Queering Tarot, Finding Ourselves
A medieval lion looking up at a flower on a lilac background
Tarot is canonically queer, but that doesn't mean such influences aren't controversial.
Pope Joan, an apocryphal medieval religious leader, is one example. Some say it's Pope Joan on the High Priestess. Others say that Pope Joan wasn’t real.
The story of Pope Joan was retold as fact for centuries, but today many believe she never existed. Yet she exists within tarot. Our retelling of her archetype makes her real.
Queering Tarot
Queering the tarot is one part believing the impossible, one part feminist storytelling. It makes space for people isolated from spirituality by Christian supremacy to reconnect.
It insists on a radical framework for tarot's symbols. It resists simple observation of archetypes, and demands participation.
Queering tarot asks us to do more than reimagine, it requires us to create new meanings for the cards. To live radically with the 78 cards, we must first find what is radical within their archetypes.
When we choose to queer tarot, to insist on the queerness inherent in tarot as a tool, we find ourselves in the cards.
Queerness and the Cards
Pamela Colman Smith's queerness and gender nonconformity flesh out this concept of tarot. We see the androgynous Fool, the genderless/all-gendered angels, we see ourselves.
Start with The Fool when queering the tarot, because they have queer meaning and queer place. Is The Fool the beginning of the Major Arcana or the end? The answer is unknown and unknowable as zero itself. The answer is not meant for anyone to know.
How do we bring the practice of queering the tarot into our everyday practice? Begin by questioning what you think you know about tarot. Let it guide you towards more complex meanings. Stop trying to nail everything down.
When we allow a loosening of meaning, truth can shine through. Personal transformation can then enter. Queers know well that there is more than one way to tell the truth.
Living the Tarot
Tarot can help us figure out how we want to change without judging our transformation.
Many of us find tarot as we leave Christian supremacist ways of doing faith. This makes sense because tarot undermines dogmatic ways of seeing the world. Tarot asks us instead to see a web of connected symbols and archetypes guiding our lives. We see the archetypes in friends and enemies, in systems and relationships.
Tarot helps us see the world anew. We must also let it help us act well. We must also let it push us to inspect the archetypes of patriarchy, and suspect them.
We cannot learn tarot. We must live it.
