Full Moon: On tarot

Good morning, friends and less-known entities. Coming back to all of you after last week's post for paid subscribers, I have some thoughts that I couldn't possibly put behind a paywall because they're too fundamental to what I practice. Fundamental both in establishing principles and in simply expounding on something I care about very much. As the full moon lights up the night tonight, the unclear is made clear, the shadows are no longer mysterious but rather illuminated — yet by light that doesn't shine directly from the sun. By day we see plainly, and by night we see... slantways.

The full moon is considered a potent time for undertaking many magical things in many traditions. In my case it's important to one of my strongest callings as a witch: divination. And in order to talk about divination, my core example will consist of tarot; although I've recently begun learning other divination forms and am interested in pursuing even more, tarot is the form I've dedicated myself to the most closely over the past several years. I practice it once a month when the moon is full, and since beginning that habit I've skipped rarely. The only other divination type that rivals tarot for my existing affections is astrology, and in fact I regard astrology as being almost separate from divination altogether, as I don't really use it to examine "situations" (which I'll get into whenever an astrology post inevitably happens).

I think it's also apt to do a post about tarot up front because, like astrology, tarot is extremely visible these days — a major token of what I toy with calling the New Witchery. New Witchery is, cynically speaking, a phenomenon branded to no one company but still commercialized: an intersection of larger companies discovering a market for a "darker" update of #content that was packaged 10-30 years ago as New Age, and of independent creatives finding distribution for either that same material or its more authentic counterpart. This phenomenon comes with art styles, fonts, and motifs that like it or not, I and other goths and ritualists can easily recognize and these days are rarely exempt from consuming; as a crucial distinction from the New Age age, Mother Goddess Moon Womb Magic merchandise and books are still available, but "there's no Devil in the craft" is out — the Devil is welcome everywhere. You can get underpants reading "Satan is my Daddy" for $15 from multiple online retailers.

I digress, but my point is that while tarot, since it was invented, has never not been popular among idle divination hobbyists and super-serious inheritors of familial magical traditions and every sort of ritualist in between, in every part of the world where tarot's taken a foothold — tarot is now big in the manner of a celebrity or corporate franchise. Shopping algorithmically for tarot cards may find you a deck, but it might just was easily find you artwork or home décor or clothing with tarot imagery on it. The actual variety of tarot decks that people have designed, independently or not, staggers me, whether I've opened Etsy or walked into a magic shop. People who may have never picked up a tarot card in their life might still be able to name the suits or some of the Major Arcana, because unless either what you're allowed to consume is governed by a highly conservative religion, or you just don't have much exposure to Western bourgeois market trends (especially those that are, for better or worse, still usually intended for binary cis women) — then chances are that tarot stuff just inherently shows up on your periphery.

And hell, although I said I'm describing all of this cynically, at the end of the day I'm an avid participant in some corners of New Witchery. Without New Witchery, I wouldn't be able to dress the way I do, nor would I have likely started this newsletter. And without New Witchery, I doubt I would be doing tarot once a month, and I doubt I would have started a full-blown deck collection; I'm at 13 decks so far, my owner knows they make a perfect holiday or birthday present, and at this point other people just give me decks as well. The thing about New Witchery's success, and the place of popular divination within that success, is that although you often have to navigate through that star-rated gloss and profit-driven pandering, the phenomenon is feeding overlapping subcultures of people hungry for authentic animism, authentic paganism, the authentic occult. When you get enough of those people together in the same spaces, filter out the brandedness and you'll find a lot of real information is being shared, real practices being taught, real ritualists are being born or remade.

It's within this context that I proudly practice divination, and tarot in particular, so without further ado, let's go deeper.

The case for divination: regarding lies, damned lies, and statistics

At this point, it's fittingly impossible to accurately attribute the quote, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Let's just call it an expression. My starting point for understanding divination lies here (pun entirely intended) and with a quote 100% attributable to Ursula K. Le Guin's introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness:

The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.

Mother Ursula was speaking about her experience as a writer, but with divination, the same words apply. There are things that science, or more generally empirical reasoning, can tell us, and then there are all the things that humans are capable of understanding better without any direct explanation.

