lesson 14: success, being liked, and being real

LESSON 14: 
Cards drawn (arc of five): Ace of Wands (4), The Tower (2), King of Pentacles (1), Seven of Wands (3), Four of Pentacles (5). 
Deck: The Lubanko Tarot by E. Lubanko

A note about this deck: I think this is one of the truly essential tarots of the modern era. Alas, I only discovered it as it was about to be out of print (don’t fret for me; I had the foresight to buy two copies). I hope that it doesn’t remain so. It is queer and sexy and wonderfully unique. When I first got it in my hot little hands, I thought: “Oh, this is THE deck.” But when I started using it for clients, many says, “wow, these are INTENSE.” They are, but in the beset way. That said, I don’t use it in casual settings much anymore—alas—I want clients to remember the message, not necessarily the intensity of the images. Still, I think it’s in my top ten decks. 

The King of Pentacles (my astrological significator and usually one of my favorite cards) is said by some to contain the entire tarot because, when the deck is in order, he’s the final card. (Typically.) I often think of the pentacles as the suit of earth—but also all the other suits wrapped into one, the five points of the pentagram representing each of the elements (including spirit). (In fact, it’s worth noting that the reason the inverted pentagram/pentacle is considered “bad” is because with the top tip pointing downward, it represents a “triumph” of the physical over the spiritual. In this way, the reversed pentagram/pentacle is quite an avatar for modern life, especially for those of us who have to put the physical over the spiritual thanks to life’s demands.)

It can be scary for readers when a court sits in a prominent position, particularly when the reading isn’t about a person, as is the case here. If you face that reality, don’t start with it! Just because the card is in the center of the spread and likely a lynchpin of the reading doesn’t mean that it’s the card we have to start with—or even that it’s the most important card in the reading. Its position makes it look important, but it may not be. This is what I mean when I say we should gaze at a spread without jumping to conclusions. The King’s position (his role as a king or the card’s place in the spread) may be ironic, it may be imagined, it may be on the way out. In any case, it’s best to reserve judgment for a moment—and if the card that “seems” like the important one doesn’t make it easy to get into the reading, don’t start there. Instead of assuming you’re doing something wrong, assume instead that your guides (or whatever makes this work) are telling you not to start there. Let’s allow information like that to be intuitive rather than intrusive. 
    
In this case, I think I may want to start with that card—but let’s cast our eyes across the spread and record any first impressions: Pentacles is the dominant suit (Note from future me: No, it’s actually not—but see below), there are no cups cards, the only major is the Tower. The numerology isn’t necessarily singing out. Next, I consider anything that catches my eye. The Seven of Wands, in this deck giving the impression of a figure with horns, feels timely. If you read last week’s lesson, I’ve been reading about the Horned God and the devil (who is sometimes assumed to be “the” horned god)—so that’s interesting. Maybe that’s the card I need to start with because I’m so struck by that co-incidence. Before I get there, though, I want to explore the slight dominance of pentacles cards. That roots this reading in the earth and as such means that we’re focusing on any one of the following (probably): work, family, finance, money, banality, and anything else down to earth. Because this is a reading in particular about divination, I take this to suggest the reading will have an overall message about grounded or down-to-earth divination—which, if you know me, is rather on brand. 
    
OK. Now to the cards themselves. 
    
The King of Pentacles gazes at the Seven of Wands. His expression is difficult to read: rueful, wistful, longing, knowing, judgmental? A bit of an enigma and in such cases it’s probably all of that and more is on his mind. Nothing, as we say a lot around here, is all one thing. I think he knows that he’s reached a certain status in life and “can’t” engage with the world in the way that the Seven of Wands does. He can’t be outwardly combative, defensive, or partisan; he can’t take a side because he (as monarchs are supposedly “supposed” to) represents all his “subjects.” (Isn’t that a gross term? Subjects? I hate it. It makes me think of how writers have to “submit” our work. Fuck you.) I think the king longs for the ability to get into the fray—and I think the reason he can’t is because of the Four of Pentacles: the stability of his place. He cannot get all Seven of Swordsy anymore because he wants to maintain his position. 
    
Choices. 
    
OK, let’s look at what he’s looking away from: The Tower and the Ace of Wands (working backwards from the king). 
    
