DIY Queering Your Tarot: A Patreon Teaser

This is a sample from a much longer and more in-depth post on my Patreon. Patreon supports all the free content I put on this blog & on my social media and allows me to offer sliding scale for my Tarot for Today classes. To unlock this whole post and SO much more exclusive content + support my ability to teach and write about tarot for a living, sign up right here.

The questions I get asked the most is about how I arrived at the interpretations and discussions I write about in Queering the Tarot and the answer is that it was a deeply personal process. It is a process I've been meaning to share for a long time though. This process will dig deep into your understanding of your own queerness as well as the tarot and it's one students get a lot out of! This means when you go through the process as I've outlined it before, it's likely going to bring you to a different tarot understanding than mine and that's great! That's actually what we want - because my answer to the question "What IS queering" is that queering is the act of deconstructing something down to it's bones and then rebuilding it in our own beautifully queer image.

To start Queering Your Tarot, think about yourself and your life. What are some pitstops on the queer journey of your life that you'd like to note in the tarot? To get that information, think about life experiences you've had, learned from and grown as a result of that can serve as a metaphor from pretty much anything else you've got going on in your life. For example, my journey to the Midwest in a Honda hatchback with my favorite person encompasses so many literal pieces of my life as well as a rich set of metaphors about what I was leaving versus what I found. Another landmark that I'm starting to work with in tarot is going into vaginismus treatment. To start kneading that into my work, I asked myself what was explicitly queer about my refusal to get treatment and what is explicitly queer about getting treatment. I find tarot cards and messages that speak to that, which also hold deeper meaning in my life at large. So before we go any further, think about a few of those times in your life, or pull some tarot cards and "assign" major milestones to them that also call on your sacred queerness. 

Next, you want to think about your queer identities and how those impact your experiences AND how that queerness is impacted by your experiences. What identities do you resonate with from within the queer umbrella? What about historically - have you identified as something in the past that doesn't quite feel right now? Where do you see that reflected in your tarot cards?

Again, that Patreon link is right here and will unlock so much more information about tarot and witchcraft + some upcoming Pride month posts on those same subjects.

Blessed Be Y’all,

Cassandra

Deck Reviews: The Fat Folks Tarot

Hello wonderful Blog Readers!

I hope you are enjoying your Wednesday so far. I am really excited because NOT only is my first deck review of the renewed blog something I am so excited about BUT the person who curated this deck has been an absolute dream to work with, sending me my copy early so I could get a true review up in plenty of time to help them sell as many as humanly possible. She’s also just been so kind and complimentary!

I am speaking of Ruby N. Ball and the Fat Folks Tarot. As soon as I heard about this project I was elated. I could not wait to get my hands on a copy. I am also fat, queer, obsessed with groups of fats and queers. It felt tailor made for me but also SO MANY OTHER people in need of this project. I did something I don’t often do - I introduced myself as the writer of Queering the Tarot to see if I could get an advance copy. I’m not an influencer and I don’t want to be. I take gifts, but in this case I was adamant that I was paying. I just wanted it literally as soon as humanly possible. Ruby obliged and days later, there it was!

I was honestly nervous opening the deck. I’d seen it online and new the artwork was good. With any new deck though, I’m afraid of one of two things: that it either won’t look as good in person or that it will be great but I won’t “feel” anything when I hold it. I absolutely did not need to worry about that with this deck. It is stunning, and I have probably flipped through just to take in the art more than I have with any other deck. I’m including my Slow Holler and Collective Tarot in this, and you KNOW how I feel about my Slow Holler and Collective Tarot. It is also IS very magical and gives stellar readings! I almost wish I had more questions or had a more full client roster because I want more excuses to use it. That’s how much I love this deck. I don’t think I’ve actually ever said that about a deck before except the Collective Tarot, and that was because I waited literally years and years and years for it to come to me.

I love this deck so much that when Fire Lyte invited me to do a chat with his Patrons with Meg Elison about expertise & general writing and witchy things, I put this deck on a short list of things I wanted to make sure I talked about. I have rarely done that with a deck, though this is certainly not the first in that case.

That’s a lot of praise so here’s some actual meat and potatoes about the deck: this is a collective deck of all fat artists. Many of them are queer, BIPOC, disabled or a combination of those things. Each card manages to incorporate traditional ideas and symbols of the card and yet take it in a totally new direction. A lot of new decks do this, but add this one to that list too. The card stock isn’t notable, but whew, there have been a lot of terrible card stock in decks lately. This stock won’t blow your mind but it does what it needs to do. In some ways, it’s better this way because the cards really do speak for themselves.

