Reading with the Queen of Wands
What are spiritual tools for in our contemporary moment? (Hint: they're not always about worst possible outcomes.)
A month ago, our dog Fitz ran away for about an hour. My dogs are my children as much as my kids or my essays are my children, and I was terrified, frantic, beside myself, bereft. For forty-five minutes, my husband Kiernan screamed Fitz’s name and tugged our four-year-old around through the trenchant trees of heaven and strange oaks and monstrous blackberry bushes that line large ravine behind our house. I went west, climbing the hills behind our neighbor’s homes, stalking the road that’s always busy with logging trucks and tired pickups with Trump/Good bumper stickers. I sifted through the tick-laden grasses that have grown up around the abandoned Apostolic Chapel crumbling across the road from the dump that marks the entrance to our 439-person town. An animal was dead in the road. A man smoking a cigarette crouched down beside it—a fox—as he waited for Animal Control to come pick it up.
I was losing a battle against my own sense of horror. I was too hot. I was still in my pajamas, red bedroom clogs, everything burred. My phone was silent in my hand, so I knew I couldn’t hope that Kiernan had found the dog. He would’ve called. I began to trudge back to the house, falling into narratives of worst possible outcomes. Dead in the road, wounded by the rusty edge of one of the appliances that people left to (not quite) decay in the hills, eaten by a bear—just yesterday, a black bear had come down Naked Mountain and been spotted on the dirt road where I take my daily walks—injured in a gulley, hurt somewhere we wouldn’t be able to find him. Fitz is a little dog with a bad back and a bad eye. He’s a Frenchie, not meant for the woods or the country, but we live where we can afford to live. I was sweating everywhere as I arrived back the house, so near tears I couldn’t even cry. What should I do?
I left the front door open, in case Fitz came back on his own and needed to get in. I went upstairs to my office, where I read for clients and write for all of you. I pulled out my oldest tarot deck, the standard Waite-Smith. I shuffled it, begging the cards and myself and god in all of their names. I felt uneasy about the begging. A true thing: it’s not always great to go to the cards when you are uncertain whether you can handle the answer. But what else could I do?
I turned over two cards, one for me in the moment, one for how to find the dog. The Seven of Cups appeared in the first position, and with it, a little relief. Here was a figure, beset by delusions and uncertainty, consulting divinatory options about what to do next—this was quite literally a depiction of “me right now.” The tarot had let me know, in its own unequivocal way, that, for now, it was operating on a literal level. I had needed that rhetorical contract, and after I received it, I didn’t allow myself hesitation before turning the second card over. I would deal with whatever came; I needed to know. The Queen of Wands appeared, an image of a confident, vital woman on her throne, a small black cat sitting at attention between her “manspread” legs.
Over years of reading, the Queen of Wands has shown up for me often in one of two ways. First, it tends to be a card that I associate with my Higher Self, the kind of person that I yearn and am working towards trying to be: a warm but incisive connector of different kinds of people, ideas, communities, and efforts. Second, the card appears when that kind of conversational, generative spirit is essential to whatever task is at hand.
My office was dark and cold, thanks to the the mini split rattling off in the room’s western corner. Outside, I could hear Kiernan and Theo still calling Fitz’s name. OK, I thought, looking at the Queen of Wands. I need to start talking to people, knocking on the neighbor’s doors. But which direction should I head in?
Aside from the few that live on our road, none of whom were home, our neighbors are separated from us on either side by ravines and foothills, curvy roads and train tracks, some of the topography of Appalachia. On this side of Highway 29, there are no national forests or protected lands, no trails that lead anywhere other than to hidden dumping grounds full of broken washing machines and abandoned sedans. I looked back at the cards; there’s an esoteric tradition of associating Wands and the element of fire with south, but in my own tarot language and experience of synchronicities over the years, I’ve come to read the Wands symbolically as east. I liked the symmetry of that, too—Cups and the element of Water were “west,” and I’d already been that way. I’d head to Lonesome Pine Road in the east. In my search, I’d stop and talk first with my favorite elderly neighbor, a retired EMT with purple nails and a big orange tabby cat named Peaches, both of whom have been known to befriend the area foxes.
D was already out on her porch when I arrived, parking my car haphazardly in the dead grass that doubles as her extra driveway. I left the keys in the ignition in my hurry to get out, and I watched as D cocked her head, purple beads jangling about her ears, around her neck and wrists, as I jogged toward her. “Everything OK?” she asked me. I told her that Fitz was missing, and was about to get into it when she interrupted me, “I knew something was back there!” She gestured toward the tree-line beyond her house, then to Peaches the cat, blinking knowingly at me from behind the lower rungs of the porch. “The cat has been mighty interested in the trees over there for the last hour. I bet your dog’s back there!”
As she spoke, I heard barking, a sound I knew, closer and louder than Kiernan’s distant yells. “Thank you,” I cried out to my own neighborhood Queen of Wands, running towards the rustling leaves behind her house, where soon my furry prodigal son would appear in tick-and-bramble relief.
*
After that maybe-improbable happy ending to a terrible weekday morning, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the various philosophies with which I read the tarot, in general, and the court cards, in particular. I first came to the tarot under the instruction of a feminist writer with a genius for critique; I learned to approach the cards against the tide of the witchy Instagram aesthetic with its “positive vibes” and “manifest-your-true-destiny-only” spirit. I’m still really glad of that! I’ll always want to engage in a certain kind of depth and breadth of reading practice, whether I’m reading tarot cards or books, political movements or cultural trends.