Now, I always shy away from saying, "Science can't explain everything," because all too often that's a pillar of ideologies that actually don't see any value in science at all, or that take certain real scientific findings at face value but then see fit to toss out others and replace them with completely non-empirical information while claiming empirical certainty. In the worst case scenarios these choices can come from deeply troubling sociopolitical motivations. As I've established before in previous posts, I think that despite various misuses of science in the past, largely it's good to practice science and pay attention to what science shows us, even if we ought to be more judicious about how we apply it. I'm very skeptical that any argument in the world could convince me to take any stance other than the pro-science side in topics like evolution, the shape of planet Earth, the value of vaccines, the origin of ancient constructed landmarks, and whether the right person's hand touching or manipulating the right part of your body will cure an ailment that isn't in that body part.[1]

If I personally say that science can't explain everything, I mean that in psychological modalities — in getting our minds to intuit things and act according to what gives us the most meaningful existences — there is often no way to break through to our intuition without using a tool beyond science. That tool may be art, or meditation, or many other things. Including, yes, divination.

So, I can't say I use divination to do things that are better determined by examining hard facts. I also don't think it's useful to practice divination in order to forecast a predetermined future; the future is always changing based on the present, entropy is always ahead of us, and we can't really live accountable, responsible lives if we use fate to excuse our past actions. Besides, as Mother Ursula also said in the same book as before, to some extent the real point of divination is to draw the line between truths and mysteries: "To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them."

However... however.

When divination is practiced wisely and safely, I've come to regard it as an excellent tool for knowing myself and for forcing myself to acknowledge and answer the questions I have simply avoided answering. Divination is a psychological inventory. It's akin to taking psychoactive drugs in order to "open the doors of perception" and see the world more clearly. Whatever form of divination you choose, it gives your brain options for making sense of situations that you don't have plain, direct language to describe.

I see all of this as the real reason why delving into divination can be risky. Not because it gives someone false power, but because it's very powerful as a way of confirming biases and giving you exactly what you want to see. Responsible divination should, in my opinion, be married to responsible mystery work, acknowledging that sometimes what you divine should be unpleasant or uncomfortable. Otherwise you're not being honest with yourself. If you use the lies of divination to only lie to yourself more than you already do, you're not going to get anywhere, at least nowhere good. An even worse mistake is to practice divination for other people and tell them only what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. The worst of all, of course, is to practice divination for others and tell them what you want them to hear. To manipulate.

If there is any sort of "evil magic" in the world, it's shit like that. But in many ways, a master manipulator using divination to dictate other people's behaviors and futures to them... they're no different from a predatory therapist. Predatory therapists do not make the practice of therapy any less useful overall. Likewise, there's a reason why every human society on the entire planet has, at some point or another, placed great stock in (spi)ritual figures who perform divination (sometimes as part of broader practices, and sometimes not).

I embrace divination as an animist birthright, and as a natural parallel communication paradigm alongside direct language, where even in that case the map is not the territory, the signifier is not the signified. All symbolic communications, all representative ones, even all indexical ones (like just pointing to a thing), are stand-ins for true objects in themselves. We can only talk in falsehoods. BDSM is all roleplay, except when it becomes reality. Drag shows, where the point is to dress up, help people figure out their authentic selves. Professional wrestling is scripted, compared to the arbitrary outcomes of other sports, but humans can derive just as much transformative meaning from this bespandexed fiction, and prognostication is rife for both the scripted and unscripted. Don't let anyone tell you that the reason not to practice divination is that it's not real. It's potently, freakishly, beautifully, horribly real, and the trick to using it properly is to tell the right lies for the right reasons.

A brief history of playing and reading cards, and why reading them "works"

One great part about the lies of divination specifically concerns the colorfully illustrated lies of tarot. It's extremely common for new practitioners, and frankly even some well-established ones, to operate under the assumption that tarot comes out of some kind of ancient esoteric tradition or at least that the cards were designed with magical intentions. This is quite inaccurate! Tarot decks come from tarocchi, playing cards of varying deck sizes used for games in Europe from the mid-1400s onward. So tarot is very old, but only insofar as decks of this kind existing that long. It took several hundred years before anyone (that we know of) started using tarocchi for divination.

