I got the request to talk a little more about my experience giving up the tarot for a few years, and I don’t mind taking requests (I’m accommodating that way). But I also have a major fear of talking about myself too much. I really am terrified of folx thinking I’m arrogant, which they do anyway because of how I talk—but whatever. Anyway, given that this is a blog about taking lessons from tarot, I thought . . . Why not ask the cards how to talk about that time of my life? So I did. Here’s what I drew: The Star (2), Nine of Cups/Happiness (1), Justice (3)
From Vanessa Decort’s glorious Sun and Moon Tarot. Let’s start by taking one card at a time, dearies: Nine of Cups. There can be too much of a good thing and nine represents that. I think it was Mae West who said “too much of a good thing can be wonderful.” (If she didn’t, it was Nigella Lawson—but I’m fairly sure Nigella, one of my great loves, was quoting Mae West . . . another of my great loves. Gay men, y’all. We have a type.) Queen Mae was right, but sometimes--sometimes--it can burn you out, and I think that’s what happened with me. But I also think that I wasn’t spiritually connected to the work anymore, and what’s interesting about that is what pulled me back into tarot was eschewing all the spirituality that dogged me to that point. When I began reading in the late nineties, tarot has kind of synonymous with Wicca—at least from what I was experiencing in the nascent interweb communities. And honestly, I tried to get into Wicca. I read my Scott Cunningham (I know he’s considered problematic now, but he was at the time the gentlest and least arrogant voice I encountered in that space, and so he’s who I clung to. He--we--contain multitudes. I got to meet his sister recently [she’d actually won a copy of my book!] and listening to her talk just a little about him reminded me that, though problematic, he was a generous human. Based on what I know about him, I do believe that had Scott lived he would have seen the need for evolution. I know that sounds like justification. It isn’t. I have no interest in defending mostly anyone these days. But based on his work, I think he would have gotten it had he lived.) But in Wicca, I just found a new dogma. It was more to memorize, more motions to go through, and more icky ritual. I don’t do ritual. I find it embarrassing. It’s performative to me and I know that there is great power in ritual, but it’s well to know that my Catholic upbringing and the joyless drag show of the Catholic mass informed that view and I just can’t shake it—even though I was a theatre girl for so long. Go figs. The Golden Dawnery was always a turnoff for me, even before I could articulate why—and though I tried to engage it, again I just saw more dogma. And this dogma was closely aligned to the dogma of my childhood, so it didn’t even have the sexiness of Wicca (which, also, not that sexy—sorry). Now I know that Wicca was directly inspired by Hermeticism, so I understand why I disliked the two so much. I traded one kind of limiting dogma for another. And my attempts to make that work . . . fizzled. I found the esotericism interesting at an intellectual level. Clearly I often still do. I enjoyed the time I spent working on The Tarot School’s correspondence courses, and I always enjoyed my conversations with Wald and Ruth Ann—who I admire a lot. But nothing in those esotericisms and correspondences ignited me. In fact, they took me further from tarot. The tarot I was trying to find. They took me farther from life. And tarot is life, or it’s about life anyway. But I didn’t know that, then. I thought I was doing something wrong. I thought I was dumb. This is the part of the story where I tell you how my schooling taught me that I’m stupid. By the time I’d reached, oh, sixth grade, I accepted that I wasn’t very bright. Everyone kept telling me I wasn’t trying and I was trying—or I was trying the way I knew how. But I was objectively lazy: I avoided my homework; the innards of my Catholic school desk looked not unlike my own innards—gory; I struggled with understanding things that everyone else got instantly; and, even when I did succeed, my teachers told me I hadn’t—they didn’t believe that I’d really done the assignment, so they told me to go back to my desk and . . . what? Pretend to work? So I did. And what I did get good at was hiding and concealing. But I knew I was an idiot. By the time I got to high school, I had nothing left in the tank and the only thing that kept me going was theatre (see last week’s post, please—we now know how that love affair turns out). I nearly wound up flunking out of school. I spent every summer in summer school. And I had no selfhood left so I made no real effort to get into college. I flamed out in community college and in the embers of that debacle I found corporate training and tarot. Through those two things, I learned I wasn’t (amn’t) dumb. But that’s a story for another day. The salient point here is that, though I’d learned I wasn’t dumb by the time I stepped away from tarot, I had an innate tendency to doubt everything I did. Including tarot. And as the esoteric stuff failed me, I began to assume I was the problem. I always assume I’m the problem. But that’s not the only thing that stopped me. I often say I’d burned myself out with tarot, and that’s