My Tarot Story
When I was a teenager circa 1986, our local radio station, WMMR, hosted a somewhat annual parade, the Louie Louie parade. It was just what it sounded like – folks marched down Broad Street singing Louie Louie, over and over again. That was it. That’s what fun looked like in 1986. So, a bunch of us took the train into town from the suburbs, Louie Louie’d our way down Broad Street to South Street, land of record stores, bookstores, novelties and new age stores. Very arty compared to the strip malls of the suburbs, and we felt super cool. In one of the New Age stores, Garland of Letters, which is still there, my friends bought pretty jewelry, and I bought my first tarot deck, the yellow box Rider-Waite Smith with the blue plaid backs. We would make other pilgrimages to South Street, and while I never actually learned to read tarot, that didn’t stop me from loving these boxes of what I felt were secrets – and I eventually ended up with three decks, the RWS, Morgan’s Tarot, and the Mythic Tarot. These decks, which I would pull out, lay out in the Celtic Cross because that’s what’s in the Little White Book, and scratch my head looking at the images, what did it all mean? There was no internet to help me out. So, the decks came with me to college, to my various apartments, and eventually, were lost in the shuffle.
Fast forward to 2021. We’re all sitting in our houses, twiddling our thumbs, waiting for the world to open up again. Like most people, I found myself working from home, and leading a pretty solitary life, during the day at least (my husband is an essential worker, and continued to go to work throughout the pandemic). I adopted companions along the way – through books, music, podcasts. Sometime during that dark time, Patti Smith took me under her wing – I found myself listening to her memoir Year of the Monkey at the same time I was reading another of her books, M Train. In her books, she describes her long time rituals – coffee, writing in cafes, visiting gravesites of famous authors, taking polaroids of meaningful objects, and pulling Tarot cards, sometimes before bed, always before a trip. I wanted to be like Patti – she was like the too cool for school kid that you wanted to be just like, to me. So, I tried reading Sylvia Plath (one of her gravesite pilgrimages), but that didn’t take. I became intrigued with her pulling Tarot cards, and I bought myself a deck, a basic RWS deck. I was hooked. As a lawyer, being an advisor is a natural fit for me, and in particular, as a trial lawyer, I’m swept up in the storytelling of the cards. It’s all about stories, to me, and tarot has become my passion.
I started studying in the traditional internet hubs – Biddy Tarot, Benebell Wen. I read Holistic Tarot, watched Benebell’s video series on youtube, I tried to read Rachel Pollack’s 78 Degrees of Wisdom (but sssshhhh, I never finished it. I frankly find it pretty unreadable, but I respect it, and for those of you that that’s your tarot bible, great, you picked a good one, it’s just not for me). I think I learned the most, however, watching Tarot Oracle’s youtube channel. He’s funny, he doesn’t take himself too seriously, and unlike some tarot tube channels, he actually reads the cards, together, to get an answer.
I began amassing decks. I did free readings on the Biddy Tarot site. And then, I received Benebell Wen’s Spirit Keepers Tarot, Revelations, along with the book, the workbook, and the accompanying video series. And then I pivoted.
Up until this point, I had been so concerned, sometimes even stressed, about honoring the creator’s intent when reading the cards. What did the artist mean with this depiction of the Hermit? How do I twist the meaning of the Little White Book into what I think I already know? Spirit Keeper’s was the end of all that. Right around the time I received Spirit Keeper’s, I was also reading Tom Benjamin’s Tarot Toolkit, the premise of the book is to give people the tools to move from “meaning centric” readings to question centric readings, and being able to answer the question based on the tools you put in your box. Are you interested in astrology, and helps you answer the question, great, put it in your box, if not – don’t. Spirit Keeper’s is not a toolkit – it’s a everything and the kitchen sink. No editing – it’s her mission to create a deck of “cultural integration and Prisca Theologia” which includes every single correspondence you can think to imprint on a tarot card. And, after struggling with the deck for a few months, I finally realized this was not the way I wanted to read tarot. What did all of this stuff have to do with getting the answer to a question like should I take this job?
That’s when I just started looking at the cards, and reading them. I found Camelia Elias, and her Read Like the Devil methodology. I watched Enrique Enriquez’s Tarology, and read his book of the same name. I watched youtube videos from both of them. I took classes with Camelia, and with her partner Bent Sorenson through their Aradia Academy. I can’t deny that I’m now a fan girl, and I can’t look at tarot any other way. Her instance on function over fixed meanings and memorized lists convinced me to throw out all of the Little White Books, and just read the damn cards. And a whole world opened up to me, now that I could draw a straight line from playing cards to Tarot de Marseille to modern pip decks, I could read anything if I just kept practicing. That’s what I’m doing. Practicing, every day. And the journey continues.
