Tarot as a Tango

It takes two

When I read for people, I remind them that a tarot session is a collaboration between you, me, my highest self and yours, my spirit guides and yours, plus god, the universe, or whatever.

It’s not just me giving you answers about what will happen on your next Tinder date.

For me, readings are most rewarding when people walk away and do something with what came up for them.

A Case Study

Over the summer, I read for a woman in conflict. There was a lot of confusion, frustration, and sadness in her heart and mind.

The Tower, reversed, appeared.

No doubt, the Tower is a tough card, a scary card. I’ve heard people call it by nicknames like “divorce” and “you’re fired.”

I have a pretty neutral perspective on this card. Sometimes as a reversal I’ll read it as a crisis that has passed depending on the context.

But during the reading I’m telling you about now, I knew this reversed Tower dwelled in more esoteric Tower territory.

The Tower card evokes the biblical tower of babble. (I wrote more about this here.)

And in the context of this reading, I understood that to find her way out of the dark place she was in, my querant would need to go past using words and trying to explain her way through it.

Pros and cons lists would be no help. She needed to accept that language, the sentences in our brains that are our thoughts, aren’t an unalloyed good.

Sometimes talking to ourselves doesn’t get us anywhere.

Magical Mark Making

She took this message and ran with it, using art as a way to transmute her experience.

Armed with her imagination, the realm of images, she created a stream of artwork until she drew something that activated her power.

When I thought about this later, it occurred to me that she took the wisdom of the tarot and made another form of magic: a sigil.

A sigil is a magical symbol with an intentional purpose. Derived from the Latin word sigillum meaning "seal," sigils have a rich history in magical practices.

I’m no expert on sigils; I’ve never made one. Though I have learned a little about them as I’ve studied tarot through other practitioners who do use them.

Sigils are visual spells, and though I don’t think it was her intention, she used her nonverbal mind, the wise subconscious, to create one that was helpful and healing.

This only happened because she was such an active participant in her tarot encounter. She filtered the cards’ messages through the prism of her own intuition and came out the otherside with an outcome I could not have given her.