I met my friend Susan in 1982. At that time, my life was rather dramatically in flux. I had just left my first husband, moved in with my mom, and changed jobs. I was twenty-one years old and it seemed like I’d already lived a lifetime.
When we first met, Susan pulled out her tarot cards and gave me a reading. I had questions about my ex-husband, and we identified one of the cards in the reading as him. She then took this card, moved it to the center of the layout, shuffled the rest of the cards, and did another reading—on him. Then she handed me the deck and said, “Now you read me.” I’d never read before, but I was aided by the fact that this was Aleister Crowley’s Thoth deck, and almost every card has a keyword of some kind on it. While most decks give you the names of the majors (Death, the Sun, and so on), this one labels (for example) the Two of Swords as Peace, the Five of Cups as Disappointment, and the Six of Wands as Victory. It was a little like having a cheat sheet, and I dove right in. Thus a lifetime of tarot reading began.
I come from a card-playing family. We started with all the little-kid games—Go Fish, War, Michigan Rummy—but quickly progressed to more interesting fare like Hearts, Gin Rummy, Oh Hell, and Double Solitaire. Cards feel natural in my hands, and shuffling relaxes me. As soon as I touched the tarot cards, I knew these were for me.
I didn’t stick with the Thoth deck. I admired Lady Frieda Harris’s artwork more than I loved it, and the sense of chaotic movement in the cards didn’t appeal to me. I acquired a Rider-Waite deck (often known today as Waite-Smith, the most popular deck in the world) and a secondhand copy of Mastering the Tarot (1973) by Eden Gray, a book I still recommend.
My first goal was to get “off book,” as they say in theater. I worked daily to memorize the card meanings, flipping through the deck like flashcards until I had a few words for each card, both upright and reversed. Mastering the Tarot is an ideal book for this purpose, giving pithy, concise, yet deep meanings.
While memorizing, I was also reading the cards, first by flipping through the book for the meaning of every card, then by checking the book only when I got stuck. I read for myself and my sister, who was seventeen and game, and for any friends who were interested. Susan and I continued to read for each other, and I continued to learn from her and study on my own. By the time I was twenty-five, I was reading professionally, and I’ve done so ever since. I taught my first class in tarot around 1993, and some of my former students are today professional readers.
At some point in the mid-1990s, my then-husband, Isaac Bonewits, started insisting that I write a book on the tarot. He was a skilled reader and had even designed his own deck. He admired my ability and thought I had something important to say on the subject. We were already divorced by the time I published my first book (The Elements of Ritual, 2003), but Isaac never dropped the matter of a tarot book. He really wanted me to write one, and so, at last, I am doing so. Sadly, Isaac died in 2010. Nonetheless, I somehow feel his approval as I write.
This book isn’t a “system.” I haven’t studied a system. I’ve read a number of books on tarot—I have a pretty decent library—and I’ve spent time with other tarot readers, both formally, in classes, and informally, just sharing knowledge and experience. What I’m teaching here is almost entirely my own; it’s stuff I’ve learned by doing, concepts I’ve developed on my own, and my personal interpretation of the books I’ve read.
What Are Tarot Interactions?
I’ve coined the term “tarot interactions” to talk about different ways in which we can relate to, and use, tarot cards. Tarot isn’t static; it interacts with its environment in a wide variety of ways. I started by thinking of various ways that cards relate to one another, and the way that various combinations of cards create unique wholes. You may think that there are 78 possible interpretations in a (78-card) deck, or perhaps 156, counting reversals. But when you consider that each two-card combination creates a unique and individual meaning, the number approaches 25,000, and when you also consider that every one of those 25,000 meanings changes based on its position in a reading, and a reading might have ten or more cards, we’re already at the quarter-million mark, and we haven’t even scratched the surface!
Cards interact with each other, with position, with the reader, and with the querent (the person receiving the reading). They interact with the context of the reading. You interact with the cards, with the querent, and with yourself as a reader. Understanding tarot interactions fundamentally changes your approach to tarot.
What Kinds of Cards Work with This Book?
Any. Most books on the tarot focus on a specific deck or a specific type of deck. A typical tarot book will be useful for any Waite-Smith–derived deck. However, Tarot Interactions applies to any tarot deck, and indeed, to any divinatory system using cards.
There are a lot of “oracle” decks out there, lovely decks of cards that do not correspond to the system known as tarot. They have different numbers of cards, different suits or no suits, and symbols that in no way are based on the medieval system known as tarot. Oracle decks may be based on Druid lore, or ogham (such as the Voice of the Trees deck), or on goddesses or crystals. They may simply be conceptual, or they may be based on an almost infinite number of other themes.
Throughout this book, I will use traditional tarot in my sample readings to illustrate my points. My personal interpretations are based on the Waite-Smith style of deck. However, the principles of interactive tarot apply to any kind of reading. Indeed, the principles in chapter 1 don’t even require cards.
If you read using an alternative deck, you may find appendices A and B easily skipped: they are about meanings and patterns in Waite-Smith decks. However, the concept of meanings and patterns still matters to you! For example, chapter 3, which is about interacting with patterns, has material that doesn’t apply to you, since it talks about suits and other traditional tarot symbols. But you can easily use those symbols as examples, and apply the underlying principles to your own preferred deck.
Who This Book Is For
By the time you read this, I expect that you’ll have already done your flashcards. You know what the tarot is, what the major and minor arcana are, and what the suits are. You probably already own at least one deck, and have already begun reading with it.
If you’re a beginner, that’s fine. In fact, that’s great. In that case, though, you will probably want some in-depth books on interpreting each card. As a teacher, I insist that all my tarot students go through the labor of memorization. It might not be fun, but there’s no substitute for it. Yes, tarot is and should be intuitive, but starting from an underlying educational structure will improve your intuition, as we’ll discuss in chapter 1. So while I hope to have your rapt attention in these pages, I do not want or expect to be your only resource. You can use the brief card interpretations I’ve provided in appendix A, but those almost certainly won’t be enough. Purchase one or more “card-by-card” books, and study them. I provide recommendations at the end of this book.
But suppose you’ve already done all that. You know the cards pretty well, but you feel like you could go further with them. Perhaps you’re doing great with the cards and you just want to dig deeper and read more. Or perhaps you feel like there’s something lacking: a sense of freedom, a sense that the cards can be more than the sum of their parts.
Tarot Interactions is designed to take you from good to great, from understanding to experiencing. It is a tool you can use to stop reading the tarot and start interacting with it, or to read it not like a series of road signs, but like a story, or a poem, or the lyrics to a song. It is my hope and intention that this book will help you become more intuitive, more psychic, and more skilled in your approach to the cards. Do the homework and the exercises to enhance your experience. Keep the recommended journal. You’ll be a very different reader at the end of this book than you are right now.
Let’s begin.