Some people will complain that the deck feels mostly cohesive but a few cards stand out. I like this in a collective deck, but not everyone does. Some people will certainly feel ways about certain styles of art versus others. I will admit there are cards that aren’t my favorite of the deck - but there’s none I wish weren’t in the deck. Some people may feel more strongly about that if they’re more averse to certain styles. I really don’t have much else to put in the critique section! There’s not much to critique - it’s really going to come down to personal preference. I do wish this deck had a booklet. I love LWBs and I love when truly creative decks like this have more supplemental info for me to read. That being said, there is one online right here which has all of the artist info and their statements. I would also argue that this deck goes well with almost any tarot book that you just really like!

The Good, specifically: In addition to being a densely knowledgeable deck, a beautiful deck and a deck giving the spotlight to marginalized artists, it’s also a straight-up good tarot deck! By that I mean I have done a number of readings with this bad boy and they’ve all been spot on. I’ve tested it via cards of the day, interviews, tarot challenges I’m doing, serious questions from clients and lower stakes questions from clients. It’s been great every time. Literally every time! It’s also tireless. When I use my decks this much it often feels like they need a break, but this one is ready to just keep going and going.

There’s enough new ideas or concepts in it this deck that if you’re like me and you just like to explore a deck for a long time, it fits your needs perfectly. Even so, it’s aces for beginners too and has a lot of easy access points “in” to the tarot.

(One final pic because I am honestly very attracted to the figures in these two cards).

The money from this deck goes to benefit the Trans Lifeline, and the deck is only $30. (It probably didn’t have a booklet to keep costs down, actually.) Pre-orders are open until July 3rd. Go snag your copy right meow!

Blessed Be Y’all,

Cassandra Snow

In Other Words: A Clarification On Intuitive Tarot

Hello Beautiful Blog Readers!

I am back chatting about tarot to kick off your week and am quite excited to do so. I’m specifically addressing intuitive tarot & the push against tarot books and existing info. I want to start by stating that tarot IS an intuitive art, and it does take practice, and it does take finding your own voice. That is one of the key differences between a good reader & a great reader. I am continually alarmed by the amount of tarot personalities calling for intuitive only reading styles though, for a few different reasons. The reasons that have to do with respect to the tradition of the craft & creating a full understanding of the tarot have been covered by other tarot writers, and anyone who knows me knows that I love little more than a solid tarot book or blog post.

What I want to talk about today in regards to intuitive tarot is this: not all of our brains work the same. If you had told me, bibliophile, art history-studying me, at 18 years old that I shouldn’t look up card interpretations and should just intuit them, I would have set down the cards and likely never picked them up again. The longer I read and study tarot the more I DO understand where tarotists who come from a solely intutive place are coming from. I do get it, even if I don’t agree. I still think the language of it this style is as troubling and limiting as telling people to solely learn from books, which some people also espouse.

My personal views for those who are curious are this: both viewpoints are true. Tarot is a mystery tradition, and mystery traditions require meditation, creative writing & other intuitive forms of connecting in order to teach you anything. Tarot IS ALSO an extremely well-studied form of divination who’s writings dating all the way back to the original deck creators will only benefit you. The BEST readings, solely in my opinion, are a synthesis of intuition & learned knowledge.

That being said, this is a blog about intuitive reading. To learn how to read intuitively, a few things are true that I don’t see talked about as much:

• Your method of intuition might differ from others. If you’re trying to “feel” what the cards are telling you but you don’t generally intuit messages that way, you’re not going to get very far. Likewise, if someone guides you to visualize what advice the card might offer but you’re not the kind of intuitive person who gets visions, you’re going to question your intuitive ability. So regardless as to how someone posits the expression of intuition, know your own intuition style and stick to that until you have a more firm grasp on some of the others.

• Your natural method of expressing intuition might also be different than someone else’s! With tarot, the assumption is that you will think to yourself or speak out loud what the card is saying to you, and certainly in a reading with another person this is most likely true. While you’re learning though, you might do better to write out what you’re feeling or seeing. You might need an activity, like mimicking the action in the card, singing an impromptu song you make up about the card or going on a meditation about it to intuit what it’s telling you. There is a method for every intuitive and learning style, so don’t be shy to break away from the pack to find yours.