partly true. When I gave it up, I had been weirdly pushing too hard to consume too much information and produce too much product. But that’s not unusual for me. I do that with just about everything. (I was going to use that as a way of blaming myself for “giving up” on theatre, but I had the ability to pause and say, “No, you’re letting go of that because you can no longer accept the abuses of power and refusal to change or atone.” Growth!) I think what really happened is that the return on investment dried up. I wasn’t getting out of it anywhere near what I was putting into it. And that’s not anyone’s “fault,” I think I’d reached a tipping point. As many of us do. We don’t typically think of the Nine of Cups behaving this way, but it’s not out of the realm of validity to say that each time you add a number to one of the minors, you’re “spending” the energy of the ace. We can think of the aces in a suit as the whole pizza. Each new number subdivides that whole, weakening it. This is counter to how many of us view the ascending numbers—we usually tend to think of each higher number as more of its suit. Totally real, totally useful, totally valid. But there are times when it makes sense contextually to consider the depletion of the potential represented by the ace—and I think that’s a pretty good way to look at nines and tens. The suit has been “spent” by that point. I don’t know whether it was burnout or what, but by the time I put my cards down for what I thought would be forever, I’d spent whatever I had and there was nothing left in my tank. Because we’re talking about cups, this indicates that I’d spent myself emotionally as well as spiritually, because those are two aspects of the suit of cups. It’s also relevant to point out, thanks to cups, that this also coincided with the beginning of a long term relationship—and because of that, there was some degree of shame involved, too. Some part of me that didn’t want potential mates thinking I was weird or creepy, because there was already so much against me: I wasn’t rich, thin, hot, or fit. So to add being a weirdo tarot reader into the mix was a bridge too far, maybe. I know that was part of it and while I don’t necessarily think that’s depicted in the card or this reading, I’ll admit it was a factor. (It turned out not to be something worth worrying about, but it’s there nonetheless.) This card receives the title Happiness in the Thoth tradition, and while I think it’s perfectly fine to ignore the word any time it’s irrelevant—I’ve also found that, if I dig, it can usually afford some additional nuance (sometimes it’s the main interpretation of the card!). Here, I think it reminds me that I was really perfectly fine with the choice. I didn’t grieve it the way I do with theatre because I never really thought of it as that big a part of my life. I enjoyed it until I didn’t, and that was fine. It was a hobby. While I sometimes fantasized about writing books about it or teaching it, I really had no desire to make it a profession or a vocation. I had other things I was doing; other purposes for being on this planet. Tarot was just something I did when I was in the mood. And I wasn’t in the mood anymore. It happens. I didn’t feel like I was losing something, and it’s not like I threw away all my cards and books. I put them away. I assumed mostly because I’d spent so much on them. But I wasn’t worried at all—a massive rarity for a freak like me. Now, on to the next card. The Star: I don’t believe in destiny. There’s something majorly privileged about the idea and it makes me uncomfortable. Things being “meant to be” make no sense. It’s meant to be that the world is destroying itself? It’s meant to be that powerful, greedy, wealthy white cis gendered het men get to run the show and have done for centuries at the expense of so much human life and culture? It’s meant to be that they’ve taught everyone else to operate from this scorched earth, it’s-mine-or-else mentality that half the people on this planet (OK, maybe less) are willing to throw their own best interests out the window just to make other people’s lives worse? No. I cannot believe that any of this is divinely inspired and I can’t believe that if there is divinity they prefer the lives of certain people over others, unless we’re talking about divinities who loathe wealth and greed. I can’t accept it. And I know that destiny is a central concept in many world faiths, and while I’m a big believer in not negating people’s experience or faith (providing it isn’t harming others), I will not accept that some people have everything and some have nothing just because it’s “meant to be.” I don’t accept that it’s part of some karmic wheel, either (and, from what I can see, nor does the actual concept of Karma, which differs dramatically from the lazy way that term is used in pop culture and new age spirituality). That said, I do think we can be on a path and not know it. And I think The Star highlights that part of my journey, too. The idea that I’m “supposed” to be working with divination makes my skin crawl. It puts me in a position of being “special” in a way that I hate. Again, it’s the implication that I somehow have some divinely ordained responsibility that other people don’t; that I’m unique or somehow important. Ew. No. I’m not special. I’m not important