Eight Useful Tarot Spreads
Introduction
We have work to do. The year is 2017. The worst of all isms (fascism, nationalism, racism, sexism, and myriad other phobias and bigotries) are trending globally. The worst of our collective histories and tendencies have come out of the woodwork, into the open, and they’re partying like it’s goddamn track and field day.
Resistance is trending too.
As a white, North American child in the late ’80s and ’90s, I encountered the word resistance in exactly three contexts:
Naively, capital R Resistance wasn’t something I associated with my own culture and stomping grounds, beyond daydreams of storybook sci-fi and fantasy worlds plunking down in my own backyard. Now The Resistance is a household phrase, capital R and all. Of course, I was privileged and sheltered in many ways as a child. In many ways, I still am. Millions of Americans from marginalized groups have been resisting for decades in ways that others haven’t duly considered. Somehow those struggles don’t get the coverage they deserve in most of our history classes and textbooks. It’s well past time for all of this to change.
Times is hard and getting harder. Everyone who knows better than the terrible isms has an unshakeable civic duty to resist them to the full extent of our abilities, with the understanding that we all work with different abilities, skills, and challenges. There are many paths to explore within resistance, and many different tasks to undertake.
This work is wonderful and worthwhile, but it’s not easy. It can be draining, frightening, and embarrassing. It requires uncomfortable levels of self-examination and accountability. It’s nuanced AF. It threatens burnout and demands moments of rest. It begs for patience, dedication, and loving-kindness, extended in many directions, including inward. It can’t be accomplished overnight, and it can’t be accomplished alone.
My sincere hope is that this little book, and the tarot spreads within it, may serve as one of the many tools in your kit to help keep you going on your path in resistance. I recognize that this is a small offering, and it means nothing without follow-through in both soul-searching and action. I wrote these spreads selfishly, to help keep myself on track, and as prompts to keep learning, to do more, and to do better. Now I’m feeding them to the screaming void that is the internet, in the hopes that maybe others will find them handy too.
Why turn to tarot in resistance? How is it relevant to this kind of work? If, as the disclaimer states, tarot is no substitute for medicine, therapy, or professional counseling, why do so many readers and seekers turn to it as a supplement to other methods of healing? What is tarot for, to the lay-reader? What does it do best?
Tarot has many uses, and you may draw on one or many within your practice. On a practical level, it can spark ideas, aid brainstorming sessions, and prompt creative works. On a personal level, particularly as a journaling tool, it can encourage introspection, provide solace, and help us better know our own hearts and minds. On a psychic or occult level, it connects us to our intuitions, and helps us divine information we can’t otherwise access immediately and consciously. It may even serve as a mediumistic tool in connecting to guides or other spirits. Viewed as a sacred text in a religious context, or a book of symbol and philosophy in a secular context, tarot guides us in our search for wisdom, gives enduring advice, and encourages empathy, reflection, and good habits.
Tarot is first and foremost an art form. It lays out a combination of pictures, symbols, text, and story before us, and we interpret these with our own creative powers, through the filters of our own interests, experiences, and biases. It’s as wise and imperfect as we are, and we get out what we put into it. And yet, in its beauty, richness of symbol, and archetypal material, it can take those willing on illuminating and surprising journeys.
Art, like science, philosophy, psychology, history, myth, and religion, is a method of exploring this world. It’s one of the best ways to investigate how the inner landscape interacts with the outer world—the human condition, and the you-specific-condition. Art gives physical form to ephemeral thoughts, feelings, and dreams. Once these are concrete, tangible to the body’s senses, we view them afresh and explore them in greater detail.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake.” (Happily, some us have the nerve to be artsy and gay.)
Nothing comforts quite like expression and creation. Nothing whispers of possibility, nothing contrasts the way things are with the way things could be, quite like story. Difficult or overwhelming truths are made gentler and more palatable with beauty. Humans are architects and story-eaters. Just as our bodies demand food and rest, our spirits require art and story to thrive.
