Leaning Witchy
My tarot cards arrived. They’re beautiful, as I suspected they would be, although they’re also slightly larger than I anticipated so my shuffling technique will take some work. Still, I’m glad they’re here.
Look at them! Btw, I get to be the Magician in this spread and I am a-ok with that analysis of the situation.
My mum has read tarot before, and own a couple of decks still I think, along with oracle cards, angel affirmations, runes for divination readings, crystals. I have strong memories of a flat she used to live in with a bronze witch ball hanging in the window, and the smell of recently-burned incense is a familiar one. When I told her about my own draws this past week she was supportive but wisely suggested that I only read for myself, rather than having anyone else read for me. I suspect it’s because she knows I go for this with a healthy dose of scepticism.
I feel like I should point out that these are the ‘Tattoo Tarot: ink & intuition’ published by Laurence King Publishing. Aren’t they gorgeous?
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not religious and I don’t consider myself especially spiritual, although I am absolutely captivated by the concept of magic. A lot of my fiction writing revolves around this enormous What If - what if there are fairies at the bottom of the garden? What if there is a kind of underworld just beneath the surface of ours that only a chosen few can see, feel, talk to? What if it really is possible to turn a base metal into gold, or to commune with lost loved ones by holding the hands of a trusted circle?
The other thing about me is that I am completely incapable of shutting my own head off. I’ve tried mindfulness and meditation a bunch of times, not least when I was advised to give it a go by a doctor concerned about my mental health when I was sixteen. Since then I have tried meditation apps, ASMR soundtracks, visualisation exercises, Magic Questioning and even the good ol’ pan pipes and a darkened room method. And I just. Can’t. Switch. Off. I find it intensely frustrating, especially when I trap myself into negative thought patterns about being… y’know. Useless. Lazy. Ugly as sin. Generally terrible. Waste of good carbon. Totally normal, Piscean thinking (I buy into astrology even less than most other branches of the Wyrd, but I have to admit I am a classic negative thinking, dreamy-creative fish person).
Tarot doesn’t require me to switch off. If anything, it asks me to wake up, to listen to those brash, brassy voices that are crying out to be heard when all I want is a bit of quiet. The act of focusing on a specific, answerable question while shuffling the deck is a meditation on a problem in lots of ways, right? The laying out of the cards a comforting ritual, and the study required for interpretation a way of hauling up thoughts I’ve maybe been unwilling to confront, or feelings I wasn’t sure how to identify.
For example, pulling up the 8 of Swords as a morning ‘what do I need to know today’ draw was interesting. It could be considered a pretty negative card, and it was reversed… but it made perfect sense to me once I’d read up on the potential interpretations and applied it to my situation. ‘Finish your blog posts’, it said. ‘Write your damn novel’. Which is fair enough, really.
I cannot stress this enough - I could honestly stare at these all day I love them so much. Strength! What a woman.
And those personal interpretations can be bloody powerful. It’s easy to see why for so many years we’ve believed in something outside of ourselves. It’s easy to see why despite being a relatively new form of divination, The Cards have become so loved and, depending on your pop culture preferences, feared.
For example, the 3 card spread you see above essentially called me out on my own bullshit pretty damn effectively this morning. I’d had a less-than-ideal exchange with someone I care about (she’s the Queen of Coins and if you knew who she was that would make perfect sense to you), and I was feeling harshly judged by her. I was sorely tempted to burn that bridge, to just stop dealing with that person again. Which would have been difficult for a lot of reasons and I guarantee I’d have ended up regretting it.
The spread above told me to stop being precious, to confront my own wrongdoing in the situation and accept that different things matter to different people - and if you care about someone, don’t you care about what matters to them too? So, the cards said, go forward with compassion and love and rise above your petty instincts. In other words, apologise again. Be sincere.
Now, you could argue the cards told me nothing of the sort - I made all of that up on my own based on who I am as a person and my own niggly guilt about the situation. Possible. But the thing is, it does'n’t really matter, does it? One way or the other I reached what I firmly believe was the right conclusion, and I got to stare at pretty pictures while I meditated on it. Maybe the magic is all in the mind.
And that, frankly, is what storytelling is all about.