In any way. (I mean in any way that makes me different from anyone else.) And in fact much of the journey of my adulthood has been letting go of the idea that I should be. I guess, if I were to give it language, I might say that The Star indicates that my being is particularly well suited to doing this kind of work, and that I was moving in this direction even though I didn’t know it. I mean I’m objectively not well-suited to the world I was trying to be part of. Most days I’m not really sure I belong in the tarot world, either, to be honest. I spend most of my time feeling not cool enough, not well-connected enough, not worthy enough. I’m not as star struck by the divinatory and new age glitterati as I used to be, I’m not really start struck by anything anymore—because that has burned me more than once. And while part of me wants people to be like, “OMG, Tom Benjamin is so cool!” I also am terrified of anyone thinking that because I know at some point I’m going to screw up and let them down. It’s a strangely double edged sword and you’d be surprised how much of my time that inner battle wages in me. I’m constantly curious what it feels like to be a person who, ya know . . . likes themselves. But the way I know that I’m well suited to this work, and why I think The Star shows up here, is because when I am doing this work? When I’m doing it well? All of that self flagellation goes away. It’s just me, the cards, the client, and the question—and we’re engaged in this beautiful dance. Even when I’m working with a client through a difficult conversation, even when I have to tell someone that what they want isn’t on the immediate horizon (or at least not a horizon that I can see), I don’t experience the self loathing. I actually experience a sort of non-state, a place where I’m simply there doing the work. Now I have to be clear: this isn’t every time, not by a long shot. But it happens enough that I’m able to look back and recognize it. The only other times I feel that way is when I’m writing or cooking. Those seem to be the three parts of my life where I’m the gentlest version of myself to myself. And I think that’s part of what’s represented by The Star. But that’s not addressing about the fact that this reading is about why I gave up tarot, not why I picked it up again. I picked it up again, based on the above, because there was something in my body chemistry that needed it. But it didn’t need it then. And what it did need, what my being needed, is another aspect of The Star I don’t talk about much: rest. The Star’s association with things like “hope” always left me cold. I’m not and never have been a hopeful person. There is a peace to the card, though, especially when we consider the heat of what comes before it. If we think about The Devil and The Tower as more erotic than destructive (and I typically do think that), The Star is “after care” (I term that also makes me cringe, but I’m a weirdo). It’s rest. It’s respite. It’s stillness and quite and nighttime. Not the intensity of The Moon’s night, which is also a card that has erotic or energetic connotations. Rather, it’s the rest that comes from REM sleep. From simply being in the throes, for lack of a better word, of slumber. We might call this the hibernation card, and if I were designing an animal tarot deck (I’m not), I’d probably but a sleeping bear on this one. Long story short, I put it down because I needed to. I needed to rest. I’d really starting getting bitchy about the questions I was getting to read about (this was at the free tarot networks, which was my only real way of reading for others at the time). I’ve told this story before, so I won’t get too much into it here, but I’d grown to really get pissed at questions I deemed “stupid.” These days I don’t think any questions is stupid, so you can see how far I’ve come—but I really started getting angry at people who wanted to know what I perceived as dumb shit, when we had the power to read about any of the world’s great mysteries! (See, basically, everything I’ve written since is an exploration of why that was bullshit.) Even though I didn’t like the esotericists, I’d adopted their snobbery. I needed to let all that go and that required rest. And I think The Star is an apt card because we can both be resting and progressing at the same time. If you’ve read Tarot on Earth, you know how often I write breaks into the activities. That’s because we need to let what we learn grow and ferment and infiltrate our bodies before we take on more. “Cramming” isn’t good, and leads to the kind of burnout where you, say, start resenting the earnest and honest questions of people you volunteered to read for. We have to take breaks and I, to sort of borrow from Alanis Morissette, equated stopping with death. A break meant never picking something up again. And so I would push myself until I reached the point where I’d overworked myself to the point of hating the thing I used to love. I did it with my day job, I did it with acting, and I did it with tarot. Next: Justice, a card I never really enjoy seeing in readings thanks to its imaginary nature. As I’ve said before, this is one of the changes Crowley made to the Thoth deck that I like—the retitling to Adjustment. I don’t read it the way he intended it to be read I don’t think but I also don’t care. One