The absolute wisdom

of the first deluded steps

When I say the tarot is beloved to me, what I mean is that the cards are a fool’s errand of encountering perfection in the heart of daily existence. When I turn my cards over every morning, I encounter the death of consensus reality and give birth to something else. What comes into being through the cards is something very much beyond the consensus of what I used to take to be real and, nevertheless, something that is here, is present within that consensus even as it interrupts it. In one sense, this newsletter was born out of my relationship with the cards. So were my children. So was my illness. So was every shift in my politics. So were my first forays into a relationship with the divine. My budding sense of myself as a radically free person, in spite of the contours of my life, my feelings about my life? That was born out of the tarot, too, as well as an understanding of love as a moral force that I have the opportunity to say “yes” to, even—especially—in moments of unbridled panic or destruction.

A few weeks ago, I had the heady experience of a few dreams coming true at once. I began to teach a course on the Major Arcana after years of wondering whether it would be possible for me to find an adequate language to describe, practically and spiritually, what I mean when I say the tarot gave me back to me, plus many other things besides. In the same week, I received the news that I have, in one sense, been waiting all my life to hear: Interruption: Divinatory Essays on Illness and Narrative will be published as a book! That same day, administrators at the hospital where I teach free writing workshops for cancer patients confirmed in a meeting that they’re interested in expanding the program to other locations within the hospital’s network. Later in the day, one of my students from the most recent iteration of the workshop—a mother with liver cancer—emailed to say she’d landed a book deal, too, in no small part as a result of the writing time, space, instruction, and framework she’d been given within my classes! I could hardly bear such good news, and all at once, in the midst of uncertainties collective and personal, too: My husband’s had a bad health scare; procedures and test results loom.¹ There were a series of mornings I found myself on the floor; getting low to the ground is one way I know how to navigate rising panic, that pentacles call of the earth. I don’t have panic attacks very often anymore, knowing as I do now that they herald shifts in my contact with the whole of the cosmos itself, not such an easy thing for a woman who used to think life inhered in matter and its destruction. When I do feel panic these days, I am always left in a place of awe for the woman I was when I turned over The Fool for the first time in a Nebraska coffee shop not so long ago. She was scared of everything. She hated everything. But, somehow, she still knew enough about something she couldn’t quite put into words, something real in that quiet place inside of herself. She still turned over The Fool and recorded the draw in her notebook. No matter that she called it the Joker. No matter that she scoffed at herself as she did so.

A few weeks ago, in the opening lecture for “Concentration Without Effort,” my six-week class on the Major Arcana, I began with the anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot’s recall of the tightrope walker as an analogy for what we’re trying to do with the tarot, what I myself have done with the tarot, by turns serious, silly, and something in between:

“What occupies us here is not just concentration in general but particularly and especially concentration without effort. What is this? Look at a tightrope walker. He is evidently completely concentrated, because if he were not, he would fall to the ground. His life is at stake, and it is only perfect concentration which can save him. Yet do you believe that his thought and his imagination are occupied with what he is doing? Do you think that he reflects and that he imagines, that he calculates and that he makes plans with regard to each step that he makes on the rope? If he were to do that, he would fall immediately …

For the tightrope walker, the juggler, and the magician, their skill and ability are, fundamentally analogous to the miracle … of transposing the centre of … consciousness from the head to the chest.”

This image of the tightrope walker who risks all but concentrates from the heart space, from a place of love, curiosity, and wonder—this chimes with my experience of what the tarot is for and when it's at its best. Every moment that I turn over a new tarot card is a moment of crisis, in the sense of the tightrope walker’s crisis, in the sense of the magician’s crisis, in the sense of the Greek work krisis, which offers up a moment of judgment, or more to the point, a moment of calling.² A moment to answer a personal call that is often coming from within even as the card is reflecting the reality of that call to you from without.