For too long in the West, many appointed as stewards and shepherds of the human spirit, in religion and academia, have failed and harmed the most vulnerable among us. Some of us are blessed with the support, camaraderie, and guidance of wonderful, uplifting religious communities. Some of us have been rejected, abused by, or cast out of our religious communities, through no fault of our own. Some of us have simply never found organized religions that spoke to us in deep, meaningful, or credible ways. For a tool that’s enjoyed such a negative, spooky, and woolly reputation in the mainstream, tarot is surprisingly compatible with different schools of thought and religious practices, including agnosticism, atheism, and absence of structured spiritual ethos. Its imagery is syncretic, drawing (and unfortunately appropriating at times) from many religions, mythologies, cultures, and times. It asks each of us to see ourselves reflected in the faces of many archetypes. Its relative accessibility and dependance on individual interpretation makes it a flexible, friendly guide to spiritual misfits and dissidents.
In its youth, tarot was a shiny, elitist trinket—a richly detailed, specially commissioned, gilded card game for the Catholic, Milanese nobility of the Renaissance, likely used for gambling. How perfect that time dropped this treasure in the hands of vagabonds, magicians, artists, performers, tricksters, and shape-shifters on the fringes of society. In asking us to recognize the emblems of all social strata within each of ourselves, tarot perpetually subverts the authorities that birthed it. It calls kings fools, paupers emperors, ladies knights, and men queens, and so it has long masked a pilot flame of queer, radical spirit, burning unseen long before the overtly common and richly queer tarot renaissance we’re witnessing and co-creating today.
Art, diversity, critical thought, radical notions, truth, facts, medicine, education, and more are under attack today. In this rapidly changing climate, the abilities to stoke your creative fires, to connect to your own intuition, to give yourself good counsel, to examine your own actions, and to have difficult conversations with yourself, go beyond parlor games, and tea and sympathy. These are powerful weapons, and tools for survival.
As an artist, an aesthete, and a spiritual seeker, I wake up and fall asleep enamored with this world, its brilliant potential, and its stunning variety of landscapes, cultures, and creatures. As a queer, spoonie, low-income person in the U.S., I wake up and fall asleep uncertain and frightened. My tarot practice, as always, helps me navigate my fears and keep on making. I hope it may help you, too.
In times governed by mad kings, violent mobs, petty tyrants, corporate overlords, oligarchs, and despicable buffoons, we broke and tired citizens, we scrappy-folks and scrapers-by, we tricksters, magicians, priestesses, artists, hermits, and fools, we have work to do.
Keep waking. Keep working.
Resistance is trending too.
As a white, North American child in the late ’80s and ’90s, I encountered the word resistance in exactly three contexts:
- lower-case brands of resistance, synonymous with procrastination and minor tension
- occasional mentions of movements elsewhere, removed by geography or history, and
- dystopian fiction.
Naively, capital R Resistance wasn’t something I associated with my own culture and stomping grounds, beyond daydreams of storybook sci-fi and fantasy worlds plunking down in my own backyard. Now The Resistance is a household phrase, capital R and all. Of course, I was privileged and sheltered in many ways as a child. In many ways, I still am. Millions of Americans from marginalized groups have been resisting for decades in ways that others haven’t duly considered. Somehow those struggles don’t get the coverage they deserve in most of our history classes and textbooks. It’s well past time for all of this to change.
Times is hard and getting harder. Everyone who knows better than the terrible isms has an unshakeable civic duty to resist them to the full extent of our abilities, with the understanding that we all work with different abilities, skills, and challenges. There are many paths to explore within resistance, and many different tasks to undertake.
This work is wonderful and worthwhile, but it’s not easy. It can be draining, frightening, and embarrassing. It requires uncomfortable levels of self-examination and accountability. It’s nuanced AF. It threatens burnout and demands moments of rest. It begs for patience, dedication, and loving-kindness, extended in many directions, including inward. It can’t be accomplished overnight, and it can’t be accomplished alone.
My sincere hope is that this little book, and the tarot spreads within it, may serve as one of the many tools in your kit to help keep you going on your path in resistance. I recognize that this is a small offering, and it means nothing without follow-through in both soul-searching and action. I wrote these spreads selfishly, to help keep myself on track, and as prompts to keep learning, to do more, and to do better. Now I’m feeding them to the screaming void that is the internet, in the hopes that maybe others will find them handy too.
Why turn to tarot in resistance? How is it relevant to this kind of work? If, as the disclaimer states, tarot is no substitute for medicine, therapy, or professional counseling, why do so many readers and seekers turn to it as a supplement to other methods of healing? What is tarot for, to the lay-reader? What does it do best?
