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
February 2025
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