• If you are struggling with the first tip, you actually might need to learn to strengthen your intuition and psychic ability to enhance your intuitive reading. I strongly recommend Mat Auryn’s Psychic Witch for that, as well taking time each day to just sit with yourself for a few moments to figure out where the intuition is coming from and how it’s expressing itself.

• Something I figured out a long time ago because of my art background is that sometimes when people say “just read it intuitively”, they are taking it for granted that you will innately internalize the art on the card. If you do that successfully already, great. If not, guess what? That is part of reading intuitively!
  
  To do this, start by pulling a card and simply describing it to yourself. This was one of my top takeaways from Mary K. Greer’s 21 Ways To Read A Tarot Card and it is unendingly helpful if you get stuck in the tarot. I strongly advise doing so out loud, as both a theatre director who knows we memorize better if we say it out loud, and a tarot practitioner that has just noticed this is helpful for whatever reason. Writing it down is useful for both of these reasons too.
  
  From there, notice any emotions or value statements that come up for you, as well as any actions that may be solutions to quandaries that pop out of your mouth. Think about those emotions, ideals, & actions and take some notes on them, or underline them if you’re writing. Those are most likely get baked into your understanding of the card this way, creating consistency and a truer understanding.

• Which brings us to this: consistency is still key! One of the biggest drawbacks to reading intuitively without the deeper structure is that it changes your understanding of a card from day to day which makes your readings super dependent on your mood and therefore more likely to be inaccurate. This is why taking notes on the above tips is so important. Over time, you can look back and see what worked out and what didn’t, which will allow you to narrow down your intuitive interpretations to something that is both consistent and more accurate.

• Finally, ESPECIALLY when you’re learning, it’s okay if you’re wrong about a card sometimes. It is! We learn by error as much as we do by anything else. This is where your notes on both tarot & your ongoing journey to strengthen your intuition overall come in handy. Figure out where the “wrong” message was sitting in your body and if maybe something else was going on that day that caused some error. You can also just note which cards you’re consistently wrong about, and do some intuitive exercises or meditations on them.
  
  I’ll also say this: sometimes your intuition and your intuitive understanding of the card WAS right, but the card’s message expressed itself completely differently than what you expected. Note it, note it, note it. See if you kind find a pattern if that consistently happens, and from there you’ll probably find a way to more closely predict how the card will express itself.

Hopefully this was helpful to all of you! Wishing you so much luck & love with all your tarot endeavors. Tarot is really such a beautiful tool & I’m so excited to see where your journey leads you as you strengthen your intuition and card understandings.

On a blog business note, I am seriously SO excited about the interview series I am cooking up and I think you will be too, so stick around.

Blessed Be Y’all,

Cassandra Snow

A Beltane/May Day/Midsommar Tarot Spread!

Hello blog readers!

Today I’ve got a simple three card tarot spread for you all about celebration as May 1st and it’s myraid of celebration options sneaks up on us. It’ll be here before you know it, and this spread should help you figure out how to celebrate & why as well as what inner work needs to happen over the following Sabbat/Spring season.

Most of the May 1st celebrations celebrate Spring's arrival and all of the sensual joy, pleasure and whimsy that can come from that. I am a pleasure activist and absolutely recommend taking the day for such purposes but I'm also a realist and I know how difficult that is even with vaccines coming as COVID numbers and strains rise, as some of us battle social anxiety instead of excitement, and in this necessary uprising for Black lives. Yet we live in a society that wants to disconnect us from our pleasure, who wants us to pay literal money for it in order to access it, and who will shame us every step of the way so we owe it to ourselves and even our communities to take back some joy and pleasure on our terms, in our time. 

This spread and reading is designed to help you tap into that. We sometimes think of pleasure as this big thing that has to take all day, take so much of our energy but it doesn't have to be. It can be ten minutes to feel the sun or rain on our skin, five minutes to laugh at some memes, four seconds to truly connect to the taste of our coffee as we drink it in. It can feel like pressure to enjoy things - but it doesn't have to. As such, this spread is further designed to help you maximize the little joys to buoy you and empower you for all of the major & important work you're doing by living your life the way you are living it. 

The placements are pretty straightforward but for people who have difficulty reading image based text, I'll outline them here:

1- What to celebrate! Plain and simple. This is what you can celebrate right now without any further work or thinking on the matter. 

2- What's blocking your potential for joy? We KNOW it's probably the world around us, but how we internalize that or how it manifests or shows up is very different for us. While I do have a collective reading here for us in a moment, I think this spread in this space & time IS really important to work through on your own.