But as our society has edged further into collapse1, there’s been a shift toward gleeful fear-mongering and nihilism in all of my reading circles, including my spiritual ones. Now witchy courses are charging hundreds and sometimes, with travel included, thousands of dollars to offer doomy interpretations of the cards that, at first glance, appear more in line with the critical stance of my original teacher. Except that these new “schools” are making money hawking fatalist views of the cards that hardly inspire any kind of radical curiosity about the possibilities of life here and now, whereas my former mentor was trying to encourage people to genuinely understand that maybe there’s a better reason to use spiritual tools than for a leg up within systems of material inequity. And also that there are limitations to what faith, magic, and belief-shifting can do within such systems.
That’s not to say that spirituality and its tools aren’t essential needs in our contemporary moment: I’ll never stop writing my own Queen-of-Wands manifesto that engagement with spiritual practice changes our hearts, and in changing our hearts, we change not only our lives, but other people’s lives, too. However in the new tarot reading of the apocalypse, the Queen of Wands skews narcissistic; the Tower can only mean sudden trauma; all of Pamela Colman Smith’s figures of court are eye-rolly because ew … what are they wearing, the clothes of empire?2
In terms of the astrological year, which begins with the spring equinox in Aries, the Queen of Wands appears as the first in a line of the tarot’s 16 court cards—the pages, knights, queens, and kings that esoterically correspond to certain times of the unfolding year, their qualities, seasons, opportunities, and doubts. It’s a tarot truism that the courts are the least favorite of any reading. Most decks following the Waite-Smith tradition feature rather obscure-looking figures on thrones or horses, or carrying wands, dressed in fairy-tale drag. It’s easy to drag them as “the spiritual it girls” of any tarot deck; they seem so self-important, so overly concerned with costume and appearance. They seem to have so very little to do with on our own lives, here on the grounds of late-stage capitalism. And yet, once we get past the critiques based on appearances, there’s a lot to learn from the court cards of any deck.3 They force encounters with others outside of us, and with the hidden emotions and surprising circumstances brought about by external relationships with people seemingly like and unlike ourselves.
The court cards also are powerful reminders that despite the appearance of hierarchies in our world, we’re all made of the same stuff, the same elemental compositions, the same distant, starry chaos. A purple-beaded lady from the wrong side of the mountain can externalize the Queen of Wand’s happy endings. Anthony Bourdain’s life and death can remind us of the complicated generosity and embodiment of the Queen of Coins. 4 The Page of Wands can be the beginning of an exciting but uncomfortable adventure for an academic who has always been careful to avoid too much spontaneity, as it was for a man who walked into a recent reading with me dressed exactly like the image of the Waite-Smith Page, right down to the yellow boots and hat. “Whoa,” he exclaimed later, drawing The Tower. “That’s exactly right, isn’t?” And so his work beyond the bounds of the ivory tower of the university has uncertainly but joyfully commenced.5
I have drawn the Queen of Wands to represent bloated extroversion, in situations, other people, and myself, sure. During my time in cancerland, and even out of it, I’ve definitely encountered my fair share of horrible shocks, large and small, with the Tower. But the latter is a card that has also come up for me—and for others, throughout its cartomantic history—as spontaneous spiritual awakening or creative breakthrough.6 And as “the watery part of fire,” the Queen of Wands signifies nothing if not rainbows, if not the sometimes-miracle of life’s many little happy endings. A good neighbor and her smart cat. Your beloved dog returned home.
I guess I should have led with this: Reading with the Queen of Wands is the first in an ongoing series exploring the court cards of the tarot through personal narrative, culture, and literature. I’ll be keeping the essays free for all of my readers, but will open up the comments and associated threads on the Substack App for questions, conversations, and one-card tarot readings for my paid subscribers.
In the comments or on the thread, I’m happy to discuss any and everything that comes up for you in association with the Queen of Wands, the court cards, or books, essays, literary figures, and/or creative practices that link up with this card or others that are top of mind for you today.
How do you encounter the Queen of Wands or court cards in the tarot? What’s the use of spiritual practice for you in times like these?
Wishing you a fiery spirit and warm connections this Wednesday!
Nevermind the large swath of people who are both au courant tarot readers and Bridgerton enthusiasts these days, lol.
Just like there’s quite a lot to learn from our own true desires as they relate to beauty, the dressed body, intellectualism, and community from either our attraction to or revulsion of any kind of “it girl” discourse. Sometimes the things we think we hate are … actually pointing us toward things we secretly desire. I, not so secretly, am always desiring a good outfit alongside a good book. The struggle, for me, is to rip out the shreds of body dysmorphia that accompany allowing myself to dress in said good outfit. Also I can’t recommend Millicent Souris’ recent essay enough.
Jessa Crispin’s beautiful essay on Bourdain as the Queen of Coins is no longer available on the internet, as far as I can tell, but you can click through the linked text above and scroll down to find a few choice paragraphs from it on this random blog, including: “The Queen of Coins works from love and expresses it through work, through the body, through pleasure, through presence. And it's easier to copy the form of embodiment (the leather jacket, the forms that pleasure takes) than what is being embodied.”
Some details have been changed to ensure my client’s anonymity!
My current favorite podcast on The Tower is Duncan Barford’s 30-minute exploration of the card in relationship to Moby Dick, the story of the Tower of Babel, the concepts of “enticement” and “spiritual lightning,” and more. Also, Rachel Pollack’s exploration of the The Tower in her book A Walk Through the Forest of Souls is second to none.
I was absolutely riveted reading this entire essay—stunning in ideas, stunning in execution, a mini-tarot thriller about your lovely lost boy! And with footnotes that layer on so, so much. Thank you for it.
I still have a copy of Jessa Crispin's "Anthony Bourdain Is the Queen of Coins" TinyLetter essay saved in my e-mail archive! If anyone needs/wants a copy, just let me know and I can forward it along!