some Spiritualists had “it.” But then came showbiz. Showbiz is poison, kids. Listen. Daddy knows. Showbiz made Spiritualism fraud. It is time again for me to tell you about Black Herman, sort of the ur-Uri Geller in a way. He was a stage magician for sure, but in fact also a root doctor, healer, and fortune teller. And eventually racism and the NYPD got to him on charges of fraud. They claimed he was pretending to be a doctor without credentials. Lots of people were. “Medicine” was new and most people couldn’t afford doctors. What made Black Herman a target? He was a hugely popular act around the country to Black and white audiences. That’s why. He had the temerity to be popular, successful, beloved and Black —an entrepreneur and healer. But the thing that made it easier for them to claim him as a fraud was because of the stage magic—which did blend over into Spiritualism. (A perhaps apocryphal story, also in Occult America, tells of Herman and his assistant visiting local cemeteries to memorize the names of the local dead before performances.) We know the cops could have gotten him they wanted to, but their job was easier because of the performance of Spiritualism, not because of his actual healing practice. The woman who complained about him wasn’t one of his actual clients; it was an undercover cop who entrapped him. This is to say that I don’t advocate for divination as performance. Partly for the sanity and benefit of the reader. We have to remember that the power structures exist to keep us from being taken seriously—up to the point where it benefits those power structures to make a public example of us and try to make us an enemy (we’re both powerless and dangerous? Sure, Jan.). And given the unhinged fuckery of the right wing, I don’t doubt we may see shit like this again over the next few years. I pray not, but I say this to advocate for truly ethical and responsible divination—by which I mean, don’t be a fucking fraud, if nothing else. Allllllllllllll of that said, what’s to say people couldn’t use a little romance in their experience? Theatre needn’t be contrived. It can be quite real. Spectacle is simply something that feels special. In the spread for the week I’ll share my example, which will be literally “how can I make my divination more ‘spectacular’?” I like spectacle more than theatre just because I’m fighting with the theatre right now. But I like the idea of a little romance, a little experience. Maybe an immersion. Immersive experiences are huge in the arts right now. I think it’s a very human need to counter our constant digital immersion. It’s like virtual reality, except it’s not virtual. It’s augmented reality, but (almost) entirely analog. Back in the beforetimes, I went to see the well-known experience Sleep No More, which is supposedly a retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth set in a decaying hotel. Everyone is masked upon arrival and then shoved into an elevator. The doors of the elevator randomly open and you’re shoved out into onto that floor—often apart from whoever you came with. They really want you to experience this without holding anyone’s hand. And so you do. You wander through this “hotel” (it’s a massive stage set, but one that feels exactly like a haunted hotel—and graveyard and aslyum . . . so many spaces exist within that hotel). There are “scenes” performed by actors throughout the rooms and characters you can follow, but nothing is linear; everything is meant to simply be experienced like a fever dream, walking through, following this character—until they lose you, and you’re left alone for a moment—and then a party erupts around you and a murder is enacted. It’s quite surreal. It’s spooky. I didn’t find it particularly sexy, but there were definitely other audience members there who seemed to—which made the danger of the experience realer, and in fact audiences members eventually started to get grabby to the point that the whole show needed to be restaged and audiences could be bounced for reaching out and touching what was not theirs to touch. And on one hand, yeah, don’t fucking touch actors. On the other hand, what a testimony to the creation of an immersion so experience that people can’t help but reach out. (But again, no! Bad!) What might we borrow from this experience or kind of experience in our divination? How could we put on a “show” that manages to be both totally real and authentic and yet somehow romantic and full of spectacle? This is an exciting question to ponder! Even as it makes me somewhat anxious, because as a former performer, I have no desire to do that during my readings. But I do like the idea of ambiance. It’s not always easy to create, and this does get to my secret desire to have my own fortune telling parlour--with a u—that has books and classes and seminars and lots of jewel toned velvet furniture and a little divination museum to boot. (Someone please give me money to do this!!!!! And the energy to make it happen!!!!. ) I mean it could be as simple as using my creative writing background to do written readings