Reading Tarot Like The Magician

My first exposure to Tarot was through a Tarot workshop I inadvertently took with Rachel Pollack while I was in graduate school. Rachel Pollack is a Tarot luminary who was an influential figure in the Tarot revival in the 1980s. Tarot was a very different art before the 80s. My work exists, in part, because of the work she did blending Tarot with modern psychology. Her book Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom was for people of her generation (and mine) what Modern Tarot by Michelle Tea is for people starting out today.

I had no idea Rachel was famous in the Tarot world when I met her. To me, she was a science fiction luminary, and I was too busy gushing about taking a class with someone who had just published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction to notice that her workshop was on the Tarot card the Hanged Man.

My school was a magnet for hippies, pagans, and weirdos, so I was probably the least Tarot-literate person in that workshop, but when she held up a well-loved copy of the Hanged Man card and started describing the connections to religious and mythological figures and ideas in the card--Odin, Osiris, Jesus, Mohammed, Odysseus, the Tree of Life--I was enchanted. Utterly. As soon as I could, I ran out to a New Age store and bought a pack of Tarot cards, and that deck of cards is sitting on my desk next to my computer as I write this almost a decade later in their worn and tattered blue velvet bag with a crescent moon pressed into it.

When I stepped into that class, I was still in Fool time. I was exploring, wandering around, didn’t know what I was doing. In the moment when I became enchanted, I stopped being the Fool, and I started being the Magician.

Become Enchanted

Now there’s something a little bit odd about what I just said, isn’t there? I said that I became the Magician when I became enchanted, but aren’t Magicians the ones who do the enchanting?

Yes, this is true, but before you can enchant anyone, you must, as Lee Morgan says in A Deed Without a Name, first be enchanted.

Why is that? And what does it mean to be enchanted? When you have been enchanted, you have fallen under someone’s spell, the way people in the old stories fell into Fairy, falling out of one life, one time and into another. Your life has changed. Your story has changed.

A spell at its most simple is a story. When a witch casts a spell, they are telling a story that, for example, a few herbs, a spoon of honey, a little lemon, and a cup of hot water will make your sore throat go away. When you decide to sip the tea, you are entering into that story. You are giving that story permission to change you.

Sometimes, the story isn’t powerful enough to change you. The herbs are wrong or your sore throat is too far advanced to be helped or the witch hasn’t told a story that convinces you it will work.

Perhaps, the witch doesn’t believe the spell will work themselves. In that case, they have failed to step into the story they’re telling themselves before trying to pull someone else in with them.

Now, when I talk about belief, I’m not talking about faith. Faith is the belief in things you haven’t seen or experienced for yourself. Witchcraft is a practice, not a religion. We do the things we do because they work for us. A witch who successfully enchants the person with the sore throat is usually a witch who has suffered a sore throat themselves and drunk the tea and discovered it works.

This is why you must first be enchanted to be the Magician. You must experience the story for yourself before you can tell it to someone else.

Creativity Is Magic

When I was in graduate school, I lived in Silicon Valley. I was new to the Valley, and I was curious about where I lived, so I decided to write my thesis novel on technology startup culture. As part of my research, I joined a hackerspace. A hackerspace is the punk rock granddaddy of co-working spaces. Co-working spaces are the Millennial stepchild of office parks. I wrote my novel surrounded by young CEOs who were trying to build companies. These companies were so young, so new, there was nothing to them but a slick website and a business card. Usually, the CEO was the only employee.

At first, it seemed kind of funny to me that these guys were calling themselves CEOs.

How can you be the chief anything when there’s only one of you?

Then one day I was at my friend Dave’s company’s launch party. I’d like to pretend it was the kind of Silicon Valley debauch you hear about in the news, but the guests were mostly members of his family. His mom made deviled eggs. If the party hadn’t been held in an office park, I would have thought it was a graduation party. In a way, it was a graduation party. Dave had graduated from the hackerspace to an office park.

During the party, Dave told me something extraordinary: “The hardest thing about starting a company is that it’s all in your head. In your head, it exists, but it can’t live there. You have to make it real for other people.”

That’s what the business cards and the fancy titles and the deviled eggs were all about. They were ways of making his company, which only existed in his dreams, real. They were about telling a story and making it real enough that people could believe it without faith.

The Fool is just an idiot with a dream. The Magician is the next step in the creative process. You become the Magician when you fall in love with an idea and try to make that dream real, when you take the image in your head and start making lines on paper, when you stop running a melody around in your head and start singing, when you pick up a deck of Tarot cards and attempt to become a reader.

Turning a dream into reality requires creating something out of nothing. If you know your physics, you know that you can’t get something from nothing. Only a Fool could believe it’s possible. To get something from nothing is magic. Literally. That’s why the Major Arcana is called the Fool’s journey. Every magician starts out as a fool. Magic is the art of bootstrapping a dream into reality, taking something that only exists in your head and turning it into something other people can interact with. Outside of the witchy world, we call it “creativity.” There is absolutely no difference between creativity and magic.

Magic Is Power, Directed

Now, let’s look at the Magician himself. He is wearing white robes with a red cloak. White is the color of innocence, and red is the color of experience. He is still fundamentally inexperienced, but he has enough experience to put it on like a costume. Over his head is the sign of infinity, which symbolizes unlimited potential. He holds a wand in his hand like a lightning rod, ready to channel power from the universe. It is a white wand, again a symbol of innocence. He doesn’t yet fully understand the powers he’s dealing with, and his action is just a little bit foolish, like someone literally trying to catch lightning.

On the table in front of him are a pentacle, a cup, a sword, and a wand. These are the symbols of the four elements and the suits of the minor arcana.

The pentacle corresponds to the element earth. By having power over the pentacle, the Magician has power over practical things such as work and finances, and power over the earth. He can ground. He can do magic that changes his circumstances in concrete ways.

The cup corresponds to the element water. Water is the element of emotions and creativity and the heart. By having power over the cup, he has power over his emotions and the emotions of others. He can tell stories and create art that make himself and others feel a certain way. The sword corresponds to the element air. Air is the element of the mind. By controlling the sword, he has power over his mind and the minds of others. He can use thought and reason to bring others over to his point of view.

The wand corresponds to the element fire. Fire is the element of passion. By controlling the wand, he has power over his passions, his energy. He can direct his energy toward the things he desires, and he can inspire others to join his cause, as well.

Flowers are everywhere on the Magician’s card. This card is fundamentally a card of growth. The person who is in a Magician phase of life—or whose Soul Card is the Magician—is someone who is primarily growth oriented. The Magician is the eternal student. Unlike the Fool who studies any old thing, the Magician has channeled his interest and study into becoming powerful in one thing.

When the Magician comes up in a reading, it might mean that the person being read for needs to focus their power, particularly in a creative direction, or that they are in a time of life when becoming empowered should be a focus for them. Either way, like the Fool, this card is fundamentally an optimistic one. It is time for the querent to become enchanted.

This post was originally published on Aquarius Moon Journal on 21 January 2019.