But, as I told the workshop participants, I also means the words “krisis” and “calling” very playfully, in a low-stakes, leading-from-the-heart way, because when you get in the practice of turning over a tarot card every day and then actually paying attention to how your life cleaves to that card and vice versa, well, then you’re doing something that is easy, something that is your human birthright to do. That is paying attention, and devoting yourself to paying attention to your own life, not, in the words of the Ancient Chaldean Oracle, “out of a laborious and evil tension” but instead out of “stability of wandering, forcing the fire to the fire.”

The tarot, in general, and the Major Arcana specifically, has helped me to develop a love of learning, a love of concentration, a love of contemplation that has been built from the ground up—one or a couple of cards a day, one day at time, over the course of almost a decade. The 22 cards of the Major Arcana have been said to be many things—a map of change, a cosmology, “a walk through the forest of souls,”³ a web of archetypes, and a host of gods breaking through into our lives for better or worse, depending. They are all of these things to me, and I have learned, little by little, to speak the language of the tarot on both of its levels, that of the general tradition alongside that of the particular. When I turn over a card, I have a personal relationship to a living being that is saying something specific to me. Tending to that conversation has greatly increased my capacities for everyday, creative, and spiritual strength. And by strength, what I really mean is love.

I didn’t turn to Aleister Crowley’s work on the tarot until a few years ago; I had been caught up in the surface- and academic-level dramas about Crowley as an unsavory character whose lies about his spiritual attainments only reinscribed his failures as a person. I’ll save an essay on my relationship to Crowley for another day.⁴ For now: the funny thing about self-deceiving failures is that, on occasion, they end up appearing that way because they’ve experienced something true. If you keep your eyes open while walking the path of the Fool you can sometimes end up with a working description of what it actually means to turn yourself over to a way of living that breaks with consensus reality. The risks and rewards and delusions inherent therein. When I first read The Book of Thoth, then, I was both alarmed and delighted to find a description of exactly what I had been doing with the tarot all these years:

“… the cards of the tarot are living individuals. It is proper to consider the relations which obtain between them and the student … he cannot reach any true appreciation of [the cards] without observing their behaviour over a long period; he can only come to an understanding of the tarot through experience. It will not be sufficient for him to intensify his studies of the cards as objective things; he must use them; he must live with them. They, too, must live with him. A card is not isolated from its fellows. The reactions of the cards, their interplay with each other, must be built into the very life of the student.”

I would have been comfortable with the idea of “building the tarot” into my life when I wrote my dissertation with the cards back in 2021. But I would have balked at the idea that beingness itself, with all of its glances and glancings of eternity, was something that could be touched through a daily tarot draw. I had yet to acknowledge never mind embrace the deceitful loser within my own heart; that girl who sought nothing less than union with God, with a divine love that she herself had spent a lifetime denying. The book that Rhyd Wildermuth and Sul Books will publish at the end of this year is a collection of essays showing the personal arc of that journey. I’ve made every important decision about my cancer treatment with the tarot cards. But in the end even the words “important” and “decision” and “cancer” fall away in the face of what kind of life and love of life is possible. In the end, even the cards fall away; are simply the crazy questions of the Fool who wonders whether love is available to her in the face of death, any death, every death, over and over again. In the end, and in every beginning, the cards are the absolute wisdom of the first deluded steps into what it means to truly live with the head transposed into the heart. Or, as my friend Eoin said to me last week, “even ‘heart’ is a barbarous word.”

Sending love on the new moon solar eclipse in Aquarius. If you’d like a guide for eclipse season, comment with your rising sign and your specific question below.

1. my gut says he will be ok. Future essay on the toll of cancer on caretakers coming maybe …

2. I also wrote about tarot as krisis here in my introduction to the occasional podcast my friend Meg Madden and I have going on the Majors!

3. title of my favorite Rachel Pollack book!

4. I recommend Alan Chapman’s incisive, riveting, and well-researched essay on Crowley’s personal life and spiritual attainments here.