​A three-card draw:
Seven of Cups (2), Temperance (1), The Hanged Man (3)
Deck: Smoke, Ash, & Embers by Three Trees
created by Stephanie Burrows, Illustrated by Adam Oehlers

Temperance makes its second appearance in one of our lessons, and that isn’t surprising; it’s a thing I’m particularly bad at. I’ve never been a moderate or temperate person and I have the emotional and occasionally physical scars to prove it. Peep my social media and you know I don’t excel at moderation. I also have that tendency when I eat. I eat fast and if I’m not careful I can eat a lot, thanks to the idea that there may not be enough if I don’t get it now. I’ve always operated under the strong feeling that the clock is and always has been rapidly ticking down for me. The threat of extinction, so to speak, has always given me a sense of urgency that isn’t always (in fact, rarely is) healthy. If I don’t make the point now, I may never make it (this is why I used to be awful about interrupting people); if I don’t solve the problem now, my opportunity will have passed; if I’m not successful to my standards of success—well, in that regard, I often feel as though I’ve run out the clock on that one. Success is a young people’s game, and while I’m not old, I definitely ain’t young anymore. 

Temperance is not the card you hear people name when you ask what their favorite card might be. (Note from future me: Having said that, I was listening to the Fortune’s Wheelhouse podcast yesterday, and both MM Meleen and T. Susan Chang talked about how much they love this card—so, there ya go. I’m wrong as often as I’m right.) I think a lot of readers, myself included, have found the card difficult to read because what, after all, is it really saying? I mean, that’s a loaded question. What it’s really saying is literally temperance. The word itself literally means self-restraint. It is frequently considered a more-or-less perfect synonym of moderation. That’s a word we understand. If you’re like me, you’re not particularly capable of it, but you know what it means. To give you an example of my fundamentally immoderate nature, I have in the last few weeks purchased several new decks—not because I didn’t have them, but I wondered if I might prefer them better in a different size or whether another printing of it might be more attractive. Like, I really don’t hold myself back unless I’m absolutely forced to. But moderation is an idea that I grasp. It is a goal. 

Temperance has a whole other weight, though; it’s not quite as simple as moderation, maybe partly because it comes to us in tarot. Everything gets seemingly elevated by becoming a tarot card—especially when it joins the major arcana. That’s a pretty tough club to get into. Most who have tried don’t make it. The trumps have been relatively solid for the last couple hundred years. It also doesn’t help that the Golden Dawn went and Golden-Dawnified everything, so that a concept as simple as “moderation” becomes something lofty, like Temperance. I’m actually in the middle of exploring more of the GD’s doctrine right now because of my challenge to myself to deep dive into the Crowley/Harris Thoth deck. (One thing I’ll grant them, those esotericists, is that nothing was left to creative impulse. Everything in those cards—the Waite-Smith, too—is there for a reason, and in the case of the Thoth deck, the color choices are deliberate, too. The printing technology of the early 1900’s limited what Waite and Smith could do with color, and we’ve all seen their deck in pretty disgusting print runs.) The fact that the card retains the title Temperance after all these years says something. Both Waite and Crowley changed things they didn’t like. 

For the esotericists, Temperance had nothing to do with moderation; it didn’t connect to consumption. It was a representation of an alchemical process, the unifying of seemingly opposite forces. Crowley turned this card into “Art,” and Harris depicts the results of this blending—a non-binary entity (they would use the cringe term androgyne, but the fact that they acknowledged the existence of the non-binary, elevating the concept, is a moderately progressive point I guess they can have—or not). But I’m not an esotericist. Even if I found the Golden Dawn’s teachings inspiring and worth my pursuing, it is the esotericism itself that bugs me. Access to divine shouldn’t be limited to the chosen few—particularly those privileged enough to afford dues into secret societies and with the leisure time to study the mysteries and the disposable income to spend on masks and cloaks. If you have divine knowledge that can save people or this planet, it is a crime to keep it secret. (On the other hand, I loathe proselytizing, too, so it’s a fine line. I don’t want to deal with latter-day missionaries. And we know they’re out there, at the moment pulling the strings on the US “judiciary.”) 

What is “Temperance” today? What line can be drawn between the alchemical unification of divine opposites forming a perfected whole and being a (for-the-love-of-god) fortune teller? Perhaps the other cards can help. (I’m going to pick on Fortune’s Wheelhouse for just a second, not because I don’t love that podcast—I adore it. But in this episode, Mel and Susie were at pains to say that “Temperance isn’t moderation.” I don’t have a problem with people having their own conclusions about the cards, but I also want to add that of course temperance is moderation, that’s literally what it means. And what is moderation? Yes, it’s not overeating, say, which is how we think of it. But it’s also facilitating. Someone who moderates is moderating, or practicing moderation. My point is, discover what the cards are for yourself. When I get smugly dismissive of esotericism, it’s because it’s often absolutism. Again, I’m a fortune teller--a thing loathed by [much of] esotericism. I read about life. I just read this morning that Crowley was adamant his cards never be made available to used by fortune tellers. Typically him. But, also? For someone like me? Even more incentive to do exactly that to his precious work. I guess what I mean to say is, don’t let anyone tell you what to do. Anyway, to conclude this digression on a positive note, I totally agree with their connection of this card to tempering--the metal-working and culinary process of hardening/strengthening something [both steel and chocolate need to be tempered] or moderating the temperature of something so that it can be mixed [hot liquid into eggs for a custard and egg whites into a thick batter are both things tempered.] This is part of the card, too!)

The Hanged Man and the Seven of Cups. Let’s spend some time with our boy, The Hanged Man. He’s another dude who gets a major tarot glow-up: from the traitor, the criminal, to this transcendent image we’re familiar with today. I frequently read the card simply as consequences. Whatever is happening is happening as a consequence of something else, in the same way that the traitor hangs from the tree as a consequence of being accused and convicted of a crime. He doesn’t want to be there. Note that I said “accused and convicted.” That doesn’t mean he’s guilty. Of course not. In fact, there’s some small evidence the hanging of a criminals by their feet was, in fact, an antisemitic sentence reserved only for Jewish people (particularly in Germany)—but I’ve only seen that on Wikipedia, so take that as you will. We know that societal minorities don’t and never have gotten a fair shake in the courts of the oppressive governors of wherever people happened to be “in charge.” We see it today in the United States. The Hanged Man might easily represent the injustice of our world, where the system favors the wealthy, male, and white over literally everyone else. What we think of as “justice” is a myth taught by the ruling class. Justice is only what the law says is right or wrong. That’s why I can suddenly have my THC gummies from my stylish, Starbucksian “dispensary” while people still sit in jail for selling the same substance without the imprimatur of the state. It’s why fucking baby formula is kept under lock and key but guns are as easy as pie to get ahold of. Justice isn’t just, so neither is the Hanged Man’s punishment—not necessarily. Sometimes guilty people do get caught. 

This is, to my way of thinking, a much more relevant way of looking at the card. How often are you going through initiations that require ego death and the prolonged discomfort described by acolytes of many traditions? My guess is, not many. (Though many of us could benefit from some casual ego death.) This is one reason why, while I find the esoteric stuff interesting, I don’t find it particularly useful. But, of course, I try not to be a fundamentalist, and I know the esoteric concepts behind the cards, or at least I know the ones that didn’t make me roll my eyes hard enough that they got knocked from my brain. The question for all readers is, which version do we use and when? And in fact, that’s exactly what I think this reading is about!

Let’s turn to the Seven of Cups. This card unlocks the reading. The Seven of Cups is a moment of emotional introspection. A self-check, in which we look at where we are and think about how we feel. This once again underscores the connection between water and air. We think about how we feel. Thinking and feeling are so closely linked, most of the time many of us can’t tell the difference! Because we think, we feel; because we feel, we think. It is a crazy, crazy cycle that has driven a lot of us (not enough, sadly) to therapy. Sometimes even (in my case) to medication. The Seven of Cups actually is doing exactly what the esoteric Hanged Man is doing: spending a serious amount of time reflecting on where we are and how we got there—at least in a manner of thinking. If the Hanged Man is undergoing an initiation, which is going to require the death of the ego, then he’s going to have to do a lot of soul searching. All the famous divinities who existed in human form do this. Buddha did it, so did Jesus. Shamans and medicine people and witches and hoodoos have done it, and continue to. Zora Neale Hurston, in one of the best first-person tales of magical arts in the US, “Hoodoo in America,” shares several initiatory experiences with various practitioners of Hoodoo and Voodoo in the South. And her experiences are consistent with the kind of extreme self-denial required of seers and holy people around the globe for, it seems, the entirety of the planet being peopled. 

The Hanged Man is undergoing a self-reflection so deep that it will leave him fundamentally different at the end of it. If he’s doing it correctly, he will transcend his own ego and die to the life he used to know. This is the esoteric reason why Death follows this card. (The exoteric reason is because criminals who get hanged die—another consequence. This is actually one reason I don’t mind Waite’s change of Justice and Strength. It makes a tidy little trio of sentencing, sentence, and sentence served.) This is a deep, inner process. Reports from those who have undergone this kind of bone-deep, soul deep self discovery or self release say that initiates begin to think they’re going mad. Nobody would endure this unless they have to. This isn’t winning Survivor. This is dying to the self as we know it and emerging as something totally connected to the collective. Transcendent though the Hanged Man may look, it’s an ugly experience. In a class, one of the participants once brought up that the process of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly is disgusting and painful. It is ugly and maybe even cruel. We like the outcome, we’d all like to think of ourselves as having become a butterfly in our own way, but to truly become a butterfly is to literally dissolve into a glutenous goo that no longer resembles a living thing; it means being completely re-formed (re-shaped, not reformed as in “fixed”) from the inside out and feeling every second of it; it means going through all that and still wanting to come out on the other side, rather than simply be put out of all this misery. That’s what the esotericists were really saying about this card. So, it sure makes it sound cringe when Becky or Chad (or their NB counterpart with a name-to-be-determined) gets on the socials that this card is about manifesting. 

Ahem. I got a little smug, there. Whoops. Clearly I haven’t experienced an ego death. Anyway. The Seven of Cups takes this into the real world, into daily life. It’s not the same thing, but it’s akin to it. It’s the more possible, more reasonable, more common experience of looking within the self and reacting to what we see there. But, in fact, it doesn’t actually matter what either card is doing, not in this reading. In this case, it matters more the realm. Which is a word I’m not used to using—can’t believe I did that, there. Point is, the major card (at least in this case) speaks of the diviner’s work in the spiritual, internal, magical realm—for lack of a better term, we’ll call it the divine plane. (I was tempted to use “astral plane,” but I didn’t want to get the haters cranky at me for misusing it.) It is the major arcana in the realm most of us learn it, putting the divine in divination. On the other side of the coin is the minor card doing the same thing, but in the material plane. Temperance takes the two and combines them. 

Which is the act of divination, when you think about it. Taking the divine—the message—and making it hearable to the recipient. This is, incidentally, another way we are like pages: we deliver messages. It’s also another reason why we have to make sure to give Mercury some love, because that was his job, too, and he “governs” that part of life.

So, something I said earlier is that it’s hard to know which “version” of a card we’re supposed to be using in a reading. Do we go with the esoteric/spiritual? Do we go with the banal? Obviously, context dictates that to a big degree, but this reading is saying something else: always do both. Which, I have to admit, is amusing—because if you know my work, you know that I’m very down to earth in my style. I rarely if ever consider the spiritual consequences of a situation unless I’ve been asked to. While I do recognize that some physical problems (not only health issues) can have spiritual causes, I’ve never considered myself really capable of—talking about spiritual remediation for any problem. 

And yet.

I have said before and will say again, the separation of divination from the spiritual is a relatively recent and mostly American-European  (colonial) thing. And even within those two culture’s spheres of influence, there are many, many people who do practical spiritual remediation as part of their practice because it’s always been there. The sort of pop divination I’ve been a proponent of is really new and comes in part from the fact that I’m not a priest or a doctor; I lack the ordinance (so to speak) to explore spiritual or medical causes for problems. The only thing I feel “qualified” to do is read from the point of view of daily life. I feel as though I don’t have any “right” to offer anything else, because I’m not called to serve any spirits or even ancestors; I haven’t been asked by any entity to do what I do. I just . . . kinda do it and always have done. I’m not sort of gifted by the divine to do what I do in the way so many other folks are—I guess the folks I would say are actually psychics or mediums? Anyway, it feels that way. Maybe I totally have been called and I just don’t know it. Maybe I’m obeying orders I can’t hear. Who knows? And to be clear: I’m not saying that’s good, it’s just my reality. Frankly, having the spiritual abilities would likely make me feel less like an imposter when that old feeling kicks in.

The point, though, is that this reading seems to suggest that every reading should be read through both lenses. For example, I tend to let the cards guide me to whether we’re thinking about something that’s more banal or more “elevated.” This reading is saying, “give both a spin.” Which, to be fair, is good advice—and not what I was expecting when I laid these cards out. In fact, I thought these cards were really saying I didn’t shuffle well enough, because all three of these showed up in the last reading I did with this deck. But I did shuffle, and they sure have an interesting journey to take. 

I did this not long ago. When I was at the Readers Studio in New York, I was lucky enough to be given the chance to offer a study group at the event—and as part of that, I got to be a reader for the “psychic fair” afterwards (I’m really uncomfortable with that word, can you tell?). One client had such an interesting situation, I decided that we should do the same reading two ways: what was going on physically, and what was going on spiritually. It was fascinating, and there seemed to be a combination of both at play. The difficulty was, the solutions weren’t going to be easy to come by. In essence, it was going to be an expensive problem—at least here in the material plane. But the idea of reading the same cards from two points of view hadn’t occurred to me before. Actually, now that I think of it I did a few things that night I’d never done before (as a reader, don’t be gross)—including asking a client to get up and switch places with me so that he could see the cards as I was seeing them. I think I did that twice, actually. No idea why I chose to then. I was feeling the “spirit,” I guess? That’s what I mean when I say that as readers we should be open. When things like that occur to us, we should see where they take us! Why not?

Same with this new approach. Why not make every reading into two readings? Read the cards through the material lens and then again through the spiritual, or vice versa. What can we learn about the question, about the outcome, about the client if we take both tracks? There’s no reason not to. And you could be reading this and be thinking, “uh, no shit; I do this every time I read!” But I don’t! I am spiritual-avoidant a lot of the time. It freaks me out, in some ways. I don’t like to admit that I have a need for spirituality, in part because I was so hurt by it in my youth. Actually, not my youth; the spirituality of my early childhood was happy because I didn’t understand that God hated me. That came when I was going through puberty. That’s where the real trauma started. But because I’d grown to love it so much, the betrayal was huge. (Shades of me sitting in the back of a friend’s car in total turmoil because I was having an existential crises about the fact that God didn’t exist. At seventeen. Dear Lord, what a mess). So maybe you can see why I resist it so much. I also hate the fact that I’m getting older and there’s a cliche that as people age, they get more spiritual. I never want to be a cliche (even though, yes, I’m a cliche in many ways).

But — and here’s the thing, my readings aren’t about me. They’re about my clients. I mean, if I read for myself they’re about me, but I don’t do it much. So this reading reminds me that just because I don’t need the spiritual doesn’t mean my clients don’t. Offering both points of view can provide them something that I haven’t been. Now, I’m not going to get down on myself. I’ve been a good reader and most of my clients have been happy with my work. I wouldn’t say I’m doing anything “wrong,” but I would say that this reminds me there’s an opportunity to at least consider the metaphysical as much as the physical in a reading about, well, anything. And that’s helpful for me to think about. Again, we cannot get stagnant as readers; we have to challenge ourselves. This reading definitely challenges me, because even talking about spiritual stuff makes me uncomfortable because the language always sounds . . . silly. And clearly I need to work on that, because I think this reading offers a point worth taking. 

