My entrance point into Tarot was Jessica Dore, a Jungian-influenced social worker. Coming across her book – Tarot for Change: Using the Cards for Self-Care, Acceptance & Growth, and all the deep, helpful content Dore offers there – prompted me to buy my first real Tarot deck. It is the one Jessica Dore uses, the Rider–Waite deck. Before that I had owned random divination decks (which all have their unique and magical qualities, don’t get me wrong), from Angels and Faeries, to Animals, given that the language of dreams, metaphysics and symbols has always been a huge fascination for me. These have proven themselves, over time, to be trustworthy companions when I have been in need of answers, when I ached for deeper understanding. When comfort and reassurance in the form of just the right words weren’t forthcoming from the places others seemed to be getting them: other people, intimate relationships, health care professionals, my logical mind. Most would agree that all of this is innocent and safe enough. Right? A way to use synchronicity to connect with deeper meaning, guidance, and self-resonance. Hardly controversial. We need this. Humans have done this forever.
Then at my Friday Coffee Group last month, a friend happened to bring The Tarot Handbook: Practical Applications of Ancient Visual Symbols, by Angeles Arrien. There it was, lying on the table in front of me, and as I reached for it, I felt another very deep and resounding yes. Encountering this book and beginning to connect with the symbology, the archetypes and the nuts and bolts of using numerology to calculate soul- and personality-level, life-time archetypes, growth symbols, and growth cycles gave me an unmistakable and unambiguous YES, and I’ve been deeply immersed ever since. Now I have new toys to play with in my creative field: the Thoth Tarot Deck by Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris, and the book that showed up at coffee group on that auspicious day. My friends, I have officially entered “the occult.”
I hope this thrills and delights you, as more of us are working our way out from under the collective spell of Christianity as it shows up in its various destructive forms in the world today. A version of Christianity that has silenced the ancient wisdom and the proper place of the feminine in spirituality for thousands of years. We need that wisdom now more than ever.
For me, child development, field dynamics, intergenerational patterns, self-parenting, and the language of empowerment are naturally blending with Tarot, in its potential to help us see who we are as individuals – not through the lens of trauma and our wounds, but through our potential as creative and spiritual beings walking on this planet, during this lifetime.
In the name of recovery and self-reclamation (and because, luckily, this is my vocation), I have done so much work to understand my infant and child self in terms of the wounds, losses, and hardship because it was the best I could do. And it has brought me a long way in reconnecting with my body and my emotional self. It has been important work, but from here, I can take it so much further.
As I play with the archetypes and the systems the Tarot incorporates, so many things fall into place. So many of my needs are met. How else might I have even thought to ask the questions:
- Who was I, besides a poor, forlorn child who got separated from her mother?
- What other forces are at play in my development besides the coping strategies I devised to deal with the stresses of my childhood home, and ensure that I had a place there?
- What inherent qualities did I bring in? (Long ago I rejected the idea that as children we are blank slates that our parents write upon to shape and form us.)
Tarot can offer us something tangibly essential in the absence of local, in-person communities made up of the grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts and uncles, and neighbors that were always present in indigenous villages. This new game offers us a way to see ourselves from a more universal perspective. When we are born, we come into our human families with inherent qualities. Incarnating allows us opportunities to experience life, including all the ways we contort ourselves to hide our essential gifts and qualities in attempts to fit into our families. With just a little help, we can reconnect with our essential selves. We can unearth and embrace who we really are. Having access to the archetypes and taking advantage of the synchronicity that Tarot offers is a rich and extremely nuanced way to unearth, reclaim and celebrate our inherent selves and our place in the world. Whether it resonates or not is up to us to decide. At the very least, the ancient lore of Tarot gives us a starting point.
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