of my great loves is using the work and words of things that hurt me or others to negate the harm they did. So I use Crowley’s deck in all kinds of ways he would have hated. Anyway, Adjustment: I like the concept better and it can still retain the concept of justice which, if we’re being honest, should be a thing that adjusts to the situations presented with it. I have a friend who has spent years working with mothers on various aspects of pre- and post-natal care and has told me about many, many women she’s spoken to over the years who wound up in prison pregnant or with young children thanks to a broken taillight and some unpaid parking tickets. That’s not fucking justice. Justice would recognize that a single mother about to bring a child into the world—and, let’s be generous: nobody, really--should wind up in prison for parking tickets and broken taillights. That’s just another modern way in which we criminalize poverty in this so-called country. Anyway, the point is, older depictions of “Justice” are static and the Crowley-Harris revision isn’t, and that’s why I like it. Happily, this stunner of a deck (again, we’re using the Sun and Moon Tarot) presents us with a butterfly, which subtly hints to the concept of “adjustment” while keeping the older title. And what’s so right about this card in this context is that I took the break because my caterpillar days were over and my butterfly days were beginning. Jesus that’s a pretentious thing to say, isn’t it?? Well, pretench or not, it’s something worth talking about—particularly if you’re experiencing fear that you may never pick up a thing you once loved that you’ve put down. Earlier I said breaks are necessary. The butterfly metaphor makes sense. If a caterpillar insists on remaining a caterpillar, it will suffer—because it can’t. Now, I don’t know whether caterpillars know what they’re going to do when they’re born. I don’t think science knows, either. While the general assumption seems to be, as of the time I’m writing this, that insects lack the “hardware” to “know” this will happen, I can’t imagine that there isn’t some awareness. See, a caterpillar isn’t even really “born” a caterpillar; their whole pre-butterfly lives are a series of transformations, moltings, the like, that help them grow. When the time is right, they wrap themselves in a cocoon and, as it’s been explained to me, “digest themselves.” What happens inside that cocoon ain’t pretty. The caterpillar turns itself into goo that eventually divides and multiplies in such a way that the butterfly forms. What I didn’t know prior to writing this is that caterpillars (which more accurately are larvae) are born with “imaginal disks”—groups of cells that, as I interpret it, hold the place for what the insect will become. They are the butterfly, but not yet. These cells survive this self-digestive process, eventually forming wings, eyes, reproductive organs, etc. So within the caterpillar at birth is are these imaginal disks of what it will become once it eats itself alive and shits itself out, which is admittedly a coarse way of saying something . . . but it’s a coarse way of saying something that, in my experience, humans do at a metaphorical level at least once and often multiple times during our lives. And I think that’s part of what was happening for me, here. Again, this runs the risk of suggesting that I’m some kind of special somewhat who was “born” to do this. I don’t think that’s true at all. I guess what I’d say is that . . . we’re all born with imaginal disks of what we might be (rather than the caterpillar’s, which are what they must be). Our metaphorical imaginal disks maybe nudge us toward certain kinds of things, but not necessarily any one specific thing. A caterpillar must become a butterfly (or moth or whatever, they don’t all turn into Monarchs); we, though, maybe have like different lanes or paths that take us to our version of that. And I think that’s why this particular card shows up here. And that actually does tie into a common way I read Justice: as the “right” or “correct” thing. I put those words in quotes because I think there’s something imprecise about them—but they’re OK for our purposes here, as long as you don’t think I think I’m somehow insinuating that I’m “better” than you. (See, I did it with the quote marks again. I love punctuation!) I stopped reading because it was right to. I think I’d reached the end of the line, or anyway the end of that particular part of my journey. I needed to let it go. It was time. I didn’t know that I’d pick it up again, nor that when I picked it up again it would become such an intense part of my life. But I didn’t worry about it because I (and this is so weird to say right now) . . . didn’t care. I didn’t. I didn’t miss it. At all. Didn’t think about it once I put the cards down—and only really remembered I even had ever done them was when I’d open my closet and see my most used decks hanging from their little bags on a hook near my clothes. I was going to say . . . “I’m lucky they survived.” I had a mold issue in that apartment. And then I didn’t say that. Well I did, obviously, I typed it above—but I stopped myself from leaning it for two reasons: One, they were all commercially made cards which are loaded with chemicals. But also . . . maybe . . . ? They survived because they