for clients in an old style way . . . hand written, sent by post, wax seal . . . that sort of a thing. I mean that would be very clearly ripping off my Instagram crush, but you get the idea. Just a little twist, just a little magic, just a little sparkle to make it something special . . . something more than “just” a reading (which should never be lost to spectacle, and I really do believe that fundamentally)—but is an experience. People like experiences. What might you do? I love this question and I may even make a video about this! It’s rather an exciting idea. And I think not a bad business thing—give yourself a “thing,” a “niche” that works. I know a fabulous reader locally, The Vintage Mystic, who does this so well—she’s got a chifforobe full of vintage 1920 garments and jewelry, all of which she looks fabulous in. And it’s perfect! She’s gotten gigs reading in the cemetery for themed events. How cool, right? Just a little theatre, just a little something special. I’m actually really inspired right now! I think I may be revisiting this in several ways. Before I get to my sample reading of the sample spread, I want to point something else out about this reading: I didn’t really spend that much time with the cards. I got kind of a beginning from them that prompted me to go down a primrose path of ideation. (Jesus, there’s a pretentious sentence.) I don’t think I’d necessarily do that with a client, unless it was taking me to some really interesting places—and I imagine that channels are probably doing just that—but when reading for ourselves, especially in writing, it’s an incredible thing to follow a thought where it takes you. That’s when you’re really reading, and, in fact, my secret to reveal to you is: the things that you find when you’re writing that way, kind of stream-of-consciousness following an idea . . . those are the times your spirit guide is leading you and that’s one way you might begin to access them. FYI. A read of one’s own This is a simple spread. Pull any number of cards you want to answer the question, “How can I bring authentic-yet-theatrical spectacle to my divination?” Since the Tarot of Prague prompted this sort-of fairy tale of a reading, I’m sticking with it! I totally did not expect this, but I’m super delighted by it. I think is my favorite of all the posts I’ve written! To answer my question I drew, in a cross: Queen of Wands (4) 7 of cups (2), Knight of Wands (1), 10 of cups (3) Emperor (5) The Knight of Wands is our axis and the first card that went down. The Fiery Seeker! Interesting. Flanked by two cups cards! The dreamy-ass seven and the full-as-fuck ten! I like to remind folks that fire and water are not, by nature, adversarial; they can be quite productive together, and I think this is an example of such a time. Flanking the fiery knight (and I associate knights with fire, too, so this would be fiery fire), the two cups cards help him “stay in his lane.” What is that lane? Still figuring that out. 🤣 The Queen of Wands and the Emperor form the vertical column. The queen takes the knight’s energy and makes it useable, practical, kind of like a conduit. The Emperor, the OG four card, the stabilizer, grounds him. He’s very, very tightly contained in this reading; he can’t stray very far from this path; he can’t let his ego or his flair get the better of him. What he can do is inspire dreaminess. A usable, grounded dreaminess. He can do this in many ways, but I just got the idea to offer a dreamy reading. Some kind of spread that’s designed to focus on what you should be dreaming about, or where dreaming wants to happen, where we benefit from dreaming—and dreaming big! I feel like I want to use the word “poetry,” even though there are no swords cards and I really don’t think you can have poems without swords for many reasons (swords are words, but also poems are tight and swords edit). Poetics, maybe, rather than poetry? So then the reading becomes based on the idea that at every moment in your life, you absolutely have to dream big about something! And this reading might present you with an immersive road map! Oooo, this is fun brainstorming. Perhaps this is an immersive reading that builds on itself as more dreams are revealed. Perhaps there is the use of poetics, somehow, the way that Enrique Enriquez uses them (I don’t know that I’m capable of his level of poetry, but let me tell you—if you want to see someone totally immersed in tarot, watch the documentary about him. It’s called Tarology and I managed to find it on Amazon ages ago). This is all quite tantalizing. More soon! Anyway, I’d love love love to hear what you come up with! Let me know and have a great week.  Headed back to questions from the divination community this week! Today, we look at this: What divinatory tools/skills/modalities am I cultivating in 2025? To broaden that a little more, I’ll think about it in terms of divinatory trends and methods that will or can thrive this year, as well as finding things for your divinatory practice that will make you feel like your growing and/or thriving.