Ah! I was wrong! Pentacles isn’t the dominant suit—I just noticed that, the Ace of Wands makes this a tie between earth and fire! We have the very first card of the minors and the very last card of the minors-slash-the-entire-deck. How cool.  Anyway, not that relevant at the moment (and it may never be, but we have it stored in our memory bank if necessary). I see the Ace of Wands and the Tower as rather similar cards, in fact; the impulse of the ace turns into action in the Tower. This king was once a revolutionary, a fighter of the old order. Now he’s become the order. 
    
Whoa! Heavy, man. Psychedelic. 
    
Not, though, uncommon. There’s a reason the cliche that people get more conservative as they age has become so well accepted. It’s because the people for whom this is true have generally gotten comfortable and no longer feel the need to sacrifice anymore. Hey, look: life’s a crazy ride. I get wanting to be comfortable. But if revolution was always part of your makeup and you deny it, you’re going to wind up a lot like this particular spread.
    
Here’s a technique that often helps me, too: I was about to say that this: “the four implies that this cannot stay this way forever.” Where does that come from? Fours are stable and sometimes stuck. They are generally conservative. So how can that number of stability indicate that things will have to change? Because four is not the last number in any system. Five inevitably comes along and messes it up. It has to because nothing is permanent. So the technique is that sometimes a number can imply the numbers on either side of it. Right? A four implies both the three that formed it and the five that will destroy it. I tend to view odd numbers as destabilizing and even ones as stabilizing. This means that we’re always in a state of revamp or recovery. When we see an even number (here, four), we know at some point that five is going to come along—it has to. Even ten implies its own dissolution in its relationship to one (particularly because the minors move on paths from one to ten and back again). Think of this all like The Wheel of Fortune: wherever you are on that card when it shows up in a spread, you know you can’t stay there forever. 
    
So: lesson fourteen becomes this: Once there was a king who used to be a fiery (Ace of Wands) revolutionary, a destroyer of the status quo (ace and Tower). He secretly longs to be that again (Seven of Wands); to say what he thinks and mess with his enemies. But he’s resigned to a life free of that. After all, he must keep his place (Four of Pentacles) or wind up . . . unsettled. Even though that unsettling thing will come one way or another.
    
What the actual FUCK does that have to do with divination?
    
Great question! And I love that the reason has behaved this way because it’s a great example of something I’ve started saying a lot: sometimes readings are literal and sometimes they’re metaphors or myths. Many of the readings we’ve done in this blog have been fairly literal. Not this one. This is a myth. It is a story from which we must find meaning. I don’t love when readings do this, because I prefer precision and specificity—but whether I want them to happen or not, they do. It’s better for me if I get used to it, right? (I have.) And here’s the thing—maybe metaphor is the method most suited to that client at that time. Sometimes direct, clear answers will shut down a client because they’re not ready to hear the answer. A myth on the other hand may make the message easier to digest. And, in fact, if you’re in the position of delivering bad news, using myth may be a great way to make the message easier to hear. (Incidentally, explore that concept—and more!—in my new book, The Modern Fortune Teller’s Field Guide, coming from Crossed Crow in 2025. Can you believe I’ve made it this many weeks without plugging my book?) 
    
Here, we have a myth. It’s not unlike Persephone and Hades or Noah’s Ark—or Grimm’s fairy tales. It’s a story into which we must dig to find meaning. Here is the meaning I take from the myth: As readers, we might reach a level of “success” (define that how you will) where we feel like the most important thing is holding on to that success. In so doing, we shut down our more fiery, more exciting gifts. We want to be “presentable.” We want to be “safe for all timezones.” We don’t say what we really think, we don’t give the whole truth, we don’t pick sides. We shut down the partisan part of ourselves so that we can maintain the myth that this “success” will last forever. 
    