3- A step to increase pleasure & joy right now. Again, pretty straightforward but this differs from the first card because it is an action step you can take to increase your pleasure and joy moving forward - not something already ready to be celebrated. 

That’s what I got y’all! If you want to see this spread in action I do have a community/collective reading from it up on my patreon which is right here. I also made some very cool announcements today such as a monthly drawing for a Zoom reading I’m starting in May for all supporters chipping in $10 or more a month. I also have Patreon only availability which I also announced details on! Again that is right here.

If you’re more of a class type, Siri Plouff of Northern Lights Witch & I are doing an EIGHT WEEK class on tapping into your creativity via the tarot & May’s Tarot for Today class is purchasable. Those are right here on the class registration page.

Blessed Be Y’all!

Cassandra Snow

Creating In Wyrd Times - An EIGHT Week Class With Yours Truly & My Best Witch Siri Plouff

Creativity (or, the urge & ability to create) is one of our most instinctual and potentially powerful skills as activists, witches and denizens of this world. 

There was a time before our world was what it is where we sang because we needed to express ourselves, sketched because it felt good, wrote love letters of delicate and impassioned prose for our lovers’ eyes only. What’s amazing about humans is how much we remember - even when we’re not aware. Every time we daydream about the future with a partner, make ridiculous jokes with a sibling or perfectly wrap up a homemade gift for a friend, we are using this natural, Divine skill. 

Our creations in modern day are no less Divine, no less innate. They are born of our passions for a better world, our birth right of expression & our wild imaginations. 2020 was a weird year and 2021 is not letting up. That energy is not going out without a fight and so many of us are so exhausted that creating anything at all feels like a vague memory of a folk tale we heard as children - NOT like something we could sit down tonight and just...do. Yet those skills live and thrive under our skin and when the chips are down is when they are itching to come play the most.

Creating In Wyrd Times is an eight week journey into our own potential for creative bliss and all of the beautiful creations that can come from that. We take this journey using Tarot Cards, exciting artistic inspiration & our own hands. We’ll forge rituals together. We’ll embrace the many, many lessons of the tarot together. We’ll brainstorm and yes, we’ll create. Together.

If this sounds like you and you are just itching for some time to play with cards & your creative prowess, we are genuinely so thrilled to have you. Click right here to learn more and/or sign up. Please note we have THREE Options for pricing: $197 is the base price. Rad. Just snag it. $250 allows Siri and I to pay ourselves for scholarship spots AND if we get more than we expect, we can increase scholarship availability. If you are someone of means, we do ask that you think about purchasing at that level. Finally, as you’ve probably gathered, there are scholarship options! We are asking that you only apply for one of those if you are BIPOC, an LGTBQ+ community member, a single parent, and/or someone who’s disability impacts your income AND you need the scholarship. Click here to learn more and register for either a scholarship or the waitlist, depending on when you get it in.

About Creating in Wyrd Times: You’ll get a weekly email full of creative prompts from the tarot itself as interpreted by Cassandra & Siri. These are yours to do with as you wish. Do them all. Pick one. Throw them in a notebook and deal with it later. That end is completely your call. Then every other week we’ll meet as a group to journey through a different tarot suit’s points of inspiration. We will create unique flash writing and/or visual sketches (or play with both if you’re so inclined). Siri will lead us through ritual and meditation to stimulate our creative unconscious. Cassandra will talk about this suit’s role in our creative lives. Then you’ll be introduced to artwork inspired by the Ace of each suit (one suit per session) and use that as a jumping off point to create something all your own.

You can use this time together to work on one project for the eight weeks, a small project per group session or 100 very little projects that you work through as inspiration hits. It’s your call. This is your journey through the tarot, your journey through the creative recesses of your mind. We’re just here to help you unlock & shape it.

Included in the workshop is a pretty dense workbook to work through at your own pace. This will help those of you who are tarot newbies feel comfortable turning to your decks throughout our eight weeks together. You do not have to be a tarot expert to thrive in this class, a base level of tarot knowledge will suffice. You don’t need to be an artist to thrive in this class either. You simply need to be willing to engage and see what comes out of that.

Given that this class takes place on Zoom, you do not need to worry about sharing with the class but there will be many times you’ll be more than welcome to share. You will need a stable internet connection and capability to run Zoom, as well as an email address you check frequently.

Cassandra and Siri share core values centered around building community and providing you with the promised information in the most generous and collaborative way possible.

The Nuts and Bolts: Siri or Cassandra will send you a Creating in Wyrd Times email every Monday. The live sessions take place every other Thursday in June & July from 6-9 PM CST.

