Where myth ends and fact begins is in the mid-fifteenth century, with the Visconti-Sforza family, who ruled Milan at the time. Now known as the Visconti tarot, it was most likely commissioned by an artist named Bonifacio Bembo as a wedding gift and intended as—no shit—a card game. In fact, the first written record of the tarot as a possibly divinatory and esoteric object came over three hundred freaking years later by this French dude and Freemason named Antoine Court de Gébelin. The tarot card game, referred to as Tarrochi in Italy, made its way to France under the name les Tarots. Court de Gébelin saw the cards and discerned them as visual distillations of the secrets of the Egyptian God Thoth.
From there, the cards were taken and interpreted by several occultists and esoteric societies over the next two centuries. Most notably, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which spawned fantastic weirdos like Aleister Crowley, the creator of the Thoth Tarot Deck, and Arthur Edward Waite, who penned the most widely used and recognized modern tarot deck, published in London in 1909. The first deck to depict each card as a scene, or a moment in a story, the Rider Waite extended the tarot’s reach beyond these boys-club secret societies and birthed the contemporary tarot interpretation.
Personally, I do not at all believe that the tarot’s first manifestation was as a deck of playing cards for some Milanese noble family. It seems much more likely that some gnarled Egyptian mystic rocking fierce malachite eye shadow went into trance and woke up with this set of images, channeled directly from the cosmos. But does it matter? What an amazing thing that the tarot has been claimed across cultures, creeds and continents. That it is so universally resonant that it can be plausibly connected to so many different origins. That it has endured and stayed relevant for at least six and a half centuries.
The survival of the tarot and its perpetuation into the twenty-first century speaks to its ability to touch the very core of the human experience. Everything has changed—technology, society, transportation, social norms, infrastructure, architecture—and yet this set of images, by resonating with the timeless aspects of existence, has persevered. When using the tarot, you are tapping into a collective history, a cumulative usage. Even without the mention of magic or spirituality (though that will be mentioned here), it is hard to deny that you are touching upon something larger than yourself when working with the cards.
Most people I speak to about the work I do seem to understand that on some level, even the ones who claim that tarot is bullshit (more on those people later), because one of the first things I hear when I say I’m a tarot reader is, “Well, I don’t want to know if anything bad is going to happen to me. Or my family or my boyfriend or dog or anyone I know.” Which is fair. I wouldn’t want to know any of that, either.
To be perfectly honest, something bad probably is going to happen to you or someone or something you care about at some point. That is the law of probability, not magic. There are ways to divine such unwelcome information, but the tarot, used with the intention of healing, doesn’t predict future disaster. The tarot has a number of dark and difficult cards (I call them “shitty cards” for the sake of word economy, although they are among my favorites in the deck), the most universally dreaded one being Death. In all of the readings I’ve given, the Death card represented a literal death twice, and both times it was to the relief, not terror, of my client.
The large degree of skepticism with which I first met the tarot was quelled by the unflinching honesty of the cards. The tarot does not shy away from the jagged edges of existence. It is not some fluffy angel deck where every card is a positive affirmation, because that ain’t life, fam. When you’re totally on your game, you’ve worked your ass off and you’re standing in a period of ease and enjoyment, the cards will reflect that. If you’re offtrack, working a job that is murdering your soul or married to the wrong person, the cards will elucidate that, as well. If the cards could speak as a collective, I would imagine they would say something like, “We care about your life more than we care about your feelings.” They are an energetic chiropractic session, and sometimes it hurts. But there is something distinctly satisfying about cracking things back into alignment. They will call you on your shit and maybe piss you off from time to time. They will not, however, predict your death. But you’re probably still freaking out about this so there is a whole Shitty Cards section to further break this down (here).
The tarot is not meant for solely cognitive interpretation. The central fact of the tarot’s existence is its imagery, and intellectual discernment alone will lead to freak-outs at the sight of the Death card because of our societally conditioned, pre-conceived notions of dying. The visuals are designed to surpass cognition and evoke a response. Pay attention to what feelings an image stirs in you, and try to ingest the cards visually and viscerally. It’s an exercise that trains the mind to trust the process of our bodies, our guts, our hearts and our intuition. Eventually, the mind will accept when its faculties aren’t needed, and it can rest. Regardless of what deck you use—and there are literally thousands to choose from—the images are its heart and soul.
Remember this: The cards will make themselves known to you. Remaining mysterious does not serve them or you. They want to be known.
Hundreds upon hundreds of readings have convinced me that the tarot can provide a person with clarity, insight and direction in absolutely any aspect of their life. Whether you’re debating renewing the lease on your apartment or feeling unsure about your life’s purpose. Big or small, mundane or metaphysical, the tarot can be used as an effective and powerful way of gathering information and laying out possible maps.
The tarot is made up of two parts—the Major and Minor Arcana. Arcana is defined as secrets or mysteries, and so it would follow that the Major Arcana contain the major mysteries of existence and the Minor Arcana, the minor ones.