And yet. The reaper is coming for you—or for your success. How much do you want to look back on your life and say, “Oh, I wish I’d said that thing but I was too afraid people wouldn’t like me”? How much do you want to deny who you really are and what you really believe in order to make people who don’t know you and don’t care about you think you’re cool? We see this with people who “make it” in really any field—they suddenly change their personality to make themselves publicity ready and safe. And what feels like a good PR move winds up informing those paying attention that everything the person did to get where they are wasn’t genuine—that the person isn’t genuine, and that everything is for show. Whatever sells tickets, as it were. Great, you’ve achieved the fame lottery and now you have to pretend to be someone you’re not. (I remember Tiny Fey, whose work I’ve often liked [major 30 Rock fan]—but who is in some ways a really good example of this—telling Bowen Yang on his podcast, “You’re too famous to be genuine.” Meaning, “you can’t say what you want anymore because too many people know you and you’re going to piss people off. Better to say nothing.”) But is that what we’re here to do? Reach the point of getting a microphone passed to us and people who are listening—and then turn it the fuck off so that the things we think don’t get into the world? So that the things we believe in never come to fruition (or of they do, it’s despite us not because of us)? I don’t know about you, but to me that ain’t it, kids. 
    
This is all very macro and may seem totally irrelevant unless you’re a well-known person in your field (and my guess is that if you are, you’re not reading this and don’t give a flying fuck what I think). We can make it micro, though. When you read for others, you’re accepting a microphone and when you’re holding it what you say matters. If you’re really an iconoclast, a firebrand, a hell raiser, are you really serving anyone if you hold back during your readings? I’m not talking about being cruel, about bludgeoning people with truth. I’m saying that if you see in a reading that the client is actually the problem, are you going to tell them? Or are you more interested in being liked? Are you going to let your ego overcome the message? If your client has said something harmful, is it in your best interest to ignore it and hope they come back? Or is it in everyone’s best interest to explain why what they said is dangerous—to give them the opportunity to learn? If your client wants to know if their partner is cheating on them and you know you can answer that but avoid it because someone might think it’s “not a good look,” are you doing your job or are you bowing to peer pressure?
    
These are big, hairy, audacious questions (a term I’m borrowing from corporate America’s “big hairy audacious goal”—a term of art that has come to make my skin crawl . . . and yet here I am using it. Life is weird). I’m not saying I’ve got good answers to them. Sometimes I have held back info because I was worried how the client would react—and sometimes it was because I didn’t want to be disliked. That’s not the case much anymore because I seem to be less interested in getting people to like me, but it’s possible I’ll do it again. What I think: we should aim for delivering readings in alignment with what we authentically believe about divination. Oh, god, that’s a hairy sentence. There was a big and weird conversation about authenticity in the tarot tube landscape a handful of years ago—and as tended to happen a lot back then, it grew into a whole “thing.” The irony of it all being that authenticity is a valuable tool for a reader. It’s how people know we’re not full of shit. Yes, you need to be the reader that you are. And you shouldn’t change what you are in the hopes of making more people like you—because when the time comes that you’ll be forced to show who you really are, and that time will absolutely come, you’re going to feel worse. 
    
I guess another way to say this: don’t base your “brand” as a reader on what you think will make you successful; base it on what you do best. In short: do your best you as often as you can and fuck the haters. Because you’re going to have to reveal who you really are at some point, anyway. If it turns out that those who trust you don’t like the real version, that gets ugly. So the best bet is to do you. And that’s pretty good advice to me. I appreciate the permission to say “fuck it.” 
    
(I suppose it’s worth noting, if you know my history, that this lesson really did come from these cards—I had no intention of talking about this today. So if you think I’m speaking about or to something in particular, I am: you: the person reading this. That’s it. This isn’t “about” any one or any thing. It’s about what the cards told me. Take that for what it’s worth.)
    
One more thing before this week’s spread. I was finishing up this blog when my friend sent me this video: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/harvard-business-review_you-are-not-your-job-title-activity-7243981287152054274-eMG0?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios
It somehow says exactly what I think is core to those whole lesson. Synchronicity at its finest!

A read of one’s own
I haven’t done an actual spread design in a few weeks, partly because I’m bad at it and partly because I felt like the lessons wanted to explore something specific and that didn’t require a spread with set positions. This week, I think we might benefit from that. This spread is designed to help us discover where, if anywhere, we might be dimming our true voice in order to make ourselves more popular or palatable or just to sustain some perceived sense of success that may or may not be real. Note: Often, spreads like this can become frustrating in situations where we’re actually not exhibiting the problem we’re attempting to solve. For example, if we’re not actually dimming our shine, we’re going to read the cards as though we are—and they may not make sense. I’ve attempted to solve for that below.


