Cartomancy as Ancestral Citation
image: a black person with curly hair wearing a white turtleneck studying in a library on a red orange psychedelic background
"Too often in the past, I have put letter writing off, because I thought whatever free time I had had to go to those survival things and if any energy left over would go to writing. However, it does occur to me that letter writing is both a survival thing and writing, plus it is so important to me to continue our conversation.
— Pat Parker to Audre Lorde, as cataloged in Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974 - 1989
Cartomancy, Bibliomancy + Citation
The truth is I've always been able to read without them. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
Its a mark of the lineage. A long conversation between the dead and the living. To work the cards is to remember those who worked the cards.
I've seen cardless reading, oracle card reading, playing card reading, palm reading, and on and on positioned as Thee Way. It should come as no surprise that I disagree.
There are advantages to reading with and without additional technology, of course. Yet the #1 reason I work with playing cards, lenormand, or tarot or any other knowledge and wisdom seeking technology (KWST) is for citation.
There's humility in citation. There's wisdom in citation. There's tradition in citation.
Even the process of citing one's sources honors the ancestry of the tradition in which one works.
Citation acknowledges the lifetimes you build upon every time you turn a card. Citation decenters your individual wisdom in favor of the grand, pulsing whole. Even their meanings are a collective intervention, a group intuition programmed into the shape of a loose book.
The style, methods, meaning, and ceremony around these citations may look different even when the technology is the same.
No two readers read alike. Yet many in the same tradition working the same technology will gain, and pass on, a cohesive flavor.
When we cite our intuition with cards or any external technology, we qualify our responses. We become a chorus. We control for loose spirit guides and our own loose tongues. We merge the logic of spirit with the spirit in us, with the spirit in all things, and the wild half-knowable wisdom of the divine.
Resolving the tension between a clients spirit, ancestors, and guides, my own, and the cards is the work of a skilled reader. It requires years of training and practice. It requires the acknowledgement and development of the gift.
It goes beyond the cards, but it honors the cards. It includes the ancestors and guides at the table, but interprets, directs, and tempers their wisdom.
Reading cards isn't about needing cards. It's about the client. It's about what ancestor elevation is for, while acknowledging the context in which many of our ancestors lived.
Let me make it physical.
For many people, their ancestors' goals include continuing the line. Around twenty-five, I noticed my readings featured more ancestors talking about babies and families. Nuclear families. Dyadic families. Traditional families.
Well this is a queer and trans first and forward service, honey.
My clients practice solo polyamory, relationship anarchy. Some are single by choice. Some are dating around, or true romantics, or undefinable loverbois and lovergirls, and all the rest. Some of them do want to bear. But not necessarily in the confines of tradition.
Some of the people the ancestors were begging for babies had neither the interest, nor the desire to retain the parts that could incubate them. So there's that negotiation, that qualification of interpretation from spirit to the client, through me.
Or even, how many of us have wanted what we simply cannot have? Not just now, but always. Have wanted to change the features of our bodies, the realities of our lives?
The human in me may want to say "No. That's not possible." But as a reader, that's not my place. People don't come to me for my opinion. They come for a meld of many things, including my citation. My spirit and technology qualified "no." The "no" that don't come from either of us, that which transcends us.
Without tarot, or lenormand, or playing cards one can still be of the two, their spirits and mine. But, quiet as it's kept, spirits have agendas of their own. They have opinions. They have biases. Readers too.
But technology in itself isn't biased. It may pick up on our bias, i.e. Algorithms of Oppression. They are yet being programmed. There's power in this third party. There's freedom and liberation in this third factor of our work together.
Learning Cards, Living Spirit
When I was preparing to develop my Learning Archetypes quiz, I realized people learn tarot in for major archetypes.
The first is The Fool. The Fool prioritizes freedom. The Fool is categorically not interested in card meanings. The Fool connects effortlessly with spirit but may not have a repeatable process by which they do that.
The Fool is a wonderful archetype in which to encounter one's intuition. It's not a very useful archetype in which to develop it.