Tarot has many uses, and you may draw on one or many within your practice. On a practical level, it can spark ideas, aid brainstorming sessions, and prompt creative works. On a personal level, particularly as a journaling tool, it can encourage introspection, provide solace, and help us better know our own hearts and minds. On a psychic or occult level, it connects us to our intuitions, and helps us divine information we can’t otherwise access immediately and consciously. It may even serve as a mediumistic tool in connecting to guides or other spirits. Viewed as a sacred text in a religious context, or a book of symbol and philosophy in a secular context, tarot guides us in our search for wisdom, gives enduring advice, and encourages empathy, reflection, and good habits.
Tarot is first and foremost an art form. It lays out a combination of pictures, symbols, text, and story before us, and we interpret these with our own creative powers, through the filters of our own interests, experiences, and biases. It’s as wise and imperfect as we are, and we get out what we put into it. And yet, in its beauty, richness of symbol, and archetypal material, it can take those willing on illuminating and surprising journeys.
Art, like science, philosophy, psychology, history, myth, and religion, is a method of exploring this world. It’s one of the best ways to investigate how the inner landscape interacts with the outer world—the human condition, and the you-specific-condition. Art gives physical form to ephemeral thoughts, feelings, and dreams. Once these are concrete, tangible to the body’s senses, we view them afresh and explore them in greater detail.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake.” (Happily, some us have the nerve to be artsy and gay.)
Nothing comforts quite like expression and creation. Nothing whispers of possibility, nothing contrasts the way things are with the way things could be, quite like story. Difficult or overwhelming truths are made gentler and more palatable with beauty. Humans are architects and story-eaters. Just as our bodies demand food and rest, our spirits require art and story to thrive.
For too long in the West, many appointed as stewards and shepherds of the human spirit, in religion and academia, have failed and harmed the most vulnerable among us. Some of us are blessed with the support, camaraderie, and guidance of wonderful, uplifting religious communities. Some of us have been rejected, abused by, or cast out of our religious communities, through no fault of our own. Some of us have simply never found organized religions that spoke to us in deep, meaningful, or credible ways. For a tool that’s enjoyed such a negative, spooky, and woolly reputation in the mainstream, tarot is surprisingly compatible with different schools of thought and religious practices, including agnosticism, atheism, and absence of structured spiritual ethos. Its imagery is syncretic, drawing (and unfortunately appropriating at times) from many religions, mythologies, cultures, and times. It asks each of us to see ourselves reflected in the faces of many archetypes. Its relative accessibility and dependance on individual interpretation makes it a flexible, friendly guide to spiritual misfits and dissidents.
In its youth, tarot was a shiny, elitist trinket—a richly detailed, specially commissioned, gilded card game for the Catholic, Milanese nobility of the Renaissance, likely used for gambling. How perfect that time dropped this treasure in the hands of vagabonds, magicians, artists, performers, tricksters, and shape-shifters on the fringes of society. In asking us to recognize the emblems of all social strata within each of ourselves, tarot perpetually subverts the authorities that birthed it. It calls kings fools, paupers emperors, ladies knights, and men queens, and so it has long masked a pilot flame of queer, radical spirit, burning unseen long before the overtly common and richly queer tarot renaissance we’re witnessing and co-creating today.
Art, diversity, critical thought, radical notions, truth, facts, medicine, education, and more are under attack today. In this rapidly changing climate, the abilities to stoke your creative fires, to connect to your own intuition, to give yourself good counsel, to examine your own actions, and to have difficult conversations with yourself, go beyond parlor games, and tea and sympathy. These are powerful weapons, and tools for survival.
As an artist, an aesthete, and a spiritual seeker, I wake up and fall asleep enamored with this world, its brilliant potential, and its stunning variety of landscapes, cultures, and creatures. As a queer, spoonie, low-income person in the U.S., I wake up and fall asleep uncertain and frightened. My tarot practice, as always, helps me navigate my fears and keep on making. I hope it may help you, too.
In times governed by mad kings, violent mobs, petty tyrants, corporate overlords, oligarchs, and despicable buffoons, we broke and tired citizens, we scrappy-folks and scrapers-by, we tricksters, magicians, priestesses, artists, hermits, and fools, we have work to do.
Keep waking. Keep working.
