WTF Is Tarot

by Bakara Wintner

  WTF IS TAROT?

  … & How Do I Do It?

  BAKARA WINTNER

  Owner of Everyday Magic

  ILLUSTRATIONS BY AUTUMN WHITEHURST

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  Page Street Publishing Co. ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  TO SHERRI,

  Who put on every hat I handed her

  and some I didn’t.

  WHO THE FUCK AM I? (AND WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?)

  I have been reading tarot professionally for a little over four years, which is not a particularly impressive number. It is not a number that implies a lifetime of devotion and study in the same way that four decades might. It is enough time to acquire an undergraduate degree, which barely qualifies you for a babysitting job these days. And yet, in these short four years, I have built a full-time tarot practice, offered intensive group and individual trainings, facilitated workshops, taught classes, opened a retail store and healing space, created a tarot deck and, now, written a book on the damn thing.

  If someone had told me that, in order to read tarot, I needed to join a monastery, spend a year in silent meditation, apprentice under a more established tarot reader for a few more years and then pass a rigorous exam at the end, that would have made much more sense to me than the swift, uncomplicated way tarot came into my life and changed absolutely everything.

  Maybe that is why the “Who the fuck am I?” question comes up so strongly for people who are drawn to the tarot. There are no quantifiable tests, formal qualifications or degrees to frame and hang on the wall. You can study the cards, certainly, and you should. But what I have come to believe about the tarot is that there is something at the core of our souls, in the marrow of our bones, that recognizes these images, archetypes and energies. The experiences and emotions captured by the cards, while steeped in myth and symbolism, are universal.

  When someone meets the tarot for the first time, there is often a spark of recognition because the cards function as a mirror. The longing we feel to connect with them is the longing we feel to connect with the truest version of ourselves and others. The tarot is your most honest friend, the one who loves you enough to call you out on your shit. Who can hear you tell a story and strip down the exaggeration and bravado and ego and see you clearly. We’ve all offered this to a person we love, probably without using cards, at some point. The tarot is a tool that allows us to provide this clarity to anyone, including strangers and ourselves.

  Standing at the beginning of my journey with the tarot, I felt an immediate connection to the cards. I was also totally overwhelmed and a little bit paralyzed by the “Who the fuck am I?” question. The only indication that I had any spiritual inclinations was my lifelong Harry Potter obsession (but trust that is a very intense, full-blown, arguably problematic one) and an affinity for the astrology section of magazines. I do not come from a magical lineage. I wasn’t initiated by the elders of my spiritual community—unless hallucinogenic drugs count—and while I thought esotericism was fascinating, I was also deeply skeptical of it. I owned a few crystals, but only because I found them in bookshops and thought they were beautiful. I had no idea what the tarot was.

  Sure I watched Matilda when I was younger and tried really hard to move objects with my mind like any self-respecting millennial child. Maybe I read a middle-grade mystery novel about a girl who astral projected all over the world and spent years trying to peel my consciousness from my body like an irrelevant but stubborn shadow. The day after my mother passed away when I was six years old, I dreamt that she walked out of my bathroom, glowing in white light, sat down on the foot of my bed and talked to me for ten minutes. But growing up has a way of beating your belief in magic out of you. When I received my first tarot deck, I was twenty-three years old and had very little memory of my magical predilections and even less interest in reconnecting with them. I was a new-to-Brooklyn little whippersnapper fresh out of college and about a year into my first adult job, where I had to put on real clothes and go into an office every day.

  I studied publishing in school and landed a job at a literary agency in Manhattan’s Flatiron district. Housed in an old brownstone, it contained the charm of a converted residence and the mystery of a very old building. Former bathrooms-turned-tiny-offices for junior agents, hand-hewn woodwork and ornate stained glass, a massive vault in the back office of the ground floor that revealed the building’s banking history. Accessible only by a narrow winding staircase, my office was a sunlit attic room. The company was small and full of characters—most of them decent, incredibly hardworking, fiercely intelligent people. The place was magic in its own right, and landing a job there felt like winning the lottery.

  Like any self-respecting millennial adolescent, I was also in therapy. In addition to a pretty horrific childhood that guaranteed lifetime admission to the “needing therapy” club, I was quickly promoted in aforementioned adult job and while my ego was flying high on that achievement, my nervous system had other ideas about it. At the suggestion of a dear friend and author at my agency, I started with a new therapist a couple months before. A raven haired, impossibly beautiful goddess-of-an-older-woman named Sherri. Her office was a bright corner room overlooking 28th Street that always smelled like gardenias and white sage. The only objects in it were a simple mid-century armchair where she sat, a light gray couch where her clients sat, a shelf in the corner that showcased books, trinkets, crystals and—I would soon learn—several tarot decks. There was a huge foam cube in the corner that, when strong emotions were evoked during a session, Sherri would encourage her clients to beat the shit out of with a tennis racket and scream. She practiced a form of body-based psychotherapy that folds in the spiritual element.