The Major Arcana
The Major Arcana are the big dog, hot shit, major players of the tarot. Starting with The Fool, card zero, and ending in The World, card twenty-one, the Major Arcana capture the landmarks and lessons that a person experiences throughout a lifetime. They speak to the bigger, overarching energies that underpin the specific, day-to-day happenings. Hindsight allows us to look at a period of our life and extract the moral of a particular story, but we cannot always see why the fuck we need to go through this super shitty, difficult thing while it’s happening. The Major Arcana reveal moments when we are standing at a pivotal point or there is a larger energy at play, hidden in the granular details.
The breakup that eviscerated you. Recovering from an addiction. Your mother dying. A spiritual awakening wherein you realized you needed to leave your job and move to another country. These are possible manifestations of the Major Arcana.
In addition to being the heaviest hitting, the Major Arcana also comprise the most iconic, famous and infamous cards in the deck. The Lovers, The Hermit, Death, The Devil and The Sun are among the more prominently featured and well known.
There is a natural progression to the Major Arcana’s journey; a narrative unfolds as you make your way from The Fool toward The World. The story is fundamentally familiar because you are experiencing it right now. As you get to know the cards, you’ll find yourself connecting your experiences to the archetypes. This is an empowering practice. It takes away the victim mentality that makes us ask, “Why is this happening to me,” and replaces it with an understanding that all experiences, light and dark, are necessary for our development and are worthy of honoring.
The Minor Arcana
The Minor Arcana, always a bridesmaid, never a bride, serve to support and further clarify the Major Arcana’s messages. If I pull six cards for a client and only one is Major Arcana, I will read the five Minor cards under the umbrella of the one Major. For example, if the Major Arcana card pulled is The Hanged Man, a card of surrender and detachment, the surrounding cards will point to areas of your life where you are being asked to let go.
Making up the remaining fifty-six cards of a ta
rot deck, the Minor Arcana represent situations, circumstances and people in our lives. Broken out in format almost exactly like a deck of playing cards, the Minor Arcana are set into four suits—Ace through Ten—and the court cards. In The Way of the Tarot, Alejandro Jodorowsky compares the four suits of the tarot to the four legs of a table upon which the tabletop of the Major Arcana rests.
Though the Minor Arcana do not inherently hold the same gravity as their Major counterparts, they are still formidable players. First of all, there are more of them, just as worldly details of life can feel more pressing than the cosmic soul lessons of it, no matter how woke you are. Say you have found your calling in the world to open an animal sanctuary (a shift that could be represented by Judgment), you still have a ton of Minor Arcana shit to do to get you there. Filing for non-profit status, hiring the right people, finding the perfect piece of land within your price range and probably spending some time plagued by the “Who the fuck am I?” question and taking measures to heal that in order to move forward—these are measures that the Minor cards will delineate.
Your shitty boss, creaky apartment you’re dying to move out of, unreliable bank account and annoying roommate could all be represented by the Minor Arcana. And we all know that an annoying roommate can be all-consuming and life-ruining, even if it doesn’t securely plug into your soul’s mission in this universe. It could, however, be a force that pushes you into a new apartment, where one of your roommates is the future CFO of your animal sanctuary.
WHAT THE FUCK IS MAGIC?
It is impossible to talk about the tarot and how it works without talking about magic, so let’s just go ahead and get that out of the way right now.
This is when people are like, “Okay, but do you actually believe in magic?” Yes. I literally, completely believe in magic. I’m not talking about fantastical magic, though I am not ruling that out. Are there monks in a cave in Asia levitating their monk friends and LOLing? Maybe. Are there witch doctors in the swamps of the South resurrecting snakes? I wouldn’t rule it out. But this isn’t the magic that I’m talking about. The experiences of magic most detectable to us are signs and synchronicities served up by the universe. It is available to us always, but it is a matter of tweaking our perceptions to be capable of identifying when magic crosses our path. This process of expanding your awareness is a natural consequence of learning the tarot.
Occultists, magicians, healers and lightworkers wiser and more experienced than I have endeavored to answer this question, to articulate the largely intangible energy of magic in a way that others may understand. But magic cannot be understood unless it is experienced—it is trying to explain the hues of autumn to the colorblind. However, most people have come into contact with magic in their lives in some capacity, so to wrap our heads around it we need only identify moments it’s been present.
At my mother’s burial, a white moth landed on my black dress and stayed there for the duration of the service. My six year old brain made the connection that a white moth represented a visitation from my mother’s spirit. Long after I shunned the idea of magic and entered a very dark decade and a half, I could not shake the association I made between her and white moths, and they appeared everywhere. The morning of my Bat Mitzvah, the first time I consumed a hallucinogen, as I was getting arrested in the parking lot of my high school, as I sat on my roof ten years after her death and read her suicide note for the first time, my high school and college graduations. Most of these appearances were met with frustration or anger, especially where she came as a reminder I was travelling down her same dangerous road of destruction and addiction. Reflecting on those instances, the anger was connected to belief. A reluctant one, one I had no interest in, but I never doubted that the moments the moth appeared, she was there as well.