For many of you, you may find yourself in the opposite boat: you’ve got the spiritual and may struggle with the material. If so, I just happen to have written two (with a third in the works) books on this topic. I’d be happy to guide you through it! It’s actually easier than you think. And for anyone who, like me, has swung in the entire different direction, there’s something to be said for practicing finding words that don’t get caught in our throat when talking about the spiritual. 

It’s worth coming back to the fact that the Seven of Cups and the Hanged Man actually do have meanings of their own, and while I said earlier it doesn’t really matter what those are, that’s not to say there’s nothing gained from exploring that a little more deeply. In fact, I gave you the practical answer: read practically and spiritually. What’s the spiritual aspect? The Seven of Cups and the Hanged Man for sure fit the spiritual landscape. The Seven of Cups typically depicts silhouetted figure staring up at a dazzling array of cups. This is one of the times where the Waite-Smith imagery lines up nicely with my own numerological thinking. That doesn’t happen much. But we can see a moment of self-reflection in the seven if we choose to. The esotericists called this card The Lord of Illusionary Success or the Lord of Debauch. The illusional success is easy enough to make sense of, we know enough people who have this particular delusion IRL (as the kids say). Debauch? What is that? There’s two meanings: indulgence, especially over indulgence. Indulgence edging gluttony. The other meaning is corruption. To corrupt the “pure” (a term I hate). Well then. 

Because I consider the suits and the element and well as the number (the esotericists didn’t; they used the astrology and Kabbalistic associations), if we’re taking the esoteric title, then that title is operating in the realm of cups/water, which is emotional and sensational. Emotional debauchery! Take that! Actually, one of the things I admire about Pamela Colman Smith was the way she could take a concept like this and make it into an image. And while it’s more likely she knew the Illusionary Success title, I can fully see emotional debauchery, as each cup contains a different feeling or sensation worth experiencing—even the scary one with the skull in the cup (the cards I’m working with don’t have that detail, but it’s hard to forget). Sometimes we don’t know there’s an experience we don’t want to have until we have it. And so the Seven of Cups can suggest exposing ourselves to different experiences to see how they feel. Interestingly, that’s exactly what I am trying to get at when I talk about being open as a reader: letting the reading wash over us and allowing us to experience different “hits,” different responses, different “feelings” about the cards and what they might mean in this reading. If you think about it, the Waite-Smith image of this card is much like that of doing a reading. Staring at all the possibilities, wondering which one works. This card gives you the answer: you’ll know it when you feel it. But you won’t know what might be possible unless you allow each “experience” to occur. In this case, to let every possibility make itself available to you and “feel” which ones are “right.”

A thing I’ve “learned” about dealing with the esoteric titles—and really everything they did—is that you have to consider it a highfalutin metaphor for something that’s actually not difficult to understand. It’s like, they had to dress the concepts up in fancy language to make it seem important, but they really were just simple ideas anyone could grasp. And, frankly, everyone should be able to grasp them. Enlightenment shouldn’t only be for the moneyed and bored. When we see “debauch” or “illusionary success,” what we’re looking at is a myth. It isn’t literal debauchery; it’s debauchery in terms of a specific experience in life. Now, for many of the esotericists, they weren’t about doing divination, doing readings, so they probably wouldn’t endorse what I’m saying. But when we look at the Ten of Swords and it says “Lord of Ruin,” this is a math equation we have to figure out. What is ruin when we’re in the suit of swords and it’s relating to this particular reading? Believe it or not, it’s the same math we do when we look at the image. If we are “ruined” in the realm of air/swords, what does that look like? What would ruined thoughts be? What would ruined communication be? What even is ruin? It’s disintegration, decay—the process of that happening, or the thing it’s happening to. Ruins can be in ruin. As it were. This, then, suggests the decay of communication or the decay of thoughts--or it suggests thinking or communication about decay. This card could easily represent archeology. But because the suit of swords is its home, it’s more likely mental archeology or writing about archeology. But it could be literal. Context.  If the question is about, “What should I study in grad school?” the answer is either going to be psychological or communicative archeology. A psychological archeologist is, essentially, a therapist. A communicative archeologist may write about long-lost or long-forgotten things, or may be a scholar of anything that involves “digging” into “ruins.” Art history, literary criticism, theatrical dramaturgy. 
 
It’s sort of a process of taking a literal thing (ruin), turning it into a metaphor (decay, disintegration) in the world of its suit (air/mentality/communication) and then turning it into a metaphor again. “Go be an intellectual archeologist” becomes “go be a therapist.” Of course, there are many others ways to think in terms of ruins, but hopefully you get the drift. Don’t take anything the esotericists said at face value. Take it apart and look at it through the lens of lived experience, and, hell, even through the lens of the damn dictionary. That’s what I’ve done with each of these terms while writing this lesson. It is incredible what can happen just by finding out the literal definition of a word we know well. What does it actually mean? This isn’t to say we don’t know, but we learn most language by listening and contextualizing—much like we read cards. We hear a word in a context a few times and we understand what it means contextually. But everyone uses words in slightly different ways because this is how we learn language (our native language, anyway). This is also why we may grow up pronouncing a word “wrong.” It’s not wrong, it’s just been picked up from people reading it and sounding it out and other people hearing it and saying it that way. In Connecticut, there’s a town called Versailles. Having taken French class and having heard the term in the context of France, I pronounced it “Vair-SIGH.” That’s not how locals say it. It’s “ver-SAILES.” We navigate most of communication this way. And I don’t think we should be stopping in the middle of conversations—or even readings—to look up the literal definition of words. But I do think that when we’re studying and playing with the cards, we say, “Well what does this literally mean? How does the dictionary define ‘Death’?” 

If we explore “death” as a literal concept, we get (according to dictionary.com), “the cessation of all the vital functions of an organism.” Merriam-Webster offers something so similar, my guess is that dictionary.com is just pointing to the same text. And the OED, well, the OED is behind a paywall, because capitalism reserves information for the elite. So, as we say around here, fuck the OED. Anyway, the point is, what happens if I operate in a reading from this literal definition as a metaphor, rather than a metaphor as a metaphor? Stay with me. I always say the cards, the majors in particular, are metaphors of experience. When we see the Death card in a reading, we’re not necessarily looking at the end of a life (another definition of the term), but the experience of deathiness. Obviously, “cessation of all vital functions of an organism” isn’t really a sexy metaphor. Still, let’s go further. What is a cessation? It’s “a temporary or complete stopping; discontinuance.” And ending right? Not quite. First of all, the arrival of the word temporary here is an intriguing and mostly accidental connection, but I know lexicographers aren’t haphazard about the words chosen to define another. But that’s not even the main thing. A discontinuance. Something that has been continued so far is being stopped. 

What are things that stop something continuing? 

A dam discontinues a river. A store discontinues the sales of an item. A network may discontinue (cancel) a series. Cancel. There’s a word we know and love in modern life. What do we mean when we cancel something (or someone)? Well, obviously it takes is right back to discontinuance, but of course words take on new lives—and cancel for sure has. To cancel, today, is to collectively and publicly shame an individual into submission and even retirement thanks to some real or perceived offense. And, in this way, Death becomes the cancel culture card. 

What’s interesting about all these words is that they imply choice. I frequently tend to read Death as inevitable--something that has to happen. I’m sure I still will. But playing this game of exploring the literal definition of the cards and journeying into the parts of its definition, into its evolution as a concept, and even into the pop culture zeitgeist, we get new shades. There is an aspect to this card, now, that is chosen. We choose to cancel, to discontinue. A series of potential outcomes has been ranked, risks have been assessed, tastes and trends considered, and a choice made. Something has become non-viable or not worthy of the risks. In essence, we choose to give up on it. A switch is flipped. The machine unplugged. We frequently tell ourselves we have no choice, but that is of course nonsense. We see it in the entertainment industry all the time, now, as shows are cancelled by one service and picked up by another, often going on to have the same amount of success. If we want something to continue, we can almost always make that happen. Bad relationships drag on for decades, jobs we’ve outgrown or that have used us up still keep us entrapped—hell, TV shows that have long decided jumped the shark still lumber across our screens in the vague hope its former spark will return. Sometimes it does. 

This is all to say that the experience of the card can be majorly opened up by exploring the concepts depicted, emblazoned, or associated with them in new contexts or in different “realms.” To return to the Seven of Cups (and the Hanged Man), as well as the concept of debauchery, there’s a warning in these cards, too: don’t get too obsessed with naval-gazing your divinatory work. What’s that mean? Good question. We’ll answer that and other questions next time on—No, kidding. What I mean is that sevens, being introspective, can become self-obsessed—and likely none more than the one in the suit of cups. The Hanged Man offers a similar risk, because he’s literally stuck there; he can’t move. The two cards, again, offer mirroring experiences—one on earth and one in the ether: don’t get too impressed with yourself, don’t get too obsessed with your gifts (all those cups, or whatever we’re debauching in), don’t start making the experience about how you feel, rather than what the client needs. 

The best analogy I can give for this is the actor who sucks all the air out of a rehearsal because he isn’t “feeling” it and needs to explore what his motivations are and needs the other actors to “give me more.” Good actors know that the way to give the best performance is to forget about yourself for the most part, and make the scene about the other person. Most scenes are about characters trying to get what they want. The way they do that is by manipulating the other players. When actors think about themselves, they’re focusing on the wrong thing. They should be focusing on what the character wants and, in essence, becoming the advocate who will get it from their parter. When they focus on their parter, the work comes to life. When they focus on themselves and how they “feel,” they’re getting self-indulgent. In the same way, when readers make the readings about us and how we feel doing it, we’re de-centering the client—who is the whole reason the reading is happening at all. 

Basically, it’s ego. And the seven can ignite the ego because it is so concerned with self-reflection and self-evaluation. When having a conversation with person who is deaf or hearing impaired and working with a sign language interpreter, you don’t look at the interpreter, you look at the person you’re speaking to. It’s rude to speak to the interpreter. They’re a facilitator. You’re there to engage with the other person. As readers, we’re interpreters. It’s not about us. It seems like it us because we’re doing most of the work, but that’s the job we asked for. The real conversation is between the divine and the client. When we make it about ourselves, we’re running the risk of our ego getting in the way. New readers sometimes ask how they know they’re reading the cards and not just letting their own biases guide them. That’s a good question. One way to check yourself is to see if you’re always getting the answers you expect from cards. If you’re never surprised by the answers, you may be operating from personal bias. It’s not a perfect method, most reading will likely yield at least something expected—but if they all do, if you’re never surprised, it could be worth considering whether you’re really letting the cards guide you or if you’re imposing yourself on the reading. Because the Hanged Man sustains whatever is happening, he, too, can get egotistical—even if he can’t literally gaze at his navel. 

Acting teacher Konstantin Stanislavksi (he of the oft-misunderstood “method”) once said, “Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art.” This sums it up: love the gift you’ve given, celebrate the gift. Don’t fall in love with yourself because you have it. Or, I guess, don’t believe your own press. 

In sum: read from a spiritual and banal standpoint any time—or every time—and don’t fall in love with your divination, too much. Don’t make it about you. And don’t fall so in love with the “mysteries” that the client doesn’t wind up with any clues. Make it about the client. All really good advice, I think. Tarot always amazes. 

A read of one’s own
This reading is designed to explore the integration (and, in a way, the dis-integration) of the spiritual and banal. 

1. Shuffle and draw a card to represent and are of your life or of your divinatory practice that could benefit from the integration of the spiritual and banal. 
2. Draw two cards and place them below the first. These represent the two aspects of the situation that benefit from blending. 
3. Draw one more card and place it below the two. This card represents a method of beginning this integration. 

(I suggest drawing three cards per position, honestly, but in this case I’ll use just one.)

A quick example: I used the Thoth deck for this. The first card, representing an area of my life where spiritual and banal could benefit from integration: The-for-love-of-fuck-Hierophant. Always cracks me up, tarot does. Where do I need to integrate the spiritual and banal? In my spiritual space. Now, I’m among those who typically look at the good ol’ Hierophant negatively, but as I always say everything is its own other, and it makes sense. I definitely compartmentalize parts of my life and when I do, it becomes restrictive. When I allow parts of my life to blend, they generally help both parts. And since this whole lesson seems to be about me integrating the spiritual and banal, this is the perfect card to show up. 

The cards that represent the two parts that need integrating are Strength/Lust and the Two of Disks (Change). I read recently that the Thoth tarot is (or was) banned in prisons, because it’s considered pornographic—in part because of this card. Crowley being Crowley, he has to go for the vulgar. But what he seems to have meant by choosing this word over strength is that it’s not just about fortitude or effort, but life force, zest, energy, particularly creative energy. It’s not just about the physical ideal, but about a whole, sort of radiant force. The card is associated with Leo, my sun sign. And I know this card must represent the spiritual part of the equation because its partner, the Two of Disks, is earth—that’s the banal part. Which banal part? Good question. 

Twos are magnetic. The draw (and repel), and in this case what we’re drawing is earth—in this case life. It’s what we’re drawn to in life and what is drawn to us. What this combination suggests is that bringing a strong, powerful, zesty, lusty spiritual energy to the things I care most about (and that seem to care most about me) would benefit me. It is, in a way, the pervading of the the things I care most about with a divine purpose. Which sounds tiring—although the Lust/Strength card is a good reminder that I’ve got the energy. (Note that I’ve more or less ignored the Thoth title for the Two of Disks. Change. It contextually doesn’t offer much. Do I draw change to me? Everyone does. Life is change. What it might offer to the reading is the sense of shifting interests in life. The things I care about and what I need to endow with divinity are varied and shift frequently. Although I don’t think of even numbers are particularly fast, so probably not that frequently. In this case, I think it offers a better shade to the reading if we read change as evolution. That creates a greater interplay between the spiritual and the divine, because of course the two evolve as we grow. It’s also a nice connection because of the prominent ouroboros/lemniscate on the Thoth card—sort of endless, eternal evolution.) 

The final card, representing a method of achieving this integration, is the Eight of Swords (Interference). Sometimes when I work with this deck, I start to doubt myself as a reader because these titles/keywords are so often impediments. They’re so total. Words offer so much less elasticity than images do. Why am I using the damn thing, then? Compulsion, actually. I’m emphatically drawn to it this summer. Shrug. Let’s start with the thing I hate the most: the keyword. Interference. Assuming I have nothing to work with but this annoying word, that is somehow supposed to be a method of integrating, that is the opposite of it. It is interfering with integration. Or is it? 

The image is (as the kids say) giving interference—this a blockade. A cage. It is interfering with something. What? Well, it’s the suit of swords. The intellect. Esotericists believe the intellect is the great enemy. Actually, that’s common in many traditions. As a writer, I find that rude. As an over-thinker, I fully understand why. The mind is cruel. Logic is cruel. The card is telling me not to let logic get in the way of this spiritual integration. So even though it’s telling me not to do something, it’s telling me what not to do. “Don’t let the mind get in the way of this process.” Or, said another way, “Interfere with your mind’s attempts to over think this.” So, OK, then; the keyword isn’t that bad. What else about the card might enlighten me further? Eights are work. This is going to take some effort. Connect it to Strength/Lust, and it’s doable, but it’s effort. (The nine would suggest it’s maybe too hard to do.) This card is Jupiter in Gemini—expansive intellect. If we’re going to allow the intellect into this integrative process, we need to do it in the most Jupiter-y way possible. Not so much logic as curiosity. Gemini is very curious. It gathers. I’ve heard it said that Gemini researches and Virgo (the other sign ruled by Mercury) edits.

