This Fool's Journey

The deck I'm currently designing and illustrating, printed out and pinned on the wall of my studio here in NYC.

Okay, crash course:

Tarot was originally purely a card game, and began to be used for divination only in the late 18th Century. One of the most common is the Raider Waite Smith deck, published in 1910, and a lot of modern decks follow this format.

Tarot decks are usually made up of 78 cards, comprised of twenty-two Major Arcana (Death, The Lovers, The Empress, etc) and the four suits (Wands, Swords, Cups/Chalices, Pentacles/Coins) which go from Ace to Ten, with a court consisting of Page, Knight, King and Queen.

If you can think of a theme for a Tarot deck, there's a very good chance it's been made and is available to buy. Medieval cats? Yep. Kinky Manga? Take your pick! I recently bought a Game of Thrones themed deck - which was surprisingly well thought-out for a "tie-in" deck. Lots of people work with the Rider Waite Smith or Marseilles deck, but recently there's been a score of more modern decks focusing on beautiful artwork - the kind you'll likely find for sale in Urban Outfitters or Free People - like the Wild Unknown or the Starchild or Fountain Tarot. Most decks have a universal theme, so in many the Three of Cups will be represent celebration and community and the Five of Swords will be about conflict and defeat....but not always.

Because the thing about Tarot is that it's completely personal. If you're learning you'll probably try to memorise the guide that comes with your first deck, and abide religiously by what the most popular books say, but after a while you'll realise that things don't add up: one guidebook will say something that another disagrees with, the pictures and symbols on a card won't make sense to you, and before long you either go mad or come up with your own story for each card.

I've done the latter. Probably a bit of the former too. But I like to read the cards intuitively, and not stick rigidly to formal understanding of the cards when it doesn't make sense to me. A book might say that the Hanged Man's yellow shoes represent his high ideals (um...okay) but it's hard for me to follow this kind of thinking sometimes.

How can you use Tarot? Well, if you believe in it, you can use it to tell some kind of fortune. Whether that's a hard-and-fast forecast of the future or a guide of what not to do is up to you. You could pick The Tower card and spend the rest of the week worrying about getting hit by a bus, or use it as a warning to think about where disaster might be looming and how you might eschew getting squished by fate. Or a bus. 

I tend to use it more introspectively. If I pull The Tower I try to think about where I can let go of the outdated structures and ways of thinking I believed - wrongly - have been keeping me safe. I look at ways I can lean into chaos, where I can let go, where I can make the most of what fate throws at me. As humans we are programmed to project patterns onto the random: we see faces in clouds and are haunted by songs and have lucky numbers. It helps us not be crushed by the awful, lonely vastness of the universe. If you read your horoscope - even if you don't believe in astrology - chances are you'll find something to in your life that the horoscope will relate to. 

When we're lost we seek guidance, and this is why I love Tarot. When asked to think about a question or problem while shuffling the cards, more often than not we ask something to which we already know the answer. We only need support, and confirmation. We need the signpost to tell us to slow down or keep going or pull a u-turn and get the hell off the highway, but the chances are our hands have been twitching at the wheel for some time.

There’s also something to be said about placing ritual in our lives, especially when they are otherwise spinning wildly. I almost always carry a deck of tarot cards in my bag with me, battered and dog-eared in their little cardboard slip. There’s something soothing about taking them, shuffling them, feeling the span of them in my hands. Shuffle, cut, shuffle, while my mind empties as much as it ever can. I place the cards carefully down, three of them in a row, and feel the soft bend and snap of them against a sticky coffee-shop table in some beat-up American town. Turn them over, sideways - one for the past, one for the present, one for the future. A quiet, isolated moment, just for me.

Which brings me to name of this blog: The Fool's Journey is a school of thought that sees The Fool, the first card in the Major Arcana, as a naive, joyful protagonist who then makes his way along a path through the rest of the Major Arcana, meeting the archetypes and situations along the way. It's a form of Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey" which you'll find reflected in many popular movies and books: The Call to Adventure ("Come be a burglar for us, Bilbo!"), the Refusal of The Call ("Nope. I like being safe here in The Shire."), and so forth. It usually involves a divine sort of gift, the loss of a mentor, the journey home, realising that the real journey took place in your heart and mind and...yeah, you get the picture (See: The Hobbit, Lord of The Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars to name a few.)

I'm going to write more about it soon, but for now let's just say that The Fool isn't the sort of card that I would normally feel a connection too, until quite recently. If you know me in real life you'll know that the last few years have been kind of tumultuous for me, and pushed me way, way, waaaay beyond the perimeters of the life I'd constructing for myself. I'm certainly not in The Shire anymore.

I don't know if I believe in magic, or divination. Sometimes I do. Sometimes not so much. The most wonderful thing I've learned from the tons of Tarot decks and books I've read over the years is that the cards can be anything you want them to be. Incredibly freeing, right? There's no right way or wrong way to read the cards. People will tell you that you must never buy your own decks, that they must be kept wrapped in a silk scarf, that they need to be cleansed with crystals and sage smoke or they won't work right for you. And you know, maybe that works for you. Or not.

I bought all of my own Tarot decks. They sit on a shelf or at the bottom of my bag, in wooden boxes or cardboard packets or fabric pouches or sometimes, precariously, loose. I've smudged them with sage once or twice. It felt nice. I've lit candles and held crystals and meditated, and sometimes that felt nice too. But mostly, all I need is the cards, a few moments, and somewhere to lay them down.