Replace the word magic with whatever you want—spirit, universal intelligence, miracles, coincidence, luck, god. Replace it with the feeling that you get when you’re thinking about someone and your song comes on the radio, or the sensation that occurs when you walk into at empty room and feel certain you’re not alone. When you make it to the top of the mountain and look out into the distance and are reminded of how small and big you are at the same time. When you meet a perfect stranger and can’t shake the feeling you know them. When you felt something would happen before it did. Replace this with those annoying clichés: “there are no mistakes” or “everything happens for a reason,” which even the most magic-averse somehow get on board with. But that’s magic, too.
In a more literal sense, magic is the manipulation of energies. While telekinesis or clairvoyance are extreme versions of this, there are simpler forms as well. It is a common belief in magic that energy follows intention. This is why mindful practices like building altars, meditation, journaling and rituals are integral to a magical life. The conscious cultivation of intention is a crucial beginning to establishing a relationship with the tarot.
It is magic that makes it possible to sit down with a complete stranger and pull cards that accurately and powerfully mirror their reality. There is a collective purpose created between the tarot, client and reader that is energetically absorbed and expressed through the cards.
One of the most commonly asked questions I get about the tarot is this: So how does it work? After much thought, I now simply answer by saying: magic.
I named my store Everyday Magic because a) it’s a great name, isn’t it? and b) it succinctly imparts my thoughts on the matter. Magic is not a theory. It is not just a striking sunset, or a synchronistic moment, or a perfect day. Magic is not a rarefied phenomenon nor does it serve us to treat it as such. There is magic in the tragedy, the shitty hair days, the excruciating pain, the arbitrary. There’s magic in the hustle, in the success and the failure. Allow yourself to see magic in every square inch and your life changes. The light and goodness are as equally sacred as the dark and the muck. To live a magical life is not synonymous with living a flawless life, or even a righteous one. Rather, it is accepting, embracing and surrendering to all of it. To the beautiful mess of being a human with a body and also a soul.
Now, I truly believe everything is magic. I see it in my work, my friendships and my pain. It is magic because I don’t believe, in all of its light and dark, that any of it is a mistake. Science knows that we have a beating heart, but what makes it beat? Why is it beating? Magic is leaning into the gorgeous mystery of it all.
Initially, I was reluctant to put words to the physical experience of magic because it feels impossible to do so without cheapening it is some way. But that is true of everything written about in this book. The words are simply a skeleton. Your experience, the amazing moments you will come to through the tarot, the identification of magic, a more aligned life, a distinct sense of ease are the muscle and blood and vital organs. The tarot, in all its magic, is just an object. We animate it with the intention we bring to the cards.
Alan Chapman writes in his book Advanced Magick for Beginners, “There are no laws unless you create them, there are no secrets unless you pretend. If magick is limited only by your imagination, just how beautiful will you make your magick, how ecstatic?”
I’ve grown accustomed to clients reaching out and saying, “You will never believe what happened,” followed by a story of how magic worked in their life.
I assure you, I will believe it. It’s not that I won’t be awed by it or grateful for the reminder or delighted by the anecdote. But I now know magic to be real in the same way I know other, very uncomplicated facts.
There is no need for blind faith. Come to magic with your doubt, your skepticism, your fear, your preconceived notions. But come.
HOW THE FUCK DO I CHOOSE A DECK?
You may have picked up this book because you either bought or received a deck and don’t know WTF to do with it. If you feel a connection to the deck you have, start there. If you don’t have one, do not resonate with its imagery, or feel unsure about how to choose, let’s hop to it. There are an overwhelming numbe
r of tarot decks available, with new ones being published all of the time. A simple Internet search will bring you to lists of thousands of decks with pictures and descriptions.
Start simple and find a deck that makes some kind of intuitive sense to you. The Rider-Waite tarot has survived the test of time and continues to be the most popular and widely used deck despite being over a century old. This is an excellent deck for beginners because of the narrative-based imagery and the plethora of websites and guidebooks corresponding to its imagery. There are more resources available to learn from if you choose a more established deck, but it is not essential. I learned from a modern indie deck whose images vary dramatically from its more traditional counterparts. Go for what you are drawn to, whether it be animals and nature, anime, Native American culture, Hinduism, Goddesses, steampunk, cooking, cats—if you’re into it, there’s probably a tarot deck for it.
If possible, find a shop near you that sells tarot cards and get your ass over there. Spend time with the decks, review the images, feel the weight of the paper. Finding your deck should feel something like Harry in Mr. Ollivander’s wand shop when he finds his wand and red and gold sparks shoot out of the tip. I’m only mildly exaggerating. Finding a deck that resonates with you both etherically and aesthetically is a delicate alchemy.
There are indie decks that, because they are self-published, are not widely available and can’t be found in most new age stores. In which case, the World Wide Web will have to do. These decks are often made by a single artist, however, and their makers can be easily reached for questions. The Fountain Tarot, Lumina Tarot, Spirit Speak Tarot, Starchild Tarot, Small Spells Tarot and Wooden Tarot are all stunning, resonant indie decks self-published by badass magic makers.
WTF Is Tarot Page 2