​If you have to think, think big.

LESSON FOUR
A row of five:
Ace of Pentacles (5), King of Wands (2), King of Cups (1), King of Pentacles (3), 5 of Swords (4)
Deck used: The Silver Acorn Tarot by Stephanie Buscema 

From the dense and esoteric, to the charming. I’m not one for “whimsy,” but there are a handful of “cute” decks that I find really charming and useable. This is one. And what’s equally interesting is the arrival of three of our four kings! This is the type of reading that might have sent me into the depths when I was starting out. Three kings! And no context! How are we ever to make sense of that? The question of the courts always freaks out new readers and I think it’s because we keep saying reading the courts is difficult. Once we get it in our heads that the court cards are tough, we agree. But if no one had told us they’re difficult, they would never have been. 

As always, let’s start by doing some noticing. Other than noticing the three kings, we notice that the only king left out is the King of Swords. The suit of swords is represented by the five. There are no major cards. The Ace of Pentacles completes the quintet. This gives pentacles a (tiny) edge in this spread. In this deck, the King of Wands looks away from the other two kings and towards the ace. The King of Cups looks at the King of Pentacles, who would be looking at the Five of Swords if his eyes were open. The Five of Swords, featuring a bird, looks the King of Pentacles. Because the deck is fairly consistent with Waite-Smith other Waite-Smith decks, I won’t dwell too much on the artwork (though it is incredibly cute while also being incredibly useful—I love this deck). 

What do we know about kings? Let’s start there, since they have shown themselves so forcefully here. It’s almost as though they’re pissed we spent two readings working with decks that eliminated them for the sexier knight. “Hey! We’re still here, jerkwad!” Kings are of course monarchs, hereditary rulers who believe (generally) that they are appointed by “god” to rule their land. There is a whole history of kingship and colonialism, and though kings predate the christo-colonial, many of us tend now to think of these guys in terms of the toxicity of unilateral rulership, among other poisonous things. Rightfully so. But of course, nothing is all one thing. There are plenty of times when kings represent oppression in readings. That said, I’ve also seen The Empress and the queens play that role, too—they are, after all, part of the self-same system. Because this blog is about lessons and advice, chances are we’re not being asked to imitate the nastier elements of kings in our readings. If anything, there’s a warning here. But let’s go deeper. 

Let’s assume for a second that it’s not kingship that makes a leader a colonizer. Let’s say that evil tendency comes instead from society and from the poisonous ways in which we’ve trained men in this colonial world. Instead, let’s remove gender from the equation. In fact, let’s—at least for the time being—remove monarchy from the equation. Let’s also do something increasingly common in modern life: let’s not jump to any conclusions based on our associations with an idea or concept. Let’s take the king’s point of view for a hot second. Here we find someone doing exactly what they were placed on this earth to do. Whatever deck I’m reading with and however that deck styles the equivalent card, I tend to begin from the neutral gaze that the king represents someone doing what (they think, at least) they were put on this earth to do. (For context, let’s contrast with the queen. Queens, in this same mythology, are put on this earth to make more kings. Who the hell wants that job, other than social media trad wives? If we take the queen as a ruler, her job is the same as the king’s. In many royalist systems, queens weren’t put on this earth to do that job. This means a queen is someone who has to do a job despite the fact that they didn’t want it or are forced to do it in the face of a system not designed to support them.)

Bringing in the elemental factors, the King of Cups, then, is a person working with the emotions, senses, feelings, religion, mediation—watery things—and is doing exactly what they should be doing. (The Queen of Cups would be someone working in that field unexpectedly or who was not to the manor born and is doing that work despite the odds. I tend to find, then, the queens cleverer, more active, and more resourceful. Struggle makes us more active.) A reading with three kings tells us about a person who is equally at home in the practical, the spiritual, and the creative—and/or someone who is at home with selling sex and sexuality (pentacles + [cups + wands]). I share that last part just to point out how we might consider these cards, not because it’s contextually relevant. But, actually, I think the reading is in part about selling ourselves. More on that presently. 

The kings are bracketed by the Ace of Pentacles and the Five of Swords. They “contain” the kings. These all-powerful rulers are being hemmed in by these two cards. And so we get a sense of restriction. Let’s see what is restricting us and why, so that we can tell whether this is good news or bad news. I recognize the Five of Swords is typically considered a negative card, but by now you know I don’t work that way. 

What we’re seeing right now is the way context shapes a reading. I don’t know what any of it means yet, but the relationships between the cards help me understand what potential meanings are relevant. If the Ace of Pentacles and Five of Swords are serving as restrictors, boundaries, or containers, then I have to read them accordingly. How does each of these cards “contain”? The Ace of Pentacles is practicality in its least developed state. It is the idea of the practical, the notion of the banal (or financial, but I’m not really seeing that as relevant--yet). There’s a naivety with the aces. Because they contain the fullness of the suit they have great potential, but because they’re “just” potential, they don’t really know what it is they’re doing, what they’re “for.” This is telling because we have three cards in the middle that fully know what they’re for. The ace knows its for something, but not yet what. It is possibility but not development. 

The Five of Swords, on the other hand, is developed. And it doesn’t like what it has become. If we think backwards from five, we deal with all the explosive potential of ace, two, and three—all of which comes to a dramatic halt with the four, which stops everything in its tracks. Four’s stability and stoicism gets stuck. It is so stable that it can no longer see what it could become. In a way, it’s the way we humans realize that we’re finite and that leaving this life means we will cease to be. Our egos hate that and so do what they can to hold on to these ideas of ourselves as hard as they can. We worry that if we change at all we will lose what we worked so hard to gain. The five comes along and says, “fuck that noise.” 

The Five of Swords (I think) is the lynchpin of this reading. What I start to see are kings who think they’ve reached the height of their abilities after only a little bit of work (the ace). The five—the only swords card—sees what they’ve become: arrogant, self-centered, self-impressed, and the worst versions of themselves. I don’t talk much about the swords representing “seeing,” but it’s a natural fit for them to play that role. There is something sharp and clear about swords/air; no other suit really “sees” quite as well. Not only does this card see that, it hates it. It wants to go to war with it. But how can it? It’s a lowly five, up against three kings and their outsized sense of potential (ace again). 

Note that I originally felt that the five and the ace bracketed or enclosed the kings. I don’t feel that way now that I’m looking closer. The five is the only card that’s doing anything and so it’s the main actor in the play. The kings have all reached a level of immobility because they think they have nowhere to go. And they’re “protected” by the ace. It stops them from moving. It roots them them, grounds them (pentacles/earth). But there’s a lumberjack coming to knock this forest down (five). Because the thing about fives? They’re inevitable. No matter how secure we think something is, there is always going to be a five moment. The mighty old oak will one day die and rot and fall. That is a four to five experience. It may take years, generations, millennia--but everything will experience a five moment sooner or later. Of course, like Death, the five doesn’t mean the end. More follows. 

(I read this morning in a book about the Thoth tarot by Lon Milo Duquette that the esotericists believed that there was a minor arcana for each of the majors. Not an individual card; an entire set of minors, one for each major. Each of the trump cards has fifty-six minor cards to go with it. The cards of course are always the same, but they may be influenced by a ruler in the way that astrological signs are “ruled” by planets. In the case above we’re seeing the five as though it’s part of Death’s minor arcana—and by that same logic, we’re seeing the Hanged Man’s version of the Ace of Pentacles. I enjoy this concept even if I’m only just sitting with whether or not it makes sense.)

Earlier we discovered that the kings represent those doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. But we didn’t say how. We didn’t describe the methods the kings were using, so we never figured out whether they were doing what they’re supposed to be doing correctly. The Five of Swords, becoming a powerful card indeed, indicates they have to be doing something wrong. One of the things I mean when I say context is important is what we’re working with right now. The cards limit each other. If the Five of Swords, which is “looking” at the other cards, represents something that needs to be shaken up, then the other cards are those things. So I need to interpret those other things in the corresponding way. I didn’t know the ace was going to represent a sort of arrested development until the Five of Swords “told” me so. I didn’t know the five was going to say that until I “listened” to it. The listening is what you’ve read to this point—my mental monologue about what the cards mean. 

Recall, two of the kings (cups and pentacles) “look” to the Five of Swords (though the pentacles’ king closes his eyes). They know this is coming. The open-eyed King of Cups for sure does. He may not be able to see it (in this deck, the king has a skull’s head; he has no eyes, but those non-eyes are “open”), but he can feel (cups) it. That said, he’s still not doing things right. Who is the King of Cups when misbehaving? Someone wishy-washy, indirect, indecisive, temperamental, moody; someone prone to tantrums and attention-seeking; someone whose self-esteem is tied entirely to what other people think of him. In essence, he goes from being an intuitive master to a petulant, selfish baby. The baby part comes from the fact that kings are typically thought to represent older people and when we “reverse” that, we’re getting someone really young. I don’t read reversals, but having just used that word you can see why I don’t—even though we’re turning out to read these kings the way one might read them reversed. 

A little digression on reversals: The reason I don’t use reversals is because the card combinations tell me whether I’m seeing each as “upright” or “reversed” without having to put the cards physically in that direction. How do I do that? Let’s do a quick summary of how I’ve read these cards so far:

• I scanned the cards without making judgments about them. I considered the number of “types” (kings, suits, numbers) I had and what that might suggest;
• I thought about who a king was by taking the metaphor of a king and de-contextualizing from the monarchy, then re-contextualized it in terms of being a human on Earth today;
• I noticed the lack of the King of Swords, the presence of swords in the five, and the lack of majors;
• I noticed the way the ace and the five seemed to bracket the reading;
• I explored the nature of aces in the context of how they might serve as a container. This is the first time I began to make any value judgments. 
• I explored the Five of Swords and where it was “looking” (where the main figure on the card faced), what fives mean, what the implied four means, and then a story began forming about stasis and shakeups:
• In doing that, I discovered that the five wasn’t containing anything; it was going to war with something it sees as having gone on too long. Here is where I began to understand the point of view of the reading. I’m seeing the reading, now, through the POV of the five. It might have made sense to think of one of the kings as the main player, but because there’s three of them their rank is actually diminished. The five was the only one “doing” anything; it has to be the lead role. 
• Having done all that, I know that the kings are misbehaving. They’re doing something that’s making the five unhappy. I begin reading them not as icons of inner purpose, but as bad little kids who need a spanking. (Metaphorically. Don’t hit children.) This means I have to read them (and the ace) in “shadow” or as “reversed.”

In this way, I let the cards tell me how they’re behaving, rather than manipulating them to do show up in a certain arrangement. There’s nothing wrong with either version, but I often found using literal reversals frustrating. Once I discovered the three-card method, where each position in a spread is filled with three cards rather than one, I discovered I didn’t need to reverse the cards because they told me how they were behaving more clearly this way. Thanks to Robert M. Place for that life-changing revelation. (See his book Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination.)

Back to the reading: Having read the King of Cups in this badly-behaving way, let’s begin contextualizing it in terms of this lesson. The only question I ask the cards at the start of each blog is “What is Lesson X?” In this case, “What is lesson four?” So I don’t have any thematic context, but this is a blog about reading tarot. Each post is a lesson on reading. So I need to begin to think about what I know so far in terms of a lesson about reading. Thinking of the King of Cups alone, we’re beginning to form the story of someone arrogant, thoughtless (remember the lack of a King of Swords in this spread—he can’t misbehave because he didn’t even show up to the party); someone judgmental rather than intuitive, someone who acts off irrational impulses rather than deep feeling. Here we have a smug-ass reader, is what we have—and one who’s stinking up the joint to boot.

But, wait! There’s more! We’ve got the other funky little kings to deal with. The other card “looking” to the Five of Swords is the King of Pentacles. He serenely and patiently sits upon his throne, holding his little pentacle, foot resting on what looks like a warthog. He’s become complacent, content with stasis, impressed with himself, and lazy; he, once a hard-worker (pentacles are the suit of work), grows sedentary—like the animal at his feet, happily snoozing. All his power means nothing because he’s not doing anything with it. He’s not doing anything with anything. He thinks he’s achieved top form and now there’s nowhere for him to go. He should be able to see the consequence of this, but he closes eyes that shouldn’t even be there! But someone is coming with a knife to harvest him. 

The King of Wands, on the other hand, faces the Ace of Pentacles. He’s still in love with his potential. All his energy goes into shining that brilliant golden coin he’s got his eyes fixed on. “Look how cool I can be!” he says. “Look at how many amazing things I can do! There’s nobody like me! When I get this project off the ground, it’s going to change the world.” Cobwebs grow from this ace, by the way, and a spider dangles from two cut sunflowers that frame the pentacle. This king is so impressed with himself, he’s growing cobwebs! The King of Wands has big Leo energy (Leo’s glyph, partnered with Cancer, are carved into the floor below him). The sunflowers having been snipped cut the life force from Leo’s home “planet.” This king’s ego is so impressed with what he could do, he’s not actually doing it! And he’s draining himself of the main source of his energy: the doing of cool shit!

And it is here that we land on the message of the reading: when you find yourself resting on your (considerable) laurels, that’s the time you’ve stopped doing the real work. You have to mess up that obsession with your potential, with what you could do, with what you have done. That’s the other thing these kings are doing in their passivity: becoming superannuated, obsolete. When we think about how good we are or could be, when we stop moving, stop working, stop growing, we not only stagnate, but we make ourselves somehow redundant. It is the myth that learning and expertise are destinations rather than journeys. The Five of Swords sees all this self-importance, arrogance, all this ego and says, “Not today, Satan.” 

This is a thing that happens as we get “good.” And this is as much a risk for the experienced reader as the new one. The new reader likely gets caught in the idea of potential, not unlike the King of Wands, always admiring what they will be able to do (the ace). They think constantly about how great it will be when they’ve hit all the hurdles, gotten though all the difficulties, and they spend a lot of time fantasizing about the greatness they’ll achieve. And by focusing on this, they actually forget to do the thing that will supposedly bring them all this greatness. Sometimes it’s not arrogance but fear that keeps folks in this potential-filled obsession. We worry we’ll never actually be able to do it so we never take the training wheels off. In that way, our fear takes over and we lose that potential because we’re afraid we won’t live up to the huge goals we’ve set for ourselves. 

This, my friends, is the story of my life. I know it well. I have always set goals too high to reach and downward spiraled when I’ve failed. This is been most true in my life as a writer (and once upon a time as an actor). I always let my ambitions outpace reality. I naively believed being talented would lead to success. But I also based my entire personality on the idea of a particular kind of success.  It wasn’t enough that I was a good writer who once in a while got theatres to produce a play I wrote. I had to be the toast of the theatre; I needed to reach the heights of theatrical stardom (something that is next to impossible to achieve in a very small, very competitive, very nepotistic, often very vicious field). But at the same time, I gave up easily. Rejection left me defeated most of the time. I didn’t have the money or energy to move to a city with a huge theatrical network, and even if I’d had, I don’t have the extroversion to network! But there I was, imagining all the great things I was entitled to once the blockade eventually lifted and I managed to get myself where I should be (with as little effort on my part as possible, and for sure as little discomfort as can be). I became only the imagined idea of potential. And anything I did get that wasn’t that didn’t matter to me. I devalued it. And in a lot of ways, I devalued myself and my work. I felt it was only worth doing if it reached the theatrical Olympus. And when I realized that would never happen, I gave up. Wasted potential. In fact, I’ve been known to whine to friends that I often feel like the sum total of all the potential I had and never lived up to. So I frequently remain in that mode.