Position one: Is there a part of my (reading) life where I’m denying myself in order to make people happy? Note: In this case, we’re looking first at the number assigned to the card. If it’s an even number, the answer is “yes”; if odd, “no.” If it’s a court card, page (or equivalent) and queen (or equivalent) are odd numbers—11 and 13; knights and kings (or equivalent) are even, 12 and 14. This has nothing to do with the meanings of the cards or any numerological energy we assign to the courts. Page is 11 because when the deck is ordered, it follows 10. That’s it. If you get an odd number, the answer is no and you don’t need to continue the reading. The card’s actual meaning can lend you advice on keeping yourself authentic. 

Position two: How am I dimming myself, in what ways am I doing this? (I recommend using at least three cards for this position.)

Position three: How can I reclaim my authenticity? (Again, I recommend 3+ cards.)

Position four: How do I handle any rejection that comes my way as I return to my true self? (3+ would be great here, too!)

A brief example: 
Position one, I drew Strength. This is an even number, so it says, “yes, you are dimming your authenticity in some way.” I’ll return to the card again to see if it can offer guidance once I pull the rest. 

Note: I didn’t draw the rest of the cards until I got a “yes.” 

Position two, answering “How am I dimming myself?” or “In what ways am I doing this?” For this I pulled The Fool, Temperance, and the Three of Wands. I’d initially intended only to pull one card for these additional positions for the sake of brevity, but one card wasn’t enough context. Ah well! In this spread, the fool walks away from Temperance and the Three of Wands—but Temperance is a unifier. It blends disparate things, so even though the Fool doesn’t know or want to be pulled back, it’s happening. Temperance, though frequently not considered a super active card, is trying to integrate a devil-may-care nonchalance about things they not only care deeply about (wands/fire) but that they’re increasingly getting more devoted to or passionate about (three=growth). It’s like there’s an escapist part of myself that wants to run from the stuff that really matters—or to present the idea that I don’t care about stuff that is important. (Now, I will say: that doesn’t sound anything like me, but these are hard readings to do because they’re often addressing something we don’t know we’re doing. And I can admit that I don’t like looking like I care about anything. That said, I’m pretty open about that fact, too, so . . . this may be showing me something I’m not capable of seeing yet.) Another way to read this is that I avoid showing my integrative work (temperance+three of swords) because I don’t want people thinking I’m an idiot (fool). Integrative work could mean my spirituality, say, or other parts of my life I don’t enjoy sharing. 

Position three, exploring how I can reclaim my authenticity. I’ve drawn: Ace of Pentacles, Queen of Swords, Page of Wands. Everyone’s favorite! A bunch of court cards! Let’s look at what we don’t see here, first: cups. The Ace of Pentacles literally shows someone with feet in the mud. The Queen of Swords asserts her wisdom and the Page of Wands does some crazy magic. It’s about showing the “dirty” work (the mess, not the sex), and trusting in one’s own wisdom and power and potency and ability to make magic. (Anyone notice how I just switched from personal pronouns to impersonal ones? I was saying “me” and “I” up until I wrote “trusting in one’s . . .” That’s a clue. I was just saying this morning I don’t like people thinking I think I’m smarter or better than I am, because I don’t want them thinking I’m arrogant. I took myself out of my own reading to avoid the directness of saying “trusting in my own . . .”)

Position four, addressing how to handle any rejection that comes my way as I show my more authentic self. Cards drawn: Three of Cups, Ten of Wands, Eight of Pentacles. Sometimes cards are pretty easy to read: “Focus on your real community while you keep doing the work that actually matters.” Boom! ​

Earlier I said I could return to the first card, the one that gave me a yes/no answer using only the card’s number, to see if it offered anything else. That card was Strength. It’s one of “my” cards because it’s associated with Leo, which is my sun sign. (If you’re paying attention, earlier I said the King of Pents is also one of my cards—in that case, my significator. That’s because that card represents the final decan of Leo, which is where my sun falls in my natal chart.) E. Lubanko’s drawing for this card has the familiar lion, but in this case as a masked person, a human body. The figure normally with the

lion is removing the mask. “Have the strength to show who you are behind the protective—Leonine—mask.” Well. That’s direct, eh? Something to work toward . . . This isn’t an easy reading for me, in many ways I’m not fully sure I’m understanding it—but I bet people who know me well would see exactly what it’s trying to say. So if you do this spread, think about doing it with a buddy! Get an outside POV. It can help really a lot.

​See you next week!

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