lesson 38: reader (Client), see thyself

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.