Tarot: A Compass For Journeying Toward the Truth of Who We Are and Who We Can Be

The Wild Reed’s 2022 Queer Appreciation series concludes by coming full circle with the sharing of a second excerpt from Queering the Tarot.

Yet unlike the first excerpt, which highlighted the words of Cassandra Snow, the author of Queering the Tarot, tonight’s excerpt is from the book’s foreword, written by Beth Maiden (right).

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Why is it that queer folks are drawn to tarot and other witchy, magical, or esoteric practices? I believe it has to do with a righteous reclaiming of the marginal spaces we inhabit. As we embrace what makes us different, we turn to tools and practices that have themselves been ridiculed or shamed. I spoke about the value of queer magic recently in an interview with queer designer and moon-witch Sarah Gottesdiener.

Queers – especially those with other intersecting marginal identities – tend to exist in the spaces the mainstream neglects; beautiful, scruffy, overgrown edgelands where we can experience a little freedom, support each other to thrive, where we get real about our pain, and where we continually look outwards. We have to look outwards because as well as being reviled and scapegoated, queers are also exotified and tokenised, and the radical spaces we create are rapidly gentrified and commodified, claimed by the mainstream and sold back to us in plastic packaging. This is always painful, but I think queer folks are used to it. It can be fuel for the fire. We push boundaries and move a little further out of the mainstream, where we discover new sources of inspiration, create new kinds of magic.

We work to liberate ourselves and each other. Queers understand that personal and collective liberation are interwoven and are used to supporting and uplifting each other in a way that runs counter to the me me me messages of the mainstream. We critique what we are offered (or sold) and turn it on its head.

To a world that categorizes us as non-normative, we say, “Your loss! We’ll build our own communities, economies, and structures of care right over here.” Picking up affordable, accessible practices like tarot, astrology, and herbalism – folk tools that to the capitalist white hetero-patriarchy are useless because they can’t be neatly explained, co-opted, and sold – is part of this radical community-building process. We use tarot to better understand and care for ourselves and our communities.

. . . Too often, mainstream discourse on LGBTQ+ experiences focuses on how queers are “just like everyone else.” We hear about “same love,” we talk about how we are all human, we fight for permission to enter the patriarchal, capitalist institutions of matrimony, and so on. I frequently hear confused voices drifting over from the mainstream, asking: Why do you need your own special hairdressers? Do you still need Pride, now that gays can get married? Why would you seek out a queer therapist? and so on.

These questions contain their own answers; their very asking shows us why and how much we do need these things. While, of course, it’s important to talk about human commonalities, while, of course, love is love, and while for many LGBTQ+ people, a seat at the mainstream table is a revolution in itself, it’s also the case that the queer experience is different from the hetero experience (depending on other intersecting circumstances such as race, class, mental health, or body type, often vastly so).

We need our own hairdressers, visibility parades, therapists, and so on because so often the people and institutions around us do not get it (or choose not to). Hetero-normative society doesn't know what it is like to have a stylist alter that haicut you’ve asked for in order to make your gender expression fit their comfort zone, doesn’t know how it feels to be continually assessing the fluctuating cost of speaking in your own voice, wearing the clothes you choose, or simply touching your lover’s hand. Hetero-normative society doesn’t see the shame and the fear every queer person has confronted (or will at some point need to confront) that is the result of growing up categorized as not “normal.” No single queer person I know (regardless of how supportive their family may be) has been immune to this shame and fear. Queer identity – with all of this shame and fear, and with its pride and its resilience and its deep, unconditional love, too – is a maze through which we walk, or crawl, or fly, or drag ourselves, or dance, or dream, or fall, or fuck, as we journey toward the truth of who we are and who we can be. Tarot is a compass for navigating that maze with curiosity, consciousness, honesty, and compassion.

– Beth Maiden
Excerpted from the foreword
to Cassandra Snow’s book,
Queering the Tarot
Weiser Books, 2019
pp. xiii-xv

Related Off-site Links:
Queer Tarot – Terra Loire (Queer Majority).
10 LGBTQ+ Tarot Books That Deserve a Spot on Your Bookshelf – Erika W. Smith (Cosmopolitan, June 27, 2022).

For previous installments in The Wild Reed’s 2022 Queer Appreciation series, see:
• Cassandra Snow on Reclaiming the Word “Queer”
• Tian Richards’ Message to Queer Youth: “Every Part of Your Identity Is a Superpower”
• Gabbi Pierce on the “Evolution of Gender”
• Afdhere Jama’s “Love Song to the Queer Somali”
• “Creative Outsider, Determined Innovator”: Remembering Berto Pasuka
• “Queer Love Is My Divine Companion”
• Dyllón Burnside: “For Me, the Term Queer Just Opens Up Space”

Opening image: The Black Queer Tarot
Image 2: Beth Maiden.
Images 3 and 4: Divine Diversity Tarot
Image 5: The Light Seer’s Tarot