In fact, even to this day you can still find tarocchi in use, they're just not very popular in anglophone cultures. I met someone recently who had just gone on a trip to northern Italy — the heartland of tarocchi — and found individuals playing tarocchini (tarocchi games) at an Alpine inn. This person didn't actually know what the cards were, they just said it was "an unusual game," but they showed a photo of the cards and I was the one who pieced it all together. Anyway, as you may be aware if you already know about tarocchi or the history of tarot in general, these cards hold common gameplay ancestry with modern "French-suited" 52-card playing decks and their respective games like poker, bridge, blackjack, hearts, and so on. While 52-card decks strip out the Major Arcana (the fancy 22 typically Roman-enumerated cards with big archetypal images like Death or The Lovers) and reduce the suited Minor Arcana cards to have only a Knight (Jack/Knave), Queen, and King (no Page), the suits are analogues of tarocchi/tarot suits. The mapping I've generally found is that the French suits of clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades = the tarot suits of pentacles/coins, swords, cups, and wands, with some variation based on elemental associations, which I'll come back to later.

In addition to reading tarot, one thing that's receiving a bit of a renaissance lately is cartomancy: despite the name, not the reading of cards in general, but specifically the reading of 52-card French-suited decks. This may suit you better than tarot if you find it easier to work with just the Minor Arcana, or if you find illustrations more confusing to interpret than just suits and numbers. Conversely, there's a rising trend toward oracle decks, which are basically the opposite: unsuited illustration-driven cards that sometimes mimic the heavy-duty Major Arcana but often use archetypes and images that don't feature in any traditional tarot and have been invented by the deck's creator. And between these two trends, there are also people constantly inventing "traditional-ish" tarot decks that feature most of the core accoutrements but change the names of certain cards or suits to better suit the deck's overall theme or the way that the creator thinks tarot best works.

Over all of this arches the influence of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. This deck is still commonly call just the Rider-Waite deck, referring to the publisher (Rider) and the mysticist designer (Waite). Many people including myself now prefer to add the name Smith at the end because Pamela Colman Smith, the actual illustrator, should receive proper credit, and it's been a typical act of chauvinism in the esoteric community to ignore a woman[2]'s significant contributions, especially considering how Smith was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn just like Waite was. In any case, if you don't think you've seen this deck before, I assure that if you've encountered any tarot imagery in your life, you almost certainly have seeen at least one RWS card. They look like this:

For tarot newcomers or outsiders, I can't overemphasize the influence of this deck. Besides the fact that lots of people still choose this one over others, the positions of the figures on the cards have been reused by thousands of other decks, likewise the exact objects and what everyone's wearing and so forth. The mimicry of the signifiers is paralleled by mimicry of the signified: many if not most tarot readers base their interpretations off of symbolic frameworks originating or widely-popularized with the RWS deck.

Whatever a tarot reader chooses to use, though, reading any sort of deck will work in principle because of interpreting a symbolic language. What goes for me here almost certainly goes for other people: the longer you personally read cards, the more you develop your own understanding of them, and this is vitally important vs. just relying on someone else's understanding.

My language for tarot

I'm not too keen on or versed in cartomancy or oracle decks, and am pretty much a tarot deck traditionalist, but I still have several major deviations from the Rider-Waite-Smith influenced system.

The four elements

I'm not sure how many other people suffer as I do on this front, but I can almost never find a deck whose interpretive guide associates what I would consider the "correct" elements with the four suits. For traditional tarot, the four classical elements link with the four suits as follows:

• Wands — Fire
• Cups — Water
• Swords — Air
• Pentacles/Coins — Earth

This means that "fiery" qualities and concepts (like passion, initiative, willpower) are associated with the Wands suit, "watery" qualities and concepts (like intuition, creativity, emotion) go with Cups, "airy" intellect and ideals go with Swords, and "earthy" finances and resources go with Coins.

