August Tarot Reading

on fear and awe, Strength and the Ace of Pentacles

There comes a time in your work with divination and astrology where the awe that “this stuff actually works” flips to fear and trepidation. Maybe you accurately forecasted your cancer diagnosis (it me, as the kids say, and ugh). Maybe, like my teacher once did, you predicted a sudden death. Maybe you threw your gaze up to the sky when some heady shit was coming together and wondered, hmmm, how weird would it be if this happened, and the this did, and the happened was really, really bad, not kind-of weird, nothing theoretical about it.

Whatever it says about us as humans, we tend to become most fully convinced of the occult side of life when it offers up doom and disruption on the menu, visions of the really, really bad made material, concrete, impossible to ignore. All of the sudden, cartomancy isn’t so much cool as foreboding, astrology isn’t so much wondrous as a reflection of future wreckage, tarot isn’t so much creative as calling down the angry house of god.

All of the sudden, you need rituals for the rituals—playing the right hymn to the right the right spirit while turning over cards, a specific order to the shuffle, meticulously chosen days and hours and minutes to do anything at all. Time and trust made scarce by their phobic parsing, anger lining the mystical experience, or just an edge of bad feelings, until nothing’s mystical at all, just a calamity of superstitions on the avoidance-reassurance spectrum.