Live Session Dates:
Thursday, June 3
Thursday, June 17
Thursday, July 2
Thursday July 15

Classes will be recorded should you sign up and then have to miss. Things happen!

Again, simply click here to sign up at whichever level works for your budget!

What Story Do YOUR Major Arcana Cards Tell?

From Coco Tafoya via Unsplash

A big breakthrough for most tarot learners is realizing that the Major Arcana, the first 22 Cards in the Tarot Deck labeled from 0-21 tell the story of The Fool’s Journey. The first card, labeled 0 is The Fool, and is a card said to be entering into new adventures and journeys (however naively and childlike that entrance may be). The World, by steep contrast, is about ENDINGS to journeys, internalizing the lessons from our journeys and often, settling in to get ready for the next cycle. With that framing it’s easy to see how the other cards can tell the story of what happens next, who The Fool meets and even what traits and personalities The Fool inhibits on their way. Factor in the work Joseph Cambell did on mapping out what a Hero’s Journey looks like & Carl Jung did naming and describing archetypes and now these first 22 cards take on a world of their own. 

One thing that we really overlook when learning tarot though is how important personal connection to the cards should be. A lot has been said, positive and negative about Unverified Personal Gnosis, but when it comes to divination it doesn’t make any sense not to develop that. While we can get substantial wisdom out of the cards by simply knowing the traditional meanings, stories & theory behind them for many people the cards won’t click until it matches up really beautifully with their own story. For EVERYONE, this deck of 78 Cards can hold any message we would ever need - but it probably won’t until we look at our story & the individual short stories within it and figure out which cards connect to what. 

Image my own, with the Smith-Waite Tarot Deck: Centennial Edition.

Personalizing the tarot based on your own stories and ideals is unspeakably important to me. A huge step towards developing Queering the Tarot was realizing how different my journey was from a standard Fool’s Journey, then quickly realizing my journey still WAS in the cards. I just had to approach them a little bit differently. If you are marginalized within the society you live in, have had very weird things happen to you, or tend to not fit in in standard discussions about the tarot then that is a huge sign that it’s time for you to map out your own story and see what the cards have to say about it. 

So how do we do that? To be good at something, you sometimes have to be bad at it first. So don’t worry if storytelling is not a personal strength of yours. Simply grab your recording, typing, or hand-writing tools after you’ve done some thinking about a personal story you want to learn or connect to the Major Arcana through. Tell your story, and then lay out your cards (in order at first). 

Some very important notes about stories & this activity to remember:

• You’ll probably want to do this several times using different stories.

• Stories have a beginning, middle and end.

• Stories do NOT have to be linear. There can be dream sequences, sidequests, long-forgotten memories popping up, etc etc.

• Stories can and often do have subplots!

• Stories have a purpose/theme/mood and lessons learned. Often, this is the part that comes from the tarot but there are exceptions to this. 

As you’re mapping out your story, figure out which card from the Major Arcana goes where. Once you’ve taken note of these associations, get used to reading with them in mind. Obviously if you pull The Magician you’re not going to tell all about the Fool and how they ended up at The Magician. You want to be able to pull up what you personally learned about The Magician quickly. It takes time. It takes practice. It takes trust in yourself and the tarot cards. When you can synthesize what you learned from a book & what you learned from your own experiences though, your readings will be pure magic. 

Here are some story prompts and/or next lines in case you get stuck:

• The Fool: I am journeying towards…..

• The Magician: I got good at….by/because...

• The High Priestess: Deep down I know this is true…

One thing you’ll likely notice is that your story might not make sense at first. That’s okay. It’s YOUR story about things YOU’VE been through and learned, so let it take whatever shape it needs to. Just check in with your cards along the way and remember to trust yourself. 

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If you liked these story starter prompts, notes on what to remember re: your story or just the overall theme & activity outlined, I strongly suggest signing up for my Alternative Approaches to Tarot which asks you to bring yourself, your identities and your wealth of intuitive, creative & practical knowledge to the cards instead of trying to memorize a bunch of guidebooks. We learn so many ways to flex our fun & creative sides to still get a deep, nuanced understanding of the cards that honors their traditional roots while forging a new path all our own. It’s a 3-session class for $100 through Eye of Horus Minneapolis and it starts Monday, April 5th at 6 PM. Click here to learn more or sign up! If you catch this blog after tomorrow, don’t worry! I run this class fairly often so you’ll have time to catch it again.

Blessed Be Y’all!
Cassandra Snow