If that works for someone, fantastic. But it doesn't work for me. This is because I cut my teeth early on enough with Wicca and Wicca-derived paganisms that for me it's impossible to associate elements with symbolic tools in any pattern besides the below:

• Wand/Rod — Air
• Cup/Chalice — Water
• Sword/Blade — Fire (as this is what weds with the chalice in the Great Rite)
• Coin/Dish — Earth

So basically, for me the traditional tarot elements have Air and Fire mixed up. Therefore if I'm interpreting from some deck's guidebook, I have to read Sword card descriptions for wherever I've drawn a Wand, and vice versa. It makes Minor Arcana interpretation slightly laborious, and in fact...

Minor Arcana, major headaches

I sympathize with people who use oracle decks, or who just read from the Major Arcana, because the Minor Arcana can stymie me in many ways beyond the elements problem.

• The card designs are often not immediately transparent as to whether what they're representing.
• Some layouts are misleading about whether the card is inverted or not.
• Depending on what interpretive guidance is offered for a given deck, there are quite frankly too many Minor Arcana cards. It's a lot to keep in one's head without the right amount of handholding (and sometimes, too much handholding makes it even more confusing).

It's a wonderful irony that although the Minor Arcana are often expected to represent very specific people, things, and circumstances instead of the grandiose concepts of the Major Arcana, in my own experience the Minor Arcana offer vaguer information. Doubly so when they're defined in an ultra-specific way. It becomes a matter of grasping at straws for how to interpret a Minor Arcana card in a spread whose other results seem to have literally nothing to do with this one interloper.

I don't enjoy reading cards that way. I'd like to be confident enough in my own interpretation of the Minor Arcana that I don't have to rely on someone else's recommendations in the first place, but until I reach that point I prefer decks where the suggested interpretations of the Minor Arcana are actually open-ended enough that they play more seamlessly with the Major Arcana. At the moment, my favorite deck to actually use (instead of just admire) is the Del Toro Deck, not because I love the movies of Guillermo del Toro (though I do) but because it has the best Minor Arcana assistance of any deck in my collection.

Inversion

I'm always torn about how to interpret inversion — that is, when a card is turned over such that its illustration appears upside-down.

Some people/guides say that you should interpret inverted cards as suggesting the exact opposite of what their upright version means. Some say that inverted cards kind of mean the same thing as their upright version, only with the negative aspects emphasized. Some say that if reading inverted cards is too difficult, just treat them as upright.

I mostly favor trying to interpret inversions as the opposite of uprights, but sometimes such an opposite is pretty hard to quantify or accept — the inherently disastrous (Burning) Tower, when inverted, becomes the best thing to ever happen to you? I don't think so. On the other hand, emphasizing the negative for every inversion is a great way to get some overly depressing readings, repeatedly. And I do feel obliged to treat inverted cards as different from upright, because the incongruity of their upside-down appearance is just too potent for me to personally ignore.

Designing a custom deck

With all of the above in mind, ultimately I need to design my own deck, not only to address the above concerns but because if the point of tarot is to intuit things, I often find the designs of certain cards in certain decks not particularly intuitive (not just with the Minor Arcana but even with the Major), so as an artist I'd rather draw images that show me what I feel like all the cards ought to mean.

So far, I haven't drawn anything out, but I've at least written down a scheme for how each card ought to look, as well as how it should be interpreted. Since spending multiple years designing, writing, inking, and illustrating my household's grimoire/Book of Shadows/whatever you'd like to call that (more on that some other week), I'm giving myself a break for a while from any extremely involving art projects, but I'll get back to this eventually. In the meantime, I make do with the more-relatively-useful decks that I've got.

Spreads, queries, querents... and superstitions

Over time, my tarot practice has led me to not just forming opinions or doubts about the cards themselves, but also about what to do with them in the first place.

For one thing, I'm choosy about spreads; I suspect most card readers are, so I should say that my particular flavor of choosiness involves my stance on divination in general. Since I'm not looking for definitive answers on what's going to happen, my spreads never give simple outcomes, only potential outcomes, e.g. outcomes to aim for or avoid, or cards that force me to acknowledge the outcomes I'm most preoccupied with. I don't play a set of three cards that I read as past, present, and future. I don't do a daily card draw and expect that to inform my day like a kind of horoscope. (As my earlier statement about astrology might suggest, I don't do actual horoscopes either.) My primary spread is one I designed myself with some of the card positions corellating to the positions in the classic Celtic Cross spread, but I allow for two outcome cards, not one, suggesting an automatic branching path. I've designed a couple other spreads that I haven't tried nearly as often, but operate under similar principles.

