I waited a long time for somebody to give me a pack of tarot cards, and then I went out and bought some myself.
I was in San Francisco visiting some friends, and when I woke blurry-eyed in the morning, my mouth dry from medication wearing thin, I rummaged their kitchen cupboard for something sweet to take the edge off. I had eaten two pieces of THC dark chocolate before I woke up completely and realised what I’d done.
I didn’t get stoned exactly; just wandered the streets in a bit of a golden haze, more liquid from the sunshine than anything else. California’s light is so intensely yellow—it almost has a weight to it, a form. After a while I walked into a bookshop, and decided to buy the tarot for myself.
I’d always hung around the fringes of the tarot—I was a witchy teenager, after having been a witchy child—and I had kind of half-internalised the mythology around coming into a deck of cards—that you needed someone to give them to you, identifying you as a worthy practitioner. Nobody ever did. Maybe they sense my ambivalence about it—I wasn’t really sure about the tarot—the tarot as it applied to me.
I admired friends who could read it, but I didn’t like what I perceived as its determinism, and I quailed at the sheer memory-power required to decode each card. I am not good at rote learning, and the images, while beautiful, didn’t grab me. They seemed too pretty, too stylised. I didn’t realise that they were a relatively new iteration, a contemporary revision of the much older Venetian deck.
So it was purely a coincidence that when I went out in search of a tarot deck of my own, the only deck I could find was the Tarot de Marseille.
I bought it for myself, everything about it felt comfortable and right. Its archetypes, drawn from 15th century Italian playing cards, were those I was already familiar with—they come from the same tradition as the Venetian Carnivale. They are the described in the language of pre-literacy, the symbols of the Catholic church inverted and made strange. The deck revealed not just a Pope but a female Pope; the devil grinned cheerfully, flashing its penis and breasts; the Tower card of the RWS showed itself as the Maison-Dieu, the House of God, a name often given to monastaries and hospitals.
Everything resonated. And what I liked most was the deck’s relative restraint.
Unlike the RWS, figuration occurs only in the Major Arcana and court cards of the TdM—the numbered suit cards are simple and stark. For this reason, when I read from friends, I often read from the Major Arcana only. The court cards provide a way of identifying a frame of reference when the question a person is trying to ask is hazy.
In Yoav Ben-Dov’s book, The Tarot de Marseille Revealed, Ben-Dov writes of using the court cards—pages, knights, queens, and kings—to help unsure querents clarify their expectations around a reading.
First I separate the court cards from the deck and spread them with their faces up. I ask the querents to concentrate on their feelings about the issue and pick up the card whose figure echoes them most closely by posture or facial expression. Then I ask them to look again at the card, describe the features that catch their attention, and comment on their reasons for having chosen it.
This technique comes from the ‘open reading’ that Ben-Dov developed, and which I use when I’m consulting my own deck. Instead of placing each card in a prescribed spread, then turning it over to relate its meaning to a fixed theme, three or so cards are drawn, and shuffled around as you need. Meaning emerges from the relationship between each figure, their gestures, their posture, their dress.
It’s not divination and it’s not exactly therapy. What it is is an opportunity to lay out the question in pictorial form, and defer the wordlessness onto shaped representatives of thought.
For me, I’ve taken the Queen of Coins as a my guide. In the early Venetian decks, she sits calmly or stands, one hand resting gently against the coin. In the later Marseilles etchings, she regards the coin with a considered scrutiny. In either case, her posture indicates stability and ease, a gentle and quiet comfort with her role in overseeing the matters of the material, earthly realm.
That is where my focus is at the moment. Where else could it be? These are difficult times, and we are all drawing inwards towards the things that sustain and support us. It’s why, as with the purchase of the cards, I am not waiting to be asked for advice, but am putting myself forward to offer it anyway.
Got a question? Email me, and I’ll pull out the cards. I’m not an expert by any means, but maybe we can work things through together. The most important thing is just to start.