This obsession with potential can dog new readers to the point that we never get past the foundational. Worse, because we’re so obsessed with how good we could be, we never let anyone see us in our messy modes. We need messy modes. Messy mode is where we begin. I recently rewatched an old episode of Drag Race All Stars, and the fabulous Yvie Oddly, a favorite of mine, did a whole number on how we should go out and fail. “Do,” she said, “fuck it up.” Of course, Yvie isn’t the first person to make this point, but because she’s the most recent place I was reminded of it, I’m getting her all the credit. We have to mess up. We can’t figure out what we’re doing wrong, or rather what we could do better, unless we do. It’s insidious. Our egos hate the idea of us messing up, but we cannot reach the full measure of our potential unless we do. We are required to fuck up. And to fuck up often. I’m not saying you want to go out there and give bad readings; I just mean, you have to go and make mistakes and then you have to figure out why, rather than getting down on yourself. 

This is true, too, for the old hats. And it may be even more important for those of us who’ve been around the block once or twice to keep our skills sharp and to keep learning. Experimentation is so important so that we don’t get stale, tired, lame; we need to keep our work fresh, we need to mix things up. We need five moments. We need them, and if we don’t get them, then we become the collective embodiment of those three kings above in their most negative manifestations. We get arrogant, lazy, soporific, and stagnant. In lesson one we did a number about what happens to stagnant water. Similarly, stagnant earth is dead earth—like a farmer’s field that has gone fallow. Stagnant fire doesn’t even exist. It goes out, like a candle flame at the end of its wick and fuel. This can happen to us as readers if we don’t keep challenging ourselves. You might recall I used Thoth decks in the last two lessons because I’ve decided to dedicate the summer to working with this system. I’m reading books about it, working with Harris’s stunning deck as well as two others, and just allowing myself to experience this kind of deck generally. It’s not a detriment to the client, because I have all my other tools to call on if I get too in the weeds with the esoteric—but I also still find so much of the esotericism a distraction from divination. So there’s little risk I’ll get too into it. 
 
Instead of embodying these immature kings, we should return to the beginning of the courts and embody the pages. They’re immature in different and important ways. The immature king knows better but refuses to act like an adult. The tantrums are all ego-driven and mostly for attention. There’s an entitlement, like a spoiled child, which is petty and easily ignited. Pages, meanwhile, actually are children. They’re curious and they want to know what’s going on. They’re immature because they’re still growing, not because they’re grown and just behaving badly. Pages are less likely to throw tantrums because they’re curious; that means their egos are harder to trigger.  They don’t think they know anything, so they don’t worry about what anyone else thinks about them. And, best of all, they’re actively interested in everything (of course, they’re primarily interested in their own suit, but we have two of the three here). 

It’s worth spending a little time exploring the absence of the King of Swords. Earlier, I said he didn’t know up to the party. I think that’s actually a good sign. He sent his soldier, the five, because he’s not staying still the way the other kings are. It’s actually really difficult for the King of Swords to stand still because the swords are so relentless—much like the mind of an over-thinker. In this case, the King of Swords is technically our knight in shining armor—or at least his rep, the five, is. Now, it’s partly a trick of math that the King of Swords didn’t appear here—there were only five cards, so the already-slim possibility of all four kings decreased with each new card. But when I look at the rest of the deck, the King of Swords is nowhere near the others—at least a good ten or fifteen cards away. There, he was flanked by the Eight of Pentacles (practical work!) and the High Priestess (she’s often considered the diviner of the majors—the knower of the secrets). He’s doing the work. Because the Priestess can sometimes be nebulous in readings, I also looked at the card that follows her: the Three of Cups. So there’s more expansiveness and the cups of course amp up her intuitive nature. This king is really connected to the real work. He’s not navel-gazing his own potential; he’s out in the field doing the thing. And he’d be better supported if the rest of the kings joined in. 
 
I’ve found myself saying over and over lately that curiosity is the cure for so many of the world’s ills. The word “cure” is right there in it. This reading talks about the consequences of denying our curiosity. All those kings, so impressed with themselves, sitting on their thrones, expecting to be lauded—and, in fact, probably being lauded—and yet they have no idea that all their power has been given away. To who? No one. It’s being squandered. They have the one thing so many people want and they’re letting it go to waste because they think they’ve done all there is to do. People are so afraid of being thought of as students. But the student isn’t the shameful role; the teacher who stops learning is. 

A read of one’s own
This is a spread designed to discover where we’re letting ourselves get stagnated, why, and how to overcome it. 

1. Shuffle your deck and then cut and put it back together. 
2. Look for the King of Cups and take the card following it out and place it on the table. 
3. Repeat for the King of Pentacles and the King of Wands. You don’t need the kings, just the card that follows them. These three card show you an area where you may be squandering your power with a lack of curiosity. 
4. Locate the Ace of Pentacles and take out the card following it. This card represents something that’s keeping you too rooted to your own ego.
5. Locate the Five of Swords and take out the card following it. Do the same with the King of Swords. These two cards represent the solution. 

A (not very) quick example: The three cards that followed the Kings of Cups, Pentacles, and Wands were: Death, The Devil, the Page of Cups. (It’s potentially interesting to know that all three of these kings wound up near the very end of the pack, sometimes with only one or two cards between them.) It’s not a combo that immediately jumps to life for me. The Devil is one of my favorite cards, and that makes me think of the term Kill your darlings. Actually, the fact that Death precedes The Devil enhances the connection there. But what does that mean? These three cards represent an area where I may be squandering my power with lack of curiosity. Because these two cards aren’t jumping to life (ironic, eh?), the Page of Cups is hopefully going to unlock the other two. I’ve been extolling the virtue of the pages, so I’m not surprised to see one in the reading. I am surprised to see it as an area where I’m not being curious, though. 

When I think this way, I think it suggests my cursory sense of curiosity. Thinking back to the misbehaving qualities of the king, we get the more negative aspects of cups/water. Those same qualities now apply to the page, who is actually being childish. It suggests a certain amount of naivety. Not something I usually consider myself, but of course we don’t tend to notice places where we’re not at our best. What am I being naive about? Death and The Devil. What do they have to do with anything? I normally interpret The Devil representing our real core, our essential selves, that part of us that we have to hide or shape to fit the needs of “civilization.” Or, it represents being drawn to those more “primal” aspects of life because we’re starting to understand how being cut off from them has made us less. Death, of course, is an ending or a stopping. It can be inevitability, too. 

I can’t help but laugh at the fact that I’m doing this work with the Thoth decks and Aleister Crowley’s infatuation with being called The Beast 666—something, apparently, his mother called him when he misbehaved. One could say I’m being naive about his work and that’s stopping me (Death) from something. Like, my attitude about his work could be getting in the way of something inevitable. Which, who knows? Might be true. It could also be saying that I’m being naive about working with this deck, and that it’ll kill me. But that’s probably not true, since I’ve read with the deck before. 

More generally, there’s a naivety about something deep, primal, core to me and it appears to be stopping me from growing. It could be an exploration of darker themes, but that’s not something I typically shy away from. It may also be telling me that my perception of the card, or the entirety of my work, is naive. Again, that doesn’t seem likely, but it’s not impossible. 

Because I’m reading backwards from the Page of Cups, Death seems to put a punctuation mark on the reading. But if I take a different track, and I start with that card, it might yield something else. The spread could be saying it’s inevitable (Death) that the deeper I go into myself or into darker work (Devil) the more naive I’ll find myself to be (page). Interesting, but none of this makes much sense given anything that’s going on in my life. So I’m probably going to reject all of these interpretations soon. This is where a lot of us get frustrated and give up. 

Let’s put these three aside for a moment, because I have the card that followed the Ace of Pentacles to tell me where I’m being too rooted in my ego. The Hermit is who followed—our third major card. I typically think of this card as representing the teacher, a thing I do a lot of, as well as an introvert. My introversion may be keeping me too rooted, and given the fact that I really don’t have much interest in doing much of anything lately, that’s a particular possibility. By the same token, it’s not something I’m particularly naive about. I know that I stay in too much. It may suggest that my focus on teaching—I’ve been doing a lot of classes and writing a lot—is also keeping me too rooted in my ego. I guess that’s possible, too. But it’s not really that helpful, frankly. In fact, I’m about to cancel a class due to low enrollment. Still, not much use, this. 

Let’s go to the final two cards—those that followed the King of Swords and the Five of Swords. These happened to be the Seven of Swords and the Queen of Pentacles. These cards tell me how to solve the problem. I’m about to look to the cards to solve a problem I don’t even know exists because the reading hasn’t given me a useful answer, yet. But, what the hell? Let’s find out what they say. The sevens look within, as you’ve likely heard me say by now, and of course the swords are intellectual, cerebral, linguistic, educational—this ties to the Hermit as an educator. The Seven of Swords asks us to spend some time considering what it is we really think. What do we really know to be true? Are we sure that what we thought was true really is? The Queen of Pentacles represents someone not necessarily born to practicality but forced to do it—and doing it really well.  Married, these two cards suggest the solution to the problem is to spend some time re-evaluating what I think about how to do the work I do. In essence, it’s a re-thinking of the whole brand: how we bring our work to life in a practical, useful way. Are the things we think are true really true? Is the way we work really working for us? The Seven of Swords and the Queen of Pentacles are going to find out by doing some work (pentacles) around it. 

Working backwards, I take this to mean that the solution to my problem is that I need to re-examine my work as a reader and spend time with what I really know to be true and how I’m making that come to life in my divinatory work. Weirdly, the reading seems to be saying that my teaching is taking me away from doing that and that I’m somewhat naive to be  avoiding the deep work (the Devil) probably because I’m scared (Death freaks me out, so I take the card to mean that in this case). I’m being naive about how much work I’ve really done on the deeper, darker parts of myself and my teaching work has been a distraction from it. I need to reconsider whether or not that’s really valuable to me and whether or not I’m doing the work as I should be—whether or not it’s bringing to life what I want it to. 

Frankly, that still doesn’t make any sense. But this is what I would say to a client if faced with these cards. More or less. 
    
Now what?
    
I always say that readings can be literal or metaphorical. If I take this reading in a more metaphorical fashion, it tells me, basically, that if I think I can be a good reader while avoiding the world, I’m being naive—and I really need to activate my work in a more worldly way. Which isn’t untrue. But, let’s be honest: I’m probably not going to do anything about it. Not at the moment. I’ve been feeling incredibly unsafe in the world lately, for a variety of reasons, and so going out always feels like pulling my skin off. But recall, I said the ego protects us from things that will help us grow. So I really should be getting out into the world. Actually, I think this has a lot to do with the fact that I should be hustling my wares a better—something I’m never good at. Weirdly, I think The Devil and Death (which in this cute deck are both rather charming) are trying to tell me I’m being naive about my own particularly creepy charm and I should be relying on it a bit more. 

Well. 
We’ll see about that!
    
This also reminds me of something: sometimes, readings aren’t helpful. Especially if you’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, or if we’re trying to solve the wrong problem. I always say, don’t use a spread that doesn’t speak to the issue. In this case, I may have invented a spread that solves I problem I don’t have. Sometimes, if a reading doesn’t make any sense, it’s worth asking ourselves if we’re actually solving the right problem.

LESSON 3
A Four-Card Cross:
Knight (King) of Cups (1)
Five of Cups (2); Two of Disks (3)
Ten of Swords (4)
Deck used: Tabula Mundi, an independently-produced, modern riff on the Thoth by MM Meleen. 


A few notes: Because I’m also reading a lot about astrology right now, I thought it would be fun to use this cross to play with two astrological aspects: oppositions and squares. In this case, The Five of Cups and the Two of Wands oppose each other, and the Knight (King) of Cups and the Ten of Swords oppose each other. Cards at right angles to each other are squared. The Knight of Cups squares the Five of Cups and the Two of Disks, as does the Ten of Swords. The Five of Cups squares the knight and the ten, as does the Two of Disks. We’ll consider all of this. Both of these aspects are “hard,” which means they tend to conflict. But as Sue Tompkins says in her books (Aspects in Astrology and The Contemporary Astrologer’s Handbook), the hard aspects are the ones most likely to lead to change and growth and action. The “easy” aspects often lead to stasis. I like thinking this way much more than the more usual binary of good/bad. 
    
The Lesson
We’ve got two of the cards folks never want to see in a reading: Five of Cups (in this deck, titled “Disappointment”) and the Ten of Swords (“Ruin”). The Knight of Cups doesn’t have an esoteric keyword, but does have an elemental title: Fire of Water. The knight representing the suit of fire; cups, of course, representing water. The Two of Disks is titled “Change.” Because the Five and Ten are so dramatic, and related numerologically, let’s start there. These cards are square each other (at right angles), which suggests they have a hard time integrating. Tompkins suggests they have a hard time seeing each other. So they tend to operate as though they’re not impacting anything else, even though they’re likely working at cross purposes to something else. In a way, it’s not unlike the concept of unconscious bias. We can’t see it, so we don’t know we have it, but it’s still hurting us (any other folks, too).

As readers, we’re often afraid of the Five of Cups and the Ten of Swords. Not the cards, per se, but more the idea of having to give readings where the things depicted on or traditionally associated with them are contextually important. No one wants to give bad news . . . not unless you’re a sociopath (or you understand that what seems like bad news is actually what’s going to spur the client on to needed change). Clients are afraid of them, too, because we don’t want to feel the way these cards suggest we have done, do, or will do. And so, for me, I’m tickled we get to begin the reading this way!

Let’s consider the math: we’ve explored a couple times now how closely air and water are related. In this case, though, even though they’re closely woven, they’re working at cross purposes. They’re fighting each other, or at least acting without regard for the other. The Five of Cups is a card of emotional or sensual upheaval. Why I dislike the Golden Dawn titles is that they limit. Upheaval isn’t bad, per se, and neither are any of the cards in the deck. Yes, we can be disappointed by emotional upheaval—but there are for sure times when we relish it. Times when, say, we’ve been stuck in a rut. The Tabula Mundi deck offers an image of a barren, desolate, arid landscape—the ground is cracked and baked, the bones of a fish and some dry cups are strewn around. In the background, a red sky oppresses the large pyramids covering the entire horizon. This is a hot card for the suit of water, and what we see if we explore the artwork is the image of a heat that has evaporated all the water—literally sucked it all out of the ground, greedily, leaving nothing for anyone (or anything) else. This isn’t water at is finest, it is water at its thirstiest. It’s water longing for water. It for sure doesn’t look good, and that’s common for this card in many decks. 

The Ten of Swords offers another barren landscape, but this one a black-tarred expanse and stormy sky (not unlike the one in the Waite-Smith Ten of Swords). An egg stands center with eight swords stuck into its top. Two rocks flank it, each with a sword stuck in, and each with a snake curled atop the stone, loosely coiled around the blade. The card is ruin. And as always it is no one’s favorite. 

The barrenness of these images grabs my attention and considering the square aspect, reminds me that you can’t rehydrate by visiting the desert. There are times when we as readers feel we have nothing in the tank, or when we experience a series of readings that simply don’t come together. We may feel like we’re losing our touch. Panic sets in, and of course panic is a thing associated with the suit of swords—particularly that trio of the eight, nine, and ten. These three cards are associated in this system (Thoth/Golden Dawn) with the sign Gemini. Gemini, ruled by my guy Mercury, tends to be a nervous sign—and I know this because all the poor Geminis in my life are prone to anxiety. Mercury moves around a lot, he’s a messenger, he can’t stand still, and when we tend to stand still too long ourselves we get nervous. 

