lesson 36: forward

(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?

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