People read Tarot for a variety of reasons. Some people use it predictively, some people use it introspectively, and so on. The uses range from the purely psychological, to decision-making, to bona fide divination. However, a common thread among all Tarot readers is that we read Tarot because it works. Whatever we’re trying to use […]
Read more "Sometimes You’re Wrong"I’ve been thinking a lot lately of two friends I had in college. To protect the innocent, we’ll call them Dave and Irina. They started dating each other fairly soon after the start of freshman year, and were together for long enough that they became firmly established as the power couple on our (admittedly small) […]
Read more "Prejudice, Preconceptions, and the Four of Cups"I’ve been away from the blog for a while, and I apologize for that. My father died unexpectedly, and I had to fly out to the West Coast to deal with that. I will likely write about the grieving process at some point here on the blog, but for now, I prefer to keep it […]
Read more "The Four of Swords and the Nine of Wands: Rest Imposes Itself"One of the great frustrations of Tarot is that the Swords get short shrift. Tarot decks contain unpleasant cards—they have to, in order to accurately represent the wide range of human experiences and emotions. A deck that has good vibes only is not actually terribly useful for divination, because it can never give you warning […]
Read more "In Defense of the Swords"With Pride month coming up, I’ve been thinking a lot about family in all its forms: Chosen family, biological family, spiritual family, and so on. Pride is, historically, an interesting time for me; my High Priestess had to drag me kicking and screaming to my first Pride, because I was still processing a great deal […]
Read more "Family in the Tens of the Minor Arcana"There are plenty of ways to draw connections between the cards of the Major Arcana. You can do it through numerology, through astrology, through the septenaries or visual cues in their symbolism. One of the simplest ways to find the connections between the cards, though, is simply to fold the sequence of the Major Arcana […]
Read more "Pairing the Major Arcana, Forward and Backward"Numerologically, we connect the Major Arcana to each other by their numerical values. You take the number associated with a particular card (e.g. Justice is 11), add together its digits and reduce to a value between 1 and 9 (in this case, 1+1=2). Although I, personally, have a pet theory that we should be using […]
Read more "The High Priestess, Justice, and Judgment: Awakenings and Initiations"When I first started reading Tarot, I felt like I had to be abstract and metaphorical in every interpretation of every card–as if it were somehow cheating for me to fall back on more straightforward, literal interpretations. In this video, I talk about how my reading style changed when I started to allow for literalism […]
Read more "Video: Getting Literal With Tarot"I made some bad decisions recently. I got in a fight and said some things I had no right to say. I spoke out of anger and spite, and even though I was right in that moment I was an ugly version of myself that I’m not proud to have been. I like to think […]
Read more "The Three of Pentacles and the Three of Wands, or, The People We Choose To Be"Holy hell, it’s been eleven months. Eleven. Months. Fuck. I’m extraordinarily lucky. No one in my immediate circle has died from COVID-19. I’m safe, healthy, and gainfully employed. I have housemates, so I haven’t been totally without social interaction for the past eleven months. My parents both lost their jobs, but my mother pretty quickly […]
Read more "Tarot Cards for the Pandemic"