were supposed to? I lost a bunch of books in that place. Ones I actually did want to keep, so—it’s interesting that they got damaged and none of my cards did. So, really, that’s kind of the story—at least contextualized by these three cards. But I suppose someone may wonder, Well: What brought you back? And it’s the same thing that, I think, brings everyone back to tarot: ASMR videos. OK, I know that’s not what brings everyone back. But I happened to stumble on ASMR videos way back toward the end of this respite and one of the creators I stumbled on was an artist who was making ASMR videos about a collage tarot deck she was making. She wasn’t a tarot reader and didn’t, as I recall, “believe” in it. I think she sort of worked on the images based on a little white book. I can’t quite recall, but it’s what I remember. I know she printed some copies and sold it, too, but I no longer remember the name and it went out of print ages ago. And, like many YouTubers, she seems to have disappeared into the ether. But it was weirdly those videos that got me thinking about it again. Not right away. That took time. But the inkling was there. This was the early days of YouTube, incidentally, or at least my experience with it. It must have been around 2010? I think I was in my early thirties at that point. Actually, you know what? I now know exactly what year it was. 2009. Because there was one thing—a deck—that brought me fully back into the fold. The Shadowscapes Tarot by Stephanie Law. That was published in 2009. I happened, on a whim, to browse the aisles of a Barnes and Noble and my eyes fell on that deck and I couldn’t look away. I snatched it off the shelf, paid for it, brought it home, and fell in love. It is stunning. I probably should have used that deck for this blog, but as always there’s no accidents when we do these things. And I think the Sun and Moon deck managed to provide the right cards, particularly that butterfly (which, honestly, is not one of my favorite cards in that pack—though I like them all, there are a few [as there always are] that I would have . . . done something different with). What happened next could fill another blog, but I don’t really need to write it because my YouTube Channel and my first two books (Tarot on Earth and Your Tarot Toolkit—the indie one with my name on it, not the one that came out later from Llewellyn) are sort of about that journey. Not in the sense that I share with you what I was doing or going through was I was writing them, but in the sense that they both reflect what I did to land where I am now. And my forthcoming book kind of fills in the blanks since Your Tarot Toolkit was released a few years ago. So there you have it. That’s the story of how and why I put down tarot for a few years (I don’t recall how many because I can’t figure out how to see when I finally gave up. If I picked it up again in 2009, then I’m assuming I put them down around 2007? Which sounds . . . not wrong. So maybe two years, maybe three? It may actually be shorter time than I thought it was, but of course it also wasn’t a part of my daily life back then as it is now, so—like everyone—my practice waxed and waned. But it doesn’t matter how long it lasted. It lasted as long as it needed to and that’s the hard part for many of us to deal with. I was lucky because I thought I was done and didn’t care. And it wasn’t even a big drama, like the one I shared with you last week. I just said, “This is stupid” and put the cards down. You know that thing where they say, “One day you’ll do this thing for the last time and you won’t know it’s the last time”? It wasn’t like that. The last time I picked up the cards, I realized one day, was the last time . . . And then it wasn’t. Creating spread off this lesson (which, alas, is really more of a personal narrative than a straight up lesson) isn’t easy. But, I can’t leave you hanging, can I? So here’s what I’ve come up with. A read of one’s own This spread is meant to help you prepare for fallow times, like the ones I describe. The difficulty with these is we generally don’t know they’re coming. Unlike burnout, there isn’t a moment where we go I can’t do this anymore! It’s usually more a thing where we put something down and then one day realize we may never do it again. Also, in this case, I’m not going to offer a sample reading. I think I’ve gotten personal enough. Wink. As always, you can use as many cards as you’d like for each position. I recommend three, but do what works for you. Position One: This card or these cards represent how you can calm any anxieties around the worry that we’re leaving something we love behind. Position Two: This card or these cards represent how we might make the most of these fallow times. Position Three: This card or these cards represent what we can do during fallow times to ensure we don’t feel stalled. This spread is probably best for times when you’ve realized you’re in a fallow period—but it doesn’t have to be. You can reword things a bit to bring you to thinking about what you might do if and when you reach that place. Hope you enjoyed this little deep dive into my psyche! See you next week!
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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
November 2024
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