Mercury and Gemini are also, though, associated with learning. This is one reason Mercury is my dude. He’s the ruler of writing, learning, words, knowledge, language—all the stuff that means so much to me. And so, this reading is proving to be about the fear that comes when we worry we’re drying up, that we’re getting stale, that we’re losing our touch—or, conversely for the new reader, that we’ll never learn enough to be able to do this well. The barrenness of the five and ten, here, couples with Mercury/Gemini highlight a thing that can happen for readers sometimes: imposter syndrome. And when imposter syndrome kicks in, we may find ourselves doing things that will dry up our potential because we don’t realize that it’s actually working at cross purposes to our goal. We could say that Mercury is also the ruler of imposter syndrome (although I don’t for a second think he has it; he just doesn’t have time to worry about it—but when we feel like we’re missing him, that sensation creeps in). 

To turn to the cards and their more traditional meanings, we may find ourselves disappointed (Five of Cups) by our readings (swords = readings). And we may find ourselves feeling that way a lot (ten swords = a lot of thinking about this + thoughts are influenced by feelings and vice versa). Or, we find ourselves disappointed by our progress, or by the response we’re getting from friends or clients. And it eats away at us. Or rather, raises our temperature to the point where all our moderating water evaporates and we’re left literally deserted. So we’re feelings all kinds of shitty about ourselves. Meanwhile, in the Ten of Swords, we’re starting to overthink, over-intellectualize. We get stuck in our head (traditionally associated with the Eight of Swords), then we panic (nine), and then we freak the fuck out (ten). Our minds and hearts are both going through their own little Greek tragedy at the same time—and so, though you can usually call on one when the other starts being a little brat, you start to “realize” that you don’t have anything to fall back on. It’s bad enough for one part of us to be having a little tantrum, but for two of them? That’s just rude. Here we see the square aspect at work. These two parts of ourselves are entitled to have a freakout, but they have to give us the respect of not doing it simultaneously. But they’re square, they’re not “seeing” each other, not communicating—even though they’re both amping the other up without knowing it. It may seem odd to think of two parts of ourselves having a freakout, but if you’re prone to freakouts (I am!) then you know that a seemingly intellectual concept can send you into an emotional spiral, and a seemingly emotional thing can have you fighting major wars in your mind. 

Let’s put this two-card combo on hold for a moment and move up to the Knight, which also squares the Five of Cups. Here, the Knight of Cups is bringing water to the five, but the five can’t see him coming, and the Knight doesn’t know where he’s going. So we’re coming to rescue ourselves, but, like . . . badly. It’s worth noting that the Knights in this deck are really the kings (in Thoth decks, generally the Prince and the Knight are astride a horse or vehicle), which means there are parts of ourselves that should know better but aren’t functioning at their best. In this case, it’s likely our intuition that’s fucking around on us. And it’s because it’s not able to see what the real problem is. In fact, the knight is “bringing” his water not to the five, where water is needed, but rather to the Ten of Swords. The Knight thinks the root of the problem is what he can see (the ten), but it’s not; it’s the thing he’s ignoring or doesn’t even know is there. It’s like he got in the car and told his GPS to take him anywhere but hoped it would take him to the train station. So, we’re really off our game and we can feel it (water/cups is the dominant suit in this spread, even if one of the cards clearly is missing water). 

The Knight also squares the Two of Disks (Change). This card depicts an hourglass with a little mechanism inside. If the sand weren’t in the glass, we’d see that the mechanism is a lemniscate (infinity symbol) made of a belt that moves the wheels. This card feels so divorced from the other three, it’s like it’s in a different reading. It’s just out here doing it’s little thing, working it’s little system, the way it always does, while the rest of the reading is having a tantrum. Why? Because that’s just what it does. And what it’s doing is life. It’s just being. It’s cycling, as cycles do, and spinning, as wheels do, and it knows—even though we don’t—that this is just a blip and the next moment will eventually come. But squaring the Knight and the Ten of Swords, it has a lot of noise to compete with. The clomping splashes of the knight through the water, and the falsetto screaming of the Ten of Swords. (Why is the Ten of Swords full of falsetto screaming? I don’t know, but right now it is. Trust your instincts.) This little machine doesn’t know there’s a kink in the works, because it can’t break down. But it knows what the rest of the reading doesn’t: it’s going to be OK.

Many of us do find ourselves in moments like this. We’re just not good enough. Or, worse, we were feeling amazing and then had a few experiences that totally harsh our mellow. And when that happens, all these alarm bells start ringing and all these different emergency responses kick into place. We worry, we start beating ourselves up (another quality of swords—hurting ourselves with words), we rush to find solutions (knight) even when we have no idea what problem we’re trying to solve (the impacts of the squares). And meanwhile, life is just humming along waiting for us to balance out (another aspect of the two) and realize that we’re being dramatic.

The strange thing about imposter syndrome is that it only seems to hit people who, like, aren’t imposters. Morons who actually have no ability never seem to doubt themselves. It’s infuriating. Perhaps we’d be too powerful if we were able to fully accept our abilities. I don’t know. But I do know that this tendency, this self-doubt, can happen any time and often when least expected. I find that whenever I tend to be riding high for a couple days, something happens to knock me down a few pegs. I chalk this up to life stopping me from getting too arrogant, but I’d sure love it if I could ride those highs a little longer. I think most people experience it from time to time, some to lesser degrees. And I do think there’s some value in moments where we pause and reflect on whether we might be in a rut. But when they become chronic, it’s worrying. 

Before saying more, let’s talk about the oppositions. These are “hard” aspects, too, but unlike the square they’re (typically) aware of each other, they can probably see each other, but there may be a tendency for them to engage in a tug-o-war, a power dynamic that can sometimes make life . . . annoying. At their best, they integrate with each other and become unified in purpose. In this reading, we have the Knight of Cups opposing the Ten of Swords, and the Five of Cups opposing the Two of Disks. 

The knight/ten oppo is the classic diviner power struggle: the emotional hero ready to save the day, and the logical over-thinker who can’t stop turning things over in their mind. It’s like if Einstein married Jesus and they made a really weird baby together. (Hot!) Earlier, I said the knight was solving the wrong problem, and it’s because he’s “intuitive”: he solves the problem he can see. He’s not intuitive, he’s “intuitive.” At least in this case. If you don’t catch my drift, he’s more like Chad making a social media video about how to get a dope job than the actual person doing and hiring for that actual job out in the world who knows what it actually takes to do and get that job. Knights (in this case they don’t lose their active powers just because they’re kings in this deck; I tend to assign the Prince the more “kingly” role, at least in terms of speed and decorum) don’t think too much, and this isn’t the “thinkiest” knight to begin with. It’s the moodiest knight, the “feelingiest” knight. He’s very in touch with . . . whatever it is he thinks he’s in touch with in that moment. And he doesn’t get the brainy types, but he likes them (air and water like each other) and he wants to help. Once he gets to the Ten of Swords, though, his attempts to save the day will fail and he’ll get sullen and lose interest in it and find another cause to champion. He’s like the dog, Dug, in Up. Sweet, earnest, but easily distracted.

The Ten of Swords, meanwhile, cannot deal with the Knight, right now. No! There is a logical solution to this and I will find it, god dammit! Tell that effete little fucker to go save someone else! I CAN DO THIS ALL BY MYSELF! The Ten of Swords, already entirely burned out and totally useless, still thinks only it can save the day; only it can make things right. It actually can’t; it has nothing left to give. The title on the card is “ruin,” and in this way it is ruined, spoiled, rotten. Not forever, at least not ideally, but right now. And one of the reasons it’s so cooked is that it, too, is trying to solve the problem incorrectly. The knight has water to bring and the ten knows where it needs to go, but both are so self-centered they can’t see that. Now, if they can get it together and integrate, they could actually do something. (For any Sondheim or musical theatre fans out where, take a look at the lyrics to Phyllis’s follies numbers in the musical Follies. There are three that have been used in various productions of of this strange and wonderful show: “Uptown/Downtown,” “The Story of Lucy and Jessie,” and “Ah, But Underneath!” All three are gorgeous interpretations of something experiencing this very thing.)

This is not unlike the student who feels that cramming all the information possible into their brain will yield results quicker. They truly believe that they can shove all that information into their mind and their mind will retain it. They don’t ever stop to think there’s actual science about how we learn and remember, and not one single study has ever shown that people learn and retain information they stuff into their heads like a pillow into a case. It simply doesn’t work. We cannot rush our learning journeys; they have to take the time they take. I use this analogy a lot for this: you can rush bread dough to rise, but you can’t rush the flavor development. If it’s warm, yeast will rise quickly. But it will only do one of the two jobs it’s there to do. Yeast is what makes yeasted bread taste like bread. When you think of a yeasted loaf, what you’re remembering the taste of is yeast. Yeast can puff up fast, but flavor development takes time. And the best way to make bread is to allow the bread to rise as slowly as possible so that as much flavor develops as possible. Learning is like that. 

For those of us who’ve been around the block and face these moments of fear that we’ve finally lost it, we’re not likely to prove to ourselves that we haven’t lost it by cranking out reading after reading. We get terrified and each lackluster reading does nothing to calm us, and instead of taking a break—which is probably the thing we actually need—we keep going, keep trying, keep pushing, putting more and more stress on the muscle and giving it no time to heal. It’s like trying to run a marathon after a sprain, hoping the sprain will just get better on its own—in part by putting as much pressure on it as possible. Or we cram ourselves with books and classes to “unlock” some kind of mystery solution to a problem we still don’t even understand.

All of this may stem from the knight’s ego—which in this case, we must take to mean the reader’s ego. The Knight of Cups is very much like a diviner, diving into the deep end of the unknown. Water is often representative of the unknown, and the unfathomable—a word related to water by “fathom,” which is a way of measuring the depth of water. A fathom is about six feet. Water is also, of course, associated with clarity. And so the diviner dives into the unknown in order to find clarity. The problem is, we may sometimes dive into the water expecting clarity and discovering only the unknown, the unfathomable. And this is in part because of the word expect. When we expect too much, we actually get in the way of possibility. 

Think of it this way. Have you ever been reading on a question and before you drew you had a certain of idea of what cards (or anyway what kinds of cards) you’re likely to see, only to find that the exact wrong cards come up? I have. Actually, one reason I read the way I do and that I’ve written about reading the way I have is because the “wrong cards” always seemed to come up for me. I never got the cards I was expecting and that other readers seemingly would get. I can’t tell you why that happens, but it did mean I had to rethink how I read. If you look at all my work, my previous books and videos, the subtext of all of it is essentially, “How to make the ‘wrong cards’ make sense in a reading.” Now, of course I don’t think that I’m getting the wrong cards—not anymore. I now understand that any card can answer any question correctly. I need to do the work to figure out how. But the point is many folks experience this and they think something is wrong with them. 

At that point, they may give up—which is sad, but not everybody needs to do this work—or they may rush to study more of the great books (and maybe not-so-great books) on the topic, attempting to inspire and get them back on track. But like the knight in this particular spread, that’s solving the wrong problem. What’s likely the issue is that you’re too full of information (Ten of Swords). You’re too full of intellect. What you need is the thing that the knight is bringing: water, feeling, sensation. These are things you can’t get from a book. And as a writer, it pains me to say it, but you can’t learn how to read tarot from a book. You can learn how the author readers tarot from a book, but you can’t learn how you read tarot from a book. I’m not saying the books aren’t helpful. I’d like to think mine are, and I’ve for sure been inspired by others’ books, too. But these books tell you what the cards mean and how to work with them. They don’t—and can’t—telly out how to put them together in the context if your lived experience. 

I occasionally get asked when I think a reader is “reader” to “go pro” or start reading for others (usually for money). I don’t have the ability to set that standard; you have to find those answers for yourself. But when asked, I say that a reader is ready to consider themselves a “pro” (I really do hate that term) when they’re able to contextualize the cards in terms of life, the question, and each other, without having to rely on memorized interpretations. When the reader can read and interpret, rather than see and recite. Again, that’s just me, but that was the barometer I used for myself and I didn’t start taking paying clients until I felt I had that ability. That said, taking on paying clients was never an ambition of mine. I fell into it by mistake, as I have done so many other areas of my career. 

The point is, it’s not about memorizing and cramming your brian full of information (Ten of Swords); it’s about having enough knowledge to call on when you need it, but also being able to feel your way through the reading. This is a thing that makes me uncomfortable to type. I’m not a sensing reader. I don’t consider myself psychic. I don’t experience clairaudience or clairsentience. I don’t hear voices or experience the presence of “guides.” And for that reason, my first two books are really systemic—in this case I mean they’re both based on the prospect of having a system that you can use and that comes from you when you need it. But that’s really only half the story. While I’ve been particularly emphatic about the systemic approach up to this point, that’s because I feel many folks lack a decent system (I did) and also because I hear from readers a lot how they reach a point where they know they know the card meanings but have reached some kind of plateau. And all of that is true. Having a system is necessary, especially when we feel somewhat dried up. But there’s more to it than that. And the opposition of the knight and the ten reminds us of that. 

It’s difficult to explain what the other half is, what that more sensational experience is. That’s one reason why the knight can’t see it. Even the Knight of Cups, who is watery AF, has a hard time giving language to this part of being a reader. It is the part that just knows/feels when something is right. And this is a thing a lot of readers feel somewhat shy discussing, because it is so hard to define and attempting to do it often sounds silly. But this is where intuition kicks in (rather than the “intuition” we discussed before). I’ve come to think intuition is really a survival mechanism. It’s part of our fight-or-flight response. We tend to be attuned to the dangers we face in life. The example I always use is that someone who lives in the city can tell when there’s cars coming at an intersection even without looking. We can sense them, feel them. Sure, we can hear them, too. And I guess what we’re really dealing with are the senses. Water is sensational in this way; it is very concerned with the senses. We think of hearing, vision, touch, taste, smell—but there’s (wait for it!) a sixth sense (oh gawd, I went there!). That sixth sense is intuition. Knowing the thing that can’t be smelled, heard, tasted, touched, or seen. It is most similar to touch in that we feel it, but of course it’s a different kind of feeling. Right now I can feel the sensation of my fingertips on the keyboard. I tend to write laying down in bed with a pillow propped under my chest. I can feel myself pressed against the pillow, I feel the part of the mattress I’m laying on, and I can feel the air conditioner tickling my legs where they extend over the end of the bed. I can feel a cut on my thumb I got tidying the kitchen (not with a knife; I don’t need knives or broken glass to cut myself—one of my special skills). Those are all touch-related. 

There is a kind of feeling that isn’t touch-centric: when we feel it in our gut or know it in our bones. We’ve talked about that already. This is intuition. The problem is, it’s difficult to tell the difference between intuition, intrusive thoughts, and bias. This is one reason many of us find it so difficult to read for ourselves: we can’t tell what’s an intuitive hit, what’s confirmation bias, and what’s our anxiety telling us we’re doomed. I don’t use my intuition as a primary tool because I don’t trust it. I know what sounds like a strange thing for a diviner to say, but I don’t. I live with severe anxiety (treated) and sometimes depression (sometimes treated) and I have a hard time telling the difference between the imagined horrors I sense on a daily basis and the actual horrors that are likely to happen. I’m someone who is somewhat afraid of giving in to intuition because it feels both like a loss of control (something I hate) and potentially a gateway to more anxiety. I keep my intuition at bay most of the time. 