This week, I chose The Darkness of Light Tarot by Tony DiMauro. It’s an absolute stunner of a creation, though it came out at a weird moment and its entirely white cast of characters meant it remained destined for my shelf. A friend and I talked about the deck yesterday, though, and I thought this was as good a place as any to revisit it. Why not? I’ve got so many decks on the shelves that don’t get any love—and as I handed over a deck I love to this friend who I know will use it more, I realized it might be worth doing a bit more of that. Revisiting and potentially finding new, loving homes. But that’s not the point of this post; just some delightful commentary from yours truly. In an arc of five, we’ve got: 7 of Blades (4), La Stella (2), Knight of Cups (1), Three of Wands (2), Ace of Cups (5). Let us note the absence of earth, herein. Out of the gate, we know we’re not being asked to stay tethered to anything old or familiar. In fact, the exclusion of only earth from the line suggests that escaping the bonds of banality may be either necessary or desirable, depending on one’s point of view. Water/Cups holds an edge in the spread, being the only element represented twice. The Knight of Cups wants to be the central character, which is apt for knights, and I think there’s a certain dreaminess about this card that suggests escapism. I’m not an advocate of escapism, that you likely know, but let’s note that the question is not what “should” we be cultivating, but rather what “are” we cultivating. So this isn’t advice as much as it is a description of our collective divinatory tendency. I don’t, however, think escapism is the only quality the card depicts and here is where the reader’s life experience meets the cards in front of him. I have been feeling for a lot of the last year that a sea change was happening in terms of divination needs. My clients have started asking questions I’m never asked—questions about ancestors, spirituality, curses, magic, and mediumship. And this makes total sense for two reasons. First, humans in the industrialized/colonizer world frequently return in a big ways to spirituality—particularly alt spirituality (at least since “alt” became a necessary qualifier)—during and after times of global catastrophe. We are not yet out of the global pandemic and we face news of new diseases threatening our safety every day. Humans also seeks spirituality in times of or after war. The Spiritualism movement in the so-called US took off in the years after the “Civil War,” and again after the two World Wars. We are in a moment following massive, indescribable loss. Of course people’s connection to their honored dead and their understanding of their own temporariness drive them toward questions of spirituality. Second, we’re also in a moment where the “spirituality” of others is being used to destroy the lives of already marginalized communities. A lot of people recognize the sheer fuckeduppery of this and at the same time are craving a connection to something larger than themselves. I also think a lot of people on the supposed left who replaced their childhood Christianity with evangelical liberalism are discovering that this religion turns out to be as hollow as the prior—perhaps more. The dreaminess of the kn/cups need not be romanticism. It may be a Don Quixote-esque quest for the ideal. (Full disclosure, I honestly only know that story based on the musical Man of La Mancha; I can’t claim to have read the book.) The fact that the Knight is preceded by the Star, a pretty strong and also idealistic sense of direction, ennobles him (although it also could make him a bit dippy and dreamy, too) it’s the 7/blades that keeps us in check. Sevens are invested in things that are deeply important to the querent. We’re not talking about unimportant stuff here. So we do have a Knight of Cups shaped by the marriage of the 7/blades and the Star: serious, introspective, deep, focused, idealistic. This makes up for the lack of earth, I guess, making him somewhat “saner” than Don Quixote. What does the knight move toward? The Three of Wands and the Ace of Cups. I’ve written elsewhere in the blog about how spirituality can be detected in the cards through the suits and how they behave. Fiery spirituality is evangelical; watery spirituality is intuitive and fluid; airy spirituality is intellectual, theological, perhaps even scientific; earth spirituality is grounded, deep, earthy, practical. As we turn our attention to the 3/wands, we recognize how it’s “contained” by two water/cups cards. One could make the argument that this is intuition containing the evangelical, which we might take to mean the containing or capturing of fundamentalism with the fluid joy of, well, not-fundamentalism. And that might be part of it; I’m sure that most folx in the divination landscape have an eye kept firmly on the “religious” right and its fundie bullshit. I think, though, that I read this trio a little differently. I read fire here, evangelism, as “activating.” How I land there is that threes are expansive, as we know; fire, of course, hot and alive. Spirituality activates intuitive spirituality. I’ll use myself as an example, because it’s all I’ve got. I have actively kept spirituality out of my divination. There are many reasons, not the least of which is the damage that Christianity did to me in my childhood. It still worked. Quite well. And in fact, the further I took divination away from spirituality, the better I got at it. My readings became clearer, more useful, more satisfying; my interpretation process went from stress to delight. I went from kinda liking reading and being kinda good at it, to loving reading and looking forward to doing it. And that worked for me. And it worked for the clients I eventually began booking. And now it’s not enough. Neither I think for me or my clients. I have, as I’ve also hinted at here, been on a more active spiritual journey lately, and I absolutely have seen similar in the questions I’m getting. One might say, and this is odd to think given that my first book was called Tarot on Earth, that I was a pretty watery reader. By this I mean the spiritual connection was all intuitive and unseen, if it was there at all (I think now it was and I couldn’t see it). My readings weren’t activated by spirituality; they were activated by . . . I’m not really sure what, because I didn’t hold any particularly solid view of why tarot worked. It just did and I liked that. I would have said I was airy, but I think there’s something about water that’s innately trusting and doesn’t think too much about things. And that’s weirdly how I handled my understanding of how to read, if not the way I actually