  At the time, I called this “the weird hippie therapy that I do.” Now, I understand the importance of intuition and the mind-body-spirit connection when it comes to healing a person.

  For the first few months, sessions with Sherri were made up of me whining about my job, managing the stress of adult life and unpacking my poor life decisions regarding finances, sleeping habits and men. Occasionally she would try to steer me into the murky waters of my childhood, which was a tactic that after a decade and a half in therapy I was able to detect and avoid with ease. I refused any of the bodywork or physical exercises she suggested. I never cried.

  Every Monday morning at 7 a.m. (AKA the worst hour of the whole week probably) I would come into Sherri’s office in a blaze of glory, massive coffee in hand, armed with the list of that week’s issues.

  On this particular morning, however, Sherri asked me something before I got a chance to take out my list.

  “I just bought a tarot deck for someone as a gift. Do you want to see it?”

  Why on earth this woman thought I would want to see a tarot deck, I don’t know. But she took the deck out of her bag and handed it to me.

  As soon as the cards hit my hands, I started to weep.

  The response was so immediate and so visceral; there was no thought or decision to start crying. Tears were forcing themselves from my eyeballs before I even properly lo
oked at the box holding the cards. I couldn’t explain what was going on. It felt like meeting someone you loved, but somehow forgot you knew. It felt like remembering.

  We sat like that for a long time, me crying softly, holding this plastic-wrapped box of cards like a baby bird.

  When I eventually stopped, she said in a very matter-of-fact way, “You need to take these cards. They’re yours.”

  “What the fuck am I going to do with them?” was all I could manage.

  I am refraining from a more dramatic retelling, but if it were up to me I would cue some epic Titanic-esque music and invoke some receiving-the-tablets-on-the-mountain imagery. I have thought about this pivotal morning a thousand times. I’ve picked Sherri’s brain over and over again, trying to bottle the moment she decided to bring up the tarot, to put it in a test tube over a flame and extract its individual ingredients. I wonder where I would be, what my life would look like, had she not listened to her intuition and put that deck in my hands. I recall the series of synchronistic events that led me to that morning and feel humbled and awed and small and grateful.

  A few weeks later, a stranger by the name of Lisa contacted me for a reading, asking about things like availability and rates. S’cume? The “Who the fuck am I?” question hit me like a ton of bricks. I definitely did not feel ready to read for another person. I hadn’t joined a monastery or found a place to silently meditate for a million years yet. I was too young, too unprepared, too inexperienced, too sarcastic, too non-magical to give a reading to anyone. I told her this.

  Lisa was stubborn. She insisted she trusted the person who referred her to me (fucking Sherri) and that she felt strongly about getting a reading specifically from me. I panicked, but agreed to see her. I tried to become an expert on the tarot in the couple days between her contacting me and our scheduled meeting via extensive Internet searches, but that was a depressing and disheartening endeavor. Every source interpreted the cards differently. The tarot is a complicated esoteric object, used across cultures and in different spiritual contexts for centuries. There are hundreds of lenses through which one can study the tarot, and even if I chose one, it was far more information than could be absorbed in two days. This was when I still believed memorization and a cognitive grasp of the cards was what was needed to be an effective tarot reader.

  I gave up. If I made an idiot of myself in front of this stranger, it wouldn’t be the first (or the worst) time.

  While I didn’t know much, I felt a connection to the tarot as well as a shift within myself since receiving my deck. I started meditating the night I got them, visualizing myself in the scenes each card depicted in order to further explore them. I played around with pulling cards for friends. My dreams grew vivid and unfamiliar. I started reading about the tarot’s history and individual card meanings a bit. The feeling of remembering grew. More than any of that, my longing to connect with these cards and the inherent magic I sensed in them was pervasive. They answered a question I didn’t know I was asking, showed me something I had absolutely no clue I was looking for.

  Lisa came over and sat on the couch and I sat on a chair in my little Brooklyn apartment. I pulled cards for her on my coffee table. I didn’t consult a guidebook or outside resource. I don’t know how much time passed. What I felt as I was reading for her was that while I didn’t know anything about this person, the cards seemed to know exactly where she had been, where she was now and where she was going. I didn’t worry about being right. The cards laid out a path and I gave a voice to the story they told. It was one of the most effortless, simple things I’ve ever done—easier than small talk. It was also one of the most profound and the most moving.

  After the reading, Lisa hugged me, forced a fifty-dollar bill into my hand and left. I’ve seen her half a dozen times since, read for members of her family and cried to her in gratitude for forcing me into the most incredible journey of my life.

  Six months and over a hundred clients later, I left my real job to read tarot full-time. This was a decision made after two straight weeks of leaving my office at five and giving readings until around midnight. My roommate wasn’t into it, so readings took place in the small amount of floor space in my bedroom, sandwiched between my bed and closet. I was working more and harder than I’d ever worked in my life, but there was also a distinct sense of ease and flow to that period. Doors kept opening. People kept coming for readings. The answer was a continuous, resounding yes.