The rate with which The Fool takes on tools and discards them reflects their active hands and mind. But rigor and deep study can bring us closer to freedom too.
Freedom doesn't begin and end with non-attachment. There's also the freedom of study, the freedom to accept and reject information. The freedom to buck conventional wisdom. Often, this leads folks who connect with spirit in The Fool archetype to reject tradition.
This can secure them the independence and non-influence they crave. But it can also give them the freedom to learn a hard head makes a soft ass.
Next we have our Hierophants, who are conversely so obsessed with tradition they can't hear their own voices, let alone spirit. They see themselves as participating in a tradition, not helping to shape it through their actions.
Folks who connect through The Hierophant have the potential to be great readers, as do all the archetypes. But Hierophants suffer from the curse of self-comparison. Worse, they are constantly comparing themselves to "masters." No wonder they find themselves lacking.
The Hierophant learning archetype can find the wisdom they're looking for by merging knowledge with the unknowable.
The rigor and reverence comes naturally to them, but they struggle to let their backbone slip. They reduce the dance to its steps.
Then there's the High Priest/ess folks. Their connection with spirit is obvious and undeniable. But they're also the first to tell you they don't "need" the cards.
This can be an arrogant position. That makes sense because natural gifts can lead to a bit of a god-complex while they're beginning to develop.
If they can learn to connect with some technology, any really, they may find that their clients benefit, and they do too.
Again, reading cards isn't about needing cards. It's about knowing your limits. It's about honoring your humanness and fallibility.
High Priest/ess learners are often pedestalized, and so often aren't allowed to be fallible. They may hide their humanness, or forget it entirely.
But to be human is to work with technology, to create it, and adjust it, and define it. That can be a spiritual project too, if the High Priest/ess would allow it to be so.
Last, but not least, are our Hermits. Let it be know from the start that I am a Hermit learner. As such, there's a special place in my heart for us.
The Hermits among us feel like they must learn in isolation, because they never feel like what they have to offer is enough. They may be the most practiced in the room, but they struggle to share what they know.
There may be many people in their lives who don't even know how intuitive Hermit learners are! But the catch is that it is through practice that we transform our gifts. It's in community that we get the feedback we need to grow as readers.
Shame and humility can look the same in the dark. Hermit learners know that. But through connection we can transmute isolation to solitude — because it becomes a choice, not an absolute.
The Meeting Place
Citation is feminist memory. Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow.
--Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life
Ancestral citation is the middle ground between our Hermits and Hierophants and our Fools and High Priest/esses.
In this beautiful, pulsing, melding middle, both study and flow are honored. In the center of the circle we teach one another what comes naturally to us. We honor our own natural talents and we create unnatural ones.
We find memories we didn't know we knew. There is harmony at the center of the circle. Harmony between our gifts and our wounds and the technology we shape. Our ancestors and guides are there, waiting to speak with us. We are ready to speak with them.
Most of all ancestral citation provides us with what many readers look for, a kind of secondary proof. Of course their is the proof of a predicted future, a clarified question. But there is also the immediate proof of citation. That what happened before will happen again and again.
The shape it takes may be different, even not totally knowable, but we can validate, we can learn history through archetype. We can allow the events of the past to clear their throat in the present.
That's all ancestral citation asks. It doesn't need you to need it, it merely wants to back up what you know. It asks us to flow into our gifts with grace and curiosity. It asks us to see the possibilities of the chorus. It asks us to prioritize the conversation.
Further Thoughts
image: hey, i'm cyree jarelle. I run Collective Cartomancy. I help queers, feminists, and leftists connect with their intuition using tarot and cartomancy. More on me.
I've seen cardless reading, oracle card reading, playing card reading, palm reading, and on and on positioned as Thee Way. It should come as no surprise that I disagree.
There are advantages to reading with and without additional technology, of course.
Yet the #1 reason I work with playing cards, lenormand, or tarot or any other knowledge and wisdom seeking technology (KWST) is for citation.
There's humility in citation. There's wisdom in citation. There's tradition in citation.