interpreted readings. If that makes sense. But of late the call to activate my work with some deeper meaning has been there and while it’s not about changing how I read, it is about changing to some degree the things I’m willing to read about. It’s also guiding my own continuing education. My focus is and will continue to be on ways of bringing more ethical spiritual support to my clients when and if they ask for it. I’m not, I want to be very clear, interested in people who try to foist their own spiritual shit on others, regardless of whether it’s “Christian” or not. When people want spiritual guidance from me, I want to be able to provide it. But only under that condition. For example, I’ve had clients ask me if I do any kind of blessings for people. That’s not something I currently offer, but it’s something that I’m exploring as something I might be comfortable with one day. And I think that’s the overall sorta journey of this reading. The spiritual is going to play an increasingly important and activated role in people’s divinatory work in 2025 and probably beyond. And that’s not remotely surprising to me. In fact, it makes me wonder whether I’m not simply offering up a big old pile of confirmation bias to you, except that I can see all of this in the cards. One thing I like to do, just to check myself, is look at the spread and see if any other combos jump out to me. So far I looked really at three sets of the cards: The Knight of Cups alone, the Knight in context of the Star and 7/blades, and the Knight in context of the 3/wands and ace/cups. Other combos worthy of exploring are the mirrored pairs, which would give us the 7/blades paired with the ace/cups and the Star paired with the 3/wands. Air and water have an affinity for each other, partly because what I think of as air—oxygen—is a big part of what makes water water. When we really consider (swords) what’s really important (seven) to us, we inevitably have big spiritual breakthroughs (ace/cups). What of the 7 of blades’ typical association with thievery and chicanery? Well, I’ve never really bought that—and that’s not what the Golden Dawn seems to have intended, anyway, which means that’s not really what PCS was drawing. The title of the card is futility, not theft. It’s doing something even though we think it won’t work, or even though it likely will not produced the desired result—or any result. Which may be what introspection and even a focus on the spiritual might seem like. “It’s futile to care about this.” But I’m of the opinion that now and for the first time in my life that our communal survival may actually depend on just that. The pairing of the Star and 3/wands is fun. In part because the Star is a “fire” card given that stars are, as I like to remind folx, being flaming balls of gas. We are always growing, this combo says. Why? The Star is our journey and threes expand. The fieriness of all of this, too, leads to that growth—because as long as there’s fuel, fire will grow. Whether we want to grow or not, we’re doing it; and if we’re diviners, we’re growing with the expectations of our clients or friends, because their questions are going to start moving along with the collective un/conscious. We are quite literally influenced by each other, which means that even if you’re a reader who has no desire to explore spiritual topics in your readings, you may very well find yourself getting more related questions this year than ever before. This is not in the cards, but I feel compelled to say it given tarot’s long association with spirituality. Whatever the history of the cards, and we are slowly finding more indications of what might have been the real history both of the deck and its use in fortune telling (see 78 Acts of Liberation by Lane Smith, and Secrets of Romani Fortune-Telling by Jezmina Von Thiele and Paulina Stevens for examples), when the hermiticists got their hands on tarot, they stole it from the every day person and coopted it for the wealthy person. To whit, they stripped it of its “fortune telling” meanings and history and wrote over that with things that only rich people had the time to care about. This is not the spirituality I’m talking about here. When I say spirituality here, I’m talking about the personal, individual connection to divinity--as well as the personal, individual participation in the collective magic of liberation. That’s a pretentious phrase. It’s important, though. Witchery or any of its sibling spiritualities, are and always have been about the marginalized. Marginalized is a good word. Pushed to the margins. Witchery and divination are tools of the margins. And so we cannot escape into esotercism that way the moneyed men of the Golden Dawn attempted to (leading, in many cases, to massive mental health issues for some of them, by the way). And it’s temping to escape. When we discover the pure bliss of spiritual moments and the joy of truly connecting with our guides, it’s intoxicating. Real life can become even more banal and even less attractive, making us want to surrender to the spiritual entirely—like some kind of divine opium. We have to be careful of that, and we have to be careful not to fall into spiritual privilege. Whether a client wants an answer to a spiritual or a banal question, the readers’ job is always to read within the context of life. If we don’t remain connected, rooted, then we can start giving the kinds of readings that help no one—exactly the kinds of readings I so actively rebelled against years ago. Diviners must keep one foot in both worlds. The absence of earth cards in this spread does highlight a risk that I pointed out to begin with: dreaminess. We do need to guard against getting so lost in the spiritual that we do lose touch with reality—and, as a result, the ability to understand the conditions our clients operate under, and what a real person living a real life can do under real circumstances to avoid or improve them. Does that make sense? Yes to spiritual development and even welcoming more of that into the reading room; no to getting so divorced from reality that we can’t function in it or read about it. The fortune teller, alas, cannot float away. We are needed here on earth. And, as always, I offer you this week’s spread! I lack the energy today to demo it, but I know for certain you don’t need me to. Let me know how it goes!! A read of one’s own
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AboutEach post is a tarot reading about the tarot, a lesson about the cards from the cards. Each ends with a brand new spread you can use to explore the main concepts of the reading. Archives
April 2025
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