All of that said, it is part of our toolkit. I’ve experienced times where interpretations of cards arrive during a reading that I’ve never used before but that I know are right in that context. Recall earlier when I pointed out the “falsetto screaming” of the Ten of Swords. Where did this come from? I don’t know, but it popped into my head and felt incredibly appropriate at the moment. But that’s not even a very good example. I recall doing a reading for a client who had a severe vision impairment and also lived with autism. Early in the reading she mentioned wanted to learn a new language when I pointed out the centrality of the Page of Swords in the spread. Over the course of the reading, we explored what this could mean and she revealed she felt like she had a hard time getting her guardians to listen to how she was feeling. “Maybe that’s the language you need to learn,” I said, somewhat off-handedly, because it literally flew out of my mouth before I had time to consider the implication. We both paused and I grew somewhat misty-eyed. She said, “Whoa. I’m going to have to sit with that one for a while.” I said, “Me, too.” That is what I’m talking about. The whole reading was leading to that moment for that client. That is intuition. Or, rather, intuitive reading. 
 
“Intuitive” gets bandied around a lot in divination spaces. It’s a word that has come to mean anything anyone wants it to and because of that it doesn’t really mean anything. And because it doesn’t mean anything, anyone who wants to can call themselves an intuitive reader and not have anyone question what that means. That’s not necessarily a good thing. Nobody questions it because nobody wants to look like they don’t know what people are talking about. But I question it. Internally, anyway. What does it mean, you read intuitively? There isn’t a reader who doesn’t use intuition. Sad to say, what most people mean when they say they’re “intuitive readers” is that they don’t really feel like doing the work of learning and so they don’t and just read by gut reaction. 

I just began a paragraph on why I think “intuitive reading” is nonsense. All reading is intuitive. But I’m not interested in hot takes, at least many. The lessons are supposed to come from the cards. I’ll reserve my feelings about people who use “intuitive” as an excuse to not do their foundational work. This reading is reminding us (me, in particular) that we can’t only read cerebrally. But also that we need to feed the intuitive side. And here we take a journey back to the cards. The solution when we feel this dry, this burned out, this out of tune isn’t to cram our heads with more knowledge or to keep working ourselves into a frenzy; it’s to care for the intuitive side of our nature, for the intuitive side of our reading lives. This is why we need to understand what “intuition” means. We can’t develop that part of ourselves if we don’t feed it. And so the reading I offer at the end of this chapter will be focused on that: what is intuition, where do we need to care for it in our lives, and how. But more on that presently. 

We’ve given short shrift for the lonely Two of Disks (“change”). Sometimes cards in readings don’t have that much to say, and that’s partly the case with this card. The image reminds us that life keeps life-ing, even when we’re in the midst of an emo crisis. But I feel compelled to spend a little time talking about the title or keyword on this card: “change.” The obvious association with change in the sense of growth or development. What if it mean in the financial sense? Change as in pocket money. While the Thoth and other Golden Dawn systems aren’t interested in the banalities of fortune telling (something you likely know I’m very interested in), they aren’t here to scold us and the suit of coins/pentacles/disks/diamonds has always been associated with finances. Classically, it represents the merchant class and banking. It’s helpful to retain this because even though this reading is so much about feeling, the disks/coins suit reminds us that this isn’t only about what we feel. It’s also about where we put our money. 

I bring this up because I’m an emotional spender. I think these days a lot of people are. But I happen to be a big spender in particular when my sense of safety is messed with. The idea of accumulating makes me feel safe, even though it doesn’t actually have any real benefit other than thinning my bank account. Books are my weakness. Books are the realm of swords. We don’t need swords in this reading; swords have done all they can. What we need are more practical (disks/pentacles/coins) things—and to that end, not that many of them. Twos, of course, are a small number. This card reminds us to ground ourselves in the real world and to remember that when we spend all our time thinking about the magical, esoteric, mystical, whatever, that we’re losing touch with reality. And when we’re reading, we’re generally reading about real life. I can count on one hand the number of times a client has asked me to read about something that the Golden Dawn would have been interested in exploring. In fact, I’m pretty sure I can count those experience on no hands.

The clinking of pocket “change” in the two of disks reminds us of a few things: first, if we are reading professionally, we need to stay connected to the real world. Too many readers don’t. We fly off into the magic kingdom and forget to remember we’re human—and so are our clients. Lately, I’ve noticed a total lack of interest in the “real world” on my part. Going to work, dealing with the bills, anything that is “grownup” and requires me to deal with life has been getting on my nerves. And this is frustrating because I do like my job. It’s also frustrating because we can’t forget reality. While I want to float away and focus on nothing but magical concepts (right now, astrology), I can’t do that—and one reason I can’t do that is because I do have clients who live down here on earth with me and they’re going to ask me to talk about that. 

The other thing this card does is remind us of the fact that life goes on. What we’re feeling now isn’t what we’re going to feel forever. This card and its focus on the hour glass definitely underscores the temporariness of these feelings. And the two little machine wheels inside also remind us a bit of cycles. We’re not going to stay here forever, but we may be back here again—in fact, it’s likely we will be here again. Things (ahem) change. What does this have to do with the clinking of change in our pockets? There’s something tangible about money, something practical, something useful (I mean, I’m going long with this one—but stay with me) that matters. We read because we need practical, useful information. We read because we need things to make sense. We need the down-to-earth. And the down-to-earth doesn’t have to be stifling or limiting—or, well, I guess it does have to be, but it can also be exciting. Look, we live in the “real world” and at the same time, we can still find answers in cards. So the point is that even things that seem banal aren’t only that. Here we return to the idea that nothing is all one thing. If something is earthy, by nature it also must be heavenly. As above, so below. 

And so the solution to these times when we feel stuck is in part to remember reality, our humanity (earth/disks) and at the same time try to find ways to nourish our intuitive side. And so that takes us to:

A read of one’s own
This reading is, as promised, designed to help us explore where we might be needing to care for our intuition and how we might do that. 

1. The first position explores how we know we may need to care for our intuition, feed it, or otherwise give it attention. This is the sign that we’re in need of some intuitive care or development. 
2. The second position explores practical advice: how we can do this in a real, active way. 
3. The third and final position explores how we can check our progress. This is something I often find useful in advice readings. It can help to have a way of knowing whether or not we’re making progress, and if so how much.

For this reading, I’ll draw three cards per position as I usually do. The arrangement doesn’t really matter—but of course lay this out however feels right to you. This is an area where I as a spread designer fall down. I rarely care what the spread looks like from a geographical standpoint.  

A quick example: For my first three cards, how I know I need to care for my intuition, I got two of the cards from the first spread! The Ten of Swords and the Five of Cups! I love that this happened. I’m using the same deck, and I gave it a decent shuffle. But I knew all along that this lesson/chapter was really for me, and so I’m not shocked to see them here. In fact, I’m delighted. The third card was the Princess (page) of Swords (Earth of Air). I’m not really worried about aspects here because I simply have three sets of three. 

The Ten of Swords and the Five of Cups mean exactly what they meant above: when I’m feeling brain dead, burned out, uncreative, dry, thirsty, totally barren, and when all my intellectual curiosity yields no results. An interesting detail on this particular Princess of Swords is a sort of crown-like shape above that, thanks to some spiky protrusions, looks a lot like a bear trap. It is the mind trap, getting stuck in thinking, getting stuck in the cerebral, getting stuck in the intellectual, all that the expense (and dehydration) of the spiritual and emotional. And as someone who would just as well never deal with emotions, I’d just as soon never have to explore that part. 

The next set of three answers how I can care for this part of me. The cards drawn here are, The Eight of Wands (“swiftness”), The Hierophant, and the Seven of Wands (“valour”). As is typically the case for me, these aren’t the cards I expected to see. Two fire cards and my least favorite trump. Fun! But this is appropriate, because I’ve already done my number on how the “right” cards never show up for me when I read. Nothing jumps out at me as particularly appropriate or helpful for this question, so I’m just going to give up my reading career right now.

Oh, I guess I could put some work into it. Fine.

But isn’t this effort exactly the thing I’m supposed to be getting away from, tarot? (I’m being snarky.) The Eight of Wands in this deck is incredibly mercurial, with my boy’s winged sandals united by a rainbow, and a caduceus tipped with a diamond takes center stage. None of this is particularly helpful, either. Nor are any of my common associations for this card: putting your work into the world, giving things energy, doing passionate labor, that sort of thing. All of it rings hollow and false. Frustrating. The Hierophant is the king of the colonizers, the ruler of the old and outdated, the master of oppression. The Seven of Wands is a wonder of defensiveness in many decks, though this deck and the Thoth system generally title it “Valour.” I guess this means that there really isn’t an answer and I’m just the kind of person who can’t take care of my intuition. In fact, all of this fire is incredibly un-intuitive. And this is what unlocks the trio for me: do something else. Go do things you care about that aren’t related. Revisit something old (Hierophant), go work on something that you’re passionate about—something that isn’t divination. The Seven is introspective: what do you care about, this card often asks. Put your back into that (the Eight of Wands, associated with labor and effort). Maybe explore things you don’t like (the Hierophant); systems you find limiting or oppressive. Not because they’re right, but because I  “can’t” learn anything from them. 

Recall that this is the first time we’re seeing fire cards in this lesson. Our original reading had two wands, a sword, and a disk/coin. Fire makes its way here finally, and I’m a fire sun. My sun is in Leo. I’m a fairly fire-y person, even though I have an airy nature, too. (Aquarius is my ascendant.) This tells me that when I feel like I’m burned out mentally and dehydrated emotionally, fire is the solution—and a fair amount of it, as we have an eight and a seven. Go play, this seems to say, go get wild, crazy, do things you really find exciting. The fire takes us away from the swords and air and tells me not to worry about those things for the moment. If water is intuitive, fire is instinctive. It may seem like a subtle thing, but instinct isn’t quite as fluid as intuition; it’s much faster, much less thoughtful. When we act from instinct we do now and think later. Intuition often makes us stop, wonder, consider—all very flowing things. Well, I guess “stopping” isn’t fluid, but the rest of it is. Instinct, fire, gets the impulse and acts on it. Here we really follow our gut, even if that’s a less considered and trustworthy part of our system. It’s OK, though, being thoughtful isn’t working and we (well, I) have nothing left to give emotionally. So just do it. In a way, this is like being Mercury. He doesn’t care what the message is he’s charged with delivering, he just delivers it. Sometimes as a reader I can get awfully wrapped up in saying things right, being correct, being please; Mercury gets a message and hands it over. I could benefit from playing in this way. 
 
The Hierophant, even though I don’t like him, frequently indicates faith. He’s telling me that there are times when it’s OK to have faith in my gut instinct. He also introduces earthiness, Taurus, into the reading. This is good, because earth was the element that sat on the periphery in the reading that opened this lesson. It tells me that my gut instinct is (often) rooted in real life. So I can trust it more than I think I do. In essence, this row says, “don’t overthink it—just do it.”

Finally, the last three cards suggest how I can check my progress during these times. Here we find The Fool, The Seven of Swords(!) (“futility”), and the Two of Wands (“dominion”).  The Seven of Swords, the introspective naval-gazing thinker! How apt, then, that in this deck, the seven is styled “futility.” If you (meaning me, in this case) find yourself (again, meaning me) thinking a lot? Remember it’s futile. It ain’t getting you where you want to be. Rather, approach the world with zero expectations (Fool) and let the fire take (Two of Wands). The association of the Two of Wands with “dominion” isn’t super helpful here. It rarely is. The suit of wants is the most colonial, most inspired (I think) by Britain’s legacy of empire. I was just browsing though a book on my TBR, T. Susie Chang’s 36 Secrets: A Decanic Journey through the Minor Arcana of the Tarot, and she explores the ways that the Two, Three, and Four of Wands take a journey from colonization (two), the setting up of a colonial government (three), and then the self-celebration of that new government (four). We can add to that the conservatism of four, which is reminds us the way colonialism sticks around even when it’s supposedly long gone (look, for example, at Haiti for the long-term impacts of colonialism). Dominion. It is almost religious in its fervor. Religion, particularly Abrahamic ones, love dominion. It was the brutal alliance of “Christianity” and Empire that led to much of the world’s ills. There were conquerers before then, but nobody managed to weaponize faith and the human fear of death like Christianity did. This ties me back to the Hierophant in the previous set of three. But because this is an advice reading, I need to look at these two cards with kinder eyes. Surely the advice is not to act like a colonizer bent on dominion. 

Rather, let’s take the fervent quality of the Two of Wands (and the Hierophant from the previous row) and take that part, but leave the colonizing out. Twos attract, probably none more than the Two of Wands/Fire. Like, as the old cliche goes, moths to a flame, eh? With my sun in Leo, I’m frequently drawn to flame. Because my sun is conjunct (so close to each other as to be in nearly or exactly the same degree of a sign) Venus, one would say that I find fire beautiful and that beauty lights me up. That’s a nice thought, but I’m rather messy and far from beautiful myself (at least in a Venusian way)—but an interesting anecdote nonetheless. What I think this means is that the Venusian passion is married to the sun’s potency, and so there’s an almost evangelical nature at play. And that feels very Two of Wands (even though that card is actually related to Aries in Mars). I take this to mean, because we’re reading about how I know I’m doing a good job caring for my intuition, is that I feel insanely passionate about what I’m doing. With The Fool, I’m to notice when I feel free of expectations, with the seven I’m to recognize when I’m falling into the habit of intellectual naval-gazing, and with the Two of Wands, I’m to notice when I feel incredibly—evangelically—attracted to the work (reading cards). I guess you could say this would give me dominion over reading, but I don’t think of reading that way. I’m a part of the puzzle, a cog in the machine, not the soul power at play. But I can for sure have dominion over my overthinking (the seven). Note how The Fool and the Two of Wands flank the seven. They’re limiting, containing, the seven’s potential to start getting in the way and making things too “thinky.” And so I know I’m doing a good job when I’m free of expectations, limit my overthinking, and when I’m feeling really passionate and drawn to my work. And that’s not a bad barometer at all!

LESSON ONE
A three-card spread of: Ten of Cups (3), Seven of Cups (1), Temperance (2)
(The number following the card titles is the order in which they were drawn and laid out.) Deck used: The Starlight Illuminated Tarot, a repainting of the Waite-Smith deck by Carol Herzer

 All divination is an act of wonder and faith, staring into the potential much the way that the Seven of Cups stares at a fantastical array of cups holding all kinds of options. In laying out the cards, we enact the famous image—wondering what our fate will be, much like the silhouetted figure, or what chance we should take. Which cup should we take? Which unlocks the future? Are any even real? Like the hero presented with the choice of three keys to three doors, one assuring total happiness, two assuring certain death, we wonder for just a moment if this really is it. Is this the time our luck has finally run out? Is the image of the skull peeking through the reflections of the cup containing a laurel wreath an indication that getting what we most desire will equal our death? Or is it more a reminder that nothing is one thing? Is it a reminder that the road to victory is fraught with risk? And what of the shrouded figure rising from their cup like Christ or another other of the dead-and-risen deities from the tomb? Is one of the options available to us a truly divine transubstantiation? 

We (tarot readers) like the suit of cups. It’s romantic, it’s sexy, it’s fluid. We live in a moment where fluidity may be essential. And as the dominant element in this spread, our first reading/lesson, we must consider the major water vibe we’ve got going here. Not only do we have the seven—a lucky number!—but also the ten, which is the fullness of the suit. It’s as much water as you can have at any one time in any one card. And we can’t deny that Temperance also gives water vibes, too, so we’re experiencing a waterlogged reading—in a good way. In fact, this reading reminds us that fluidity is a fundamental need in divination. We have to (I can’t believe I’m about to say this) “go with the flow” (to quote Margo Channing in All About Eve: “I detest cheap sentiment”). But it is true. Reading well is an exercises in fluidity. 
 