One other thing in common for these spread designs and their implementation is how I handle cards in the "query" position — the card(s) symbolizing what you have a question about. While I always put at least one card in this position, I actually just do not ask questions before laying the cards out. I think tarot is more automatically rewarding if you read the cards to have them show you what's really on your mind, as opposed to contorting their meanings into showing you what you think should be on your mind. This especially applies with interpreting query-positioned cards themselves. Why ask a question like, "Am I going to stop being poor?" when the card that gets played for you might, very confusingly, suggest you have an abundance of material wealth? Of course, card interpretation often relies on a willingness to see through riddles, so I wouldn't disagree with someone claiming you could interpret such an incongruous card as meaning that your query card shows how you're despairing of ever attaining material wealth. But I find it's easier to make such interpretations if I'm not constraining myself with the language of a question. When the full moon reigns, I just get my cards out and read them and see what they have to say.

A related quirk of mine as a reader is that so far I've only ever read tarot for myself, never for someone else. I don't want to be constantly interrupting myself to consult a guide book as I interpret the cards for someone else. Interestingly, a couple years ago I found out some people believe you should only ever read tarot for someone else, not for yourself; the logic is that if you read for yourself, you bring too many of your own preconceived ideas to the literal table. Well, naturally. But if you see that as a bad thing, I think such reasoning applies to people who genuinely believe (or want to believe) that their cards are telling them something completely external to the reader's own psychology. Since I don't work that way, I think I'm probably the best possible interpreter of my own tarot readings, and it should take extra skill to do it for someone else. Maybe I'll offer readings to others one day — I already have an idle habit of doing others' natal charts — but it's not really on my radar.

As for other taboos or similar "rules" that other people have about tarot, I deviate in some respects and overlap in others. In the same context that I found out some people think you should only read tarot for other people, I also found out some people think you should only practice tarot with a deck you were gifted. I definitely don't think this is the case, but I take gift decks more seriously than ones I idly purchase, and at least the del Toro deck referenced above was a gift, as are several of my other favorites to date. A curious coincience, at least. Meanwhile, there are superstitions about storing decks in silk — which I largely don't follow, but I do think it's important to protect decks from the elements, and it feels nice to read them on top of a fancy cloth intead of an ordinary flat surface, so I do use the cloth that came with my copy of the Hieronymous Bosch Tarot. And I don't know what anyone else does with ritual requirements for shuffling, cutting, pulling, laying, or turning cards; but in my own case I shuffle 12 times (for the 12 zodiac signs and months), then I pull and lay cards face-down with my left hand, and after laying them all I flip the cards over with my right hand.

What tarot has done for me, so far

Since I began regular monthly tarot, I wouldn't say it's been therapeutic in the same manner as actual therapy. That's why I go to a therapist. But just as you often can't solve your own challenges by relying completely on your own perspective, you also can't solve them by relying completely on someone else's. I may not find doing tarot for myself to be directly healing, but it's very centering, focusing, and meditative.

Sometimes it holds up things I'm afraid of and provides necessary structure for thinking about them without catastrophizing. The ambiguity of the outcome reminds me that nothing is certain and that it's okay for nothing to be certain. Sometimes tarot reminds me of good things that I've forgotten about or don't give myself enough credit for accomplishing. Sometimes tarot helps me feel hopeful without having something specific to cling to. Often, tarot gives me a proverbial reality check: although I don't go into a reading with a specific question, I assume that my eyes and mind are going to latch on to certain potential meanings in the cards, and then I'm smacked with a very different situation that I haven't been letting myself think about but should. Especially situations that don't really merit a trained therapist's help but that do bear proper and intensive thought.

