August 8th 2026:

Bad news: I’m writing online again.

It’s been a while since I’ve had anything resembling a blog, but as a twenty-something year old transsexual with a philosophy degree and too much free time, I suppose the matter is a bit out of my hands. That said, I’d rather not commit to any big philosophy or media criticism projects at the moment, so I’m dedicating this section of my website to off-the-cuff thoughts and rambles—and tarot, the subject of this particular entry and possibly a recurring theme.

Before my first attempt at a reading, I’d like to elaborate some thoughts on the practice in general, and the spiritual legitimacy thereof. Personally, I tend to take a bit of a moderate approach to the whole ‘is tarot real’ debate. To illustrate this, I have devised the following three point tarot-belief-scale, with each number representing a common attitude towards the practice.

1. Tarot is a mechanism for divination in the truest sense, and as such, is a deeply spiritual practice which puts one into contact with powers beyond our understanding.
2. Tarot is a useful mechanism for shuffling around one’s thoughts and coming to new conclusions about oneself, but is ultimately profoundly secular.
3. Tarot is a bunch of hippy-dippy new-age woo and an insult to genuine religious practice.

On this scale, I’m generally inclined to put myself slightly below a two—somewhere around one and three quarters. I generally agree with viewpoint two that tarot primarily functions as a means of internal reflection and self-discovery, but I have a hard time viewing such processes through a solely secular lens. Self discovery and chance are always quasi-divine affairs. That is to say, while I don’t find any mystical power between me and the deck, I do find that one person and one deck is enough to constitute a spiritual affair.

I apologize if this seems vague. The exact contours of the spirituality of self-discovery (or perhaps self-creation) are somewhat muddy and confused to me at the moment, but hopefully the more time I spend consciously trying to become someone (both with and without a deck) the more light I can shine on the issue.

For today’s reading I will be using the one and only tarot deck in my possession, Cilla Conway’s The Intuitive Tarot (2004) which I bought for myself in high school. The case is a bit beat up from all the times I had it in my book bag, but the cards are in perfect condition, and I find the wear-and-tear on the box a bit charming. I use blue embroidery thread to keep the cards together, initially because I was afraid of losing one, but now because I think it looks kinda sick. One of these days I will probably learn some Shibari, at which point I will bind my cards more intricately.

I rarely find myself doing specific spreads with tarot. Typically I just cut the cards a few times, draw whichever one of the 78 identical reverse-patterns I get a good vibe from, and do my best at figuring out what it could mean. For whatever reason, though, this time I ended up doing a three-card spread. This leaves me in the frustrating exciting position of not only reading cards for themselves, but also figuring out what sort of relation might exist between them. I am rejecting out of hand a past-present-future reading out of hand for the simple reason that I don’t really vibe with it.

I first drew The Chariot, which surprised me given I pulled the same card last week. This was followed by The One of Cups, and the Page of Swords. I’m sure a more skilled reader could make big hay of the fact that I drew the same Major Arcana card twice in such a short period of time, but for now I think I’ll let that speak for itself. Cilla Conway describes the card as follows:

The Chariot represents our mature selves. Having separated from our parents, we seek our place in the world. Riding high, we consider ourselves equal to (or better than) others. This change of status has a price however. As we grow we learn to play a part; to fit into family, college and work. We don a mask – the persona – which helps us forge our way through life while hiding our real selves. (Cilla Conway, The Intuitive Tarot pp. 47)

Taking visual cues from the card, Conway’s description, and the repeated draw, I’m inclined to view The Chariot as a persistent theme of self-assertion and authenticity in my life. While the charioteer certainly dons a mask, it is a mask that they choose to don. The mask is the sense of self which one forms with great difficulty. Without a mask, one falls into a dissociative blur of non-subjectivity.

Which brings us to the One of Cups. From what I can gather, this card is a manifestation of pure primordial potentiality. Here, I’m reminded of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus—because of course I am—wherein we see desire conceptualized as a flow between partial objects; partial because from the point of view of desire, the source and interruption are never fully present. In this sense, the yonic moon in the center of the card produces a flow that the contours of the cup interrupt. Which is conceptually cool I suppose, but as Father John Misty once said: “what's that gotta do with this atom bomb in me?”

The relevance is that the one of cups here seems to form a counter-force to The Chariot; raw affect devoid of a cohesive object. If the chariot is the ego, the one of cups is the dissociative blur of id which exists prior to any coherent world or identity. With this distinction in mind we can finally approach the Page of Swords.

The Page of Swords is, from what I can glean from Conway’s description, clarity of purpose. I’m inclined to view this clarity as the unity of being and becoming, pluralism and monism, being-there and becoming-intense. The Page is not a dialectical overcoming of the distinction, but the addition of their identity as a third term among them. In this sense, conceptualizing the Page of Swords is the task ahead of me.

In truth I don’t expect that this reading is especially good, both owing to the fact that it’s my first time fleshing one out, and that I’m largely out of practice writing anything interesting. That said, I did have a lot of fun thinking through it. Maybe the real tarot is the thoughts we shared along the way.