I was tempted to begin this paragraph saying, “The act of laying out cards to make sense of the world is an objectively crazy thing to do.” But the idea of objectivity is false. Humans aren’t capable of it. Frequently, what we consider objectivity is really the ability to view information through a biased lens that we have collectively “agreed” is objective, but that just favors a certain point of view. Today, that means anything stripped of magic, spirituality, human emotion, and even of humanity. It is the lens of the “scientist,” but not the idealized scientist many of us lefties associate with that gig. No, it is the “scientist” who operates from a bias that what meets their expectations of real is real . . . and anything else is bullshit. It is a fundamentalist point of view, and in its way colonial. The secular totality of science is really an overcorrection thanks to the outsized influence of Christianity and its mythos. It rarely has to do with the scientific method and everything to do with personal distaste for the spiritual. The overcorrection is understandable, but fundamentalism is always fundamentalism, even when it’s happening on the political left—or, anyway, tangential to it. Science was (and in parts of the world, still is) part of the spiritual; science is how we make sense of the numinous, and in this way it is our modern myth-making. But to suggest that science and the spiritual are separate is to operate from a modern colonial attitude that centers post-humanistic European cosmology over, well, everything else.

 Science knows that our spirit, our emotions (water) impacts our health. But the individualist focus of modern secular thought stops at the end of our nose. Sure, if we’re stressed we’re going to have poorer health—but the solutions to that are simply to not be stressed anymore. Fixed. Right? Except not right, because that’s not how life works (unless you’re privileged enough to be able to, say, quit a toxic job without suffering financially). Nothing is as simple at pop-science makes it seem, and here I guess I should say I’m focusing mostly on the celebrity scientist who casually and wryly shits all over the spiritual while recognizing the possibility of quantum mechanics and string theory. It’s possible (maybe probable?) that in other parts of space, another writer could be writing sentences very much like this right now—but it’s impossible that a deck of cards might be able to reflect our reality or that the position of the celestial bodies at birth might help us understand who we are. 

For a real scientist, anything is possible until proven unlikely. For the pop-scientist, nothing is possible unless it meets his (for it is always a cis het man) barometer of possibility.  And that is fully unscientific. 
    
This isn’t an anti-science screed. I like science. Real science. Science that understands the scientific method, which is an experiment-based approach to figuring out why things work as they do. Science is that is open-minded and doesn’t pull down its pants and show its whole ass when it encounters something it doesn’t understand or doesn’t like. Science needn’t be divorced from the spiritual, and for most of human history it wasn’t. It’s only today that we are so fundamentally opposed to considering the inter-being of living on this planet, living in this universe, being part of this solar system, and whatever else exists out there. If string theory is possible, if there could be a version of “me” out there somewhere in another galaxy living out a similar life, that sure sounds a lot like magic to me. And science would do well operating more from a place of awe and curiosity rather than bias and fundamentalism. 

Looking for wisdom in a pack of cards is no more nuts than taking an experimental new medication, especially given the litany of side-effects we’re forced to endure during the commercial breaks of every TV show. (Would we even have TV anymore without the pharmaceutical industry? Again, I’m not anti-meds; I benefit from some. But dear god with the fucking ads. I know more about moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis than I ever imaged I would for someone who doesn’t [yet] have it.) Divination at least won’t kill you or put you at risk of lymphoma. And humanity has gone to the randomizing of banal objects to understand itself throughout our time on earth. Divination is one of the oldest art forms there is, and despite attempts from the christo-colonial church and the Celebrity Science Industrial Complex(TM) to shame and bully people out of it, people still reach for it. 
 
Life is fluid. It is not a straight line, as much as it is easiest to think in those terms. As we grow on our life journeys, we have big leaps forward, small steps forward, big leaps backward, and stumbles. We cannot get where we’re going by being stuck. And I say this as someone who is astrologically very fixed. I don’t like change. I’m fiery and airy. Water freaks me out in many ways. Being fluid scares me. And yet: it is the fluid that survives. It is the tree that bends in the wind that makes it through the storm. Life needs fluidity. Like water, when life stands still too long it can become riddled with toxins. We must evolve, we must trickle through lives many channels and never stop. It is the actual moving, the flowing, that reminds us we’re living. There’s nothing wrong with pauses, with rests, much like in music, but we are not static and do not benefit from longterm stasis. Life is the same. 

This watery reading, this first lesson on tarot, reminds us that we cannot take the pedantic bias of the not-very-scientific scientist as our role model (or any other fundie). We have to make fluidity essential. When we become static as readers we give readings that reflect stasis. When we get so married to what we are “sure” works correctly, we can find ourselves making a crutch out of those things. We become closed. We become stuck. The water dries up, leaving a muddy mess into which we sink like we’re a faithful horse in some traumatizing “family” sci-fi movie from the eighties (I see you, Never Ending Story). And as the mud dries, we not only get stuck there, but the weight of the clay increases as it hardens. This can make us suffocate. (Check out YouTube videos of people putting themselves in wet cement if you don’t believe me.)

The Ten of Cups reminds us that we must be fully fluid in our work, which, in this case, I take to mean open and adaptable. We respond in real time and when we face an obstacle, we can find a new path. This is especially important for folks at the beginning of their tarot journeys, where we can feel sometimes as if there is only one way. There isn’t. Learning is a series of successes and failures on the path to finding your way. But also it is when a new reader hits a snag during the reading process, when they see a card and none of their memorized meanings make sense, that fluidity is most necessary and least frequently called upon. Panic causes that, and the inevitable downward spiral. I know it well. In fact, when I read for myself I often still do this. I’m just too lazy to read for myself. I’m too lazy to be fluid. I’m (usually) delighted to be fluid while reading for others. There are times when it feels a little stiffer, a little less satin, but that’s just life. Most of the time, it’s a gorgeous, flowing dance of interpretation. 

Panic and downward spiraling defy fluidity. Feelings of imposter syndrome and worthlessness emerge from the depths of panic and the downward spiral, and this causes our fight-flight-or-freeze response to activate. Our bodies literally flood with chemicals designed to help us survive this imminent threat and this limits the things we’re capable of doing in that moment. The triple-F response focuses us on one goal: get out of this situation. That isn’t a great place to operate from when attempting to read for anyone. And while it is difficult to stop the dawning of the triple-F, it isn’t required that we stay there. In fact, a return to fluidity, a return to the cards before us, can liberate us from the grasp of those protective but stultifying chemicals. 

And the arrival of the term “chemical” draws our attention to Temperance, the card we’ve not yet considered. Pamela Colman Smith’s, with one foot on land and one in water, reminds us that divination is a two-part work: a connection to the ephemeral (water) and the information stored there and the solid (earth, the foot on the ground). When we’re reading we’re pulling information from the ephemeral and grounding it for mortal consumption. It’s the giving of language to a reading that does this. And in many ways language contains the reading in the way that a riverbed contains a river or tidal estuary contains at least a part of an ocean. The container gives us shape and helps us make sense of what we’re seeing. 

In New Orleans, Louisiana, a long bridge—a causeway—spans the length of Lake Pontchartrain. At the time I’m writing this, it holds the Guiness World Record for longest continuous span over water. It is so long that you drive over for about eight miles without being able to see land. People get so disoriented, they sometimes have to stop and turn around, or get someone else to drive them across. The vastness of the ocean and the gentle curve of the bridge (really the curve of the Earth) makes it feel as though there’s nothing in front of you. Those who have driven it say it feels like you’re driving to the end of the world. And while many people make their way over the causeway daily with no issue, many freak the fuck out (as I would). 

The openness of water, and the endlessness of the ocean (or, in this case, a lake) can be too difficult for the human mind to make sense of. Trying to imagine the vastness of water can be much like imagining what seventy-five billion dollars looks like. We have no real concept of it and if we were to find ourselves in the middle of it we might think there’s nothing but money. Water needs a container. When we are in the position of having no container, we can feel something akin to what those of us with bridge phobia (gephyrophobia) feel when faced with a ride across an endless expanse and the feeling of nothing solid to rest on—as well as nowhere solid to stop, if necessary. Water without something to rein it in will go everywhere and drown in its own intensity. 

Language is one of the ways in which we give divination shape. While there are no swords cards (air) in the reading, water can’t be without air; it is made up in part of oxygen. And so wherever there is water, there is the implication of at least oxygen. The problem with air is that’s not very good at holding things. That’s not what it’s “there” for. Language, too, isn’t a solid foundation and while it can give shape it also presents the opportunity for misunderstanding. Words are fluid. Language, like water, changes shape and flows where its easiest to go. And this is one reason conflict arises. It lives in the gap between the idea expressed by a speaker (or writer) and the ability of the listener to make the same or similar sense of those words that the speaker did. It is imprecise. 

We can see how closely water (emotion) and air (words) are in the reactions we experience to what other people say. Not only that, we can see how closely the two are related when we consider the way the words we speak to ourselves impact how we feel. If, like me, you experience a tendency toward negative self talk and generalized anxiety, you know that you’re in a constant dialogue with yourself in which you obsess over the meanest language, the cruelest ideas. I mean, they may not be objectively mean or cruel, but the impact on the self is. (On the other hand, if you’re a narcissist who tells yourself wonderful stories about you, this will be a foreign and possibly impossible to imagine. Also, I hate you because I often wish I could do that.) Language is very watery. It’s not good enough. It’s not strong enough. It’s a shocking thing for a writer to say, but it’s because I know language so well that I recognize its weakness. Particularly English, which is a major mess—in part because it is a language of colonialism. It is stolen from around the world, much like the contents of the British Museum. 

No, language isn’t enough, but it is the thing we use to conduct divination. At least in part. And then this spread, this watery spread, reflects the struggles of the diviner: how can we use our limited abilities to make sense of the messages contained in the cards (or bones or flight patterns of birds or hunting entrails) and relate it to others in a way that is clear, logical, and (ideally) actionable? It is here that water answers the question again: tenacity. Water is not put off by obstacles and frequently pays no attention to them. I think of the opening lines of the (problematic and yet moving—thank you, dialectics) Memoirs of a Geisha, in which the narrator recalls being told that her wateriness means she will always find a new path. It is the relentlessness of water, its tenacity (which connects it to fire) that serves as our advisor here: yes, we are stuck with an imprecise medium, and yet it is effective especially when we remain tenacious in our effort to make it work, to make it make sense. 

Water is so tenacious that, when faced with solid rock, it will silkily wear away at that rock until a deep bed is formed—and it will continue to wear away at that solidity until there’s nothing left beneath it, or until the sources of that water are dammed up—trapping it, forcing it into stillness and toxicity. 

Water doesn’t quit. 

Neither do diviners. Because we recognize that we have a responsibility to get the answer—or at least as close to the answer as we can. We keep trying, we keep carving away at the obstacles, and keep finding new paths, we keep moving. Or we should. Because when the diviner, like water, gets stagnate, only poison grows. Cholera spreads through stagnant water. For the diviner, stagnancy leaves us stunted, stuck, and unable to see past the end of our nose. It makes us conservative, egotistical, and even terrified of being found out or contradicted. A reader who can’t fathom an alternative interpretation, who can’t see the value in an ever-deepening relationship to their tools, is a reader giving stuck, formulaic readings that lack the fluidity we’ve already learned is so valuable. 

This is the influence on water of air in its most rigid: when the air is cold and freezes the water, stopping anything from growing. Yes, nothing rots when frozen, but water can only freeze when its standing still. There may be plenty of time for the rot to seep in before the ice takes hold. Ice can’t preserve what is already bad. And because it’s numbing, we don’t know we’re there. We just know there’s a vague sense of discomfort and a deadening of the senses. Even a deadening of the joy that once used to come from practicing divination. 

Happily, ice can melt. But it takes heat, fire. We don’t have that in this reading, and unlike air, there is no implied availability of fire in water. This is why they’re so often thought of as ill-dignified or adversarial. They’re not, or not anymore than any other element is with any other—context always dictates relationship—but they don’t “contain” each other in the way that water contains air. We need to bring in fire, and we do that through passion. And in this reading, the absence of earth and fire tells us something: we have to work (earth) hard (fire) to bring them in. 

See, the wateriness of this reading makes sense. The diviner is watery by nature, even if we’re stronger in other elements generally. Fluid people are drawn to divination because it is so watery. It is the intuition and the spirituality—both watery qualities—that draws us. And we get to bathe in the luxury of all the potential spiritual paths we can take with it. It is an area in life where we are not only encouraged but required to deep dive into the illogical, the impossible to quantify, the silky, the liquid, the imprecise, the sensational. Think back to the Oracle at Delphi, in which the seeker received inscrutable-yet-poetic revelations that had to be made sense of. Think of the very nature of divining. So much if it is driven by instinct. And intuition is in some ways another manifestation of instinct. Intuition is another aspect of our survival mechanism. We don’t know how it works, but we know we have it when it kicks in. In classes I always say that those of us city mice who spent our lives waiting at busy intersections can tell when cars are coming without looking. Likewise, country mice can sense the presence of predators who may put their stock in danger. Our intuition is tuned to our circumstances, and the “safer” we feel in life (I.e., the more protected the world is designed to keep us), the less we need it. People who aren’t drawn to divination may, in fact, doubt it because they doubt that there is actual danger in the world. Bill Nye may have no need to consider the reality of intuitive sciences because he’s been relatively safe most of his life. I don’t know him, so I don’t know. But I do know that the more marginalized society makes us, the more in tune with intuition we must be. It is how we navigate the dangers of being on the margin—where there are rarely protections. 

I’d wager one reason watery/intuitive types are so drawn to spirituality and divination is because it is a chance to use our skills in a productive rather than reactive way. It’s a chance to indulge in our natural abilities in a place that is safe because it is equally watery. Walk into a room of divination-minded folks, and you will probably feel relatively safe (insecurities aside) because the vibe is very fluid, very easy, very sensitive in the sense of thoughtful. (You’ll also likely find a lot of people who tend to drift off or away in the middle of a conversation when someone or something else catches their fleeting attention—and this is another example of the air innate in water.) Divination is a safe space because you have to be marginal, you are required to exhibit fluidity. It asks us to bask in our slinky, satin spirits. When you are someone who didn’t know you needed tarot in your life and you discover it, it’s like slipping off the restrictive corset of logic and feeling your body fills out to its natural shape—and then slipping on a silk robe, flowing and somehow both cooling and warming simultaneously (silk has that effect). We never want to talk that robe off!

But: When we make divination into a partnering act—reading for someone else, including ourselves—we do need to have at least one foot in something real. That’s because the concerns we’re reading about are real. Frequently, they’re also not particularly watery, at least in the sense of adaptability and sensitivity. It is the gentle lamb lost in the big city. It needs more than just its gentleness to survive making its way through Times Square on New Year’s Eve (terrifying). It may not naturally vibrate on that level, but if it wants to get out alive in needs to find a way of exhibiting that. 

So, diviners must force ourselves to take advantage of fire and earth. We spoke of earth already when we noted Temperance’s foot on dry land. We must, like the angel, keep one foot on solid ground so that we don’t drown. But we also need something to keep us warm. Water and air are generally pretty cool, pretty chill (we might even say aloof). I associate air with winter and water with spring. This is because we notice air most when it’s cold—only the cold can bite at us in that way. When the air is too hot, it’s uncomfortable but it lacks bite; it’s duller, heavier, more like being bludgeoned with a wand or baton. When it’s cold, the air hurts. It cuts. And it can even burn. And the cold makes water freeze. When it warms up—as fire enters the picture—water melts and can flow again. I associate fire/wands with summer. It is more common to put fire and water against each other, what astrologers would call “opposition” because they’re adversarial. But good astrologers have told me that oppositions aren’t necessarily adversarial; they’re two forces that need to be integrated.

