Today, I want to explore tarot, creativity, and wounded family systems. This is part one—I’ll be posting part two tomorrow.
The idea for this essay came after I noticed a striking similarity between my approaches to 🔮 tarot and ✍️ fiction writing, and this led to musing on how my wounded family system has affected both.
A note before we start…
My approach to tarot is intuitive, a word I use in contrast to relying on conventional card meanings.
I want to stress that I’m referring to a specific usage of conventional meanings, one where the reader interprets the cards solely through that lens and regards contradictory insights as inaccurate.
I know many diviners incorporate conventional meanings into a broader intuitive dialogue and things are seldom this either/or, but if you feel like your readings are stilted or you lock up when you lay down the cards, afraid you might “get it wrong,” I think you’ll find this essay helpful! ✨
In my experience, readings are richer, and their insights more relevant and actionable…
…when conventional card meanings aren’t hampering an in-the-moment, personal connection to the cards. But the tricky part of reading intuitively is overcoming that deer-in-the-headlights effect where you’re staring blankly at a card, fingers itching to pull out the book to find the “answer.”
📚 After starting out with a traditional tarot education, memorizing standard interpretations with the aid of well-thumbed flashcards, I began to notice an inner battle unfolding whenever I sat across from a client, cards splayed before us on my tarot table.
On the one hand, the conventional meanings were vying for my attention, but on the other hand there was a veritable fire hose of insights striving to burst free, insights that didn’t quite fit with traditional interpretations.
For years, I overrode those insights, and to be honest, my readings were pretty darn dry. It was only when I learned how to work with my inner fire hose that my readings became infused with life, and not coincidentally, I was getting feedback from clients on their accuracy and usefulness.
It might be tempting to say we should ditch all frameworks and simply “go with the flow”…
…but I think this overlooks the presence of an already existing framework, hiding in plain sight. 🔎
The cards themselves.
When you’re doing a tarot (or oracle) reading, you’re not simply staring off into space, picking insights out of thin air. You’re gazing at an image that activates certain insights over others.
This is one of the reasons I find the conventional-meanings approach so stultifying. It’s easy to lay down the cards and immediately reach for the book (or the memorized meanings) without really looking at the image. 🫣 This robs our psyche of an opportunity to interact with the card and the magic of the moment.
But there’s something else at play, something that relates to my experience of wounded family systems. Rather than providing guidance on how to build an authentic relationship with the cards and with yourself, conventional card meanings dictate the content of that relationship.
To use a human relationship analogy, this is the difference between helping someone build healthy communication skills versus policing which topics they are and aren’t allowed to talk about. The former supports while the latter constricts.
To unpack why this can be so very problematic, here’s a quote from More Than Two by Eve Rickerts and Andrea Zanin.
Rules-based systems tend to represent, or lead to, a rigid mentality that’s focused on obedience and reward versus disobedience and punishment. In such a framework, a person’s moral character is judged based on whether they’re obeying the rules.
Misunderstandings, failures and changes of heart are coded as acts of betrayal, in which the ‘betrayer’ is necessarily the bad guy and the ‘betrayed’ automatically the good. This framework places a high price—being a moral failure—on any person who finds the rules too confining, forgets one, makes an error in judgment or otherwise doesn’t follow the system.
Such a system doesn’t lend itself well to compassion, kindness or open communication about what is and isn’t working. (192)
Conventional tarot meanings were created by people (not ordained by the universe), the majority of whom were cishet white guys living back in the day. This doesn’t mean those meanings are useless, not by a long shot, and in many cases they could be extremely helpful.
But they don’t fully represent the multifaceted experience of being a human, perhaps even more so when said humans aren’t cishet or male or white.
Giving yourself permission to experience each card as yourself, and in the moment in which you’re reading, transforms a pile of cardstock into 78 portals that shift every time you shuffle the deck and ask your question.
Remember at the start when I mentioned this essay was inspired by similarities between my tarot approach and my fiction writing?
That’s where we’ll pick up tomorrow. 💖