  If four years is not an impressive number, then six months is a drop in the bucket. All the while I was wrestling with my feelings of inadequacy, legitimacy and worthiness to do this work. The “Who the fuck am I?” question kept me up at night. But what happened was with each day, each reading, each experience to help another person that the tarot afforded me, the question started to answer itself. I learned the “Who the fuck am I?” question is a universal one. Who the fuck am I to think I deserve fulfilling, equal partnership? Who the fuck am I to have a job that I love? To demand respect, to be heard, to set boundaries, to believe that I can live a big, gorgeous, magical life?

  The answer kept coming, for me and for my clients. You are a child of the divine, you are compressed stardust, you are a human being. You have a responsibility to cause as little harm to yourself and others as possible. To live the best, biggest life you can and to leave everyone you come across better than you found them.

  I’m going to make what may be a radical declaration: You do not need to learn the tarot because you already know it. You may need to learn more about yourself, you may need to spend some time in the voluminous caverns of your own heart, but you do not need to memorize the textbook meanings of seventy-eight cards. Getting to know the tarot is identifying the times in your life when you have been in the presence of an archetype. When you took a huge risk and didn’t know why you were doing it but only knew you must—that’s The Fool. When you came to a crushing moment of clarity and asked “Wait, am I really still doing this shit?” you were in the presence of The Wheel of Fortune. When you let go of a relationship with someone you loved but knew you needed to leave, you were leaning into Death. When you had an overwhelming feeling that you were exactly where you need to be, doing exactly what you should be doing, you were embodying the energy of Judgment.

  You know the essence of each card. There is also a lot you don’t know. The tarot has been studied and interpreted through the lens of Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Kabbalah, astrology, alchemy, numerology, symbology, Wicca … just to name a few. There are tons of books on all of them, and they are valuable and rich resources for deepening your relationship with the cards. That is not this book. I know very little about most of those topics. I saw the cards, and I recognized them as a set of images that serves to identify the archetypes living in all of us. I believe that this soul-level recognition can happen between anyone who truly has a desire to connect with the cards and, by extension, their intuition. This is true of any deck of cards that you find personally resonant, and this book is written to guide you through any and all of them. Whether you want to use the cards for yourself, with your loved ones, or desire reading professionally, it is my hope that this book will convince you that you already have all you need to begin.

  The “Who the fuck am I?” question rarely comes up for me anymore. I’ve answered it, for myself, in my dark nights of the soul, over and over again. I feel it sometimes—when I’m reading for an especially intimidating client, when I taught my first class on the tarot, when I was asked to write this book. But it doesn’t plague me anymore. It doesn’t roll around in my stomach like a pinball hitting every wormhole of self-doubt and self-hate in the way it once did. While the tarot is the thing that brought about the “Who the fuck am I?” question more intensely than any other fact of my life, it is also the thing that answered it.

  And now I’m a full-time tarot card reader and healer. My clients are entrepreneurs, students, CEOs of major corporations, waiters, celebrities, stay-at-home moms, artists, other healers and
a lot of people who don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. A lot of them use the tarot now in some capacity. Some pull a card for themselves every morning. Some of them bought a deck and stare it at from time to time. Some are full-time tarot readers. They’ve also asked the “Who the fuck am I” question and are answering it for themselves.

  The voice of this book will be light, crass and hopefully funny, but do not let that be confused with nonchalance for the tarot itself. It changed my life in every way possible, and my intention is to make this incredible tool accessible to anyone interested in connecting with it.

  As long as the tarot is shrouded in shadow and mystery, it is not being used to its full capacity. And that’s who the fuck I am—your young blood, no-nonsense, sometimes sassy girl guide to this expansive and profound magical object. Don’t freak out. Don’t get overwhelmed. Don’t feel like you’re not in the cool kids club of people who are worthy of using these cards because they are somehow more magical or capable than you. You got this. Now let’s fucking go.

  WHAT THE FUCK IS TAROT?

  Simply put, the tarot is a deck of seventy-eight cards. It is believed that the whole spectrum of potential human experience is captured within these cards. The cards you pull at any given time speak to the experience you are having in that moment. Therefore, the meanings of the cards range from as dark and mysterious as our dreamscapes and shadow selves to as boring and adult-ish as saving money and not sleeping with that guy-you-really-want-to-sleep-with-but-know-it’s-a-terrible-idea.

  To add another sparkly layer of magic to this object, the origin of the tarot is unknown. Occultists’ theories vary, and widely. From Ancient Greece and Egypt to Old Testament times, Atlantis and outer space—there is much speculation, but no proof, of where the tarot was born. It has been linked to the Kabbalistic tree of life, Dionysus, Pythagoras, Chaldean astrology, various initiatory rituals and the Romany people.