Fire and water are opposites in that one can cancel the other out. Fire can evaporate water; water can put out fire. But like all polarities, they aren’t separate entities. They’re actually the same thing. Because fire and water are two ends of the same pole, they’re both the other. Water is fire; fire is water. That’s an insane thing to say, right? But it’s true. Because you can’t have one thing without the other. The presence of water implies the presence of not-water. Elementally, not-water is fire. Likewise, the presence of fire indicates not-fire. Elementally, not-fire is water. The North and South Poles are two ends of the same line; they’re not two separate lines. They’re two points on a line, but if either one of them didn’t exist, the other one would also not exist. At the same time, because one exists, the other has to exist. Polarity isn’t binary; it is a mutual unity. A sort of oneness. 

So much of spirituality in humanity has obsessed about the duality of “male” and “female.” The binary nature of being, and the often-dueling forces that make up everything. This, alas, cannot be confined to christo-colonial thinking; it’s in much of the world’s cultures. The god/goddess dynamic. And this duality, this binary, is becoming increasingly less relevant in life. The present discussion of gender is an example and the reality of the non-binary person—the person who is neither “man” or “woman” and somehow “both” and somehow “neither.” (My liberal use of curly quotes indicates the present lack of clear language to express this.) Happily, this is also a concept that has existed spiritually, too, but it certainly hasn’t taken center stage in the way the binary has. I hope that’s changing. Because, if we apply the somewhat nebulous logic I used in regards to the fire/water polarity, then we have to recognize that nobody is a man or a woman, because in order to be one you also have to be the other. Male/female are a polarity, not a binary. And while we think in terms of masc and femme for genderfluid people, we only know what those terms mean because we understand them in contrast to the other—which means that if one ceases to be, so does the other. 

If we were to take all the masc and femme qualities that supposedly make people up and created a Venn diagram for each person on this planet, the things that fall into the non-binary category would exponentially outweigh the binary. Most of us most of the time present in a neutral—a non-binary—state. What we could call our “resting state.” When we are in our natural or resting state, we are not posing as anything, and as such we’re in essence without masculinity or femininity because we aren’t actively comparing ourselves to some other (gendered) thing. Nor is anyone else comparing us. We just are. We’re being. And when we’re being, the masculinity or femininity of any person ceases to exist, because we’re not being contextualized. A butch person doesn’t watch TV differently from a femme person. A femme person doesn’t nap differently from a butch person. They may watch different things, but that has nothing to with their position on the pole of masc/femme.

The obsession with binaries I think is a heterosexual habit. In spiritual spaces, I think the obsession with the divine masculine and the divine feminine is in some ways an intentional misreading of what the esoteric principals were actually attempting to say. Now, I’m no esotericist. But having been in these spaces long enough, and having read enough of Robert M. Place’s books, I can see that the goal of alchemy, say, is the integration of the self. Place (and others, but I read it in Place first) uses the metaphor of a prince and princess joining together to become something larger. In the current editions of this Alchemical Tarot,  he was a Lovers card with the prince and princess engaged penile/vaginal penetrative sex. It was, he says, changed for the original mass market edition to a PG version to make it more palatable to the consumer, at least in the mind of the publisher. But of course that bowdlerizing of the original image (now happily restored) misses the point. The intercourse depicted on the card isn’t a sex act; it is an integration of two things that were always meant to be one. It’s not a man in a woman fucking; it’s an entity becoming itself whole self. 

Any of these polarities, including the lingam and yoni (seen on the front of the Waite-Smith Chariot) or yin-yang are discussed in hetero-dominant societies as two parts of the same whole. No. They are one part of one whole—or two points on the same line. They cannot be two parts of a whole, because they cannot be separated. If they are, they immediately cease to be. It isn’t lingam and yoni it’s lingamyoni; it’s not yin and yang, it’s yinyang (which, annoyingly, is how a lot of Americans say it, adding a “g” to “ying”). Ken Burns said that Abraham Lincoln thought of the US as a “one-thing.” Let’s set aside the politics of the US for a moment, and take that “one-thing” concept because it’s contextually useful. Think of it this way: The annoyingly lost cause-y historian Shelby Foote says that, prior to the American Civil War, people said, “The United States are . . .” (as in “The United States are a colonial powerhouse”). The verb “are” in this case is the correct one to use when referring to a collective. (“These grapes are tasty.”) After the war, the grammar changed and people said “The United States is . . .” (As in “The United States is a colonial powerhouse.”) That doesn’t technically make sense. (It’s not “correct” to say “These grapes is tasty.”) 

Allow me to pause for a second and re-state something I’ve said many times: English grammar is a classist and racist and nationalist tool used to gate-keep anyone who doesn’t talk like a moneyed white academic out of the best-paying jobs. When I say “it’s not correct,” I mean by the rules of this grammar, not by the moral code of anything. But, with that caveat, Foote’s example is a good one for our purposes right now because he’s saying that the US became a one-thing after that war. He’s wrong, of course; that’s not at all what happened. But it’s a good way of thinking about the male-female polarity. There’s no opposition, it’s a one-thing. Most of life is non-binary, including gender. 

This is all to say that because this is a watery reading, fire has to be implied because by this way of thinking one can’t exist without the other. This is remembering that we’re thinking about fire and water as metaphors of experience, not in terms of actual elements in life. The wateriness of this reading implies the necessity of fire, but because fire exists only because its “opposite” is so strongly represented, it means we frequently have to work harder to bring the fire out. Further, it’s also more work to keep the fire going because water wants to put it out and stay watery. 

When fire and water work together, they create steam—which can power so many things. This is another way in which fire and water aren’t adversarial but complimentary. In fact, thinking in terms of astrological oppositions, steam is in many ways the perfect integration of fire and water into power. Rather than cancelling each other out, they create something powerful together. Steam is a great example of that one-thing, or that lingamyoni/yinyang concept, because it is the direct result of the integration of two seemingly opposing forces. The reality of steam proves the unity of fire and water, or more metaphorically, that everything is its own other. 

Because fire is only implied in this reading, it means that there’s a level of tenacity that diviners are going to have to find to make their practice sustainable. Earlier we saw that water has tenacity in its ability to find new paths and even forge new ones when necessary—carving a whole riverbed or canyon out of rock. That said, though, water prefers the easy path. It only starts carving out a new path if there’s absolutely no other way, and then it can take generations for it to even make a dent. Fire, on the other hand, is fast-acting and can clear a swath for itself in a matter of hours. It’s not that fire is active and water is passive; that’s more binary nonsense. Action is passive and vice-versa, because one doesn’t exist without the other. It’s that fire is insistent where water is oblique. That’s a weird analogy, right? Those two words aren’t related. But they’re not meant to be. Water is oblique because it doesn’t care what path it takes; it’ll go off to the side just as easily as it’ll go straight ahead. It doesn’t need a straight route or a direct path. (In fact, it may prefer it. Water is associated with the moon, which is the ruler of Cancer; cancer is the crab, who moves side-to-side.) Fire is hungry and demands food and attention. It doesn’t need a straight path, but it’s not concerned with a path. It can go wherever it wants, generally, as long as there’s food. It demands food, it demands attention. It, like the sun, is very Leonine. It roars and expects everything to get out of its way. In this way, we can see that fire and water aren’t oppositional because they have fundamentally different goals. Fire eats, water flows. 

As watery diviners, we lure fire into our work by giving it food. 

(It’s worth pointing out that I just grabbed the Thoth deck to check out how Lady Frieda Harris painted Temperance (Art, in that deck) and discovered that the card is associated with Sagittarius, which is a fire sign—so there’s another link to fire. If you take the posture as earth and Sagittarius as fire, then all four suits are implied here already.)

Problem is, what each person’s fire wants to eat is different. There will be clues, though, because when our fire “meets” food its interested, we’re going to have a reaction. That reaction is frequently curiosity. When our fire needs feeding, it sends signals to us. In my case, my fire currently wants to “eat” astrology. Because I work with tarot, I’ve always had a tangential connection to that topic, but I don’t really find the tarot/astrology correspondences make much sense so I’ve never really dedicated much time to it. (For example, I fundamentally believe that The Moon card should correspond to, you know, the actual moon.) Lately, it’s all I want to read about. Not in tarot terms, but it’s having an impact on my tarot reading because I can’t escape the connections.

Sometimes the food our fire thinks we want turns out not to hit the spot. The Golden Dawn’s systems, while somewhat interesting, seemed worth studying but I quickly found it did not nourish my fire. You may feel the exact opposite, and that’s likely since I think most readers (tarot readers, anyway) do. When that happens, we’d do well to stop worrying so much about what we thought we wanted and seek out something else. Don’t waste time, you don’t want your fire to get too hungry. It won’t go out; it can’t, at least as long as there’s water. But it can get ravenous, and when that happens we frequently wind up spending a lot of money on things we never wind up paying any attention to. 

As diviners, we must feed ourselves new things—new methods, new concepts, new ideas, new systems, new tools, new perspectives—in order to keep our fire burning. While learning is typically under the governance of swords, it’s worth noting that fire and air are as inseparable as air and water. Fire isn’t made of air, but it cannot burn without it. Air is one of the fuels fire needs. The best way to put out fire is to suffocate it. Knowledge, particularly of things related to divination but that aren’t repeating what we already know, is a great fuel for fire and it’s why so many people who start out with tarot wind up deep-diving into so many different tangential topics.

I’ve told the story of my big hiatus from tarot in all my other books, so I won’t tell it again here. But the important thing is, I stopped being curious. I thought I knew it all. I let my water put my fire out because I didn’t feed my fire. There have been other other times, though, where I fed my fire too much and it flamed out. We call this burnout. I’ve written a lot about this, too, but I bring it up here to point out that—though this is a watery reading—it demonstrates that, even when a reading is biased toward one of the elements, the remaining elements are still necessary. The fact of each element implies the fact of the others. 

Crowley titled this card Art and Lady Frieda Harris (the motor of that deck and the reason it exists) painted an alchemical act. This reminds us that divination is both an art and a science, and in fact highlights for us again the reality that these seemingly opposing concepts aren’t opposing at all. They are a polarity, two sides of the same coin, both part of a one-thing. Is there a science to divination? Yes. It is our technique, the foundation we stand on when we read. It doesn’t matter what that foundation is, but we must have one. There must be something to hold us up, particularly when the more watery/intuitive aspects of our personality don’t feel like playing. (This only really matters if we’re reading for money, where we have to read when we’re asked to, not just when we feel like it—but if you’ve ever read for yourself and found it falling flat, this is where a stronger foundation can help . . . and, actually, a little more art.) The art is using that science, that foundation, to make meaning. The two things work together, just like water and fire, and are at their best when viewed not as separate entities but a one-thing. Art is science; science is art. 

When reading, I rarely view the majors as behaving differently from the minors. Unless there’s a big sexy surfeit of majors, I just take their metaphor into the fold and they function with the same importance as the minors. In this case, Temperance is doing a lot of things: it’s standing in for the whole deck (implying air, fire, and earth, and if course being a major), and so it’s also reminding us that being a diviner means having a “foot” in every part of life. It is a reminder that, though we are working in a “sensational” art (in this case, take sensation to mean the feeling of sensations—the experience of sensing), we have to be able to talk about everything. Divination isn’t a one-thing, either. 

If you know my work, you know I’m a very “secular” reader; my brand is kind of staked on that, as are my two books. For most folks, that secularism may seem impossible. How can divination—a word literally connected to divinity—not have a spiritual core? But when I found tarot, I was done with spirituality. It had done a great deal of harm to me, and so I had to go on a journey of secularizing divination. That journey may sound nuts to some people, but it was what I needed to get good at this.

This is another way in which we need to think about the wateriness of this reading and the reality of being a diviner. By stripping all spirituality from my divination, I had to come up with a way of reading that made sense in the day-to-day. I couldn’t rely on some ephemeral concept of Temperance meaning “the great work.” I had to understand it in the way we get around life: drinking too much, political movements, intemperance. I had, in many ways, to get literal. I couldn’t care about whether that card was associated with Sagittarius nor where it showed up on the (appropriated) Tree of Life. I had to understand what it meant for someone who has having problems at work. 

That became and remains central to my reading style. 

Temperance serving such heavy duty energy in this particular reading reminds us that we’re often seeing integration depicted on the cards. Frieda Harris’s Art card demonstrates that a bit better than the Waite-Smith, but in both the mixing of the cups is the integration of the parts into the one—the integration of opposing forces, the one-thingness of what we usually think of as binaries. Temperance itself is integration. 

This in a way takes (finally) us right back to the beginning. The fully overwhelming (ten and seven of cups) feeling and the tonnage of possibility. How do we choose? We don’t. We integrate. Temperance takes the Ten and Seven of Cups (the ten, in this case, intensifying the seven) and integrates all those possibilities into a one-thing. In this case, that one-thing is divination. It is a reading. The act of a tarot reading is the reader laying out lots of possibilities—each card in the deck and each combination suggests many, many possibilities. The reader integrates them into the message, one foot on land, one on water; all parts (fire, water, air, and earth) working together (integrated) into one message. That message, too, is a one-thing born of seemingly disparate parts. The answer isn’t separate from the cards; it is the cards, or at least the integration of them, making their separateness imaginary. 

When we read, we integrate ourselves, the divine, and the client; we integrate the cards, the question, and the correspondences; we integrate the logical and intuitive mind; we integrate the banal with the spiritual and the below with the above. And it is fluidity that allows us to do that, because without it we will get stuck, static, and still. Fluidity facilitates integration. Things that are tense, stolid—these things can’t blend, they refuse to. Their ego demands their separateness. And as such they become less-than and they’re more at risk. But fluid things aren’t bound in that way and so they’re free to integrate, in the way that steams meet and form rivers, and the way the angel in the Waite-Smith Temperance card creates their impossible flow. 

A read of one’s own
Here’s a spread inspired by the lessons of this chapter:

1. Shuffle the deck and cut in two even stacks (alternatively, deal out two face-down stacks of cards, going back and forth until the deck is split). 
2. Flip over the top two cards. These two elements are really one part of you that are living apart and want integration.
3. Take up the rest of the two stacks and combine them back together. Shuffle and cut.
4. Draw from three to seven cards and place them face-up between the two you originally drew. This line represents a fluid path toward integration.
5. Read the cards in between backwards, forwards, in mirrored pairs, whatever makes sense. Also consider the relationship of the cards to the original two and what that adds to the reading.

A quick example: I drew the Page of Wands and the Seven of Wands from the two stacks (I just cut the deck; I didn’t deal out two stacks). For the sake of this example, I’m delighted to see two cards of the same element! This is a reminder that any one-thing is also a two-thing, because everything is also its opposite. Here, I see that I have two fiery parts of myself. I read this as the fact that I need to integrate my ambitions for success (page) with the fact that I get defensive when coming up against even the tamest obstacles (seven). 

Now, I draw three cards to bridge them. (Normally, I’d prefer doing up to seven but I’m aiming for something quick.) I’m legitimately cracking up. I got: The King of Wands, the Four of Wands, and the Knight of Wands. You cannot make this shit up.  In this deck (an indie version of the Waite-Smith with much better coloring), the knight and the king both face left, which is where the page sits (who looks at them) and away from the right (where the seven sits, looking at us). The knight runs into the four. This tells me that I need to take that defensive fight (the seven and knight) and stabilize it (four) big time. I need to channel it into the real work, the mature work of creation (king). It’s also worth noting that the movement from knight to four to king tells me that I need to “grow up.” That’s not necessarily helpful advice, but it’s also not irrelevant because this reading is clearly telling on my ego and the nastier sides of my Leo sun. It also tells me that I have to take my temper and use it (knight/four) for something productive (four) that befits my status (king). 

I could go on, but you get the drift. 

​Try it! I can’t tell you how much this reading tickled me. Especially given the massive meltdown I had yesterday morning about the book proposal I sent out for another project.