Most of all, monthly tarot is a time to let my feelings and impulses just tell a story about themselves. I'm a lot better at not swallowing my feelings back than I used to be, but my upbringing (and both sincerely and sarcastically speaking, my Capricorn moon) makes this a challenge. It's always good to give myself routine reminders that it's okay to have emotions, in fact more than okay — valuable, important. Those emotions may not feel pleasant, but I have to acknowledge their existence. Those emotions may not have completely fair origins or effects on other people, but I can't possibly address their sources or impacts if I'm still stuck believing those emotions aren't even what I'm feeling. So I lay out the cards, and read them, and tell myself that whatever I see, whatever I interpret, whatever I feel, I can take or leave it when the process is done and I put the cards away, but here in the moment it's all right to just exist inside myself and note what my body-mind is dwelling on.

This function of tarot, and I suspect of overall divination, forms another stone in the foundation of this newsletter. I'm writing Salt for the Eclipse to lay out things I've learned about helping to heal my own hypervigilance and anxiety. I'm also writing to lay out what I think may heal humanity's social crises and the planet's collapsing ecosystems. In such contexts, I don't think I or anyone else will get very far without spending time cultivating intuition and respecting our own psychologies. Tarot or other divination may not count among the tools you need for that process, but for me they are.

[1] Slight caveat here: when I was very young, probably early teens, I did briefly get into Reiki as my mother brought me repeatedly to a Reiki practitioner, I think in an attempt to address my mental health issues. I would say that a little bit more than mere placebo was in effect for this experience; so much about stress and trauma is literally embodied that to receive firm, warm touch, even not in a massage context, can be very soothing to me, and ritualizing it doubly so. However, even though I received a Level 1 attunement in the course of my Reiki years, I never pursued Reiki any further after that stage — I think my parents' divorce interfered with visits — and if you asked me point blank whether Reiki works as it's described by practitioners to work, I would say, "Not really."[3]

[2] I do not say "a woman of color" here because as this page details extensively, Pamela Colman Smith was absolutely not Black, not mixed race, not assigned any other racial category in her lifetime but whiteness, and her family history was glutted with white settlers. The misconception of Smith as a woman of color comes from misreading the fact of her upbringing in Jamaica and her own personal appropriative performances of Blackness. Let's just say I feel obliged to credit Smith with a major tarot deck's illustration out of sheer pedantry, not because she was a hero.

[3] Sharp puncture warning but: my relationship with all practices derived from Ayurveda or TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) will always be a little complex, though, insofar as I'm skeptical of both fields and yet a) I'd like to avoid implicitly racist assumptions, and b) I think I "get" some of the purely somatic benefits of chakra or meridian work, as demonstrated to me through not only Reiki but through recently receiving an EMG (electromyography) test, which involved a needle poking most of my leg muscles and sending electrical stimulation. Despite the pain of the needles themselves, by the end of the experience I felt intensely relaxed and un-anxious. A very rational explanation for that would be the relief of embodied stress, but that doesn't make something like acupuncture silly. I'd actually like to try acupuncture now for the mental health end of things. It's just also not exactly something I would do if I got a cancer diagnosis, unless it were again for the stress relief.

Thanks for reading. Next week will be another full moon post because of the timing. For that, I'm going to come back to something I briefly touched on here: art, but this time not as a practice for illustrating truth through elaborate falsehood. Rather, I intend to write about art as a devotional act.

I've gotten a couple new free signups lately, to which I say: thank you, hello, and welcome! Nonetheless, I have to make my weekly entreaty for some of my readers to convert their accounts to paid subscriptions if you can possibly afford it. It's $1/month as the starting tier, and currently I should still have a 14-day free trial period in place. To get a paid account after you've signed up, load the main page for Salt for the Eclipse and then click the red circular button on the bottom right, or the "Account" link on the top right. This should pop up a panel where you can upgrade.

Please consider this if it's within your budget and you foresee yourself reading more than just this one post! I'm underpaid and I have several thousand dollars in likely unaffordable expenses coming due over the next six months. Also, I was just rejected for another job that could have addressed that debt. I still have the fire to write here regardless, and it warms me further just to know that folks are reading, but this writing does take me away from things I could be writing and submitting elsewhere for money, and it takes me away from hunting for a higher-paying day job. Most of these posts are still taking me somewhere between 4 and 6 solid hours to write. I'd like to make sure this newsletter goes on for at least a year, but at some point this may become less likely if not enough people are paying.

Entreaty complete. Thanks again for joining me, and have an excellent weekend.